• by Tyler Jordan , July 18, 2024

Today’s marketing leaders face a common challenge: increasing or maintaining growth with a dwindling budget.

Before you dig into how to grow, consider the following ways to find and reallocate ineffective budget.

Approach ABM with caution. I’ve seen many brands invest in account-based marketing platforms and insights without a plan for how to optimize them. Make sure you have a strategy and have proven that you can see results before investing in a tool.

Exploring the full functionality of LinkedIn ads combined with lower-cost sales tools like Apollo to build your account lists lets you test 70%-80% of your ABM initiatives without paying extra costs.

If you’ve exhausted LinkedIn’s potential for ABM and have a plan for using the data and features of a platform like 6Sense or Demandbase, go for it -- but get a second opinion on your LinkedIn campaigns first.

Reconsider your attribution technology. Attribution tools promise to teach advertisers how each dollar of their spend works toward their end goals. But setup is costly, and there are other factors to consider.

Implementation requires internal resources many brands don’t have, and lots of brands need to work on cleaning their data. Beyond that, you need experts to analyze data, there’s no plan for how to use it, and you might accidentally stir up internal politics between channel owners.

Often, it’s better to pick a North Star metric and focus on that. Then you can build reports to see first-touch, last-touch, and contributing clicks to help color in the picture a bit more, with a much lower lift.

Do some incrementality testing. If you’ve never conducted incrementality tests, you’re almost certainly spending budget to engage users who would have purchased from you anyway.

This goes hand-in-hand with a focus on last-click attribution: if you’re only giving credit to ads that lead directly to a conversion, you’re not examining the value of engagements along the way. In many cases, when upper-funnel campaigns have built affinity, the ad that leads directly to a conversion is simply a reminder for the user to take an action.

I guarantee you that a well-constructed holdout test will show you where you can cut budget and maintain revenue.

Check your default settings! This is the simplest way to save yourself tons of wasted spend. The major ad platforms have some sneaky default settings that will leak budget with little revenue to show for it.Those settings include:

Google

I’ve seen a major increase of accounts with default settings lately. Keep an eye out for these:

-- Google will opt your campaigns into Search Partners automatically unless you turn off that setting - which you should almost always do.

-- The same is true of Google Video Partners in YouTube campaigns.

-- Google Display has audience expansion settings that you need to turn off if they’re not relevant (they usually aren’t). This is especially true when you’re running remarketing campaigns and need to keep the audience clean.

-- Turn off the auto-apply setting for “Set a target CPA” and “automatically created assets.” Giving Google control here is not advised.

 Meta & LinkedIn

Meta and LinkedIn also push advertisers into expanded audiences, so check those settings to make sure they’re off. Again, this is vital for remarketing, and it’s generally important to focus on the people you want to engage.

Remember: reps pushing those features are salespeople trying to make money for their platforms. In 2024, those platforms – especially Google – are more interested in short-term gains than in helping brands grow long-term.