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The problem with Economic Development marketing and how to overcome it

The problem with Economic Development marketing and how to overcome it

All over America, economic development professionals are on a seemingly never ending rat wheel. They're all seeking the same ever more elusive large projects, courting site locators, and offering handouts to bribe prospects to locate in their communities.

These professionals have no control over whether they can perform their jobs successfully. At the end of the day, success or failure comes down to local (and often state) politics and luck. They work on projects for months, only to see them vanish in front of their eyes without having any control over the outcome.

To make matters worse, economic developers get all of the blame when things don't work out.

From politicians who thwart projects because of their own political interests to citizens who don't do their part to make sure they're educated and marketable, the answer is always the same. Somebody's head must roll, and that head is always the economic developer's.

How different would life be if you could control the marketing and sales process rather than being at the mercy of site locators, politics, and luck?

Would you be more successful if you could identify the perfect prospects for your locality and market directly to them? What if these prospects are flying below the radar and being ignored by other ED's and site locators, leaving them as prime targets for you? What if prospects even found you themselves, and you could start out by communicating directly with the decision maker(s) rather than their underlings?

Now, I'm not naïve enough to think a community can avoid ever having to offer incentives to land projects. My point is that location decisions based mostly on real business decisions or the owner's wants and needs are much more likely to be permanent decisions.

And projects like that are much more likely to come via smaller companies that aren't sexy enough for politicians, aren't represented by site locators, and are hard for economic developers to know about unless the prospect finds them instead of them finding the prospect.

Your job is to help them find you.

This is doable, and doable starting today. It's not a fast process and requires a willingness to invest in a viable long-term solution, but it will transform your economic development marketing if you follow through.

You must start marketing as a successful business would, rather than as traditional economic developers do.

That means concentrating on highly targeted personas that fit your unique selling proposition.

  1. Identify the perfect types of prospects for your community based on a realistic assessment of what you have to offer: available workforce & training programs, supply chain, natural resources, infrastructure, etc. Work with your existing businesses to identify supply chain opportunities.

  2. What is the ideal company size and industry? What's their budget and number of employees? Will you target existing businesses or entrepreneurs who want to start new businesses? If existing, where are they most likely to be located now?

  3. Develop personas for decision makers in each of these prospects. Not just the type of company, but down to imagining an actual owner or executive – Owner, CFO/Controller, President, etc. What type of person would be an owner or executive of a company like this? Age? Male or female? Interests? Family life? The more detailed the description you can create of a theoretical prospect, the better you can target them.

  4. What keeps this person up at night? What do they worry about? What's their pain point and how can you help them address it? What type of information might they be looking for?

  5. Stop being a commodity. What is your unique selling proposition, the thing that makes you the perfect place for your ideal prospect? Every locality has something that makes it unique, and something that draws certain types of people to move there. If everything were based on decreased costs, people would never move to NYC or Los Angeles. And if everything were based on convenience or proximity to cities, people would never move to Alaska. They move to these places because of other desires, whether to meet real needs or for emotional reasons. If you can match your unique selling proposition to your ideal prospect, the location will sell itself once you connect with the prospect.

  6. When you have a very detailed picture of your target industries and related personas, and why your community is the perfect location for them, massage your website content and all marketing materials to make those people feel you're communicating directly with them. Continually develop content that becomes actual resources for people who are looking for that type of information to help them find you through search engines when researching their problem.

  7. Invest your energy and efforts into identifying potential prospects and developing campaigns to reach out to them rather than spending all of your time going to trade shows where everyone is chasing the same prospects.

  8. Stop talking about the features of your community and start talking about the benefits to the prospect of locating there. How will they be better off? Use case studies of existing businesses that they can relate to. Tell the story of other successful businesses who had the same types of issues you imagine your ideal prospects will have, and show how they were able to be successful in your community.

    HINT – a success story to an ED is an announcement that states the amount of investment and how many jobs are promised. That's not a success story to a prospect, it's a Me Wall. What prospects care about is what happened to the company after it located in your community.

  9. Develop marketing automation to help generate leads, identify and nurture prospects, analyze content and campaigns, and prove ROI.

  10. Continually tweak your campaigns, and develop content and resources aimed directly at your ideal prospects.

Is this a lot more “work” than waiting for site locators to bring prospects to you? Of course. But will you have more control over the prospects you're able to pitch to and the probability of being able to close them? Definitely.

There's no disputing that entrepreneurs who choose a community based on their own needs or wants rather than on incentives are more likely to become permanent residents of that community, enriching it in more ways than generating jobs. These are the people who generously donate to local non-profits, volunteer, support youth and community organizations, and help build the social fabric of communities in every way imaginable.

In the 70's, a man who didn't live in our community identified a supply chain need here through his job with another company in another city. With no economic development incentives and only $7,000 in savings, he moved here, started from scratch working out of a small warehouse, and built the largest privately owned company in the county. He raised a family, donated large amounts of money to help improve the community, and volunteered massive amounts of time. Even after retiring, he remained in the community, continued to invest in local development, and continued to volunteer to help improve the local economy. He could be lying on a beach somewhere sipping a cocktail or out deep sea fishing, but he's here because he wants to be here.

Contrast that to a typical project that's landed through incentives. In general, there's no loyalty to the community and few, if any, of the top executives live in the community. When the incentives run out or the corporation is ready to expand, they're out looking for a new location that will fork over everything from land to cash to entice them to abandon the community who has already sacrificed to have them move there. This never-ending cycle is no-win for everyone other than corporations and site locators.

If you don't mind having your success be totally dependent on the actions of others and are indifferent to the criticism and blame that comes along with that, stick with what you're doing.

On the other hand, if you're sick of wasting months of work and being unfairly blamed, there's only one way out and that's to change how you're marketing.

I'll leave you with a scenario to think about - one ED developed smaller targeted prospects, invested $200k in marketing, and landed 10 projects that had an average of 10 employees each, creating 100 new jobs. The other ED worked tirelessly in pursuit of that headline-grabbing, career-making larger project but has generated very few new jobs and realizes they'll be run out of town before long; they're now updating their resume for a job search so they can start the whole process over again.

Which person would you rather be?

 

Photo licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Attribution: Doenertier82 at the German language Wikipedia

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