Someone in the room always asks it. Maybe it’s a board member looking at strategic priorities. It could be a city council member reviewing the annual budget. Or perhaps a chamber partner who’s been funding your work for years is quietly wondering if it’s worth it.

“How do we know this is actually working?”

It’s a fair question. If you don’t have a good answer for your economic development marketing efforts, you’re not just losing a benefit argument, you may be losing the resources you need to do work that takes years to pay off.

Economic development marketing is one of the most complex ROI challenges in any sector. The payoff is often accumulative over time, but the community impact of today’s efforts may be seen for generations. A manufacturer relocates to your region because of a brand campaign you ran last year. A convention books your city because a site planner saw your CVB’s video in their feed. A talent pipeline grows because you built a quality-of-life narrative before the jobs even existed. The investments are long-term and the results are real, but connecting the dots for stakeholders who need proof today is a challenge.

So how can economic development marketing shape a story that’s honest, compelling, and manages realistic expectations?

1. Align Stakeholders on What ROI Means Before You Launch

Economic development marketing doesn’t work like a direct mail campaign. You’re not measuring click conversions for the purchase of a product. You’re measuring shifts in perception, increases in qualified inquiries, improvements in brand recognition among decision-makers, and (potentially years down the line) investment announcements, job creation numbers, and visitor spending growth.

The problem is that most stakeholders are wired to expect shorter feedback loops. When that expectation isn’t addressed upfront, even successful campaigns get questioned at the six-month mark because results may not be immediately visible.

Get in front of that challenge by having that conversation before the first campaign effort launches, not during the first budget review. Build a shared measurement framework with your board, your funders, and your partners that defines what success looks like at 6 months, 18 months, and 5 years. Agree on what early signals tell you the strategy is working and any indicators that represent the ultimate outcomes. When everyone is measuring the same thing, the ROI conversation becomes a progress report instead of a cross-examination.

Build this measurement framework in from the start so strategy and accountability are being designed together.

2. Track Brand Awareness Like a Business Asset

Place branding is often treated like a creative project, but the value of brand awareness is greater than the lifespan of any campaign. A Nielsen study in collaboration with Google found that a 1% increase in brand awareness produces meaningful gains in both short-term and long-term results. The challenge for most economic development organizations is that they run a campaign and then wait for the phone to ring, with no real way to measure broader awareness.

Core metrics to track may include branded search volume (people searching for your region or organization by name), share of voice compared to competing communities, direct website traffic, and brand perception surveys with your target audiences (site selectors, business owners, prospective residents, meeting planners). These are leading indicators that can point to whether your long-term efforts are gaining traction well before any big ribbon cuttings.

While we’d all love to commission a large brand lift study, even simple tracking gives you something to report and improve against.

3. Map the Funnel for Business Attraction and Retention

Economic development organizations tend to focus on the big win – the major announcement, the groundbreaking, the new jobs number. Those outcomes are exciting and matter enormously to stakeholders, but we can’t ignore the funnel that lead to those successes. Measuring at every stage of that journey tells a valuable ROI story.

At the top of the funnel, measure impressions, reach and engagement with your content. Then, don’t ignore the critical middle. Track inquiries, exploratory conversations, site visits. A simple pipeline tracker can demonstrate momentum and set you up for the answer to, “How do we keep this momentum going?”

4. Build Accountability into Your Advocacy Efforts

Advocacy campaigns are the hardest to measure since they’re about shifting attitudes, building relationships, and creating the policy environment that makes your community more competitive. The results are real, but they don’t show up well in a metrics dashboard.

That said, advocacy does have measurable outcomes. Media coverage in the outlets that matter to your target audiences (trade publications read by site selectors, regional business journals, economic development trade media) has calculable value and signals your narrative is resonating with those important to you. Growth in your coalition of partners and funders means your message is landing in your community, too. Finally, when your talking points show up in third-party coverage and community conversations without prompting, your advocacy is working. (At Chartwell, we call that the “gold star messaging moment!”)

5. Connect Your Efforts So Your Measurement Can Connect Too

One of the most common measurement problems in economic development marketing isn’t a lack of data, it’s a lack of integration. Organizations run a brand refresh here, a digital campaign there, a video series over here, each with different goals, different vendors, and different tracking systems. When it’s time to report on ROI, the pieces don’t add up because they weren’t connected from the get-go.

An integrated campaign approach solves this. When your campaign creative, content, digital advertising, public relations, and analytics are all built around the same goals and using the same measurement infrastructure, reporting becomes dramatically simpler and more compelling. You’re telling one story with multiple data points reinforcing each other.

Smart organizations are moving toward unified campaign strategies that let every channel reinforce the same story, and every dollar get measured against the same set of outcomes. Chartwell’s integrated marketing plans are built for exactly this kind challenge with the results dashboard to match.

Do the Work, Track the Gains, Celebrate the Momentum

Economic development is a long game. The communities that win are the ones that invest consistently in their brand, their story, and their relationships, even when the immediate returns aren’t obvious. Sustaining the investments requires trust from the people funding them and trust requires evidence. Measure the work and communicate wins in terms your stakeholders understand to earn the continued support for efforts that genuinely changes communities.

CWA Economic Development Marketing is a specific division of Chartwell Agency which partners with municipalities, chambers of commerce, and economic development organization to develop integrated marketing strategies with built-in measurement frameworks. Learn more about our economic development work or give us a call to start a conversation.