How to Manage & Track Marketing Expenses with Expense Card

Managing and tracking marketing expenses can be a tricky task, especially when a significant portion of your company’s revenue is involved. 

In fact, a recent survey of chief marketing officers found that an average of 7.7% of company revenue is allocated to marketing in 2024. 

With so much at stake, it’s crucial to have a system in place that not only helps you keep track of your spending but also ensures every dollar spent contributes to the growth of your brand. 

One powerful tool for achieving this is the expense card, which offers a streamlined, efficient way to manage marketing costs while maintaining control and transparency. Read more to know the details. 

Marketing expenses definition

Marketing expenses are the costs a business incurs to promote its products or services, helping to raise awareness, attract customers, and drive sales. 

Simply put, it’s the money spent to share your brand’s message and convince people to buy from you.

These expenses typically fall into categories like:

• Advertising: Creating and placing ads (online and offline).
• Content creation: Producing blogs, videos, or other materials.
• Public relations: Media outreach and maintaining brand image.
• Market research: Surveys, focus groups, and data collection.
• Events and sponsorships: Costs for trade shows or sponsorships.
• Digital marketing tools: Software for managing online campaigns.
• Sales promotion: Discounts or giveaways to boost sales.
• Influencer partnerships: Payments to influencers to promote your brand.

The biggest challenge is ensuring that every dollar spent delivers a solid return on investment (ROI). 

With so many channels to choose from, it’s tough to decide where to allocate resources and measure the impact of each campaign.

The importance of tracking marketing expenses

Consistent, long-term marketing efforts require careful budgeting to see real results. Here’s why tracking your marketing expenses is essential:

1. Understanding your ROI

Wondering if your marketing is truly effective? By tracking your expenses, you can get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not. 

You’ll know exactly which strategies are delivering the best return on investment, allowing you to make data-backed decisions and fine-tune your budget. 

For smaller businesses, this is a game-changer, helping to focus on high-impact tactics like paid ads and social media marketing.

2. Avoiding costly tax mistakes

Tracking marketing costs also helps you stay on top of tax requirements. Marketing departments often have significant payroll expenses, and without precise tracking, you could face issues with tax filings—like under- or over-withholding for payroll taxes. 

Staying on top of your marketing budget ensures you’re meeting tax obligations and prevents the risk of penalties.

3. Creating a feasible marketing budget

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Tracking expenses is the first step in developing a realistic marketing budget. 

With a clear overview of your spending, you can make smarter choices about how to allocate resources, ensuring your money goes further and supports your key priorities.

4. Making smarter, data-driven decisions

The scattershot approach rarely works in marketing. By closely monitoring your expenses, you can keep your spending in check and make adjustments as needed. 

If certain campaigns aren’t providing the results you expect, you can shift focus to higher-performing strategies, and with solid data, you’re more likely to secure approval for future marketing investments.

Read more: How to Track Business Expenses Easily

Different types of expenses in marketing including the example

Managing your marketing budget involves understanding the different types of expenses that can arise throughout the year. Some are predictable and planned, while others can catch you by surprise. 

1. Carried-over expenses

These are expenses that span across fiscal years, meaning they are not fully accounted for in one budget period. Examples include:

• Marketing campaigns that continue into the next fiscal year
• Annual events or conferences
• Subscription services for technology or data tools
• Open purchase orders (POs) for contractors, agencies, etc.
• Corporate allocations or depreciation

These expenses often need to be tracked carefully because they might already be charged or reconciled at the start of the fiscal year, giving you a clearer picture of your remaining budget.

2. Planned marketing expenses

These are expenses you know will occur and can estimate ahead of time. The key is getting them into your budget, even if the estimates are not perfect. For example:

• Event-related costs like room bookings, travel, meals, and printing
• Digital campaigns with set daily spending limits
• Contractor retainers and ongoing subscriptions

Sometimes these expenses are small enough to charge directly to a credit card, but other times they may require a formal purchase order (PO) or negotiation. 

In some cases, you may group similar expenses into an “expense bucket,” allowing you to plan for costs like travel or general marketing without having to break down every individual item.

3. Unplanned marketing expenses

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Unfortunately, unplanned expenses are inevitable. These are costs that appear unexpectedly and may already be accounted for when you first notice them. Common unanticipated expenses include:

• Unexpected public relations costs (e.g., crisis management)
• Unforeseen changes in the market or external factors (like a natural disaster)
• Internal mistakes or reclassifications, such as expenses moved from other departments

To minimize their impact, it’s helpful to analyze historical data to anticipate some of these surprise costs and adjust your budget accordingly.

4. Disputed expenses

Sometimes, you might see an expense that doesn’t seem to belong in your marketing budget. 

This could happen with corporate or departmental budget allocations. It’s important to track these expenses in your budget as if they’re yours until finance resolves the issue, ensuring your budget remains accurate.

5. Moving expenses

You’ve accounted for an expense, but when you look at the report, it’s missing or applied to a different period. Understanding how your finance team tracks and accounts for expenses is crucial. 

A delay or misclassification can result in either overspending or underspending, even if you’ve done everything right on your end.

By being proactive in tracking both planned and unplanned expenses, you can maintain better control over your marketing budget and avoid surprises as the year unfolds.

