Sure, it's the industry's leading corporate site selection data tool but ZoomProspector is also so much more. Did you know it's also a compelling open access community data tool? A business intelligence portal to support your small and medium-sized businesses? A source of inexhaustible content for your digital marketing mix? All of these things (and more) are tremendously useful to your target audiences. Here are some easy ways to drive more qualified traffic your way and then ensure they can find what they need on your website.
If you're one of the hundreds of communities, regions, and states around the world using ZoomProspector, you already know why it's the industry's leading online data tool for location analysis. But if the only link to it on your website is described as "Site selector" or "Property Search" or "Sites & Buildings," you are losing opportunities to provide robust, easy-to-analyze data to your community stakeholders and businesses.
The heart of this effective digital place marketing strategy lies with the all-powerful Share button built into every report on ZoomProspector. GIS Planning is the only vendor on the market to offer this handy feature for every report and level of analysis, so you can drive prospects back to your website and not a static PDF that goes nowhere. Clicking on the Share button makes it easy to share directly to social media or send it via email, but it also generates a unique hyperlink that makes effective place marketing much easier.
There is no reason to limit your links to ZoomProspector to one single place on your website. In fact, it makes much more sense to put it in multiple places - using different descriptions to appeal to different kinds of visitors. You should also use it on your social media channels, in email newsletters, email campaigns, responses to RFPs and anything else you can think of.
Here are some of the ways to link to different searches, reports and sections of the ZoomProspector tool to ensure different kinds of visitors can benefit from the data research and analysis:
Why have only one property search link? If you've got important property assets listed as search filters, you can link directly to those search results, such as
this one from Michigan Business, pictured below. Every one of the "Map Sites" buttons in that block goes to ZoomProspector but they will each take you to different filtered searches. Best of all, the descriptions for those links offer valuable keywords to ensure prospective investors end up on your website.
Your ZoomProspector tool offers powerful data reports about your community in addition to a database of available commercial properties. But if you only call it a "Property Search" tool, no one will know. Add a link to the
Community Data tab with descriptive text such as "Community Data Portal" or "Interactive Community Data" in the sections of your websites other community stakeholders are likely to visit. Add that link to your city or county website as well. It's easy to do and it benefits everyone - well-informed stakeholders are the best possible ambassadors for your region.
Support your businesses with market intel. The pandemic has put the health of our businesses top of mind for economic developers everywhere. Many of these businesses (especially the small- and medium-sized ones) cannot afford to pay for consultants or business data. With ZoomProspector, they can access all kinds of valuable data on wages, demographics, labour force and consumer spending, as well as mapping out competitors and suppliers. Help direct them to this information in ZoomProspector with a link in the relevant sections of your website to the
Business Report and
Consumer Spending report in the Community Data section of the web tool, using descriptive link text such as "Business Data Tool" or "Consumer Spending Data."
Workforce attraction and talent pool data are extremely important considerations in any location decision. Highlight the interactive talent data for your region by linking directly to it from your website. You can also add a Talent tab to the top of ZoomProspector, as in this example from the Colorado Springs Chamber and EDC.
Show off how your community compares to others across the country. Link to a pre-built Compare Communities report in ZoomProspector,
such as this one from Four Corners Economic Development (NM). It's still fully interactive but it starts off by showcasing how this community compares on key data points to the five communities they are most often grouped with. It's an innovative example of how proactive analysis can play a part in your place marketing.
Interested in learning more about the ways GIS Planning web tools can work for your community? Schedule a demo today!