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Apr
27
Need Market Research? Check Your Local Economic Development Organization
April 27, 2007 | Anita Campbell
I live in Northeast Ohio near Akron and Cleveland, and for years the area was engaged in self-flagellation over the loss of Big Steel and manufacturing jobs. The local newspapers were in death-watch mode, highlighting every job layoff with big bold headlines. Of course, they never seemed to place the same focus on the many small businesses that were growing and thriving — or for that matter even the large businesses that were growing and thriving. (And some wonder why newspaper readership is declining.)
The good news is that the region has gotten smart. Local economic development organizations got together and have taken a much more proactive approach. The first thing they did was start emphasizing the positives.
By now you are probably wondering: what does this have to do with marketing to small businesses? A lot.
The economic development organizations in my region launched a website, called ClevelandPlus.com, that provides a ton of helpful information about the local region. It is obviously intended to inform outsiders about the local region, to convince business site planners to locate new facilities in the area.
As I was exploring the site, I realized that it also is a valuable market research resource for those businesses that sell to small businesses inside their local area. It contains general business demographics, such as number of businesses by size, industry and so on. But it goes well past the big-picture statistics, all the way down to the individual business level, including small businesses, and shows the businesses by industry, name and street address. You can download the data to an Excel spreadsheet – you can even map it out:
That got me to thinking. If you market to local small businesses in your area, check to see if your local economic development organization offers similar business data online.
The website for my local region is powered by a company called GIS Planning. If you go to the GIS Planning corporate website you will see a list of links to local communities across the United States using the GIS Planning web technology. Not all of the websites provide business profile data (some are for other kinds of data), but it’s a good place to start.
While you might be able to find this kind of business data elsewhere, it is scattered at various places and you would have to do some serious work to pull it all together and slice and dice it to make it useful for marketing — or you would have to pay for it. Websites like this are a tremendous time saver and money saver.
Comments
3 Comments so far
That link to the GIS Planning corporate website is useful. I agree with your comment regarding the period when the newspapers were in death-watch mode. It seems that to the media, the only good news is bad news. Like sharks that smell blood in the water. Anything of a positive nature isn’t newsworthy to them. There are times when it’s so overwhelming that I don’t even watch. I would love to see other news media taking a more positive approach with their reporting in general as well as with small business.
Very useful website. Positive is always a better approach.
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