Place & Talent Attraction
Campaigns that pull people to a region: remote workers, returning natives, skilled trades, new grads. Audience modeling, geo and IP-match targeting, and creative that makes a place feel like the obvious next move.
Economic development 05
We market the opportunity, not just the place.
Place attraction. Talent attraction. Business and investment attraction. We help economic development organizations tell a region's story at scale and prove it moved real leads, not just impressions. Our principals have led statewide opportunity marketing at full national scale.
The challenge 01
A region competes for the same talent and capital as everyone else, so the story has to do real work.
Economic development marketing is uniquely hard. You're selling a place to audiences that have never been there (site selectors, founders, remote workers, returning natives) against fifty other regions making the same promises. The brand has to be aspirational enough to move people and honest enough to survive a public board, a legislature and the press.
We don't just run an awareness campaign and hand you a slide of impressions. We build a system: positioning, paid media, content, landing experiences and clean attribution, so you can show a funder exactly what the investment returned. That's the difference between a tourism-style ad buy and a pipeline.
Read how we did it for MEDC →Flagship proof 02
MEDC "Pure Opportunity": statewide place marketing at national scale.
Our senior team led the strategy and media behind Michigan's "Pure Opportunity" economic-development campaign: a multi-channel, always-on engine attracting talent, business and investment to the state. This is the kind of complex, public-sector, board-accountable work economic development demands, and it's exactly the work we do.
In one fiscal year the program drove 454M+ impressions and 28,000+ qualified leads. The following year, with the media budget cut by half, our team held results within roughly 9% (about 25,800 leads on 352M impressions). Efficiency, not just reach.
A note on attribution: Pure Opportunity is work our founders and senior team led, executed during a prior agency tenure (Lambert). We present it as the credential you'd be hiring: the experience our principals bring, not a Zoned-the-company client logo.
Read the full case →
Pure Opportunity · statewide
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impressions in a single fiscal year of statewide opportunity marketing
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qualified leads driven for the state in one year
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media budget cut while results held within ~9% YoY
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disciplines in one system, from strategy to attribution
What we do 03
One integrated engine for place, talent and investment attraction.
Most regions stitch together a branding shop, a media buyer and a web vendor who never talk to each other. We run all of it under one roof, so the positioning shows up in the ad, the ad lands on the right page, and the page reports back to your board.
Business & Investment Marketing
Reaching site selectors, founders and expanding employers with the case for your region, including industry-specific value props, lead capture, and nurture that keeps you in the conversation through a long decision cycle.
Regional Brand & Positioning
Identity, naming and a visual system that a coalition of stakeholders can actually rally behind, built with our Community-Centric Naming methodology so the brand reflects the place, not a consultant's template.
Paid Media at Scale
In-house buying across search, social, programmatic, CTV/OTT and OOH. The same hands that have run multimillion-dollar statewide campaigns run yours, with budget pacing tuned for efficiency, not vanity reach.
Sites & Landing Experiences
Fast, accessible web experiences for EDO sites, microsites and campaign landing pages. WCAG 2.1 AA by default, built to convert a curious visitor into a lead, an RFI or a relocation inquiry.
Attribution & Reporting
GA4, dashboards and multi-touch attribution that translate marketing into the numbers a board, a council and a funder respect: cost-per-lead, qualified pipeline and ROI you can defend in public.
Who you're really selling to 04
A region isn't one audience. It's a dozen, each making a different decision.
"Attract talent and investment" sounds like one job. In practice it's many. On the statewide Pure Opportunity program, our team segmented the work down to the sub-audience, because a site selector vetting a region against fifty others reads nothing like an out-of-state engineer weighing a relocation. We build the message, the channel mix and the landing experience around each one, so the right person sees the right case for the place.
That segmentation discipline is what separates a region's brand campaign from a billboard. It's how you defend a media plan to a board: every dollar is pointed at a named audience and a measurable action.
