For decades, investment promotion agencies (IPAs) have generally lived and died by three core metrics: projects generated, jobs created, and capital investment secured, writes Steve Duncan of C Studios.
There’s an irony here: despite having “promotion” baked into the name, IPAs have kept promotion metrics from sitting at the head table. Instead, they are relegated to internal team dashboards which are nice to have, but aren’t part of resource allocation discussions with funding stakeholders.
IPAs have focused exclusively on outcomes, not on the underlying marketing activities that influence decisions long before projects materialize. That might have been fine when globalization was young and few competitors existed, but the playing field is different today. No perception, no influence.
Location options are in abundance, decisions by executives are made differently, and the shift by some locations to value over volume requires a more intentional approach. That’s why we propose a fourth KPI pillar for IPAs: reputation.
IPAs as facilitator or influencer?
The most crucial decisions about your location’s fate often happen before you’ve had a chance to make your pitch. Research we’ve done on Winning Strategies in Investment Promotion Marketing shows that 72% of companies don’t contact an IPA until they are already at the short-listing phase.
That is mirrored by Bain & Company’s own revelation that B2B decisions often start with an initial consideration set, with the final decision going to one of those initial options 90% of the time. LinkedIn largely agrees, suggesting that 95% of your audience is “out of market” at any given time; but that doesn’t mean they’re not listening and forming opinions for when they move “in market.”
To shift from facilitator of decisions to influencer of them, IPAs should move beyond only focusing on the traditional three short-term outcomes and incorporate the long-term driver of them—reputation.
Put another way, a farmer doesn’t just collect the harvest each year without also considering the long-term health of the soil.
Shifting to the GROW framework
Rather than replacing traditional metrics, our GROW model integrates reputation alongside existing KPIs. GROW stands for:
- G (Gains): Capital expenditure secured, which ultimately stems from…
- R (Reputation): Anything from perception monitoring to website visits and marketing leads, all of which drive…
- O (Opportunities): Project pipeline, which should convert into…
- W (Workforce): Jobs created.
Reputation feels intangible, making it easy to dismiss as unmeasurable. But progressive IPAs are proving that is not the case by tracking:
- Brand sentiment studies: Formal research on how decision-makers view your location and how they see it ranked versus competitor markets.
- Website visits from target markets: Not just overall traffic, but qualified visits from priority regions and sectors, which are often lower than most groups would like to admit.
- Marketing-qualified leads: Early expressions of interest that, with the right process, may develop into project opportunities.
This holistic view allows IPAs to demonstrate progress not just in the short-term, but also considering the long-term growth of a location’s reputation and visibility as an essential component of its growth story.
Adding reputation metrics to your KPI dashboard helps justify strategic marketing investments that might not deliver immediate projects, but that build a foundation for sustainable success. To win an FDI decision, your location must win the journey. And that pursuit becomes much more probable if reputation is monitored and managed.
Connect with Steve of C Studios to explore how you can build reputation as part of your Investment Attraction strategy.
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