Local Digital Advertising & Mobile Marketing Trends

Reaching local audiences through digital advertising channels has become one of the most important mobile marketing trends. A growing list of advertising tools, platforms and content for building consumer context and engagement around location signals have made local digital advertising highly relevant and effective.

Generally, local has been thought of as physical place that contains media, consumers and businesses. However, mobile is redefining what local means for digital advertising campaigns. The marketing trend for local is not just a circle in a geographic market, but also includes wherever users are located at the moment.

Local Marketing Trends 2015-2019

The market for local advertising is quite large. It’s estimated that in 2015, advertisers will spend a total of $139.4 billion dollars targeting local audiences in traditional and digital media, according to BIA/Kelsey’s “local media advertising marketplace” forecast, which comprises 12 key media that generate revenues by selling access to local audiences to all types of advertisers. This includes audience advertising sales specifying local and regional markets.

The biggest local digital advertising channels include Online Search, Display and Video, which is 11.5% of the total spending, followed by Mobile Marketing with 4.8%. It also consists of digital sales by traditional media channels, including Newspapers (2.5%), TV (0.7%), Radio (0.8%) and Yellow Pages (1.6%).

Who Is Buying Local Ads?

Perception may be that it is mostly local businesses who buy local digital advertising. The reality is that national marketers and local SMBs each account for about 36% of spending targeting local audiences. The remaining 28% of spending is from larger local businesses. Spending trends among SMBs, Local Non-SMB and National advertisers targeting local audiences are expected to remain about the same through 2019.

A very interesting marketing trend with local and national advertisers buying local digital advertising is how the mix is changing in the mobile channel. In 2014, $900 million or only about 21% of the total spend in local mobile advertising came from local advertisers. By 2019, total spend by local advertisers is expected to grow to $6.5 billion or about 36% of the total spend in mobile advertising targeting local audiences. Clearly, the mobile marketing channel is becoming increasingly important to local advertisers over time.

http://www.iab.net/localbuyersguide

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