Marketing Spend Optimization: Expert Ways to Optimize Your Marketing & Ad Spend

I recently watched a TikTok clip of a CEO explaining how, when businesses face tough times, marketing is often the first budget to get slashed.

It stuck with me because, ironically, that’s when smart marketing spend becomes more critical than ever. Without it, companies risk spiraling deeper into inefficiency and lost opportunities.

Is your audience on LinkedIn? Then why throw money at Facebook ads like crazy? And vice versa. But that’s just scratching the surface; Optimizing marketing spend is way more complex than it seems.

Let’s start by exploring 10 real-life examples of how senior marketing pros optimize their campaigns. Get yourself ready to be blown away and fine-tune your campaigns.

P.S. This guide is packed with tips for seasoned pros and beginners alike.

Table of Contents

• What is marketing spend optimization?
• How to Optimize Your Marketing Spend in 4 Steps
• 6 Expert Tips for Optimizing Marketing Spend

Marketing spend optimization means getting the most out of your marketing budget. It’s figuring out where to spend your money so it delivers the best results — more sales, leads, or brand awareness.

In short, you use deep analytics to see what’s working and adjust your strategy to make every dollar count.

A simple example:

A clothing store spends $50,000 a month on social media ads, email campaigns, and influencer partnerships. After looking at the numbers, they realize:

• Social media ads bring in $20,000 for every $10,000 spent.
• Emails pull in $30,000 for just $5,000.
• Influencers? They cost $20,000 but only generate $15,000.

To optimize, the store decided to put less into influencers and more into email campaigns since emails are crushing it on ROI. They’re not spending more this way — they’re just spending smarter.

Ad Spend Optimization

While marketing spend optimization looks at the entire marketing budget (email campaigns, sponsorships, ads, and content), ad spend optimization focuses on paid ads only. It’s a narrower focus, concentrating on ad platforms and how they perform.

It uses data to optimize ad spend, placement (Google, Facebook, TikTok, etc.), and keyword selection to reduce CPA while maximizing effectiveness.

For instance, imagine a coffee shop that runs $10,000 worth of Facebook and Google ads monthly.

• Facebook ads cost $2 per click and bring in $5,000 in sales.
• Google ads cost $1 per click and generate $8,000.

So, what will they do? Shift more of their budget to Google ads, where they get a higher return on each dollar spent.

Pro tip: The Advertising ROI Calculator helps you plan and evaluate your ad campaigns by estimating costs, clicks, leads, and potential profits. Simply enter your budget, CPC, conversion rate, and lead-to-customer rate to predict your ROI and make smarter, data-driven decisions for your ads.

Source

How to Optimize Your Marketing Spend in 4 Steps

Marketing spend can make or break your strategy. If you want to be in the “win” category, you need to know how to optimize it.

First, let’s walk you through the four basic steps to marketing optimization. After this, you’ll find senior-level tips.

1. Set clear goals for better solutions.

Start with a goal in mind about what you want the campaign to accomplish. Is it leads, sales, views, or a different metric? Then, dig into data.

Robert Brill, CEO of Brill Media, wanted leads, so they measured cost per lead and looked for lead quality in the backend with HubSpot.

“We were getting $114 cost per lead on Facebook ads, but over $250 cost per lead on LinkedIn. LinkedIn ads were more effective at turning into customers. So, we spent more time on LinkedIn and also worked on tuning up Meta ads,” he says.

What Brill Media’s team did next is fascinating:

“By vetting problem language, solution language, and transformation language, we cut our lead cost from $114 to $27, which is a 76% lower lead cost. The best part is those leads turned into more money and faster for Brill Media because we pinpointed our customers’ deepest darkest needs and gave them a transformation,” Brill says.

The strategy behind Brill Media’s ad spend optimizations was researching on Reddit, Twitter X, and AI what problems people are having with agencies.

Then, they independently ran a few hundred impressions of ads on each of the statements and took the ones with the best click-through rate.

The refining statement for the ad:

The power of setting goals for marketing spend optimization couldn’t be overstated. Once you‘re there, it’s time to see if you’ve done your homework on market and audience research.

These eight free budget templates for Excel and Google Sheets can help you set those goals and track everything from branding to events.

2. Target the right audiences.

Targeting high-value audiences means you’re putting your budget on the people who’ll actually convert, not throwing money at broad, random campaigns.

Plus, high-value audiences tend to bring long-term benefits (high LTVs). These are the customers who stick around, spend more, and are easier to retain.

