by Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS

Mobile and local marketing go hand in hand. So in the 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about the engagement rate of local marketing tactics …

Q: What percentage of customers/prospects interact with your organization’s LOCAL mobile marketing tactics?

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POINTS TO CONSIDER

A major marketing buzzword in 2013 is LoSoMo. That’s local/social/mobile.

Like any form of marketing, local marketing is more powerful when it is relevant. And, by being able to get granular to the local and micro-local level, marketers are creating more compelling content for potential customers.

This is the great benefit of mobile marketing. Not only can marketers create relevant content based on physical location, but also on time of day, offer preference and other behavioral metrics.

Therefore, it is with great interest that we look at some data about how local marketing is performing for mobile marketers so far.

Half of marketers don’t know level of interaction with customers

Interestingly, half of survey respondents simply don’t know. How well have you been able to track your local mobile marketing performance?

A benefit of a local digital platform like mobile marketing over a traditional local tactic like telephone directories should be the ability to measure performance. Why do you think so many marketers cannot track performance, especially of tactics like social check-in, geolocation opt-in, and coupon redemption that have such a natural interaction metric (namely, how many people checked in, opted in, or redeemed a coupon)?

What has worked for you? What advice would you give your peers to better track local mobile interaction?

Local mobile tactics garner high interaction

Of the marketers who do know, a majority (or, in the case of social check-in, very close to a majority) marketers report high interaction rates.

How have local mobile marketing tactics worked for you? What have you done to encourage customer adoption? Since such tactics are so intrusive to potential customers and they have so many options to choose from, how have you answered the question "Why should I do this?" for customers as you encourage them to interact?

Have you created value propositions specifically for your local initiatives? And, what incentives have you used? Are they different from offline local incentives or online, computer-based incentives?

Share your answers to the above questions, and any additional analysis and tips you may have, in the MarketingSherpa LinkedIn Group for a chance to be published in a future blog post. For more information about mobile marketing, download the free excerpt from the 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report.

Useful links related to this research

Mobile Marketing: Use video content as a tactic to engage your customers

Mobile Marketing: Providing relevant content dynamically

Mobile Email Marketing: 50% more app downloads from device-targeted ads