How to manage & track marketing expenses effectively

Tracking marketing expenses doesn’t have to be complicated. With the right tools, you can easily control spending, track budgets, and stay organized. The best way to manage expenses is with expense management software. 

These tools offer corporate cards (physical or virtual) to separate budgets, automatically track spending, and integrate with accounting software for seamless financial management. Here’s a simple approach to managing your marketing budget:

1. Start with a clear budget

The foundation of any marketing strategy begins with a well-defined budget. Before jumping into any campaign, it’s essential to know how much you can spend based on your revenue and objectives. 

Here’s a quick breakdown of how you can allocate your marketing budget:

• Small businesses: Typically allocate 7-10% of their total revenue toward marketing.
• B2C companies: In competitive sectors, you might consider allocating as much as 15% of your revenue to marketing.

Take a look at past marketing data to guide your budget decisions. For instance, if a $15,000 digital ad campaign worked well previously, that gives you a reliable benchmark for setting future budgets.

Why it matters: Having a clear budget helps you stay within financial limits, allowing you to focus on impactful marketing initiatives rather than worrying about financial constraints.

2. Automate tracking

Manual tracking is not only time-consuming but also prone to mistakes. Leveraging expense management software, such as Mekari Expense, which integrates with accounting tools, can automate the process of tracking your expenses in real time. 

These tools also offer the added benefit of corporate expense cards—both physical and virtual—enabling you to separate budgets by campaign, department, or client. The key benefits of such tools include:

• Track your expenses in real time, providing up-to-date insights into your spending.
• Instantly flag any overspending (e.g., a $5,000 influencer campaign going over budget).
• Automatically match receipts and transactions, reducing hours spent on reconciliation.

Why it matters: Automation saves you time and eliminates errors, helping you maintain an accurate and efficient financial overview without the hassle of manual tracking.

3. Monitor ROI 

Not all marketing efforts yield the same results. To ensure that your marketing dollars are well spent, it’s critical to monitor the return on investment (ROI) for each campaign. For example:

• A $15,000 email marketing campaign that generates $60,000 in sales is a success.
• A $10,000 event sponsorship that only brings in 50 new customers may require adjustments in targeting and approach.

Use metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Why it matters: ROI acts as a compass for your marketing strategy, guiding you to invest more in high-performing campaigns and scale back on less effective ones.

Read more: How to Calculate SaaS ROI and TCO for Management Approval

4. Set spending limits

Even with a solid budget, it’s easy to overspend if you don’t set clear limits. With expense management software, you can use your corporate cards to set hard spending caps for each campaign or channel, and monitor how close you are to reaching those limits.

Example: If you allocate $12,000 for a digital marketing campaign, break it down into categories such as $6,000 for paid social media ads, $4,000 for content production, and $2,000 for analytics tools. Regularly check each category’s expenditure to stay within the overall budget.

Why it matters: Setting spending limits ensures you remain disciplined and prevents you from exceeding your budget, avoiding the risk of going over budget on major expenses.

5. Reconcile regularly

Reconciliation is the process of matching receipts and invoices with the actual transactions recorded. It is essential for maintaining accurate financial records and ensuring compliance. 

With expense management software and corporate cards, this process becomes seamless:

• Reconcile weekly or bi-weekly, rather than waiting until the end of the month when things can pile up.
• Use expense management software that is integrated with accounting software to automate this process and save valuable time.

Example: After sponsoring a $12,000 online webinar, reconcile all expenses related to the event, such as platform fees, speaker fees, and promotional materials, to ensure they align with your approved budget.

Why it matters: Regular reconciliation helps you maintain transparency in your finances and avoids errors that could lead to discrepancies or audit issues.

6. Learn from your spending

Marketing is a dynamic field, and spending patterns can change over time. It’s important to regularly review what is consuming your budget and evaluate whether it’s delivering the expected results. For instance:

• If high-ticket items like influencer collaborations or trade shows aren’t producing the desired results, consider reallocating those funds toward higher-performing channels.
• Track patterns to learn which campaigns generate the best ROI and which ones are worth revising or cutting.

Why it matters: Learning from past spending allows you to optimize your marketing strategy, improve your decision-making, and allocate resources toward activities that yield the highest returns.

Marketing spend management software recommendation

Managing marketing expenses should be effortless, strategic, and even empowering. With the right approach, you can take full control of your budget, maximize your ROI, and avoid those dreaded financial surprises. 

Instead of getting lost in spreadsheets or chasing down receipts, smart businesses use expense management software to keep things simple and transparent.

That’s where Mekari Expense comes in. Designed to make marketing spend management seamless, it offers an expense card, Mekari Corporate Card — tailored for marketing teams, allowing you to:

• Separate budgets
• Track spending in real time
• Stay within limits without the manual hassle
• Automatic reporting
• Smooth integration with accounting software

So, you’ll never lose sight of where your money is going. If you want to make marketing spend tracking effortless and effective, Mekari Expense is the game-changer you need.

References

Gartner. ‘’Gartner CMO Survey Reveals Marketing Budgets Have Dropped to 7.7% of Overall Company Revenue in 2024’’