Economic Development Marketing Needs to Think More Like B2B Marketing
Economic developers need to move from promotion to pipeline.
Dane Carlson
Economic development marketing has outgrown the small box many organizations still put it in.
For a long time, marketing was treated as communications support. Keep the website current. Post on LinkedIn. Make the community look credible. Support the big announcement. Help the board, the public, and the business community understand what the organization is doing.
That work still matters. A community’s story needs to be clear, current, and easy to find.
But Andrew Phillips’s conversation with Dane Carlson points to a bigger idea: economic development marketing should operate more like B2B marketing. Not because EDOs need to copy corporate marketing playbooks without thinking, but because the work itself has B2B characteristics. The sales cycle is long. The audience is specific. The decision group is layered. The stakes are high. And the goal is not merely to create awareness. The goal is to be remembered by the right people at the right moment.
That changes the job.
Marketing is not just there to keep channels active. It is there to help a community earn a place on the mental short list before a formal site search begins. It helps business development work better. It turns brand, targeting, content, and data into a clearer path toward better conversations.
The strategic shift is simple: stop treating economic development marketing as promotion and start treating it as part of the growth system.
The Competition Starts Before the RFI
Economic developers often think about competition in terms of active projects. Which region wins the facility? Which community makes the shortlist? Which incentive package, site, workforce case, or relationship moves the project forward?
Those questions matter, of course. But by the time an RFI shows up, part of the competition has already happened.
Before a site selector sends a request, before a company studies available properties, before an executive team asks for a deeper look, a place has to become mentally available. Someone has to remember it, recognize it, or have enough familiarity with it to believe it is worth researching.
That is where brand matters.
Brand is easy to dismiss as the softer side of economic development because it does not look like dealmaking. It is not a site visit. It is not a prospect meeting. It is not the moment when a consultant calls with a live opportunity. It may not produce an immediate lead that can be assigned to a business development team member.
But in a long-cycle sales environment, familiarity is not soft. It is infrastructure.
A company may not be ready to expand today. A consultant may not have a relevant project this quarter. An executive may not be thinking about a new operating footprint until a supply chain issue, cost pressure, customer shift, or workforce challenge forces the conversation. When that moment comes, the places already associated with competence, relevance, and fit have an advantage.
That is the practical value of brand in economic development. It makes a market easier to recall and easier to trust before the hard sell begins.
The opposite is expensive invisibility. A community can have strong assets and still lose because it never entered the decision-maker’s mind early enough. It can have good sites, a credible workforce story, responsive leadership, and a compelling business case, yet still remain outside the mental short list.
Once that happens, the rest of the case may never get heard.
Marketing cannot win a project by itself. But weak marketing can keep a community from being considered at all.
Why the B2B Frame Fits Economic Development
Phillips’s B2B framing works because it gives economic development a better operating model.
In B2B marketing, the buyer is rarely one person. The sales cycle is rarely quick. A company does not see one ad, read one post, fill out one form, and immediately make a major decision. Instead, multiple people shape the process over time. Different messages matter at different stages. Awareness, trust, proof, timing, and follow-up all work together.
Economic development works much the same way.
A location decision can involve executives, real estate teams, operations leaders, HR, finance, consultants, legal, utilities, state partners, local governments, and internal champions. The process can stretch across months or years. A prospect may pay attention long before it ever identifies itself. A consultant may be influenced by repeated exposure before a live opportunity exists.
That is why economic development marketing should not be managed as a collection of isolated communications tasks.
It needs audience discipline. Who are we trying to reach? Site selectors? Industry executives? Expanding companies in specific sectors? Existing employers? Developers? Entrepreneurs? Each audience has different questions, different levels of intent, and different reasons to care.
It needs message discipline. What should this audience remember about the market? What proof do they need? What misconceptions should be corrected? What makes the region relevant to their decision?
It needs channel discipline. Where does this audience actually pay attention? What role should LinkedIn play? What belongs on the website? What requires direct outreach? What should support business development follow-up?
And it needs performance discipline. Did the work reach the right people? Did it generate better conversations? Did it improve lead quality? Did it give the business development team a cleaner path into the market?
Those questions move marketing out of the world of “Are we active?” and into the world of “Is this useful?”
That is the difference between communications output and strategy.
Visibility Is Not the Same as Targeting
Many EDOs are producing more content than they used to, and that is mostly a good thing. Communities need to be visible. Their websites need fresh information. Their LinkedIn pages should not look abandoned. Their wins, assets, advantages, and stories need to be put into the market consistently.
But more activity creates a trap: it can make motion feel like progress.
A campaign gets impressions. A LinkedIn post gets engagement. A website page gets traffic. A form collects names. A newsletter list grows. The dashboard moves, and the organization can point to visible marketing output.
The harder question is whether that activity is reaching the right audience for the right reason.
This is where Phillips’s point about lead quality matters. Economic development does not need more weak signals. It needs better signals. A large audience is not useful if it is mostly irrelevant. A high click count does not mean much if the people clicking have no role in location decisions. A lead form is not a win if it creates busywork for the business development team without moving the region closer to real opportunity.
