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Economic Development Marketing in modern times

November 19th, 2010, by: ruud.storm

The Economic Developers Association of Canada (EDAC), Canada’s national organization of Economic Developers, has published an excellent report on economic development marketing practices. You can find the full report on www.edac.ca

I think the trends observed 2009 – 2010 are global, and not only applicable to Canadian Developers. Some conclusions I would like to share:

  • Business attraction is the top ranked marketing objective. Business retention is a distant second. I recognise this sequence, even to a level where business retention is undervalued. Once established companies do not feel serviced any more by the Agencies that brought them in, and start looking for alternative locations. Never forget your existing clients
  • Those that increase their marketing budgets are planning further increases. Those that have decreased in
    2009 and 2010 are planning more decreases. The gap continues to widen.     How do companies find you when you reduce your marketing efforts? You have to be where they are looking, and that is in well over 50% online. Make sure you can be found, and present relevant information in the earliest possible phase of a search. Longlist-Shortlist-Selection starts with being on the Longlist
  • Half of EDAC members are marketing without a single dedicated staff member. That can only be done by tying in to an organization or platform that fills that gap for you. What is your road to the client?
  • 37% of respondents say their website is the single most effective marketing technique they are using, and 70% have a dedicated, frequently updated web presence. This 37% may very well be higher, since investments originate more and more from Emerging Countries and Regions, and there we find a high focus on Online. Content edditing to survive the “5 sec diagonal scan” and Search Engine Optimisation are processes that should be in order ot truly call your website an effective marketing technique
  • This year’s study asked EDAC members for the first time about marketing measurement: Lead generation, website analytics and event attendance are the top measures used by Canadian Economic Developers. 69% say that their measurement efforts are somewhat effective, but 22% have no idea if their marketing is working at all. If you consider, or are forced, to reduce marketing budgets, then make sure that what you allocate is generating maximum effect. Can your marketing efforts be measured?

We believe that Global-arena.com , the No 1 in online business locations, can increase your marketing results on a decreased budget. For more information, please mail me on ruud.storm@global-arena.com

I would like to thank EDAC for their excellent survey, and for their approach to stimulate to use the results freely.

Posted in: FDI business, Surveys
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Business Alliance between Global Arena AG and Katsura Suzuki Consulting

November 2nd, 2010, by: Natalia Gimpel

Energizing Japanese business to expand globally and business investment between Japan and Switzerland

Katsura Suzuki Consulting (KSC), based in Switzerland offers business consulting services and network support to global-operating Japanese clients and Japanese companies relocating to, or investing in Switzerland and similarly for Swiss companies with business interests in Japan.

Global Arena AG, also headquartered in Switzerland, offers the worlds largest and most extensive global marketplace of business locations and related services through its website (www.global-arena.com). Location decisions are supported with Global Arena Rank™, an advanced algorithm providing objective location rankings. Global-arena.com is the only globally comprehensive resource for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) information.

Implementation of location and foreign direct investment decision involves a wide variety of partners including corporate real estate, taxation, human resources, finance and legal services.

The KSC/Global Arena alliance makes it easier for Swiss and Japanese companies to go global, by offering FDI marketplace transparency and ranking services to Swiss and Japanese business partners. At the same time, the KSC/Global Arena alliance will reduce FDI transaction costs, as well as simplify and accelerate implementation of these decisions.

To read more about Katsura Suzuki Consulting, please go to www.ksc-global.com

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Posted in: business locations, FDI business
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More and more Chinese companies are investing abroad, how to engage with them?

October 6th, 2010, by: ruud.storm

Global Arena was at the China International Fair on Investment and Trade (CIFIT 2010) in Xiamen, China. This fair is organised by the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM).

As revealed in UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2010, China and Hong Kong combined are the economy receiving the largest FDI inflow, the same report puts China at the third position for FDI outflow, only behind USA and France, with Chinese FDI outflow totalling 100 billion dollars.
To both China’s inflow and outflow of capital, the China Investment Promotion Agency (CIPA) is playing a pivotal role. Global-arena.com is starting a cooperation with CIPA to develop a Chinese version of our Online Business Location platform, optimised for use from within China, so exclusively aiming at Chinese companies looking for business locations outside China.

