Local marketing is becoming more popular, but companies are not measuring their progress effectively.

A report from Balihoo found that marketers targeting local audiences with their campaigns expect major results from their efforts. Moreover, these organizations are dedicating an increasingly large portion of their budget to ensure that local campaigns hit the right audience.

The study found that 21 percent of nationally recognized brands are focusing at least 25 percent of their budgets to campaigns designed for specific regional audiences. Moreover, only 12 percent are not attempting to target local shoppers and prospects with any form of marketing.

According to Balihoo, one of the biggest challenges with local marketing is assessing the effectiveness of campaigns. Small businesses with hyper-local targeting have it a little easier in this regard, especially those that draw most of their business from in-store purchases. For national brands, it’s likely that their prospects will see content tailored to their region in conjunction with information for national audiences. Fifty-eight percent have said they are not actively monitoring ROI for their localized content marketing efforts.

The study suggests companies are delving into local web marketing without any clear metrics for defining success. The need for improved analytics is proving common across a number of marketing channels.

Brafton recently reported that social media marketing is especially difficult for some organizations to track. Twenty-seven percent of companies said that they use intuition to assess the success of social campaigns, while an additional 28 percent said they don’t have any method of measuring success in place.

Joe Meloni is Brafton's former Executive News and Content Writer. He studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for a number of print and web-based publications.