Over the past several years, companies across every sector have been more focused than ever on financial efficiency. In this era of corporate belt-tightening and volatile markets, leaders are pressured to account for every outbound dollar to achieve their strategic goals. Unfortunately, as part of the drive to cut budgets, marketing is often the first on the chopping block.
This comes as no surprise to anyone in the industry. As marketers, we’re used to skepticism from outside our field that doesn't understand the breadth and importance of what we do. We also understand the work it takes to trace and understand ROI, and not everyone is doing it. The negative effects of this neglect are fairly measurable. In 2024, research by Proxima found that many companies are spending between 40 and 60 percent of their digital budgets ineffectively. These numbers give credence to the old industry maxim: “I know that half of my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.”
But slashing marketing budgets does nothing to solve the problem. The waste ratio still exists, just on a smaller scale. Instead, coming to a better understanding of how best to leverage spend (and where it makes the most impact) will sharpen marketing strategies and enable better financial accountability across the board. Here are some of the core considerations and steps to ensure your marketing spend is efficient, and your ROI is measurable:
Digital advertising platforms such as Meta and Google strive to make automated marketing simple. Creating and launching an ad campaign now takes only a few clicks. With the emergence of AI digital marketing services, these processes are becoming even more streamlined. This ease doesn’t mean you should completely outsource your marketing strategy to digital tools, however. They may make the physical work faster, but that's just the tip of the iceberg in marketing.
How will these tools help you achieve success? Have you defined what success looks like to you? You can’t score a goal with just a ball and field; you need a net. One of the most fundamental parts of your overall marketing strategy, and one of the best ways to avoid wasting ad spend long-term, is to identify your SMART goals.
SMART goals (the letters here represent Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) provide you with target numbers and parameters to pursue. They should be rooted in your other divisional goals, such as sales, accounting, etc., to ensure your efforts help to advance how you define success as an organization.
They also help you make decisions at every juncture of your marketing campaign, guiding how many dollars to spend and how to spend them. One possible SMART goal, for instance, might be to increase your website traffic by 15% over the next quarter. As you proceed with your campaign, you will see what’s helping you get closer to that number, and what isn’t. As time goes on, you will be able to identify wasteful spending by investing in only what helps you get closer to your goals.
In identifying your SMART goals, you should be sure they are grounded in a high-level marketing strategy. For example, a Meta ad campaign is not a strategy; it's a tactic. A strategy encompasses all of your individual marketing tactics, like social media, search ads, and billboards, as a high-level vision for what you want to accomplish from a marketing perspective within a given timeframe.
Let’s say you'd like to gain 10,000 new Instagram followers. Sure, you could throw money into an Instagram growth campaign for weeks and effectively make it happen. Unless this growth is supported by strong social content and high engagement, though, those numbers are eventually going to go back down. Now, if there’s a strategic reason you want to gain specifically 10,000 followers, then you can invest in hitting this number with the knowledge that it may increase your ROI. Maybe Instagram has consistently been your best business development tool, and last year you gained 5,000 followers, so you aim to double that number this year. These two scenarios demonstrate something important: the first doesn't have any clear SMART goals, strategy, or reasoning for the marketing spend, while the second has all three.
A final thought on this: tactics will only serve your larger strategy if you know how to measure their performance. Put work into regularly monitoring your campaign results and analytics. Assess what creative is doing best to help you achieve your SMART goals and what buyer personas are responding most to your efforts.
This is a common trap. Companies get in a groove of throwing x amount of dollars every quarter into social or search ads with passive confidence that it’s driving their business growth on some level. It probably is driving it somewhat. But then, one day out of nowhere, Meta changes its algorithm or Google changes Search. Suddenly those ads stop converting, and if they are your only driver of website traffic, you’ve lost your entire customer stream. A worse version of this story is when the company doesn’t monitor its digital performance and analytics, so it doesn’t notice when the ads stop driving traffic. This leads to exponential waste that could go on for months.
Dramatic changes can happen on any platform. Algorithms evolve. AI is changing the entire game. Business partnerships are made and dissolved. Things are constantly happening beyond our control, so an overemphasis on any one platform’s paid advertising is incredibly short-sighted. Instead, you should explore a range of digital marketing tactics.
Your product and brand are unique, and some channels will work better for you than they would for another company. Zeroing in on which tactics serve your overall marketing strategy and optimizing them over time is the best approach to ensuring you avoid wasteful spending and bring more long-term value to your business. Employing regular checkpoints on marketing performance and the progress of your SMART goals can help you stay on track.
As you continue to hone your tactics and the tools you use, it’s important to increase your digital marketing expertise and awareness of industry trends and developments. Sign up for our ABM Swipefile for tips, tricks, and techniques to keep you ahead of the curve, or get your free Signal Fire Snapshot to see your site's current standing.