Dan Bowen, founder of Bowen Media, told me how they use performance analytics to optimize marketing budgets by focusing on high-value audiences. For one e-commerce client, they identified a specific demographic that was driving the most conversions and decided to shift resources to that group.

Here’s what they did exactly:

“We moved 20% of the budget from underperforming demographics to this high-performing audience through Google Ads and Meta Ads. The client saw a 37% increase in ROI within a month. This way, every dollar was being spent on the most conversion-ready audience,” Bowen says.

This approach ensured their budget was optimized for maximum impact, delivering impressive results in a short time.

3. Analyze your marketing spend.

The next step in optimizing your marketing spend is to review where your current budget is going.

This includes analyzing every channel, campaign, and resource used.

Understanding what delivers the best ROI will help guide decisions on where to reduce spending or where to invest more.

Source

Marketing analytics is a long topic for another article, but I’ll leave you with practical resources:

• Marketing Analytics Courses & Certificates from Semrush Academy
• Marketing analytics: A guide to improve your skills
• HubSpot for Marketing Analytics: Training

Expert tip: “Always monitor Lifetime Value (LTV) against your CPA. In one campaign, we identified a product with a high LTV and focused our spend on upselling and retargeting existing customers, resulting in a 60% increase in revenue without increasing the overall budget,” said Oscar Diaz, co-founder and CTO at Sobefy eCommerce.

HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics & Dashboard Software lets you measure performance, track customer journeys, and analyze all your campaigns in one place. Make smarter, data-driven decisions and see the impact of your efforts.

4. Reallocate funds based on performance.

Continuously test and adjust campaigns based on real-time performance.

According to Diaz, his team kicked off the task with Google Analytics and Facebook Ads Manager. These tools were used to track campaign performance in real time. They could then pause underperforming campaigns to reallocate funds to top-performing ones.

“In ecommerce campaigns, we noticed that paid search ads were driving significantly higher conversions than social media ads, even though the latter received a larger share of the budget. By reallocating funds to Google Ads while refining targeting for social platforms, we reduced our cost per acquisition (CPA) by 30%,” Diaz says.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s ad tool, part of the Marketing Hub, lets you create non-disruptive, engaging ads that perfectly blend with your content and boost ROI. You can connect your Google Ads, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts, track revenue directly from your CRM, and segment audiences for more targeted campaigns.

Want to see it in action? Check out the tutorial with Jorie Munroe to learn more:

5. Conduct regular performance audits.

By regularly checking how each of your channels is performing, you can quickly move funds to the places that are getting you the best return.

For its client, Bowen Media used Google and HubSpot Analytics to find that display ads were getting high impressions but low conversions. By moving 15% of the budget to higher intent search ads, they increased leads by 28% without increasing overall spend.

“We achieve these results using practical strategies like audience segmentation, A/B testing, and regular data reviews. For example, tools like HubSpot and Google Ads Smart Bidding automate budget optimization by making performance-based adjustments,” says Bowen.

6 Expert Tips for Optimizing Marketing Spend

Even though I shared great insights above, I was craving more spicy tips that only the best pros know. So, I dug a little deeper.

1. Use profit-first funnel analysis.

A profit-first funnel analysis means breaking your marketing funnel into stages like awareness, consideration, and conversion and adjusting your budget based on how each stage performs.

Dan Ben-Nun, founder & CEO at Adspace, shared an example of this with a DTC campaign. They had solid conversions but low traffic. Instead of spreading the budget evenly, they focused more on top-of-the-funnel paid ads to drive more traffic and leads.

This tweak alone boosted revenue by 26% without increasing spend.

“We combine this tactic with micro-influencer collaborations to achieve better results. Our primary objective is always to gather as much data as possible and use it to make sound decisions that will maximize impact without overextending our marketing budget,” Ben-Nun explains.

2. Use attribution modeling to reallocate the budget.

Analyzing attribution data to understand the actual role of each channel in driving conversions is key to ad spend optimization. GlobeMonitor, a marketing research agency, revealed its journey with attribution modeling accounted for reduced the overall cost per acquisition by 20%.

“In one campaign targeting B2B clients, we initially distributed the budget equally across paid search, LinkedIn ads, and content marketing. Attribution modeling revealed LinkedIn ads generated the highest-quality leads with a 40% conversion rate, while paid search brought in a larger volume of lower-quality leads that inflated the cost per acquisition,” said Bassem Mostafa, lead market analyst and founder of GlobeMonitor.

