Established industry clusters often feature prominently in regional inward investment value propositions and marketing campaigns. And for very good reasons. As geographical concentrations of specialised companies and organisations, clusters have proven potential to boost business productivity - a key benefit for investing companies searching for the best possible location.
What's more, harnessing the capabilities of industry cluster partnerships can transform the quality and performance of sector-focused inward investment marketing. Here's how.
1) More distinctive sector value propositions
Effective sector value proposition development requires a combination of skills - to understand the factors driving business investment and location choice; to produce credible location and sector data comparisons; and to craft persuasive proposition messages. But above all, an effective value proposition must demonstrate unique value - to set your location apart from - and above - the competition.
Insights provided by cluster partners including businesses, research organisations and skills providers can be key to identifying the cluster's outstanding, often niche, capabilities. And your unique sector value proposition is likely to include a highly distinctive combination of those benefits for investing businesses.
2) More impactful inward investment marketing content
Strategic online content should be at the heart of every inward investment marketing campaign - to present the location (and sector) solutions investing businesses are searching for at specific stages in their location selection journeys. But results-focused content marketing requires both quality and quantity - to enable the continual attraction (including via SEO) and engagement (including via business social media) of targeted investor audiences.
Industry cluster partners can both inform effective content development (by providing expert insights and data) and supply 'ready-to-go' content (their own collateral). If these contributions are integrated into your campaign in a strategic way, the result can be measurably impressive marketing perfomance.
3) Sector advocacy and thought leadership
Your regional industry cluster is likely to include organisations at the forefront of their sector, with recognised leaders who command respect and influence. By combining powerful value proposition messages with advocacy from high-profile industry figures - including thought leaders - you'll be well-positioned to influence senior decision makers in targeted investing businesses.
Sector leaders and influencers can be incorporated into inward investment marketing campaigns using formats including semi-structured interviews and business case studies. The key is to ensure that your marketing strategy and delivery achieves the credibility required to secure their full buy-in, and their visible participation.
4) Access to high-value industry networks
Regional business leaders have always provided potential routes into senior-level industry networks, but in recent years that potential has been supercharged. Those networks are now replicated - and enhanced - online, and influential supporters can multiply your messages into them with minimal demands on their time - just the few seconds it takes to click a mouse or write a short, supportive comment.
Once again, credibility is key. Industry leaders are only likely to endorse your content if it shows a deep understanding of sector business drivers and speaks the industry's language. If you get it right there's a big prize - privileged access to targeted networks of business decision makers and intermediaries.
The challenges of working with industry cluster partnerships
So, harnessing the capabilities of your industry cluster partnership can potentially transform your inward investment marketing performance. But inevitably partnership working also presents challenges. Here, based on our experience, are some of them:
1) Managing complexity
Any project involving multiple organisations has the potential to get complicated and difficult to manage. Skilled project management is therefore essential, combined with leadership from an organisation viewed as impartial.
Usually, leadership is an obvious role for the regional economic development or investment promotion agency. However, we've also managed cluster partnership marketing projects that have been led effectively by private-sector organisations - e.g. multi-occupancy industrial sites operators (process industry sector) and airports (logistics sector). It's no coincidence that both these types of organisations have partnership working in their DNA.
2) Prioritising collective regional goals
Working in partnership with other local businesses, towards collective regional goals, can seem counter-intuitive for companies focused on their own commercial objectives. It can therefore be necessary to set out clearly how a thriving and expanding regional cluster, including new inward investors, can be the 'rising tide that lifts all boats'.
In Clarity's experience, the benefits of cluster growth have been most immediately obvious to businesses in highly integrated clusters. If, for example, a process manufacturing site is connected to a liquid bulk terminal by pipeline infrastructure, the site, pipeline, and terminal companies all benefit directly from new site occupants. Businesses in less integrated clusters can need more convincing, with other local companies sometimes, initially, viewed more as competitors (for customers and labour) than partners.
Having said all that, in recent years, in the UK, successful, high-profile cluster development projects have made businesses more aware of the opportunities - with inward investment accompanied by major strategic investments in assets such as research or training centres that deliver value for all the cluster's businesses. The benefits are, therefore, probably more widely understood now than ever before.
3) Maintaining strategic focus
Lots of organisations; lots of participants; lots of objectives; lots of location and cluster benefits; masses of marketing content...
The risk in all this is a failing that so often afflicts inward investment and place marketing projects: telling everyone, everywhere, everything that's great about a business location (or industry cluster) all the time, without the strategic focus required to communicate the right messages to the right people in the right places - as a basis for achieving defined, measurable success.
The solution (in combination with skilled, effective project management) is to develop, and professionally deliver, a results-focused inward investment marketing strategy - to transform all that risk and complexity into a uniquely persuasive inward investment marketing campaign for your location and industry cluster.
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