What to Do When Your Competitors Increase Spend
Your competitors’ ads are suddenly everywhere. Search results that used to be affordable are now crowded and expensive, social feeds feel like their private billboard, and your leadership team is asking pointed questions about “what we’re doing about it.” The instinctive response is to either match their spend or retreat to protect margins. Both reactions can be dangerous if they are not grounded in a clear strategy.
Across many industries, marketing budgets are rising, not shrinking. In fact, the average marketing budget as a percentage of company revenue has climbed to around 9.4%, up from 7.7% the prior year, signaling that brands are committing more aggressively to growth-focused activity rather than pulling back on promotion according to analysis from Amra and Elma LLC. If a competitor is suddenly outspending you, it is often a symptom of a larger shift in your market, not just a single aggressive move from one rival.
The good news: a bigger budget is not the same as a better strategy. When competitors increase spend, the companies that win are not always the loudest; they are the ones that respond with precision-protecting their core, investing where returns are strongest, and using data to do what their rivals will not or cannot.
Recognize What Their Higher Spend Really Means
A spike in a competitor’s marketing activity is rarely random. It can signal fresh funding, a leadership change, a new product launch, or a direct reaction to your own recent wins. Before changing your own budget or plan, it helps to understand what kind of move they are making. Are they trying to buy market share quickly, or are they simply catching up to a new industry baseline for marketing investment?
Recent survey data shows that overall marketing budgets have grown, with total marketing spend rising in the low single digits over the past year while digital marketing investment increased more than twice as fast, indicating that brands are leaning especially hard into digital channels according to The CMO Survey. If competitors are ramping up spend, they may simply be aligning with this broader shift rather than attempting to launch an all-out attack on your specific position.
This distinction matters. A generalized market shift calls for a thoughtful recalibration of your own channel mix and benchmarks, not a panic-fueled budget arms race. A targeted competitive play, on the other hand, may demand sharper defensive tactics-tightening retention campaigns, reinforcing your brand’s strongest proof points, and focusing your spend where you can outmaneuver rather than outshout.
Questions to Ask Before You React
Before rewriting plans or requesting more budget, stepping back to interrogate what is actually happening will keep your response grounded. The goal is to treat the competitor’s increased spend as an input to your strategy, not as its primary driver.
Start by examining where their spend is showing up first. If it is largely in awareness channels-like broad social campaigns, sponsorships, or video-your immediate risk may be lower than if you see a sudden escalation in direct-response channels right next to your core offers. A surge in search and shopping ads on your branded terms or a wave of comparison-style creative aimed at your specific differentiators often indicates a more aggressive attempt to pull customers away.
It also pays to consider whether their move looks sustainable. A one-off blitz around a major launch is very different from a steady, multi-quarter escalation in paid media. Treating those scenarios differently prevents you from over-correcting in the short term or underreacting to a more structural change in your category.
Map where their new spend is concentrated: search, social, display, offline, or partnerships.
Watch for shifts in their messaging that seem designed to neutralize your biggest strengths.
Track how quickly they adjust creative, offers, and landing pages; fast iteration can signal a serious testing program, not just a splashy push.
Protect Your Base: Defend Core Customers and Market Share
When competitors get louder, it becomes easier for loyal customers to be tempted by new offers, discounts, or flashy positioning. The first priority in any response should be to defend the customers and segments that drive the bulk of your profit, because losing even a small slice of that base can take years to win back.
Research on advertising through downturns has shown that companies increasing marketing investment during tough periods enjoyed an average profit lift of 4.3% in the subsequent recovery, while those that simply held budgets flat saw gains of only 0.6%, and companies that cut spend actually experienced a profit decline of 0.8% as documented in the International Journal of Business and Social Science. The same logic applies when a rival turns up the volume: going quiet might protect short-term margins, but it often weakens brand salience and hands momentum to competitors just as buyers are re-evaluating their options.
Experts in that same body of research emphasize that maintaining advertising during turbulent periods signals stability and allows brands to dominate share of voice in key channels, and that consistent visibility across both boom and lean times sustains essential brand recognition. Letting spend drop just as competitors accelerate makes it easier for them to become the default choice in customers’ minds, even if your product remains stronger on paper.
Practical Ways to Defend Your Core
Defending share does not always mean spending dramatically more. Often it means spending more precisely on the customers who matter most and on the moments when they are most at risk of being poached.
Strengthening retention and loyalty programs is an immediate lever. Sharper lifecycle messaging, timely educational content, and personalized offers can increase the perceived value of staying with you compared to chasing a competitor’s introductory deal. Paid media can support this by prioritizing remarketing and customer match audiences wherever possible, ensuring current customers are reminded of your advantages when they see rival campaigns.
