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In today's fast-paced digital world, having an effective digital marketing strategy has become essential for businesses looking to thrive and stay ahead of their competition.
Having and maintaining financial oversight is crucial for maintaining an effective digital marketing strategy due to the dynamic and ever-changing nature of the industry. Tools such as virtual cards with bespoke spending controls and a functional spend management platform provide real-time visibility and control over marketing expenses, ensuring that budgets are adhered to and any potential for overspending is mitigated.
Virtual cards can be issued for specific campaigns or team members, allowing for precise tracking and accountability of expenditures. Additionally, spend management platforms can integrate with various accounting tools, providing streamlined expense reporting and analytics that enable data-driven decision-making. This ensures that marketing funds are allocated efficiently and enables agile adjustments to campaigns based on performance metrics.
Ultimately, these tools help maintain financial discipline, reduce fraud risk, allow for regular evaluation and adjustment of digital marketing strategies, and enhance the overall effectiveness of digital marketing efforts for businesses of all sizes.
Optimising digital ad spend is vital for businesses and cannot be overlooked. By strategically allocating resources and budgeting, organisations can maximise their marketing budgets, increase return on investment (ROI), and improve overall campaign performance.
Moreover, the aforementioned use of a spend management platform and virtual cards allow businesses to make real-time adjustments to their campaigns and digital marketing tactics. By continuously monitoring marketing spend in real time, businesses can identify areas for improvement and optimise their strategies accordingly.
For example, if a certain campaign isn't delivering desired results in relation to its ad spend, businesses can reallocate their budget to higher-performing ads or different online channels to better engage their audience and potential customers. This financial visibility enables businesses to be flexible and adapt, making informed decisions based on data and insights to enhance campaign performance.
As power-users of the Equals Money online platform as a spend management solution, the Digital Marketing team at Equals Money have developed a unique intimacy to the product we market.
Using Equals Money allows us to easily budget, track ad spending in real time, and implement tight controls across all online channels. From social media ads to affiliate marketing, all digital marketing channels are maximised to align with our overall business goals.
However, the real jewel in the crown is our virtual card offering, which has allowed us to create an ultra-transparent reporting framework for our Finance team, so they have complete visibility over every penny spent across every digital marketing campaign.
Virtual cards from Equals Money can take two forms: Individual cards for transactions associated with a specific person and Shared cards for transactions belonging to several people, such as specific teams, projects, or departments.
However, the Digital Marketing team has implemented an entirely different setup using virtual cards: one card per ad platform.
By creating separate virtual cards for each online platform or digital marketing channel and linking to a particular Balance (a money management feature in the Equals Money platform), a natural, granular reporting framework is created, ready for the Finance team.
For example, by having a single digital card for Google Ads, one for LinkedIn Ads, and one for Microsoft Ads, all ad spend is clearly defined, segregated, and most importantly, visible.
No more endless scrolling through transaction lists and reports - simply select the card you want to filter by, and easily view ad spend organised by digital platform.
When used alongside Balances, campaign spending via Shared virtual cards is clearly defined by purpose, limits, and reporting.
Balances are user-determined, segregated ‘pots’ of money that can be created and loaded to define clear spending channels for departments, projects, and more. For example, within our Digital Marketing team at Equals Money, we have a Balance that reflects our annual budget and within that we have other sub-Balances for each individual team (e.g. the Content Marketing team) that reflects their spending allowance for social media platforms within the budget.
Over the years, ad platforms have improved in respecting campaign and marketing budgets set by advertisers. However, one thing ad platforms certainly won’t respect is the dreaded “fat finger”. That extra zero added to a campaign budget or a keyword “Max CPC” (Maximum Cost Per Click) can do serious damage, with monthly budgets accidentally spent overnight or worse.
At a previous business of mine, an individual (who shall remain nameless) punched in an extra zero on a Max CPC bid, resulting in £10,000s of wasted ad spend overnight. An expensive lesson for any digital-first business.
With Equals Money, you can set daily, weekly, monthly or even lifetime spending limits per card. You can even set a maximum transaction value per card for extra protection. It’s not a silver bullet for human error or poor attention to detail, but by setting rigid card limits, ad platforms can alert you when payments fail and act as a secondary defence, potentially saving you from real disaster.
Eliminate the sharing of card details. Whether it’s via email, Slack, Zoom, or carrier pigeon, sharing card details isn’t safe and poses a major security risk to your business.
Virtual cards for specific use-cases keep your details safe and spending secure. By creating unique cards for each ad platform, SaaS subscription, or any online purchase, only the admin of each account will ever need to access the card details.
Unique virtual cards also enhance security by minimising exposure to fraud; if a card number is compromised, it can be quickly canceled without affecting other operations. This heightened control makes virtual cards a powerful tool for optimising digital marketing strategies and ensuring financial discipline.
Virtual cards and the Equals Money platform allow for strategic campaign spending, increased visibility across all digital marketing channels, and the centralisation of expenses incurred by marketing teams, as discussed and discovered by Rival Content, a video-first digital content agency.
“Using Equals Money has given our team greater visibility over our ad spend as it’s allocated. Before Equals, each person on the team was using their own personal business card. We didn’t have a single platform that gave us a clear picture of budgets and ad spend all in one place. Thanks to Equals, we can now work from a shared, fixed pool of funds which we can see per client, campaign, and platform. It’s also just a much easier way to keep on top of our cashflow.” - Portia Abatan, Co-Founder and Producer, Rival Content
