How businesses can use virtual prepaid cards to manage marketing & ad spend

Managing marketing and advertising spend today isn't just about setting budgets—it’s about maintaining control in a fast-moving, high-stakes environment. With multiple campaigns, ad networks, teams, and vendors all demanding quick payments, the traditional model of handing out a shared company credit card just doesn't cut it anymore. 

Businesses need a smarter, more secure way to fuel their marketing efforts without losing oversight—and that's where virtual prepaid cards come in. In this blog, we'll explore how switching to virtual prepaid cards can streamline your marketing expense management, boost operational control, and help you avoid becoming the next cautionary tale. 

In today’s complex and fast-moving environments, where different teams handle separate campaigns, events, vendors, and media spends, relying on a single corporate credit card is a recipe for disaster. 

When employees juggle purchases across marketing channels, travel expenses, event logistics, and online ads—all using the same card—visibility collapses and financial discipline weakens. And as spending becomes fragmented, your finance team is left scrambling to reconcile transactions long after the damage is done. 

o avoid becoming the next cautionary tale, forward-thinking organizations are replacing traditional credit cards with virtual prepaid cards. 

What is marketing spending? 

Marketing spending refers to the total amount of money a company allocates or uses to build brand awareness, enhance its public image, and generate inbound leads. This spend typically covers a wide range of online promotional activities, such as social media campaigns, content marketing, paid advertising, SEO initiatives, public relations efforts, outreach programs, marketing tools, and more. 

When planning your marketing spend, it’s important to factor in elements like the type of industry you operate in, the size of your business, your growth stage, target audience, and expansion goals.  

Based on these considerations, you’ll need to create a marketing budget. The effectiveness of this budget—and how closely you manage and optimize it—plays a key role in determining the success of your marketing expense management. 

Common marketing expenses for company 

When businesses invest in marketing, their budgets usually spread across multiple channels, each playing a unique role in brand growth and lead generation. While interconnected, these activities should have their own dedicated budgets for better control and maximum impact. Let’s dive deeper into the major categories of marketing spend: 

Branding and brand management 

Your brand is how customers perceive and remember you. Expenses under this category include developing a strong logo, crafting your mission and vision statements, creating brand guidelines, branded merchandise and maintaining consistency across all customer touchpoints (website, emails, social media, etc.). 
Why it's important: A well-established brand boosts customer trust and loyalty, making all future marketing efforts more effective. 

Digital advertising and paid promotions 

Paid digital marketing campaigns drive instant visibility and traffic. Common forms include: 

• Search engine marketing (SEM): Paid ads on Google, Bing, etc., appearing when users search relevant keywords. 
• Social media advertising: Sponsored posts, carousel ads, video ads on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. 
• Marketplace advertising: Ads within ecommerce platforms like Amazon or Walmart to boost product sales. 

Why it's important: Paid promotions get your brand in front of targeted audiences quickly and effectively. 

SEO and outreach expenses 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts aim for organic visibility. Spending here includes technical website optimization, blog creation, link building, keyword research, and collaboration with online publishers for backlinks. 
Why it's important: Organic traffic is a long-term asset, and higher rankings mean more leads without recurring ad spend. 

Public relations (PR) campaigns 

PR helps build credibility through media exposure. Typical PR activities include press releases, media outreach, influencer collaborations, and brand reputation management. 
Why it's important: Good PR positions your brand as trustworthy and influential, which is key for long-term growth. 

Marketing tools and software 

You’ll need various marketing tools to manage campaigns, track data, and engage audiences. These can include: 

• CRM systems like HubSpot or Salesforce. 
• SEO platforms like SEMrush or Ahrefs. 
• Email automation tools like Mailchimp. 
• Social media scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. 

Why it's important: Tools streamline workflows, provide insights, and allow your team to operate more efficiently at scale. 

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising 

PPC is a digital advertising model where you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Ads can appear: 

• On search engines like Google (e.g., Google Ads) 
• On social media like Facebook and LinkedIn 
• Across websites through display networks 

You can control how much you’re willing to pay per click and set total campaign budgets. 
 

Why it's important: PPC provides fast, measurable results, and it’s highly scalable depending on your business goals. 

Problems of marketing expense management using credit card 

For managing multiple business advertising expenses, using a dedicated corporate credit card linked to the organization's account is the standard approach. However, there are several serious limitations and risks involved. Remember Wescom Solutions Inc.? They learned these lessons the hard way. 

