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Marketing or appealing rhetoric plays more into how many people participate in a mass movement, but distance poses its own significant challenges to even small affinity groups and individuals.

Language is one of the important thing that factors in to the relative trendiness or obscurity of a struggle, as well as mass media coverage. The more people that speak the language and the more flow of information, more instantaneous translation of information to English and media savvy people to get it trending in main social media platforms. This is of course referring only to what makes it trend, not what makes it effective or successful by whatever metrics.

In terms of branding, the Zapatistas seem to be the only ones still engaged in regular updating of their branding. Of course, mentioning all of these in a single breath is just a cynical poke, more than a real question. But we can see for example how Occupy as branding has fizzled out, and that definitely became a brand and franchise. BLM is still active and relevant but it's more of a slogan than a brand or a movement.

While marketing and trending news can motivate many to do banners and march, substantial direct action is more a product of very particular life experiences and circumstances that make few people be able and willing to carry them out.

It's easier for people to resort to symbolic expression the more distant or abstract a problem seems, or the more powerless they feel.
For a real direct action there needs to be a clarity about the intervention, which requires an intimacy with a particular struggle or front, an immediacy and an understanding that goes beyond rhetoric and beyond disinterested abstract academic analysis.
So I would say there is a relation between proximity and effectiveness but not in a straightforward manner of nearer = better, but rather there's no substitute for real experience

Long-distance relationships (whether labeled as mutual aid or solidarity) suck and aren't real, just a painstakingly maintained illusion that falls apart the moment that communication stops. There is no possible being/growing together in silence. Solidarity seems to be more often applied to support in one direction, although also standing together against a common foe, while mutual aid seems to be more of a way of life, a way to do subsistence and care, but it's often just misused to mean charity.

People often try to solve other's problems or give unsolicited advice as an escape from their own, though not saying trying to help others is bad. The clusterfuck of struggles coexist in conflict regardless and anarchy is a bastard orphan.