HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (February 1, 2022) – Huntsville is booming today, with low unemployment, strong job creation and capital investment, and population growth making us the biggest city in Alabama years ahead of projections. To help keep this growth going, the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber has redesigned its economic development and recruitment websites. These are now on a single site, as we announce the relaunch of asmartplace.com. With this, we also debut our freshened-up logo, color palettes, and branding for ASmartPlace®.
The goal of the revamped site is to tell the story of Huntsville to businesses and individuals considering expansion or a move to the region. With two primary tracks – one for site selectors and one for job seekers – the information is organized into four sections: Locate & Expand Here, Economic Overview, Career Opportunities, and Call Huntsville Home.
“The first version of asmartplace.com launched 15 years ago,” said Lucia Cape, the Chamber’s Senior VP of Economic Development, Industry Relations, and Workforce. “We created ‘A Smart Place’ using a slogan developed to support the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure process. We strongly feel it captures the essence of the Huntsville metro, then and now, from being named one of the world’s smartest cities by Forbes in 2009 to retaining our ranking of highest concentration of engineers year after year.”
One reason for updating the site is to support the workforce marketing campaign the Chamber is starting in 2022. The campaign will drive traffic to the updated website and engage visitors for ongoing communication. The campaign will have two audiences, defined by the 2019 Deloitte Labor Market Analysis for North Alabama. The first audience is talent across the United States that meets the needs of our existing and future employers, and the second audience is students across the region and their parents to share the high-demand careers available to them right here. Both campaigns will use social media and digital marketing.
“One of the top recommendations of the Deloitte labor study was to develop a nationally branded affinity marketing campaign about the Huntsville region,” explained Cape. “We have been running trial campaigns to test messaging and geofencing parameters during local and national events, such as the Space and Missile Defense Conference and the National Space Symposium.”
Digital and social media ads have featured national rankings, workforce statistics and career opportunities. The analytics from these campaigns have provided valuable feedback about what generates traffic to asmartplace.com.
Talent is one of the top reasons companies locate and expand in the Huntsville metro, and our growth has created even more demand for educated, skilled workers. The Chamber is committed to supporting new and existing companies by attracting more talent into the community and increasing “smart career” awareness among students to ensure we remain ASmartPlace well into the future.