It also helps to reinforce your value narrative to existing accounts. Sales and account teams should be equipped with simple, compelling stories and evidence that highlight the tangible outcomes you deliver. When customers truly understand what they are getting from you, a rival’s higher ad frequency feels more like background noise than a compelling alternative.
Audit your top customer segments and identify where they are most exposed to competitor messaging.
Adjust bidding and targeting to prioritize defending those segments in paid search and paid social.
Align CRM, email, and content teams around a focused retention storyline that counters your rivals’ key claims.
Compete Smarter With Data, Not Guesswork
The riskiest reaction to a competitor’s budget surge is to increase your own spend without a clear view of what is working. When auction dynamics shift and CPAs or CPCs rise, guessing becomes expensive quickly. The most effective leaders lean harder into measurement, experimentation, and competitive intelligence instead of simply approving larger invoices.
Competitive intelligence itself is becoming a bigger line item. A significant share of companies now expect to increase their spend on monitoring competitor activity and market signals, with nearly two-thirds indicating plans to invest more in this area according to research from Evalueserve. That trend reflects a recognition that seeing how rivals allocate resources, test creative, and adjust offers can uncover opportunities to differentiate rather than just mirror their actions.
Practical data work in this environment means tightening your tracking, focusing on incremental impact rather than vanity metrics, and running disciplined tests to understand how your performance responds to increased competitive noise. This can include geo-based experiments, daypart tests, creative and offer splits, and channel attribution improvements so that every additional dollar you do choose to spend has a clear job and measurable return.
Building a More Resilient Measurement Foundation
High-pressure moments expose weak measurement systems. If your reporting cannot reliably tell you which channels and campaigns are truly moving revenue, you will feel forced to either match competitor spend everywhere or risk missing critical opportunities. Neither extreme is healthy.
Start by ensuring that key conversion events are tracked cleanly across your major platforms and analytics tools. That often means working through seemingly unglamorous tasks such as tagging consistency, offline conversion uploads, and clear definitions of primary and secondary success metrics. But without that foundation, it becomes nearly impossible to separate the effect of your own campaigns from the noise created by competitor activity.
It is also smart to define guardrails ahead of time. Determine the range of acceptable CAC, ROAS, or payback periods for different segments or product lines, so that when auctions heat up you can make swift, data-backed decisions about where to hold the line, where to temporarily accept higher costs, and where to pull back.
Identify the metrics that truly represent profitable growth for your business and align your dashboards accordingly.
Use structured tests to see how channels behave when competitor activity increases, rather than assuming.
Invest in tools or partners that help you monitor competitors without distracting your in-house team.
Outstrategize Their Budget: Positioning, Creative, and Offer
Money buys reach, but strategy wins attention. When a competitor raises their spend, they often default to more of the same messaging, just with higher frequency. That can create fatigue and even annoyance if the messaging is not sharply tuned to customer needs. Brands that win in these moments usually do so by refining their positioning, sharpening creative, and tailoring offers so that each impression works harder.
Other industries provide a useful analogy. In semiconductors, for example, research and development spending has ballooned from about $19 billion in the mid-2000s to roughly $43 billion in recent years, a sign of intense competition and an escalating investment race to secure technological leadership as reported by McKinsey & Company. Yet within that giant spend, the winners are not simply those who invest the most, but those who direct investment into the right architectures, capabilities, and ecosystems. Marketing works the same way: focus and differentiation beat blunt force most of the time.
When rivals pour more money into campaigns, the best counter is not always to chase them into the same creative territory. A clearer, more specific promise to a well-defined audience can cut through clutter even at lower frequency. Refreshing your offer structure-through better guarantees, smarter bundling, or more aligned pricing tiers-can also make your proposition stand out even if competitors flood the market with generic discounts.
Sharpening Your Message While They Turn Up the Volume
Each touchpoint becomes more valuable when the environment gets noisy. Vague messaging and bloated creative lose out quickly when buyers are bombarded with options. Tightening your story often delivers outsized returns in these conditions.
Focus your communication on a small set of proof-backed claims that are difficult for competitors to copy quickly. That could be proprietary technology, uniquely strong service outcomes, integration depth, or a customer experience advantage. Then express those claims in language that customers actually use, not just internal jargon. The easier it is for buyers to repeat your story to others inside their organization, the more resilient your brand becomes against high-frequency competitor ads.
Testing is vital here. Shorter cycles of creative and messaging experiments allow you to see which angles resonate most strongly in a more competitive auction. Instead of creating a single “hero” campaign to run for months, treat your campaigns as a series of learning opportunities that continually refine your understanding of what customers notice and act on.
