The challenge
St. Lucie County sits between Miami and Orlando, within a three-hour drive of 70% of Florida’s population, connected by I-95 and Florida’s Turnpike. It has 21 miles of beaches, a deep-water port at Fort Pierce with the largest mobile boat lift in the country, and enough entitled residential land to absorb the post-pandemic influx into Florida without a planning bottleneck.
The problem was never the offer. It was recognition. The county competed against better-known Florida markets, and a site consultant doing early research had no reason to look at it, and no easy way to check the numbers if they did.
The approach
When the EDC rebuilt its website with Marketing Alliance, it put a Site Selector Toolbox at the top of the site rather than scattering data through the pages beneath it.
“I really liked the idea of having that site selector toolbox right there so consultants can go right to it and get whatever information they want.”
Seven Localintel Dashboards sit on that one page. Economic Advantages, Workforce Advantages and Talent Pipeline Advantages cover the labor question from three directions. Logistics Advantages carries the road, rail, air and port access that drives the county’s distribution case. Industry Advantages shows which sectors are growing fastest. Community Profile and Quality of Life cover the demographic and livability picture.
A consultant who lands there can answer most early screening questions without sending an email.
The result
The website won Innovation in Marketing from the Florida Economic Development Council in 2024.
More usefully, the deployment has kept growing. Four dashboards were documented on the toolbox in 2024 and it now runs seven, with the Quality of Life tool since moved to a newer version, none of which required the EDC to rebuild the page or change a line of embed code. The team has since added Studio to its subscription, giving it reports, profiles and stories drawn from the same data already running on the website.
“Adding Localintel’s insights and interactive data visualization tools throughout our website has significantly enhanced our ability to communicate our location’s strengths more effectively.”
A county that struggled to get noticed now gets screened on its numbers rather than its reputation, which is the trade it was looking for.