We finally got movement on our "Culinary Arts District" a couple of weeks ago with approval from city council. New Jersey Mainstreet designer Cindy Williams did a phenomenal job with the branding and strategy concepts. Putting a face on the direction and strategy for the central business district is a huge step forward.
Carola and I are working on this next phase of the investor roll out, we have to continue positioning ourselves as the host city for Culinary Arts Business / Food Business...
When I first sat down to figure this mess out, there were a lot of surface layers to peel back in order to get a full idea of what needed to be done.
The bottom line is we have to do more with less and the only way to approach this beast is through technology, If we can all get on the same page.
Literally, all staff working off the same document, we will finally have cohesion.
For example, in the past, lets say i want to do a mailing to promote our facade grant program. Where are the marketing dollars to perform a mass mailing?, where are the addresses for all the city business owners. When was the last time these businesses were contacted? How do we know who we spoke to and about what?
There are a few dozen of these questions that are unaswered, hence the relunctance and lack of marketing in years past.
Now, in order to move forward we have to connect our office, allowing all staff members access to the exact same information. Once we are all on the same page with up to date data. We can begin to develop strategies and build lists of targets for our programs.
The first rule in marketing and advertising is to define your target audience. This definition of a target was non-existent. For too long we have a taken a one-size -fits-all approach to development and it has proven very unproductive.
For instance, just because we have one Urban Enterprise Zone does not mean that we have only one market within the Zone. These individual markets have unique needs and demands and must be addressed on each business level.
The UEZ database allows us to collect invidual data on the zone and also determine appropriate project needs based on the data. At a glance we can begin to recognize a trend and develop programs accordingly.
Next...how the beast operates.
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