Audit your current messaging to remove generic claims and highlight truly distinctive strengths.
Refresh creatives to feel current and specific to customer pains, not just aspirational imagery.
Align offers with value, avoiding reactionary discounts that damage long-term positioning.
Partner Strategically: When to Bring in Outside Experts
Handling a competitor’s spending surge often stretches internal teams. Marketers are asked to adjust strategy, manage stakeholders, produce more creative, and maintain reporting quality under tighter timelines. At a certain point, adding more internal urgency without additional capacity simply leads to burnout and rushed decisions.
This is where the right external partner can change the trajectory. When we work with clients at North Country Consulting, we focus on building a clear, practical response plan that considers competitive dynamics, margin realities, and the organization’s appetite for risk. Our role is not to suggest reflexive budget increases, but to help teams decide where more investment will actually move the needle and where discipline matters more than volume.
We also bring a broader perspective from seeing how different companies respond to similar competitive pressures. That context allows us to shortcut experimentation, avoid common pitfalls, and bring battle-tested playbooks to your particular situation. Because we sit across strategy, performance channels, and analytics, we can coordinate a response that keeps leadership aligned while giving execution teams clear, achievable priorities.
Why North Country Consulting Is Often the Best Fit
Many agencies react to competitors’ higher spend by recommending that clients simply allocate more budget. Our approach at North Country Consulting is different. We start with your business goals, your financial constraints, and the realities of your market. From there, we design a response that protects your base, identifies asymmetric opportunities, and sets realistic guardrails so you are never spending blindly.
We are particularly effective for teams that already have strong in-house marketers but need a strategic counterpart who can challenge assumptions, structure tests, and build a credible narrative for executives and boards. By combining hands-on performance expertise with senior-level strategic thinking, we help clients use competitive pressure as a catalyst for better systems, tighter messaging, and more resilient growth.
If your competitors are suddenly everywhere and internal conversations are getting tense, bringing us in early can keep your response calm, structured, and grounded in evidence rather than fear. That is often the difference between temporarily weathering a competitor’s campaign and using it as the moment your own marketing operation levels up.
Strategic scenario planning that maps out multiple response options and their financial implications.
Channel-specific playbooks for search, social, and lifecycle marketing under heightened competition.
Executive-ready reporting and storytelling that builds confidence in the plan and its results.
Turn Their Spending Surge Into Your Advantage
When a competitor dramatically increases spend, it can feel like they are seizing the narrative in your category. Yet history and data suggest that aggressive cuts are often more damaging than competitors’ increases. One analysis of advertising behavior found that brands reducing their ad investment by around 10% saw market share fall by roughly 5–7% within half a year, with rivals capturing most of that lost ground according to research summarized by ShunAds. Pulling back too far or too fast can unintentionally hand momentum to the very competitors you are worried about.
Scholars studying marketing behavior across economic cycles have long argued that maintaining visible, consistent advertising-both in strong markets and during downturns-sustains brand recognition and signals reliability when others look uncertain. That consistency is often what allows brands to emerge from turbulent periods with stronger share and pricing power, even if they were not the largest spenders at any given moment. When applied to competitive flare-ups, the lesson is clear: resilience and clarity matter as much as raw dollars.
Responding well rarely means matching every move your rival makes. It means understanding what their higher spend is likely to achieve, protecting your most valuable relationships, using data and intelligence to guide your own investments, and sharpening your story so that each impression earns its keep. With that foundation in place, competitive pressure becomes less of a threat and more of an opportunity to build a stronger, more disciplined marketing engine.
Making Your Next Moves Count
The next time you see your competitors flood the market, resist the urge to scramble. Treat it as a signal to revisit your assumptions, tighten your focus, and double down on what makes your brand meaningfully different. That process creates durable advantages long after their initial burst of spending fades.
If you want help turning that kind of pressure into progress, we at North Country Consulting are ready to work alongside your team. We will help you analyze the competitive landscape, prioritize the highest-impact actions, and execute a plan that keeps your brand visible, credible, and profitable even when the volume around you gets loud.
The brands that thrive when competitors increase spend are not always the ones with the largest budgets. They are the ones with the clearest strategy, the most disciplined execution, and the courage to stay focused on long-term value instead of short-term noise.
Ready to navigate the competitive digital marketing landscape with a partner who brings unparalleled Google Ads expertise and a history of driving revenue growth? At North Country Consulting, we leverage our founder's extensive experience from Google and leading revenue teams at major startups like Stripe and Apollo.io to deliver results that matter. Book a free consultation with us today and let's craft a strategy that not only responds to your competitors' spending surges but turns them into your strategic advantage.