By Paul Cranch, LGAQ Lead for Trade & Investment
The announcement that Brisbane will host the 2032 Olympics has instantly boosted the potential of Queensland’s regions as ideal places for investment.
A quarter of Queensland’s 77 councils already have established investment websites and are ideally positioned to exploit the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the Olympics brings.
More councils are proactively developing and planning to publish new investment websites in what will be a relatively inexpensive but rewarding strategy to attract investment.
For the same cost of printing a hard copy investment prospectus, any council can create a very effective online presence to promote and profile their region.
It can be measured for effectiveness, track backend data to tailor and update with the latest information as well as collect who and where viewers are coming from to generate and identify leads and develop marketing campaigns.
If your council is reviewing or considering creating an investment website, below are some tips for noting.
Starting from the top, determine what the main purpose of the website is:
- Understand your users. This is the key to developing meaningful and comprehensive content
- Segment your audience and prioritise your users (investors, government agencies, site selection advisors, media, researchers, etc.).
- Focus on helping each user type achieve its goals when visiting your website (getting to the information they need quickly).
- Start with the content you have and evaluate it for relevance, quality, and comprehensiveness
- Use reliable sources of content
- Then, fill in the gaps.
What your website must have:
- Contact information (introduce the team)
- Incentive programs
- Utilities cost info (what are the costs for water, electricity, internet, natural gas etc.)
- Recent announcements (investments, infrastructure, research and development initiatives in the region)
- Testimonials (from existing businesses, answering the question: ‘why they are there?’)
- Industry-targeted info (e.g., aged care facility investors—community profile and aging population statistics)
- Map of your region (include ports, roads, rail, utilities, clusters)
- Largest employers (who are the big players in town)
- Education and workforce development providers (TAFEs, universities etc.)
- Business cases and studies for local industries (e.g. accommodation studies, supply chain studies etc.).
Here are some questions you need to answer to finish the job of creating an effective investment website:
- How do you generally consider the quality of your investment promotion website? Is there more than one website?
- Could the contents and layout of the website be improved? What do investors want to know first (is it what councils can do for them)?
- Have you undertaken any evaluation of the use of the current website? What do investors think of your website and quality of information?
- Does your council engage in reactive or pro-active investment promotion? Considering all your investment promotion efforts, are they focused and costeffective?
- What are the types of data/measurements you can gain from the website uses to generate leads?
For further ideas, check out some of the current local government investment promotion websites on Congruent’s trade and investment page for ideas.
If your council is thinking about profiling its opportunities for investment online, let me review, provide feedback and share what I am seeing and what I know investors are looking for.