Everyone involved in inward investment promotion is likely to agree that their organisation's marketing activities should be focused on delivering results. Which means making tangible progress towards our ultimate goal - landing more inward investment projects (and creating regional prosperity and high value jobs in the process).
The key to achieving this is making our inward investment marketing more strategic.
But What is Strategic Inward Investment Marketing?
To start with some definitions:
Marketing, in our field, is all the things we do to promote our location (or site, or industry cluster) to investing businesses.1 And a strategy is a plan for achieving success.2
It's fair to say, then, that strategic inward investment marketing is promoting our location in a planned way to achieve our goals.
We can go further and say this: when we market our location strategically, everything we do has a clearly defined (and therefore measurable) goal.
Inward Investment Marketing Activity ⇨ Measurable Goal
How We Can Set Goals and Measure Our Inward Investment Marketing Performance
The process of attracting investing businesses involves a series of stages, which we can think of as their journeys towards investing in our region. These stages provide the basis for setting our goals (or targets, or KPIs) and measuring our performance against them. (And digital marketing is, of course, the easiest to measure):
How We Can Develop a Results-focused Inward Investment Marketing Strategy
Awareness is a dubious metric - it's easy to spend money making lots of the wrong people aware of our location or site offer. For more awareness to lead on to more consideration and more lead conversion, we need to be strategic right from the start - targeting the right audiences with the right messages in the right places. Which means:
- Starting with effective location and market research - to understand our location benefits, and how they align with the needs of specific types of investing businesses (i.e. our inward investment value proposition)
- Establishing how we can find those targeted business decision makers (or help them to find us)
- Establishing how we can appeal to them at specific stages in their location research and selection journeys
For example:
Strategic short videos can be optimised to build initial awareness of our location offer: presenting key benefits briefly and at a headline level, aligned with the priority location factors of our target businesses.
(Images: Clarity animated videos, for South Humber, UK)
Strategic location data packs can be optimised to enable consideration of our location offer: presenting more detailed information and data relating to a wider range of relevant location factors.
(Images: Clarity location/sector data packs, for Invest Lincolnshire, UK)
Once we know the measurable results we're trying to achieve - ⇧ Awareness - ⇧ Consideration - ⇧ Conversion - we can design and optimise every piece of marketing content accordingly.
But it's not just about content. The principle of setting and pursuing measurable goals should apply to all our marketing investments and activities - online and offline - from the way we build our website to the events and exhibitions we consider attending.
How We Can Avoid Unstrategic Inward Investment Marketing
Inward investment marketing is unstrategic when it isn't planned carefully - based on research, evidence and solid rationale - to achieve specific, measurable results.
Sometimes we see inward investment marketing plans detailing the activities organisations intend to undertake: develop a brand, build a website, produce brochures and videos, attend particular events and exhibitions, and so on. But an action plan isn't a strategy - unless each activity is designed to achieve a specific goal - the why? not just the how? - the likely result will be expensive under-achievement.
Examples of unstrategic marketing are easy to find in the world of inward investment attraction. Here are just a couple:
1) Large stands at property industry events presenting sector-focused, 'end user investor' propositions to the wrong audience. (In our experience, the rationale is often 'because everyone else is going', and because size is mistaken for effectiveness).
How to be more strategic: Identify, and address, the specific needs and drivers of property investors, and consider if and how event attendance is the most effective, and cost-effective, way of engaging them. (Or: identify where and how best to engage 'end user investor' audiences in specific target sectors.)
2) Expensive, over-long videos showcasing everything that's good about a location - for everyone.
How to be more strategic: Consider the investor audience segment a video is for, where it will be used, how it will help them at a specific stage in their location selection journey, and their likely attention span at that stage. This will help us to optimise the video's content and length, and your sharing strategy.
The Measurable Benefits of More Strategic Inward Investment Marketing
To sum up - with more strategic inward investment marketing, you can:
- Communicate valuable location and site solutions to targeted investor audiences.
- Provide relevant content, in suitable formats, at specific stages in their location selection journeys.
- Measure your success at each stage, continually improve your marketing, and deliver tangible results.
Above all, you can maximise the likelihood of landing more inward investment projects, with all the benefits that will follow for your region.
Author:
Nick Smillie
Managing Director & Senior Consultant
