Charles City Area Development Corp. expands marketing efforts

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

The Charles City Area Development Corp. owns a piece of property in the south part of town that it thinks would be perfect for a small industry or other business to purchase and locate to. The members of that group also think Charles City is a pretty great place to live, and would like more people to move here.

Toward those ends, the Area Development Corp. (CCADC) is stepping up its marketing efforts, creating print, video and probably billboard messages.

Emily Garden, a CCADC member who has taken the lead on the group’s marketing campaign, explained some of the steps at the group’s monthly meeting last week.

“We have a lot going with marketing right now, which is good,” said Garden, who is the marketing manager with Soifer Family McDonald’s.

“We have a lot of potential in this area. I appreciate your patience, as it takes a long time to execute a marketing plan like the one we laid out a year-plus ago,” she said.

Recent moves have included buying an ad in Site Selection Magazine, which bills itself as “Publishing cutting-edge editorial on the state of industry and locations for expansion planning decision makers.” It is targeted at ​​corporate executives, site selection consultants and real estate professionals.

The ad shows a picture of the Avenue of the Saints Development Park at the intersection of the Avenue of the Saints and South Grand Avenue, with a locator map showing where Charles City is in the Midwest and the highways it links with.

The ad says, “We compete. You win.” and “Visit AvenueOfTheSaints.com for access to a 75 acre, state-certified, shovel-ready development site connecting St. Paul to St. Louis,” along with contact information and the logo of the International Economic Development Council, signifying the CCADC is an Accredited Economic Development Organization.

“Yes, there’s a lot more that we could say,” Garden told the other CCADC members, but in this ad they wanted to concentrate on the site location and ready availability.

“We just wanted to get that big part and then use that AEDO certification on there so we added that seal to the top,” she said.

The group also gets an ad on the Site Selector Magazine website (siteselection.com) as part of the package.

The CCADC has also produced a video with Jake Buss, owner of Marathon Videography in Charles City, showing some of the highlights of the community, that the group is spreading to various professional sites and on social media. The video can be viewed at the CCADC’s Facebook site, facebook.com/charlescityadc.

“Although the video doesn’t maybe at first glance look like an advertisement for land, it’s supporting that journey to getting business owners here. Where I would not necessarily share a land parcel video, I would share that Charles City video,” she said.

Garden also talked about placing a billboard at an appropriate site, and said the choices are renting a billboard or purchasing a billboard that the CCADC could rent to others when it wasn’t using it.

“My suggestion was that it’s a lot maybe more economically feasible to lease a board for at least that first year and see where we go with it,” she said.

Charles City Mayor Dean Andrews asked, “Are people who are looking for sites, are they going to see a billboard and say, ‘Oh, there’s a site,’” or are they more likely to look for available property in areas they’re already interested in?

“Yes, we’re selling land, but we’re also selling a town. We’re selling an emotional connection to an area,” Garden said. “So if you’re going to come here and make a million-dollar investment you need to know that the people you’re bringing have a place to come that’s good and they have a school to go to and they have homes to live in.”

She continued, “With a billboard, it’s not necessarily that a site selector is going to be driving right by on (highway) 218, but it’s increasing visibility.”

She said it’s always about the first person to see it, but the person that first person tells about it, and then the person that second person tells.

“I think that’s what we’re looking at, both with that video and with the billboard signage,” she said.

Garden said the community and CCADC is getting a lot of exposure with these initial efforts, “but we have more coming where we’re going to focus more on the industrial park and more of our working side, you know, employees and different video shots.”

Tim Fox, the CCADC executive director, thanked Garden and asked for a round of applause for her from the group for the work she had been putting into the project.