Let's walk through why relying on a company credit card for marketing spend can be risky and inefficient: 

1. Control over employee spending 

At the outset, using a single corporate card for marketing expenses creates a lack of individual accountability. 
With multiple ad campaigns running across Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and different team members handling each, monitoring who spent what becomes a nightmare. 

Problem: 

• Employees can easily exceed pre-set ad caps or spend on unauthorized campaigns. 
• Manual reconciliation efforts increase, leaving gaps for unnoticed overspending or abuse. 

You lose critical visibility, and without robust checks and balances, the chances of fraudulent activities or financial mismanagement skyrocket—exactly what Wescom faced. 

2. Loss of credit cards or details 

When there’s a single point of failure—a company credit card—losing the card or leaking its details can have serious consequences. 

Problem: 

• Misplacement or unauthorized use can immediately halt all marketing operations. 
• Fraudulent use can max out the credit limit, block further transactions, and cause irreversible financial losses. 

 
Campaigns could be paused for days while you cancel the card, issue a new one, and reconfigure all your linked payment methods, leading to lost leads, missed opportunities, and marketing disruptions. 

3. Outdated technology 

Traditional corporate card management portals often have clunky interfaces and lack real-time functionality. 

Problem: 

• Making any changes—like raising spending limits, blocking fraudulent charges, or analyzing expenses—requires manual interventions, often involving multiple rounds of communication with banks. 
• No seamless integration with your internal finance or expense management systems. 

You spend more time managing operational inefficiencies than focusing on scaling your campaigns or analyzing ROI—wasting precious team bandwidth. 

4. Sharing card details across teams 

One common credit card shared across teams and platforms means multiple people handle sensitive financial information. 

Problem: 

• Each new transaction requires employees to locate the card details, request approvals, and wait for the green light. 
• There's no clear audit trail showing who authorized or executed each transaction. 

This leads to slow payment cycles, reduced agility, higher risk of data breaches, and unnecessary complexity in an already fast-paced marketing environment. 

5. Risk of card frauds 

Using one card for all activities across various teams means no structured oversight—making it easier for unauthorized or illegal transactions to slip through. 

Problem: 

• No real-time alerts or approvals. 
• Employees could use the card for personal or unapproved expenses without immediate detection. 

You risk financial damage, internal compliance breaches, and reputational harm due to lack of robust spending governance. 

Virtual prepaid cards: A brilliant alternative to credit cards 

It’s time to give your expense management system a face-lift. The future isn’t plastic; it’s virtual. Swap your business credit cards in favor of virtual prepaid cards. Let’s learn more about them. 

Virtual cards 

A virtual card is simply an online version of a plastic bank card. They work in the same fashion as normal plastic cards for online transactions. The pertinent details that distinguish a card, such as the 16-digit number, expiry date, and CVV number, are accessible by logging into your account online. Although linked to your business card account, these virtual numbers cannot be traced back. 

Prepaid cards 

Prepaid cards are loaded with a certain sum of money, and there is no connection with your business’s banking account. Your expense management department decides how much “cash” is allocated to the card, and this limit cannot be breached. 

Virtual prepaid cards 

These are an amalgamation of the previous two card types. Virtual prepaid cards scale your security to the maximum. Instead of letting employees like Minetto run up debts using a single company card, top-up each virtual prepaid card with an allocated budget. Since this card has the benefits of a virtual card, there’s nothing physical to steal, and the card cannot be traced back to the company bank account. 

Benefits of managing marketing spend using corporate virtual card 

It’s not a hard sell to convince you why virtual prepaid cards are a great option for managing your marketing and advertising spending. Read on to find out their benefits. 

1. Ease of use 

A massive benefit of using virtual prepaid cards is that they can be used to charge goods and services by employees without having to go through the formal purchase request and approval process. Virtual prepaid cards can be created quickly and used straightaway. Your business won’t need to wait a week to receive the card. Additionally, you can create as many cards as you need for your business. 

2. Ease of customization 

Your business can issue an individual employee’s name on the card associated with a specific Facebook/Google/Microsoft ad campaign account, meaning only that employee will have access to the card. 

3. Increase safety and security 

Virtual prepaid cards aren’t physical items; they reduce the chances of cloning and fraud. Additionally, hackers can’t trace the details back to the original account. If needed, your expenses department can freeze the card remotely and immediately. 

