How to get the most out of your marketing spend

Today’s marketing challenges

Today’s marketing leaders face a complex operating environment shaped by leaner budgets, rising expectations and accelerating transformation. From data privacy shifts to the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and evolving global delivery models, the landscape is forcing CMOs to rethink how they manage the end-to-end marketing process. Below are six core challenges reshaping how organizations approach modern marketing.

1. More with less

• Marketing teams are being tasked with executing hyper-personalized omnichannel campaigns to drive real-time engagement — all on flat or shrinking budgets. CMOs are exploring levers like AI and global delivery models to lower costs and boost performance.

2. Fragmented media landscape

• The US media landscape is fractured, with consumer attention divided across streaming, social platforms, creator ecosystems and retail media. As marketers try to balance brand-building and performance strategies, they must contend with an ecosystem that makes integrated planning a persistent obstacle.

3. Data privacy and signal loss

• The deprecation of ad IDs and tightening privacy regulations have upended long-standing audience strategies. Marketers must rebuild targeting and measurement frameworks around their own first-party data — without alienating privacy-conscious consumers.

4. Content abundance

• Content demands have exploded across channels — but most marketing organizations still operate on creative timelines designed for quarterly campaigns, not daily relevance. The struggle to deliver both quality and quantity has strained internal marketing teams and external agency partners.

5. Talent and MarTech underutilization

• Despite years of MarTech investment, many marketing organizations still struggle to unlock the full value of their technology. Furthermore, persistent skills gaps remain unaddressed, and siloed talent structures — whether across channels, brands or regions — limit effective collaboration, insight sharing and scaled activation. 

6. Pressure to prove ROI

• As scrutiny of marketing effectiveness grows, many teams lack a clear line of sight into total investment and struggle to connect spend to strategic outcomes. Metrics are often too granular or disconnected from business results, making it difficult to tell a cohesive performance story that resonates beyond the marketing function.

Dissecting marketing investments

To navigate the complexities of today’s marketing environment, it’s vital to mobilize all components of the marketing budget. With budgets often stretched thin and the demand for measurable results growing, organizations must thoughtfully assess their marketing spend to identify where resources are allocated and how they can be optimized.

Examining each of the elements helps uncover the relationships, overlaps and redundancies that can exist between marketing expenditures. By understanding how the following components relate to each other, marketers can make informed decisions so that every dollar spent contributes effectively to their overall marketing strategy:

• Agency fees

Agencies play a pivotal role in crafting and executing marketing strategies. However, their services come at a cost. With the trend toward in-house and offshore marketing teams gaining traction, companies must weigh the benefits of external expertise against potential cost savings and greater control over marketing activities. 

• Media spend

Allocating budgets across an ever-expanding array of paid and owned media channels while incubating earned media and user-generated content is a formidable task. The key to optimizing media spend lies in leveraging data to make informed decisions so that all expenditures fully contribute to overarching marketing objectives.

• MarTech, AI and data investments

The MarTech landscape is vast and continuously evolving, offering tools for automation, analytics, customer relationship management and more. While these technologies promise efficiency and enhanced targeting capabilities, they also represent significant investments. Marketers must judiciously select technologies that offer the best ROI. And in evaluating their budgets, they must pay close attention to how their chosen MarTech tools are performing in relation to their strategic goals.

• Employee salaries and talent costs

Talented marketing professionals are the backbone of any successful campaign. However, attracting and retaining such talent can be costly. Companies must balance the need for specialized skills with the benefits of upskilling existing employees to maintain a team that is both capable and cost-effective.

Although these elements are interconnected, many organizations tend to limit their focus to a single area when looking to optimize their costs. However, this piecemeal approach fails to provide a complete view of the budget dynamics.

For example, one company’s spending on MarTech investments may seem in line with industry benchmarks. But neglecting to examine the other parts of the profit-and-loss (P&L) statement could mean that the organization fails to recognize that a large portion of their agency fees may also be MarTech-related. When this amount is added to the MarTech investment portion of the budget, the total spending could exceed the benchmark.

A different company that wants to cut costs might hesitate to spend more on MarTech even though implementing such tools, as well as technologies like automation and generative AI (GenAI), would result in significant savings in both time and costs. The way a marketing campaign is managed from conception to execution makes a big difference, and MarTech resources can accelerate and streamline these processes.

Strategies for optimizing marketing spend

So, what can companies do now to optimize their marketing expenditures? Here are some actions that organizations should prioritize:

• Mobilize every dollar and resource. All too often, a company looking to cut costs may not recognize that adjusting spending in one area might necessitate an adjustment in another area. It takes a holistic look at the entire P&L statement to get an accurate idea of the overall effectiveness of marketing investments and ensure that every dollar spent contributes to the company’s strategic objectives. A trusted advisor with the right technology and tools can help companies navigate the parts of the P&L that are growing the fastest, understand how the different pieces fit together and plot the best way forward amid the major challenges we explored above.
• Measure the right activities. Understanding the ROI of marketing activities is crucial for justifying spend and informing future strategies. And understanding the level of decision-making required and the nature of the action to be taken is an essential first step. Measurement should support strategic decisions and alignment on activities like resource allocation and driving enterprise goals but equally needs to enable operational decisions day in and day out to manage campaigns and make adjustments in flight. Marketers must employ measurement frameworks that create clarity at the strategic, tactical and operational levels to support the right decisions while balancing cost and complexity.
• Rethink every role and partner in light of AI. It is hard to overstate the impact that AI can have for the marketing function. Tasks across the organization will be transformed — from simple work such as content adaptation and copy generation to elaborate interactions across brands and agencies. This flexibility can lead to a more effective use of marketing resources and better alignment with consumer needs but requires the operating model to adapt and roles within agency and vendor partners to be reimagined.
• Invest to optimize. Game-changing technologies like automation and GenAI, in addition to MarTech tools, are streamlining everything from content creation to performance tracking and analysis. These technologies help marketing teams accomplish more, including reducing the need for manual tasks, improving efficiency, personalizing customer interactions and boosting ROI.