According to Mostafa, Content marketing was effective in nurturing LinkedIn leads but was underfunded in the initial allocation.

To address these insights, GlobeMonitor’s team reduced the paid search budget by 30%, redirected it to LinkedIn ads, and increased investment in content marketing to improve lead nurturing.

These adjustments resulted in:

• Improved lead quality and reduced the overall cost per acquisition by 20%.
• Conversion rates on LinkedIn increased to 48%.
• Content engagement grew by 30%.

“Our case demonstrates how attribution modeling and well-aligned strategies could maximize impact without increasing the overall budget,” says Mostafa.

3. Retarget and A/B test.

“Make data-driven choices, which means spending on what delivers ROI and scaling back on what doesn’t,” says John Kawecki, marketing manager at F1 B.

In one campaign, Kawecki zeroed in on Facebook and Instagram ads promoting content around F1 events. He started small with a clear objective — boosting article engagement; and tracked which ads generated clicks and engagement at the lowest cost.

Through A/B testing of different copy and visuals, he could reallocate the budget to the top-performing ads.

“The retargeting ads proved especially effective. We targeted users who‘d previously engaged with our content but hadn’t signed up for our newsletter. These retargeting ads converted at a much higher rate, and shifting more budget there drove up our subscriber numbers,” Kawecki says.

The takeaway: Track performance and reallocate based on real-time data. When something flops, pull back fast. When it works, double down.

4. Strengthen your core market before expanding.

When you target people who are already interested in what you offer, you can expect better results, build loyalty, and learn what works. That means you can refine your strategy before branching out, making expansion smoother and more cost-effective.

Daniel Meursing, founder and CEO at Premier Staff, shared a perfect example of this approach.

Instead of spreading their resources across multiple cities, he focused on the Los Angeles luxury event market.

By growing just 5% in their established market, they saw better returns than pushing for 100% growth in new areas. This led them to shift their marketing budget to dominate their home market first.

Main lesson? Rushing into expansion doesn’t always lead to better results. Focusing on your core market first can set you up for bigger, more sustainable growth later.

5. Shift to highly localized ads.

In the legal vertical, the competition is fierce, with the most expensive (aka high CPC) keywords. Ad spend optimization is vital here, and the tactics can be virtuosic. That happened to Affinity Law.

“We focus on ROI by combining precise audience targeting with consistent testing. One strategy that worked exceptionally well was shifting a portion of our budget from broad social media campaigns to highly localized ads on Google and Facebook,” explains Kalim Khan, co-founder and senior partner.

For example, instead of targeting “personal injury law” on a national scale, they refined it to “Toronto pedestrian accident lawyer” or “Hamilton car crash legal advice.” This shift increased their conversion rate by 35% while reducing the cost per lead by 20%.

6. Invest in SEO-driven content and push it with paid ads.

Granted, it’s not a direct influence on ad spend but a tactic that really pays off over time. High-traffic and low-competition keywords can grow your organic reach and attract the right audience over time.

Meanwhile, targeted and paid content distribution can amplify your reach and result in leads with a low CPL (cost per lead).

A real-life example comes from Penfriend, an AI blog writer.

“In March of this year (2024), the team identified high-traffic, low-competition keywords using Ahrefs and allocated a significant portion of the marketing budget to create pillar content around these topics. Each blog post served as a hub, internally linking to related articles, which improved topical authority and search rankings,” shares Penfriend’s COO Inge von Aulock.

Aulock notes that the team allocated a small budget for content distribution to amplify the reach of these blogs on LinkedIn, X, and Facebook, specifically to audiences likely to share or engage.

“Many of the posts in this strategy generated 3-16x the organic traffic with growing clicks within a month and were shared by several key industry influencers, driving even more visibility,” shares Aulock.

Marketing Isn’t Ads — and Ads Aren’t Marketing

Be where your audience is. That’s the one rule I’ll always tell you when it comes to managing marketing costs.

For some, it will be investing in a solid blog, while for others, TikTok ads will be the way to go.

The key is targeting the right people on the right channels with the right statements. Of course, you need a smart plan and a solid strategy to back it up. And if you’re not sure — ask. Talk to an expert. Team up with people who know their stuff.

Don’t ignore the whole marketing to focus only on ads — that’s not how you build brand loyalty. Marketing is the long game, and ads are the shortcut. Balance them wisely, and you’ll get the best of both worlds.