EcoDevos spin data Web to snare site selectors

Economic development groups in Northern Colorado are changing their face to the world.

Larimer County’s Northern Colorado Economic Development Corp. and Weld County’s Upstate Colorado Economic Development have both revamped their Web sites in the past six months to meet the growing demand in the industry for information – and lots of it – on the Internet.

Both Web sites – www.ncedc.com and www.upstatecolorado.org – now have a mountain of information available, including statistics about the labor force, salaries, education, cost of living and housing availability. Both also have geographic information system, or GIS, maps that provide views of satellite images of exact locations of land and buildings and what surrounds them.

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The Web pages enable site selectors – those hired to scout out potential relocation or building sites for companies across the country – to gather all the information they need without making a phone call.

The volume of information means Larimer and Weld counties could be on a company’s short-list for possible relocation sites and the area’s economic development groups wouldn’t even know it.

“Ninety percent of site-selection decisions are now made using the Internet,´ said Larry Burkhardt, president and CEO of Upstate Colorado, which launched its new Web site in April. “Now communities can be qualified or disqualified based on what you have or don’t have on your Web page.”

The Larimer and Weld economic development groups hired the same Denver-based marketing firm, ccintellect, to design and market their Web sites. The company has designed and marketed about 40 economic development Web sites across the country in the past 10 years, said Ben Wright, principal for the firm.

What site selectors want

Wright said his company’s surveys of site selectors show they want three things: They want to develop a relationship with economic developers; they want to use a great Web site; and they want to be invited to visit cities on “familiarization tours,” visits organized by economic development groups.

“There aren’t many industries where a Web site is just as important as a personal relationship,” Wright said.

Web sites are at the center of economic development growth. Wright estimates spending on Web sites in the economic development industry has grown about 30 percent a year in the past few years.

Unlike a lot of Web sites, economic development sites don’t require registration or ask users to take surveys. Anonymity is important to site selectors, Wright said, because they want to make initial decisions without any persuasion from economic developers.

“We want to give the information away and make it easier for site selectors to access it,´ said Jacob Castillo, vice president of NCEDC, which launched its new Web site late last year. “The better our Web site is, the more likely site selectors will be to contact us.”

Before the groups revamped their Web sites, they e-mailed maps and demographic information to site selectors who contacted them. Before the Internet, organizations had to mail out packets of information. By the time groups got requests for such information, they knew their communities had made a company’s short-list of possible new locations.

Speed dating for businesses

Personal contact is still the only way Castillo or Burkhardt know if Larimer or Weld counties make a company’s short list. The difference now is that site selectors have already done much of their research on the Internet before contacting them.

“It’s kind of like speed dating,” Wright said. “The site selectors will call only four of five of the communities they’ve looked at. About 80 to 90 percent of them don’t get called at all.”

A Web site is the key to attracting the attention of site selectors, most of whom live in New York City, Wright said.

“A Web site is the front door to your community,” he said. “The more rural communities really have to do some things to catch the attention of these site selectors in big cities.”

Real-estate information is updated daily, and the demographic information is updated at least quarterly, Castillo said. Marketing includes writing content for sites that make it come up on the first page of an Internet search.

“There are probably 500 site selectors in the country, and each of them does about 20 Google searches a day,” Wright said. “We’ve identified the 40 to 45 terms site selectors use when they search for communities online.”

To increase their appearance on Google and other search engines, economic development groups also bid for the sponsored results that come up on the right-hand side of the search results. These are paid advertisements whose price and order on the page vary depending on how many hits a Web site gets.

Upstate Colorado and the NCEDC also plan to track the hits on various pages of their Web sites. That will tell them what users are looking at the most and which areas of the Web site need to change.

“This type of Web site is what site selection people are coming to expect,” Castillo said. “For us this is a dynamic format that is constantly evolving.”