To make global-arena.cn most effective, it needs to be hosted in China, optimised for the Baidu search engine (China’s equivelent for Google) and be in the Chinese language. In the very near future we will start offering our Premium clients with a Complete profile the facility to be active on the Chinese FDI Marketplace, once this is established, we will also offer Start and Plus clients the opportunity to effectively promote their location in China for a modest fee.
I welcome your comments, recommendations and questions about attracting investments to your location from Chinese companies

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2nd UNCTAD World Investment Forum (WIF 2010) At Xiamen, China

September 3rd, 2010, by: ruud.storm

Some of the greatest  minds and movers in the field of investment will assemble at UNCTAD’s WIF 2010 to discuss how to promote sustainable investment and development in the new phase of globalization and take advantage of opportunities that could rise across the globe. This is how UNCTAD (www.unctad.org) announces their WIF 2010. Global-Arena will be present, and we think we can contribute to UNCTAD’s goals in two ways;

- Including sustainability indices in our economic parameters is already a set goal, and we want to discus how these parameters should be developed , for our global platform we need to be able to compare all countries and regions, supported by independant, trusted data.
Only then are we able to support our clients in descision making during location analysis

- Another aspect of supporting sustainable investment and development is to give developing and under-developped countries and regions a fair chance to compete for investment from abroad. We believe that if www.global-arena.com offers a comparisson on independant, trusted data between countries in every state of development, that will greatly increase the acces to FDI for the least developped countries, since that comparisson takes away that part in a risk assesment currently regarded as “the great unknown”
We want to take up the challenge to compare Mali to Finland and to Vietnam. To achieve this, we need the help of UNCTAD to research and create data sources of the same integrity as we currently use for Europe and USA.

We see it as our responsibility to support investment descisions with (standardized) sustainibility parameters (eg Carbon Footprint, sustainable development and innovation), and next to that offer every country acces to FDI via a fair comparison of their advantages and challenges.

Posted in: FDI business
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Why getting your location on top of Google search has just gotten even more difficult – but you can do something about it now

July 30th, 2010, by: Peter Storm

Why? Because Google has updated its search ranking algorithm Pagerank. Simply put, where in the past good content that was heavily linked got good results. Now that good content needs good links AND good Activity. Traffic, social media, discussions, interaction, media.

What can you do about it? You need to work on your site, with your site with your network to get more activity. It requires focus, attention, effort and skills. From my experience, most location promotion agencies already have a hard time with good content structure and links. The activity addition is just to hard or the process to influence this yourself with all stakeholders and technology involved is to complex to stick to it for long.

Your clients also appreciate the activity! Not just Google robots. That is why we are developing a social media page for our Premium location promotion clients. To make it easier and more important to automate the update process where possible. Obviously you must maintain the sources; news, blogs, twitter, facebook, youtube linkedin… But after that we put it all together for your clients on your profile. But how does this help my site? Indirectly because your profile is linked to your site and ideally your site is linked to your profile on www.Global-Arena.com

What really matters is that we are your fishing net using our global top-ranking, your profile content and matching data to find those clients on google.com that fit your location advantages. Than we hand them over to your own web infrastructure. The activity page on our site for your location helps to inform the client and tighten the net.

Posted in: Google
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Its talent, stupid

July 26th, 2010, by: Peter Storm

“It’s the economy, stupid” was a phrase in American politics widely used during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign against George H. W. Bush. The phrase was intended for internal campaign use to remember the team of the importance of the economy as one of their top-3 campaign speaking points. The other two being change and health care. So we can safely conclude that 18 years later that change is hard and takes time. A lot of time.

Take the time you need for your changes but rest assure that todays global Talent will not wait for you. For Corporations and FDI the future is Talent. Everewhere for everyone – from all Western developed economies to India and China. My recent conversations with global strategy managers and facility planners from DELL, GE, Nokia, RioTinto and Google confirm this picture. They know it is about talent. Their global resource allocation strategy gears towards talent, away from “just” labour and cost arbitrate.  What I found intriguing is that GE and Nokia have moved to a strategy to select locations for their global operations where they can establish (lead, dominate) a favourable talent eco-system. They choose to work with FDI-promotion agencies in their long-listing process that understood and actively supported them in this process.

Are you ready to compete for talent – by creating your own global talent supply chain or support your investors with theirs?

Curious to hear from you if you believe that the future of FDI is about something completely different or talent done different. Welcome your point of view.

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Posted in: Talent
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Export, a first step to FDI?

