Marketing & Attraction: How We Tell Grant County’s Story and Who Needs to Hear It

Part of our Growing Grant County series. This month: targeting with discipline, positioning with honesty, and building a lead pipeline measured by quality engagement.

Say “marketing” to most people and they picture billboards, slogans and logos. In economic development, marketing is matchmaking; finding the right companies for a place like Grant County and giving those companies an honest reason to look at Grant County. 

This is the next entry in our Growing Grant County series, where we open up the mechanics of our field for the people we work alongside: business owners, city and town leaders, utility engineers, brokers and the site selectors who steer corporate location decisions. Earlier posts covered site readiness, access to capital, and workforce. Here we take on business attraction: how a county positions itself, generates qualified leads without cutting ethical corners, and knows whether any of it is actually working.

Targeting: The Discipline of Saying No

Attraction begins with a decision most communities are reluctant to make, whom not to pursue. A target industry is simply a sector whose needs line up with what a place already has. Chasing every lead potentially spreads a small team thin and, worse, sends prospects a muddled message about what we are. 

Manufacturing has anchored Grant County’s economy since the gas boom made Marion the “Queen City of the Gas Belt,” and the sector still accounts for nearly 18% of jobs in the county (Lightcast). Legacy firms such as Atlas Foundry, founded in 1893, and Bahr Brothers Manufacturing, founded in 1909, still operate here. Interstate 69 runs the length of the county, putting Marion roughly 70 miles from Indianapolis and 50 miles from Fort Wayne. Three higher-education institutions help renew the workforce: Ivy Tech Community College, Indiana Wesleyan University, and Taylor University. Those facts steer us toward advanced manufacturing, food and agribusiness processing, logistics and distribution along the I-69 corridor, and the healthcare and education sectors already growing here. 

We build that judgment on data, not instinct. Labor and industry figures from Lightcast, STATS Indiana, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics tell us which sectors have room to grow, where our wage and skill base is competitive, and which prospects are likely to thrive rather than struggle. Targeting is not about turning business away. It is about spending finite time where a match is most likely, which serves the prospect as much as it serves our county.

Positioning: The Honest Value Proposition

Before we can generate a lead, we have to answer a simple question from a company that has never heard of us: “Why here?” 

A value proposition is the answer. It's a clear, honest statement of the specific value a location offers a defined type of business. It explains why this place beats the alternatives for a company on the factors that actually matter to a prospect: talent, cost, speed, access, and risk. A good one is specific enough to test and modest enough to survive due diligence. 

The field generally frames positioning three ways: how a place is different, where it competes on cost, and which market it focuses on. Grant County’s honest proposition draws on all three. We sit between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, two of Indiana’s largest job hubs, with interstate access in both directions. We offer a deep, multigenerational manufacturing workforce and the university pipeline to renew it. Our cost of living and cost of doing business are lower than in the metros on either end of I-69. And we are small enough to move fast. The Growth Council is built to convene local officials, utility engineers, and business leaders around a single project quickly, which is what we have long called working at the speed of business. 

Honesty includes naming trade-offs. We are a county of about 65,000 people, not a metro (U.S. Census Bureau). A company that needs 500 skilled hires in 90 days should be able to confirm this type of information before a site visit, not after. A value proposition that oversells will eventually fall short, and the failure costs a community the one thing it cannot quickly rebuild: credibility.

Storytelling: Evidence Over Adjectives

A value proposition is a claim. The stories we share are evidence. 

When Café Valley invested $20.3 million to add production lines and roughly 100 jobs at its Marion bakery, and Hartson-Kennedy put $2.1 million into its countertop plant and added about 50 jobs, those were not just company announcements. They are proof that a company can expand and find support here. The most credible marketing a county does is business retention and expansion. When existing employers are visibly thriving, outside prospects notice. 

Credible storytelling also means meeting site selectors where they work. These are professionals on deadlines, and for many of them the first and sometimes only impression of a county is its website. Four things should be findable in a click or two rather than gated behind a phone call: available sites and buildings, workforce and wage data, utility and infrastructure detail, and incentive summaries. In 2025 we received a grant from Duke Energy’s economic development partnership program to sharpen how we present Grant County’s assets to site selectors. Storytelling, done right, is infrastructure. 