Metric-driven marketing should not mean drowning in analytics. It should mean using data to improve judgment.
Are we reaching companies in the industries we actually want? Are we engaging people who influence location decisions? Are we learning which messages produce meaningful interest? Are we seeing patterns that help refine targeting? Are we separating curiosity from opportunity?
That is where economic development can borrow from serious B2B marketing. The point is not to worship the dashboard. The point is to connect marketing activity to business development usefulness.
If a campaign produces leads the business development team cannot use, the campaign is not successful just because it produced numbers. If LinkedIn targeting helps narrow the audience from a vague geography or broad industry label to a more relevant set of companies, roles, or growth signals, that is not just better advertising.
It is better strategy.
Marketing and Business Development Need the Same Room
The biggest practical implication is internal.
Economic development marketing cannot sit off to the side while business development does the “real” work. That divide may be common, but it weakens both functions. Marketing needs to know what business development is hearing in the field, and business development needs marketing that does more than produce brochures, social posts, and campaign assets.
The business development team knows which questions prospects ask, which objections come up repeatedly, which target sectors are active, which relationships are warming, and where the market’s story is not landing. That information should shape the content, campaigns, web pages, follow-up materials, and positioning that marketing produces.
Marketing, in turn, should help business development with audience intelligence, stronger proof points, better follow-up materials, sharper campaigns, and more consistent market visibility. It should make the organization easier to find, easier to understand, and easier to trust.
When that loop is weak, EDOs drift into disconnected work. Marketing optimizes for output. Business development relies on personal relationships and one-off materials. Campaigns are launched without enough feedback from prospect conversations. Website pages are built around what the organization wants to say instead of what decision-makers need to know. Social media becomes a visibility exercise rather than a positioning and relationship tool.
That is how marketing becomes busy but not especially useful.
A stronger model treats marketing as business development infrastructure. It helps the organization warm the market before outreach. It reinforces the brand between conversations. It gives prospects proof before a meeting. It keeps the community visible during long stretches when no formal project is active. It gives the team a reason to follow up that is more useful than “just checking in.”
Most importantly, it makes the place feel familiar before the pitch ever starts.
That matters in a relationship-heavy field. Relationships still matter deeply in economic development, but they are shaped by repeated signals: what people have seen, what they remember, what they trust, and whether the community appears relevant to their needs.
Marketing helps create those conditions.
The LinkedIn Lesson Is Bigger Than LinkedIn
Phillips’s discussion of LinkedIn, JobsOhio, and Nicole Sherlock is helpful because it shows how a more metric-driven digital mindset can enter economic development from outside the field. But the real lesson is not that every EDO should simply post more on LinkedIn.
The lesson is that digital channels can be used with more discipline.
LinkedIn is not just a broadcast platform. Used well, it can help an organization target specific audiences, test messages, build familiarity, support relationship development, and learn which topics are resonating with the people an EDO actually wants to reach.
That matters because economic development audiences are narrow. Most communities do not need mass attention. They need attention from a defined group of decision-makers, influencers, consultants, executives, employers, and partners.
The platform is only useful if the strategy is clear.
Who needs to know this place exists? What should they associate with it? What proof will make the message credible? What action should become easier because they saw it? How will the business development team use the attention that marketing creates?
Those questions matter more than the posting schedule.
A weak strategy with frequent posts is still weak. A strong strategy uses the platform to support the larger business development process.
The Standard Is Usefulness
The better standard for economic development marketing is not whether the organization is producing enough. It is whether the work is making the community easier to consider, easier to trust, and easier to choose.
That means marketing should be judged by more than activity metrics. Consistency matters, but consistency alone is not strategy. Engagement matters, but engagement alone is not lead quality. Brand awareness matters, but only if it builds the right kind of familiarity with the right audiences.
The useful questions are more direct.
Is marketing helping the region earn a place on the mental short list? Is it sharpening targeting? Is it improving the quality of leads and conversations? Is it giving the business development team better openings? Is it reinforcing the market’s strongest proof points? Is it making long-cycle sales easier to manage over time?
Those questions force marketing into the core of economic development strategy.
That is where it belongs.
Communities do not need more disconnected promotion. They need economic development marketing that understands the sales cycle, respects the audience, measures what matters, and supports the people responsible for turning attention into opportunity.
Andrew Phillips’s B2B framing matters because it raises the bar. It asks EDOs to stop treating marketing as the department that keeps the story moving and start treating it as part of how the organization competes.
The communities that make that shift will not just look more polished. They will be remembered earlier, targeted more precisely, and better prepared when a real opportunity enters the pipeline.
Economic development marketing only works when your site data can back up the story.
Sitehunt automates industrial site research so economic developers can respond to site selection RFIs in minutes, not days. It helps teams turn scattered property, infrastructure, GIS, environmental, workforce, and logistics data into RFI-ready site intelligence before the next prospect asks, “What sites do you have?”
Because when your marketing creates interest, your team needs to be ready to answer with confidence.
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