Local ads are now bringing in more money than they ever have before, and are continuing their rapid increase.
According to a new report that has been released by BIA/Kelsey, the mobile marketing sector’s local advertising revenues in the United States will be reaching $4.5 billion by the end of this year.
This will represent a massive increase over the $2.9 billion that was brought in during 2013.
These details have been published in the mobile marketing local ad revenues report from the firm, which also predicted that these figures will more than triple by the year 2018. At that point, the report predicts that the revenues will have risen to $15.7 billion. This helps to illustrate the importance of local when it comes to advertising online.
The report also showed that mobile marketing spending in the U.S. will rise to $11.4 billion, this year.
That will then continue to grow over the next five years until it reaches $30.3 billion. By the end of the forecast period of this report, mobile ads that are locally targeted will come to represent more than half (52 percent) of all of the mobile ad spending in the United States.
Propelling this localized share of the revenues forward over this channel is the rapid adoption of various tactics to appeal to smartphone users when they are within specific locations or seeking local businesses. These include such options as click to call, click to map, and geo-fencing. These are rapidly becoming more commonplace among national advertisers, who currently make up the majority of ad spending over this channel in the U.S. They are also those that are making the greatest effort to take advantage of the growing availability and yet currently greatly undervalued local advertising category.
Many smaller advertisers have yet to understand that the demand in searches is increasingly headed in a mobile direction as individuals bring their smartphones wherever they go and use them for a growing number of purposes. Therefore, this ad inventory is undervalued, providing an ideal opportunity to step into that mobile marketing space while it is the least expensive and most rewarding to do so.
Success in advertising over smartphones is beginning to require this vital component.
Although location based marketing may not be the entire issue when it comes to mobile, it is easily proving itself to be the most important factor over this channel, says a new report from Thinknear.
The company specializes in this area and is now claiming that it is vital to advertising success on smartphones.
General Manager Eli Portnoy of Thinknear, a mobile advertising firm that focuses on location based marketing, explained that “The phone is a portable device we carry in our pocket and is a part of what we are doing all day and every day. You have your phone with you when you are commuting, when you are at work, when you are seeing friends, when you go home. It’s ubiquitous. And you use it to interact with your world and what’s important to you.”
That said, Portnoy pointed out that many businesses forget how precise location based marketing can be.
He pointed out that many mobile marketing firms and advertisers forget that smartphones are an exceptionally portable device and that people take them along no matter where they go. This makes it possible for “very precise location capabilities.”
Using the geolocation technology that is built into the majority of smartphones, these days, can give companies the ability to better understand who their main customers actually are and what they typically do. This insight can be invaluable to being able to provide those consumers with just what they want, at the time that it is most relevant to them.
The main issue standing between companies and their ability to actually obtain accurate location data, which they can then use, is the same as the one standing in the way of the use of many other parts of the mobile marketing industry. While the technology is out there, it isn’t always possible to use it to capture the valuable data. Portnoy explained that “Users have to have their GPS on, give the app permission to use their location, have a clear line of sight to a GPS satellite, and so on.”
Therefore, not every impression will provide usable location based marketing data. However, there are ways around it and firms such as Thinknear appear to be able to help to provide strategies that will guide companies and show them the mobile ropes.