The ethical line in storytelling is simple: everything we say has to be verifiable. Real numbers, real photographs, and real employers who agreed to be featured. The moment a community’s story outpaces its facts, the site-selection process will find the gap. 

The Pipeline: Lead Generation Without Shortcuts

A lead is any company, site selector, or investor showing interest in the county. The pipeline is the path a lead travels from first awareness, through active consideration, to due diligence, and sometimes to a decision to locate here. Due diligence is the verification stage, when a company checks every claim we have made against public records, site tests, and interviews. Most leads won’t reach the end, and that is normal. The purpose of a pipeline is not to hold onto every lead. It is to move the right ones forward and to learn, honestly, why the others fell away. 

Leads reach us from many directions: the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and its requests for information (RFIs), site selectors and location advisors, commercial brokers, referrals from existing employers, utility partners, and, increasingly, companies that simply found us online. Ethical lead generation across all of these rests on five non-negotiables: 

• Accuracy first. Our job is to give prospects accurate, current, and credible information, not the rosiest version. A wrong wage figure or an overstated readiness claim, discovered late in a project, damages trust that took years to build. 

• Confidentiality. Corporate location searches are sensitive, and premature disclosure can jeopardize jobs or projects. Prospects who ask for discretion get it. 

• Responsiveness. Speed itself is an ethical commitment. A prospect who waits a week for a data request has been quietly told where they rank. We treat inbound inquiries with the urgency a location decision deserves. 

• Honest qualifications. Sometimes the most ethical thing we can do is tell a prospect we are not the right fit. Recognizing a mismatch early saves everyone time and money, and it protects our credibility for the next, better-matched project. 

• Retention before recruitment. Attraction never comes at the expense of the businesses already here. Supporting and expanding our existing employers comes first, always. 

No manipulative tactics, no bait-and-switch incentives, and no traded confidences. In a field where reputations travel fast among a small national community of site selectors, ethics and effectiveness turn out to be the same thing. 

Measurement: Two Numbers Beyond Lead Count

It is tempting to judge a marketing effort by the number of leads it produces. But lead count is a volume metric, and volume can flatter. Thirty inquiries that go nowhere are worth less than three that fit. To gauge the health of a pipeline, we watch two other numbers closely. 

1. Conversion rate, or the qualification rate. Of every lead that comes in, how many advance to a real, qualified project: a substantive RFI response, a site visit, or a spot on a company’s short list? A rising conversion rate is the clearest sign that our targeting and positioning are working. We are attracting the right companies, not merely more of them. A pipeline stuffed with leads that never qualify is not a healthy pipeline. It is a signal to sharpen who we reach and what we tell them. 

2. Pipeline velocity, or response and progression time. How quickly do we respond to an inquiry, and how quickly do qualified projects move from one stage to the next? Speed matters on its own terms, and it matters as a diagnostic. Projects that stall in a single stage reveal exactly where our process, our data, or our sites need work. 

A third lens worth a glance is the quality of what sits in the pipeline: the jobs and capital investment that active projects represent. That measure keeps a team from mistaking many small, low-fit leads for real momentum. But conversion and velocity are the two that most directly answer the question every board and funder asks: is this working? 

The Bottom Line: Matchmaking That Holds Up

Marketing and attraction, done well, is not salesmanship. It is targeting with discipline, positioning with honesty, storytelling backed by evidence, and a pipeline judged by quality rather than noise. It is matchmaking, and the best matches are the ones that hold up under scrutiny, because both sides told the truth. 

That work is not ours alone. Every employer who lets us tell their expansion story, every municipality and utility partner who helps a site reach “ready,” and every broker who brings us a serious prospect strengthens the pipeline for the whole county. If you have a site, a story, or a lead worth pursuing, we would like to hear from you. You may use our simple contact form for general inquiries or our business and employer highlights form for deeper feedback.

Reach the Growth Council at communications@grantcounty.com or (765) 662-0650, and follow the Growing Grant County series at grantcounty.com/news.