June 22nd, 2010, by: ruud.storm

Traditional economies (Europe & North America) face huge budget deficits that need addressing; governments need to (and will) run down their budgets. But this mechanism automatically reduces autonomous growth, so how to keep your economy running? The drop of the Euro (from 1.50 to the dollar to 1.20) is generally welcomed as a tool to increase export, and export is certainly contributing to economic growth.
We at Global Arena see export and FDI related; often companies start to export their products to other countries and continents, and only after prolonged success they consider shifting (part of their) production to these export countries. With our GlobalArenaRank methodology we can support companies in their location analyses, to make sure they expand their activities to countries and regions that best serve their needs and expectations.

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Posted in: Export, FDI business
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What could you do if your agency has to deliver more FDI inflow at less cost

May 29th, 2010, by: Peter Storm

If you are managing an Western FDI Agency that you are likely in this situtation; you face a rapidly increasing demand for FDI inflow combined with short term significant pressure on your FDI Agency budget.

And not to forget to further complicate the situation you’re in;  competition is increasing globally and heating up fast?

What could you do if you recognize this pattern as the situation you are in or heading towards? 

In my point of view this scenario most likely applies to most Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) promotion agencies globally. The current global ecomonic environment and situation is to complicated to assume that there is a one-size-fits-all problem and solution. But I believe that 80% will face this pattern of budget pressure already or very soon while having to deliver more FDI results at the same time in a more complex, more competitive and larger market due to the changing patterns in global FDI flows.

Now I worry about this as well as a business leader, even though our marketplace for global business locations provides a solution exactly to this problem. My interpretation is that innovation is hard and takes time to get adopted – even online innovation. I experience the FDI market appears largely as a conservative market – in particular in Europe. That is why it will be hard for most agencies to deliver what they need to in the near future. The good news is that there are proven solutions on the market that will support you with the transformation of your agency and FDI business model.

European government budgets (lets not forget the USA) are under more pressure every day, as governments realize that over spending and government lending have painful limits in uncertain markets. The need for Foreign Investments is mounting rapidly. FDI agency executives need a plan to cut budget and get more results delivered fast in a generally soft FDI market where companies are very cautious with strategic investments.

I recommend a strategy that is focused on;

  1. intelligent online promotion (cheeper than anything else)
  2. pro active investor acquisition (most effective but also most complex)
  3. transform the agency from volume processing to value creation (the only way to cut budget while increading output)

This requires that you can change your organization to become the leader in these areas. We know how to do that and have the services you need to implement this fast.

Do you have a different perspective on where the industry is heading? I welcome your point of view.

Posted in: FDI business
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Would it not be easier to buy some Google Adwords such as FDI…

May 19th, 2010, by: Peter Storm

I just talked to a potential client and he raised the following challenge: “I believe it may be easier/more effective to buy some keywords in Google such as “FDI” and “Europe” to increase the visibility of our website.”

That’s a very valid and important question. Would it? I am sure it could but it would cost you a fortune and huge management effort to control the Adwords budget and keyword selection and placement positioning. Not because Adwords is difficult but because FDI is VERY GENERIC. Google would love you for placing that keyword – axe your Adwords credit line and you would end up competing heavily for FDI add placemen at high cost and marginal effect. Not a good idea at all.

What would work is that we agree with you – our Investment Promotion Agency or Location Promotion Agency client – to place Adwords against your profile page on Global-Arena.com. That would bring more effect and more impact for less cost. Way less. And, not at last, we could also tell you by our extensive ongoing FDI research what keywords fit your location advantages and investor acquisition strategy and in what countries it should run. It requires a lot of FDI global market insight to do this right. And that’s the only option you have considering the drain potential of this instrument on your marketing budget. Adwords the Tyrannosaurus Rex running around in your marking budget and department. Its impressive but hungry all the time.

I could go on for another 2 pages on this great topic in more relevant detail. We should. We will dive in to it in more detail in next articles.

Cheers – time to go to bed.

Posted in: Uncategorized
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What’s going on at the FDI Marketplace – Google Pagerank up, more countries and locations and better search functionality

May 18th, 2010, by: Peter Storm

If we do the right things than what is going on at the FDI Marketplace matters to you our clients and users.

Some things you notice like more countries and more locations. Other things are equally important but take a bit of time and effort to experience; for instance that our Google Pagerank is rapidly improving. Global-Arena.com is on a steady and fast track to become a global top-100’000 website this summer. Nice – so what – you may think. Good to know that what this means is that our clients, your clients, can find us and your location easier in their Google Search queries. That matters a lot I trust. They find you when it matters most – when they need you.

I wanted to share a preview of our new FDI Site Search system but it appears we have to fix something on the Blog system first. Stay tuned for the preview.

Peter

Posted in: global-arena.com
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