What do you do for an encore after pioneering web-based economic development tools that have become the industry standard worldwide?
If you are GIS Planning, you simply build a new product that promises to revolutionize the practice of economic development marketing.
GIS Planning’s new ZoomProspector allows companies to search a wealth of data for every U.S. city and county in order to evaluate the optimal location for a new business expansion or relocation. Information that formerly took months of research to obtain can now be available in mere minutes.
Free to the user, it offers rich, incredibly detailed data that speeds and simplifies the site selection search process for the 750,000 companies that seek new locations annually.
For site seekers, it delivers quantifiable and consistent information that makes comparisons between communities more objective. ZoomProspector not only provides an aggregated list of communities matching self-determined criteria, it can rank the various locations based upon the sufficiency of their match to the search variables.
ZoomProspector also provides links to economic development organizations (EDOs) and site selection consultants as an additional resource to those searching for the best sites. Although all communities meeting the search criteria are returned to the user, those EDO’s utilizing GIS Planning’s web-based geographic information system, called ZoomProspector Enterprise, receive priority listings.
For the economic development practitioner community, ZoomProspector has the potential to revolutionize traditional marketing practices. With an estimated eighty-five percent of all site searches beginning with a web search, ZoomProspector provides a powerful new marketing tool for communities, counties, regions and states.
“In today’s financial crisis economic developers can’t afford to lose business investment in their communities. ZoomProspector connects start-up, expanding and relocating businesses with the communities that match their needs. It delivers high value by providing qualified leads to economic development organizations,” says Anatalio Ubalde, Co-Founder and CEO of GIS Planning.
“It’s a lot better to be an economic developer getting a call from a business that says ‘We’ve already decided that your community could be a great match for our business,’ instead of a caller that says ‘Tell me about your community,” Ubalde says. “ZoomProspector facilitates a better site location process by giving businesses the information they need to make intelligent expansion decisions and also connect them with the right economic development organizations.”
ZoomProspector’s main benefit is that it levels the economic development marketing playing field by removing barriers to data access. Smaller communities that have been previously disadvantaged because of a lack of staff, technology expertise or funding can now compete effectively with larger communities for new investment opportunities. ZoomProspector provides the data, the web presence, the search capabilities and marketing support that previously were only available from a larger community, region or state.
ZoomProspector aggregates information on the community characteristics typically sought by site selectors, corporate real estate professionals and businesses such as population and labor force; educational attainment; entrepreneurialism and innovation; venture capital investments and household incomes. This capability will save local EDO’s the many hours of time it takes to conduct this basic but important research and frees them to focus on higher value marketing efforts.
The aggregation capabilities offered by the software are commonly deployed in other applications such as those used for home purchases but ZoomProspector marks the first time it will be put to use in the field of economic development marketing. It has been a long time in the making, and its launch marks the culmination of years of planning by Ubalde and his team.
One key to success for ZoomProspector will be the company’s ability to drive traffic to the site from corporate real estate executives and site selection consultants. But, with its marketplace potential and opportunity to develop complementary partnerships to supplement its capabilities, ZoomProspector should rapidly become a popular website destination for site seekers.
Like GIS Planning’s previous efforts, ZoomProspector is no doubt destined to become another industry standard for economic development web sites. And, it will surely change the face of economic development marketing by forcing EDO’s to think differently about how to best market their communities.
For more information on ZoomProspector, visit other media mentions at the links below:
Washington Post
C-Net News
Venture Beat
Mashable
Profy
bub.blicio.us
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