When you think about region-related marketing, what comes to mind?
It’s probably video ads on TV, streaming apps and social media encouraging you to spend your summer vacation exploring Michigan and your winter getaway taking in golf and art in Scottsdale. These paid ads are aimed at tourists who come, stay a week, spend some money, and return home.
Here in San Antonio, we invite people to visit the Alamo and River Walk and take in the city’s Missions, which are designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites. This type of “destination marketing” is very different from the “place marketing,” which many metros implement to tell their region’s story to the businesses and people in the hope they will relocate permanently.
greater:SATX is the economic development organization (EDO) for the eight-county Greater San Antonio, Texas region. Our organization is a public-private partnership charged with driving the region’s transformative growth by focusing predominantly on job creation. Key areas of our work include global corporate recruitment, local business advancement, workforce strategies and global place marketing.
Until recently, we marketed San Antonio the same way many other EDOs do their metros: traditional ads dedicated to corporate site selection or industry trades, as well as conducting site selection consultant tours, trade shows, and delegation visits.
Our results were solid, but we knew we needed to do better if the region was to achieve its fullest potential. We knew from experience that the availability of a large, skilled workforce was the top factor for businesses thinking of relocating. San Antonio, while one of the fastest-growing metros in the country, needed more mid-career and mid-level managers to meet demand.
Research also showed us that people and businesses now shop for new cities, comparing features and costs and checking online reviews and resources when deciding where to locate.
This consumer approach led us to market the region as a unified brand rather than as a collection of individual assets, like infrastructure, low taxes, incentives and inexpensive available land. We set out to expand our place marketing efforts.
Place Marketing + Consumer Branding Practices
We leveraged consumer branding best practices for business-to-business and business-to-consumer place marketing, targeting corporate leaders and 25- to 50-year-old professionals across our core industries: aerospace, cybersecurity, financial services and advanced manufacturing.
We engaged with The Harris Poll to survey consumer sentiment on a national level, assessing San Antonio’s image compared to competing peer cities, especially among the younger early-career and mid-level professionals we needed to attract. In hindsight, it sounds like common sense, but we were the first EDO in the country to use The Harris Poll to leverage consumer surveys and sentiment to guide marketing efforts.
Many successful rebrands involve a new name and ours was no exception. Our former name was the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation. It had no brand position, did not position the region internationally and didn’t aim to engage with the sought-after workers a region needs to attract businesses. So, we changed our organization’s name to greater:SATX Regional Economic Partnership, which we believe reflects the region today and in the future, announces our purpose (Regional Economic Partnership), and inspires confidence.
A new name required a new logo, of course, and a tagline. We chose “Life Works Greater™ in San Antonio,” targeting people to come work, live and build careers in the region. “Greater” is a double entendre: a reference to the burgeoning eight-county region we serve, as well as the big ways people and companies benefit by relocating here.
The campaign was launched in late 2022 and continues through today. It includes digital advertising, display and retargeting ads, programmatic video, SEO, paid social media on LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as outdoor. The ads work to attract workers and businesses and are a stark contrast to the traditional ads run in site selection outlets, which featured men in hard hats, skylines and manufacturing plants. Today’s ads showcase couples and families enjoying life.
Place Marketing — Four Tips
Having now gone through our place marketing pivot, we offer these best practices:
#1. When marketing a place, think of it as a consumer product. Use consumer brand approaches. If you don’t have experts on staff, find people with strong consumer product experience, such as a branding firm or creative agency steeped in direct-to-consumer work.
#2. Go through the same steps you would when creating a consumer brand for a new cosmetic line or snack food. For example, take the time to get to the heart of the product – your metro – with brand promise and essence statements. Do a competitive analysis to determine consumer sentiment about your metro, using outside experts like The Harris Poll.
#3. Create the brand and campaign assets and test their impact on your target audiences. Adjust where needed, and then launch. The beauty of digital marketing channels is that you can optimize on the fly, making slight evolutions as you learn what is resonating and what may not among your target audiences.
#4. Bring the heart back to your product. Traditional economic development marketing often overlooks the most vital element: the people whose lives are directly impacted by major decisions. Positioning your metro as a hub for job investment should go beyond numbers—it’s about the individuals in your community. Prioritizing people is key to creating a thriving and sustainable place to live, work, and build the future.
About The Author
Cecilia Garcia Redmond is Chief Brand and Communications Officer for greater:SATX, the economic development partnership leading the San Antonio region’s transformative growth through global corporate recruitment, local business advancement, workforce development and place marketing. An expert in brand marketing and strategic communications, she has extensive B2C and B2B experience across a range of well-known American brands.
