Content Every EDO Website's 'Key Industries' Section Should Have
Published: Wednesday, May 3, 2017 | Tags: content management, economic development
Table of contents:
Creating Content for your Economic Development Organization
Did you miss Part 1 of this blog series? Read our post Content Every EDO Website's 'Doing Business Here' Section Should Have!
Knowing what content to include on your website can be just as important as how the site looks during the website building process. Many website design companies offer to develop and organize the content for your site as an additional service, but this can come at a large price.
Doing it yourself can save you a lot of money, but it’s not as simple as throwing a few words on the page and leaving it up to the customer to figure out how to navigate your website. You want to carefully structure your website’s content so that it is intuitive, easy to quickly understand, and acts as a spokesperson for your economic development organization and region.
To help guide you through the process, we have created a breakdown of how to organize the content on your site and descriptions of what to include in each section.
Before you sit down and start writing, you may want to map a basic outline of how your website’s information should be structured. As author and content marketing expert, Ann Hadley, once wrote, “the more the think, the easier the ink.”
As you may know, creating a content sitemap will help you list your EDO’s main focus areas as top level menus followed by more detailed navigation.
Based on the sitemap we created earlier, we know that most economic development organization’s site are arranged into four or so main categories:
- Doing Business Here
- Key Industries
- Life/Lifestyle or Living Here
- About Us/Resources
Everything else included on your economic development’s website will likely branch off one of these categories.
In this blog, we will explore what pages and subpages make up the Key Industries section. As you go through each section, you will find a hyperlink and an image, showing one of our favorite websites that incorporates the best practice or content that we are discussing.
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Key Industries
Greater MSP and Charles County Economic Development take two different approaches for where their ‘Key Industries’ information is located.
Greater MSP, due to the nature of their title menus, includes key industries under the ‘Doing Business Here’ tab. A totally reasonable decision. Whereas Charles County includes key industries as a menu option on their main page.
Wherever you decide, consider the guidelines below to give you an idea of what to include in this section.
Similar to major employers, what are some key industries or fields that power your economy? What are the reasons these industries are so popular in your region? Industries can include but are not limited to:
- Health and Sciences
- Federal Contracting
- Retail
- Technology
- Business Services and Headquarters
- Manufacturing
- Food & Agriculture
- Finance
- Renewable Energy
If you are unsure of what your key industries may be, try to identify which companies are the top employers for your workforce. What kind of business do those employers conduct? Once you have a nice list, narrow down the top four or five industries.
If there do not seem to be many that jump out from the others, that’s OK. This can be an opportunity to show the variety of businesses thriving in your area.
On Greater MSP’s site, the top five industries are highlighted. But they also include a nice infographic that provides additional industries, employment rates, and projected growth.
When listing your top industries, give an overview and include information such as the number of companies and jobs in each field. You can also list any other factors that are significant for your area or have a great impact on the economy in your region.
That’s it!
By including the following information throughout this blog on your Key Industries pages, your EDO will have a beautiful website packed with helpful, informative, and persuasive content.
While including all of this will give you a well-rounded website, we encourage you to take one more look at your EDO, and what you would like your target audience to know. Review all of your information and decide if there is anything more you can include about yourselves or the region.
Thank you for taking the time to read through this blog! We hope you found it helpful. For everything on how to write content for your EDO, all in one place, download the Ebook How to Write Content for your Economic Development Organization now!
To learn more about content creation for your EDO, our post Creating Content for your Economic Development Organization is a great place to see tips and tricks for keeping your members (potential and existing) well informed. Or read our post How EDOs And Chambers Can Be The Ultimate Business News Providers to see how exactly EDOs can keep the public in the know!
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