Talent & relocation
Out-of-state career changers, returning natives and new grads, reached on LinkedIn, search, social and programmatic with the case for living and working here, mapped to relocation and careers landing pages.
Site selectors & investors
The consultants and corporate real-estate teams who shortlist regions, reached with industry-specific value props on innovation, infrastructure and workforce potential, plus lead capture for a long decision cycle.
Employers & expanding business
SMB decision-makers through enterprise CEOs and tech-sector influencers: the retention and expansion audience, reminded that the region they already chose is still the smart bet.
Stakeholders & residents
Elected officials, non-profit leaders and residents: the public coalition a publicly-funded campaign has to inform and keep on side, with accessible, benefit-driven messaging.
Who we partner with 05
State agencies, EDOs, SBDCs and the regional partners who do this work every day.
Economic development runs on coalitions: a state agency, a regional EDO, a small-business network and a destination org all chasing the same outcome from different angles. We've worked alongside that ecosystem and we know how to make a campaign serve all of it at once.
Statewide economic development
Team-led work for the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC): the "Pure Opportunity" platform, run at full national scale and accountable to public stakeholders.
Small business, restaurants & entrepreneurship
The Michigan Small Business Development Center (MI SBDC), supporting the founders, expansions and main-street businesses that make regional growth real on the ground. Restaurants and food service are the visible heartbeat of a thriving district and a discipline we specialize in: online ordering, reservations, local SEO and review management that fill seats.
Regional EDOs
The Right Place (West Michigan's regional economic development organization) and partners like it, where business attraction, retention and expansion all live under one mandate.
Destination & place marketing
Experience Grand Rapids and tourism-adjacent civic clients, because talent and visitor attraction draw on the same story, and a region's brand has to work for both.
How we work 06
A system you can stand behind in a public meeting.
Economic development is funded by people who answer to taxpayers. Every dollar has to be defensible. Here's how we make the work both ambitious and accountable.
Listen & position
Stakeholder and listening sessions, market analysis and persona work to find the true, defensible story of the place. No borrowed slogans.
Build the engine
Creative, landing experiences and an always-on media plan across the channels your audiences actually use, mapped to a clear set of KPIs.
Run & optimize
In-house buying with budget pacing and weekly optimization. That discipline is why our team held MEDC results within ~9% on half the spend.
Prove the return
Transparent dashboards and attribution that turn the work into leads, cost-per-lead and ROI your board can repeat verbatim.
Built for statewide scale 07
National reach, run from one room, across every channel your audiences live on.
Place marketing only works if it shows up everywhere a decision gets made and stays consistent across all of it. Our team restructured Michigan's plan into a single omnichannel ecosystem: paid search, social, programmatic display, endemic placements, direct buys, OOH, radio, event sponsorships and influencer. One team, one strategy, one set of numbers, not five vendors pointing at each other.
The reach speaks to the scale: 622M impressions in FY23, 454M in FY24, and a projected 353M in FY25. The FY25 figure held with the media budget cut in half. The principals on this work have managed $30M+ in annual media spend at that altitude. We can run a region of any size, but we've already run one at full national scale.
Statewide · national scale
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in annual media spend our principals have managed at national scale
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peak single-year statewide impressions (FY23)
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paid channels orchestrated as one always-on engine
Related work 08
Proof from complex, public-facing mandates.
Economic development sits where government rigor meets growth ambition. The same team has delivered both: at scale, in public, with the numbers to show for it.
Economic developmentStatewide opportunity marketing
28,000+qualified leads in a single fiscal year, at national scale
Read the case →
Lead generation650% lower cost-per-lead, YoY
6,000+qualified leads against a 3–4K goal, on similar spend
Read the case →
Public sector147M+ impressions, statewide
Gold & Silver2025 Ragan PR Daily Content Marketing Awards
Read the case →
Let's talk 09
Let's market your region like the opportunity it is.
Tell us what you're trying to grow: talent, business, investment, or all three. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right partner, and exactly how we'd build the system to get there.