Question

Topic: Strategy

Marketing A City/county With Multiple Partners?

Posted by erin.trowbridge on 8/7/2007 at 3:13 PM ET 125 Points
As a non-profit, non-government economic development organization, we work to attract new companies to our area, grow existing businesses, help create new businesses through entrepreneurship and innovation, and develop tools that will help employers to bring in critical talent necessary to do business.

At this point, we need a marketing plan for our organization - to guide our advertising, promotion, and staff time.

I'm having a hard time determining exactly what our product is - is it the geographical area? If so, there are other economic development-related organizations in this area that market the same thing. How do we make sure that outsiders get a consistent message?

Or, are our services the product - access to financial programs, facilitating site selection or new business creation?

Is there anyone out there who has had to market this? Any help on how to construct a marketing plan for economic development that includes ?
Any ideas on where I can get marketing help with this?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 8/7/2007 at 5:37 PM Accepted
    Erin,

    To find your product, I would start with what you are trying to solve. A good exercise to pin down what you are trying to solve is what I call the "What Will This Get You" exercise. Lets start the exercise:

    It sound like you want to bring in new business and help grow existing business. I would ask you: What will bringing in new business and and helping grow existing businesses get you? And you would say something like: Economic development. And then I would ask you again: and what will economic development get you?

    Keep going until you've boiled it down to what are trying to solve. Whatever helps to solve the problem I would call your "product."

    I hope this helps.
  • Posted by Tracey on 8/7/2007 at 5:54 PM Member
    Sounds to me like your product is community development (a service). Your customer is the local community -- including both business-owners and residents.

    I'd recommend starting off by googling "non-profit CDC" or "community development corporation" -- just to check out what others are doing. Check out the NCRC. I think partnerships would be very important in CDC marketing -- not only with local businesses and orgs but also national advocacy groups, banks, and politicians. Your organization might consider an NCRC membership, which I believe may offer some marketing tools or support...not sure. Also, check out OperationHope.org... they work with orgs like yours too. Hope that helps!
  • Posted by bobhogg on 8/8/2007 at 2:41 AM Accepted
    Hi Erin...

    This sounds like one of these situations where you have a range of products/services that you offer to a wide range of stakeholders. If that's right, then you probably need to address each stakeholder group as "customers", understand how that customer group can be segmented, then prepare a marketing plan for each group - all within an overall corporate plan, of course!

    So, for example, one customer group could be companies that you are trying to attract to the area. What does your area offer in the way of resources for companies in different industries? This might lead you to concentrate on attracting firms in those industry sectors -and that's something you might do in partnership with the other economic development organisations in the area.

    Another customer group could be local residents who want to become entrepreneurs - here your access to support resources could be the key, but, again, do the local resources of the area favour start-ups in some industry sectors rather than others?

    You don't say what part of the world you are in, but your problem sounds very much like the one being faced by the economic development partnerships and urban regeneration companies here in the UK which I and my partners have some experience of. My direct email address is on my profile page if you think we can help further.

    Good luck,
    Bob
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 8/8/2007 at 9:35 AM Member
    It sounds like a business incubator. In the United States, there's a great national organization (https://www.nbia.org/) that helps create incubators. The network of members is very supportive and active, and have lots of marketing / business information online.


  • Posted by erin.trowbridge on 8/9/2007 at 12:22 AM Author
    This was all very helpful - thank you. I put the "What will this get me?" exercise to work, and the results led me to our mission statement. So I guess that means we're on track...? The trouble I have now is that the corporation has outlined its 3 lines of business which all of our activities revolve around, and I think I'm trying to use those as 'products'. The more I look at it, that doesn't seem to be the case.

    I also checked out the Houston example and a few other marketing plans of economic development-related entities. None of them follow any of the basic marketing templates (for lack of a better word). Usually, you can follow a system - market analysis, target markets, goals and objectives, SWOT, strategies, etc. It's all so fuzzy when you don't have the concepts of product 1, product 2, product 3...to focus on. Everything overlaps.

    Being fairly green in the marketing profession, it's difficult to know where to start in the realm of economic development marketing, when all I learned about in school was product/service marketing in the for-profit world where sales mattered more than they do here. Any other thoughts?
  • Posted by erin.trowbridge on 8/9/2007 at 11:07 PM Author
    Thanks Steve. We also have mulitple economic development organizations within our location, primarily at local government offices. In addition, there is a regional non-profit entity (though not well-organized at this point) that is evolving and the CVB who all think they're in economic development. With all of these groups providing similar services and 'competing' with each other for bragging rights and state dollars, how do we make sure that when we're marketing our location, we have one voice? Do we have to go through a location branding process? Any thoughts?
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 8/9/2007 at 11:25 PM Accepted
    I would suggest that you try to form a single umbrella agency (whose members of these individual ones that are currently competing). The agency will act as the funnel for state dollars, divying up the money based on budgets for each program. Each member agency, in turn, clearly identifies what they do best and offers supportive programs. The umbrella agency's responsibility is to mesh the various programs into a cohesive overall package for businesses.

    This approach will no doubt require a fair bit of skill and political tact. It will result in everyone "winning", since they will be members of the umbrella and will be receiving additional funds (and won't have to take on programs that they aren't good at).
  • Posted by erin.trowbridge on 8/10/2007 at 2:09 PM Author
    Thank you all so much for your helpful comments. I believe this umbrella organization exists partially in the regional group, but it is just disorganized, understaffed, and underfunded right now. Hopefully, their role will become the 'umbrella' that we need, while local organizations each focus on individual parts of business needs.

    Thanks again!
    Erin
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