You’ve got to start marketing your community to attract business, right? It sounds easy. Advertise in some trade journals, go on a few marketing missions with the region or state, create a cool community logo and bam! Companies will be calling. Maybe the solution is a $50,000 branding campaign. Hire a marketing firm and they’ll come in and figure out your brand. Then you put your new logo on a few letters and THEN the companies will be calling.
What will you market? Most communities have charming downtowns, improved business/industrial parks, and available workforce. Most communities also have some incentives; a revolving loan fund, TIF districts, and possibly others to encourage and entice a company to locate within their community. But what sets your community apart from the others? It’s important to know the competitive advantages of the community, including local and regional assets, strengths and weaknesses, what types of companies already exist in the community and what makes them successful there.
Who will you send the letters to? Have you defined your target market? Is your potential audience reachable on a national level, are they international….or are they already in your very own backyard? If you’ve answered all of the above, that’s good, but then is the message going to be the same to all three groups? What are the needs of the target audiences? What will be appealing to them…. And do you have it already?
Understanding the community and the target audience are very big important tasks on the road to marketing the community. Economic development marketing can be very high tech and high level but the basics still apply. Know your community. Know your target market. Then, and only then should you attempt to reach out to the potential businesses or companies which you’d like to attract.
Applying all of the proper marketing strategies in the appropriate order may help to draw some attention to your community, but there are many things that are disregarded when considering marketing the community. There are things every municipal employee, Chamber of Commerce member, even resident citizen can do every day to be marketing the community.
For the next few weeks we’ll examine Economic Development Marketing, and the things each community can do to strengthen their position in terms of being reactive AND proactive with marketing efforts.