Building a smarter ad spend strategy for today’s retail landscape

Navigating the retail landscape today is no easy task. For both brick-and-mortar and online retailers, customer acquisition is becoming harder, more expensive, and less predictable. Rising media costs, increased competition, and continued economic pressure are putting profit margins under strain, forcing brands to question whether their current ad spend strategy is truly working. In this environment, incremental tweaks to platforms or formats won’t deliver sustainable results. What’s needed is a clearer, more intentional strategy, one that prioritises long-term impact over short-term efficiency, and focuses on where investment drives growth.  

Customer discovery: the foundation of an effective strategy

Audience personas often fall short of providing actionable insights, causing ad spend strategies to fail before media planning even begins. By combining first-party data (1PD) with insight-driven tools, we can develop audience understanding that goes beyond age, gender, or income. This approach allows marketers to outline the total addressable market (TAM) and forecast growth. A strong ad spend strategy is built on understanding how and why people behave, their motivations, decision triggers, influences, and expectations. When investment is guided by behaviour and intent rather than assumptions, ad spend becomes more efficient and more effective.  

Comms playbook: aligning ad spend with messages that matter

Once you’ve uncovered customer opportunities, the next step in any ad spend strategy is ensuring media investment is supported by messaging that resonates. A robust comms playbook connects creative and media through a shared understanding of the jobs to be done at each stage of the customer journey. This means:

• Tailoring messaging to audience mindset, not just channel
• Adapting creative to context while maintaining a consistent brand “red thread”
• Ensuring creative and media work together to maximise impact of ad spend

When messaging aligns with moments that matter, ad spend works harder, driving stronger engagement, improved recall, and greater long-term brand value.  

Optimising touchpoints: where spend compounds over time

Every interaction with your brand represents an opportunity to make an impression on your target audience, emphasizing the need to consider each touch and understand its integrated impacts before allocating resources. Planning should focus on understanding which channels and touchpoints drive results, which contribute to long-term growth, and how different interactions work together across the journey. Rather than chasing the fastest return, effective ad spend strategies focus on investment where impact compounds over time. By understanding how touchpoints interact and reinforce each other, brands can balance short-term performance with sustainable growth. Have a question? Connect with our team.