Competitive Benchmarking
Benchmark your community against the places you actually compete with.
A number means more when it has context. Compare your market with real competitors and see where you lead, where you trail, and which strengths are worth putting in front of a prospect, board, or council.
Start with the question
Benchmarking should answer more than “Are we above average?”
How do we compare with the markets we lose projects to?
Choose the places that matter instead of relying only on a national average.
What are our strongest competitive advantages?
See where your market stands out across the measures that affect location decisions.
Where are we weaker than our peers?
Find gaps early so the team can explain them, plan around them, or improve them.
Is our workforce stronger or more expensive?
Compare labor availability, cost, hiring and turnover, and future talent pipeline.
Are our industries growing faster or slower than competing markets?
Compare the business base, growth signals, and industry patterns behind each economy.
How should we explain the result to leadership?
Turn the comparison into sourced reports and clear visuals.
Why the old way is hard
A benchmark built once is already getting old.
Traditional benchmarking often ends in a spreadsheet or report that is difficult to update. Competitors change. New data is released. A new project may require a completely different peer group.
Static peer groups
The places you compare against for strategy may not be the same places you compete against for a project.
Old numbers
A report becomes less useful as the underlying data changes.
Too much manual work
Changing one competitor can mean rebuilding tables and charts.
Weak context
A number without a comparison does not show whether it is actually strong or weak.
How Incenti helps
Build the benchmark around the question you are trying to answer.
Choose the right peers
Compare the places that matter for the strategy, project, or conversation.
Use the same measures
Put markets on a common basis wherever the source data supports it.
See national context
Use percentile rankings to understand where each market sits against the broader field.
Change the comparison when the question changes
Move from one competitor set to another without rebuilding the research from scratch.
What you can benchmark
Workforce
Availability, cost, hiring and turnover, projections, and talent pipeline.
Business Cost
Energy, healthcare, tax climate, housing, and other operating cost factors.
Industries
Business base, sector patterns, business formation, and growth signals.
Community
Cost of living, housing, healthcare, safety, broadband, migration, and quality of life.
Risk & Infrastructure
Natural hazards, severe weather, environmental context, transportation, and logistics.
Incentives
What states offer and what they have actually awarded.
How teams use it
Economic Development Organizations
Use benchmarking to prepare for business attraction, strategic planning, board presentations, community conversations, and competitive project work.
- Compare against actual project competitors
- Show strengths with context
- Identify gaps before they become objections
- Support strategy with current sourced comparisons
Site Selectors & Corporate Location Teams
Use the same comparison framework to understand how candidate markets differ and which measures deserve deeper review.
- Compare candidate markets
- Understand where each place stands nationally
- Change peer groups as the project narrows
- Keep source context attached to the numbers
Ask Insights
“Where does this county outperform the three markets it competes with most often?”
Ask about the markets in your comparison and get an answer grounded in Insights data.
Competitive Benchmarking FAQs
What is economic development benchmarking?
Can I choose my own competitor markets?
Does Insights provide percentile rankings?
Can I benchmark more than workforce and cost?
Can I use benchmarking results in a report?
Know where your market stands before someone else tells you.
Build a live benchmark using the communities you actually compete with.