It will take more than passing visits to the Greater Rhode Island website to generate the type of leads that translate into actual economic growth, but according to proponents, the building blocks are now in place.
The new economic-development website that launched on Nov. 25 was the main attraction at the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting, attended by more than 740 people. The site is a marketing tool that offers statewide data on population density, demographics, property, the workforce and other information that can be downloaded or managed in custom reports.
However, in the week and a half that followed, not one lead had popped up through the site, said Scott Gibbs, president of the Cumberland-based Economic Development Foundation, a partner in the website-building effort.
Converting website visits to economic-development prospects is the end-game, says Ben Wright, CEO of Atlas Advertising of Denver, but getting there takes coordination, diverse marketing, fresh and timely updates and continued website monitoring, as well as sheer time. His firm built the site with the help of the Reckoner Group of Newport, which contributed conceptual design.
“The [marketing] to statewide businesses as well as businesses outside the state has yet to be done, so that’s what comes next,” said Wright. “There are going to be hundreds of people on the site each day. We believe in the Rhode Island and Providence product as a place, and there are going to be great stories told about the community and I would expect those stories will appeal.”
About 90 percent of all business relocations start with some kind of online search, Wright said, describing the impetus for the website during a phone interview following the Chamber’s annual meeting, where he was a speaker. The Chamber, the foundation and the R.I. Economic Development Corporation are partners in greaterri.com.
Wright’s firm, Atlas, conducted a national survey of 220 economic-development organizations and found that while 175 website visits typically convert to just one “conversation” with a company, a 120-to-1 ratio is what Atlas clients can expect to achieve – based on 42 percent more conversations generated by its clients, compared to average economic-development organizations.
“I always felt Rhode Island’s entry into the marketplace wasn’t strong enough,” said White. “What we wanted to put together was something that was very visually appealing, comprehensive and for users to be able to customize the site and download reports.”
This new website uses more than 1,000 distinct data points. It also provides a blog, videos, a searchable real estate database, and links to local industry information about some of the state’s biggest economic drivers, from brain science to consumer-product design.
Of all the tools the website offers, the “About” page and the built-in real estate property database are segments most likely to generate interest, Wright says. Given that, the question remains: If you build it, will they come?
“The answer is: a good website will be ‘sticky’ once people get there, meaning it will keep people there and the time spent on it will grow,” he said. “But you have to get people there. You have to market it. That means marketing it inside the state to companies that are expanding. It means marketing it outside the state to site selectors and companies in the Northeast. It means engaging local partners.” That marketing effort is just beginning, Wright said, and involves, in part, promoting the database to cities and towns in an effort to get them to adapt it for their use.
For a fee of up to $1,500 a year depending on the size of a municipality, Gibbs said, the foundation would have Atlas take the property database system and repackage it for an individual city or town’s website so that it only enabled searches within that particular community.
If enough cities and towns participate, the additional tools have the potential to increase property-search traffic by as much as 139 percent, Wright said.
“The one benefit of that uniformity is comparability,” said Wright. “Somebody can look at a piece of property and the demographics around it in Providence and a neighboring community very easily, so they can really evaluate property in the state easily because of that common tool set.”
Long term, Valois noted, getting Rhode Island “on the radar screen” of investors, real estate brokers and developers requires nuanced measurement of website traffic to be sure it’s working as intended.
Besides using Google Analytics, the free industry standard, to gauge where the traffic comes from, how long visitors spend on the site and what pages they viewed, Atlas offers a heat map that shows where activity is most concentrated. The tool has been refined by Crazyegg.com, and Atlas is a customer, Wright said.
The website also is responsive on different mobile devices, to enable brokers and investors who are developing lists of properties to access information, search for directions to a site and generally find the data they need when selecting a location, Wright and others said.
When those leads do come – and they will, Valois says – the EDC, which is being reorganized in 2014 as the Commerce Corporation, will be ready.
“Our role has been to work on providing a lot of the data and research embedded in the site,” he said. “We helped with some of the content and we are repositioning the organization at EDC to be able to respond professionally to any inquiries … and try to turn a lead into an actual sale. If we get someone’s inquiry about a location in Rhode Island, we need to track that to make sure it gets done properly.”
Responses from the state will eventually be automated with such mechanisms as confirmation emails “to make sure nothing falls through the cracks,” he said.
That means follow-up, referrals, and help from the Chamber in managing inquiries and pushing out news and messages through social media.
“It’s going to take time,” Valois said. “That’s the ultimate goal – to get to where we can respond comprehensively.” •
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