Local and Mobile Marketing Spending Continues to Increase

Everyone already knows that marketing has gone digital and it is never coming back. However, a lot of people are unaware that marketing is also starting to go local. A recent study conducted by BIA/Kelsey, an advertisement consultation firm, has discovered that spending on both local and mobile marketing is set to increase from $132.5 billion in 2012 to $148.8 billion in 2017. That is a 12.3 percent increase in spending, or 16.3 billion dollars.

Mark Fratrik, Chief Economist at BIA/Kelsey, says that local marketers will increase their spending on local advertising just under 9 percent by 2015, while national marketers will likely increase their spending up to 20 percent. Realize that the 12.3 percent of increased spending will NOT come from local marketers, but from larger national brands. However, national marketers are starting to take note of the fact that sometimes it is better to market to a smaller area, rather than nationally, to get the best results out of their campaigns.

“Large advertisers are realizing that sometimes a nationwide message won’t work; sometimes you need to tailor an ad to a particular area,” commented Fratrik.

Fratrik also mentioned that a majority of spending on marketing will occur on the digital side. Digital media spending has been forecasted to double by 2017. This amounts to $41.1 billion in marketing and close to a third of all spending digitally. On the other side of marketing, spending is expected to plateau or even start to tail off in traditional marketing mediums like magazines, newspapers, and yellow pages. It is expected that marketers will be spending around 107.6 billion on traditional marketing mediums in 2017, or a 1 percent decrease.

It has been theorized that the increase in spending on digital mediums will be driven by marketers spending more on mobile advertising. In fact, mobile marketing spending is expected to increase to $6.4 billion by 2017. That is a 600 percent increase! Oh, and by the way, online marketing is also expected to pick up 46.5 percent.

“Mobile’s the explosion,” said Fatrik. “Just the way it affords advertisers the ability to target people in specific locations at specific times. If you want to advertise something like a lunch special, most working people can’t be reached by local TV or radio, and they’re not necessarily reading the newspaper. But they have a mobile device that can display an ad at 11:15 for french fries at McDonald’s that’s three blocks away. And boy, that’s the great aspect of it”

So as you can see, local marketing as well as mobile marketing are continuing their meteoric rise to the top of the marketing hierarchy. Companies can no longer survive just on traditional outbound marketing alone. You must have some sort of an inbound marketing strategy, whether it’s SMS marketing, mobile optimization, SEO, content creation, etc. in order to make it in today’s world of digital media. But don’t worry, you are not alone. Agencies like us here at Anchor Mobile are here to help!