Developers at the Economic Development Authority in Western Nevada (EDAWN), a nonprofit regional economic investment authority chartered with attracting companies to Reno, Nevada, have developed a platform that can identify when companies have an interest in relocating.

EDAWN’s platform, built on technology from Bombora, identifies interest from website searches and intent data based on specific topics and words on a page. It can also identify the company considering the move by analyzing the content its employees consume. 

Doug Erwin, senior vice president at EDAWN, led the team that developed the tool, which took between six and eight months to build. “We take a pre-identified data set of potential companies that might want to move,” he said, “and feed that data into Bombora.

Bombora’s technology analyzes website searches and content read on sites of about 1.5 million companies worldwide. It establishes a baseline to measure how often employees search on or show interest in a specific topic. A co-op of publishers like Business Insider pool the data and allow businesses to check the topics getting traffic from specific domains.

When interest rises above the baseline, Bombora calls it “a surge.” EDAWN subscribes to certain topics such as “corporate communication,” “corporate relocation,” and “Reno.”

EDAWN uploads “raw” data from Crunchbase into the Bombora tool. It sends back a list of companies based on the type of media that people at the company consume, such as information on business relocation, corporate relocation and some other things like lower taxes and operational efficiencies.

“Open rates, click-through rates and reply rates have gone up significantly,” he said. “We’ve been able to build a real lead generation tool from it.”  

Erwin said the model turns the data into an email campaign to capitalize on the lack of retention rates driving companies and people out of the Bay area.

“We send about 100 emails every other week,” he said. “And we built a pipeline of about 60 companies we’re working with. We’ve had about 10% say they are in the active stages of planning two visit sites.”

The normal sales cycle is about 16 months to 18 months, Erwin, said, but the nonprofit already has seen one company commit to moving. The big experiment with this data is trying to identify the correct time to approach them.