4. Bypass blocking concerns 

If you’re using a single company-wide credit card, there’s a chance that you’ll come up against the credit limit, which can cause transactions to get blocked or the card to get declined. In other instances, using the same card for each marketing campaign can trigger a fraud alert, causing the ad management platforms to block your accounts. 

5. Increase control over spending 

Your business receives a more transparent overview of company finances like Wescom’s case, you can drill down to see who is spending where (not more than the allocated amount). This transparency makes it easier to manage finances. 

6. Real-time tracking made effortless 

Corporate virtual cards transform marketing expense management by offering a centralized, real-time view of all spending activities. 
With built-in expense management software, these cards allow you to monitor updates, track changes, and oversee spending as it happens — no more waiting for month-end reports. 

Thanks to customizable controls, you can approve payment requests, flag unauthorized expenses, and manage reimbursements instantly, based on the rules you define—helping you stay agile and in control at every step. 

7. Lower risk of card blocks and transaction failures 

When marketing teams rely on a single shared company credit card for multiple ad campaigns, the risk of hitting credit limits — and getting the card blocked — increases dramatically. 
Frequent, high-volume transactions can trigger fraud alerts and cause ad accounts to be temporarily suspended, disrupting campaign continuity. 

Issuing separate virtual cards for different teams, campaigns, or clients minimizes these risks. 
It reduces the strain on any single card, offers better visibility into spending patterns, and enables proactive management to avoid blocks and declines before they happen. 

8. Lightens the load on finance teams 

Virtual card solutions with automated payment systems, pre-approval workflows, fraud protection, and seamless integrations drastically reduce manual work for finance teams. 
Routine tasks like tracking expenses, validating payments, and handling reimbursements can now be automated and streamlined through the expense management software. 

By eliminating manual bottlenecks, finance teams are freed up to focus on higher-value strategic work—like financial planning, auditing, and optimizing budgets, rather than chasing receipts or reconciling endless spreadsheets. 

Factors to consider while choosing a virtual card partner 

Here are a few considerations to keep in mind while choosing virtual card partner: 

Ease of issuing virtual corporate cards 

Virtual cards naturally have an edge over physical cards thanks to how quickly and easily they can be issued. 
However, the ease of issuing virtual corporate cards can vary significantly between providers. 
When choosing a corporate virtual card solution, prioritize a provider that offers a simple, user-friendly process for card creation and management — ensuring minimal administrative burden on your teams. 

Integration with existing accounting systems 

Another critical factor to consider is how well the virtual card platform integrates with your current accounting software. 
While many providers claim to support integrations, not all offer true seamless compatibility with the systems you may already be using. 

Always verify integration capabilities upfront to ensure the platform aligns smoothly with your workflows, helping you automate reporting, reconciliation, and financial management without extra hassle. 

Transparency around exchange rates 

When using virtual cards for international transactions, currency exchange rates and additional fees can impact your overall costs. 
It’s important to compare rates across providers and understand any hidden charges before making a decision. 

Choosing a provider that offers competitive exchange rates and full transparency will help you manage cross-border payments more efficiently and cost-effectively. 

Robust security measures 

Finally, security should be non-negotiable when selecting a virtual corporate card solution. 
Ensure that the provider offers strong, easily accessible security features like 3D Secure authentication, robust encryption standards, security certifications, and customizable approval workflows. 

An airtight security framework not only protects your company’s financial data but also builds trust internally across finance and marketing teams. 

Why choose Xoxoday Plum for virtual prepaid cards? 

Managing marketing expenses shouldn't feel like juggling knives. Xoxoday Plum simplifies virtual prepaid card management, offering a seamless, secure, and scalable solution for modern businesses. 

With Xoxoday Plum, you can instantly issue virtual prepaid cards to your marketing, sales, or finance teams anytime, anywhere. Whether you're fueling ad campaigns, running promotions, or rewarding employees, Xoxoday Plum ensures you stay agile without losing control. 

Here’s why Xoxoday Plum is your best partner for virtual prepaid cards: 

• Instant activation: Issue cards on-demand within minutes—no lengthy bank approvals or delays. 
• Global acceptance: Give your teams spending power at millions of merchants worldwide, online and offline. 
• Enhanced security: Avoid credit limit breaches, unauthorized use, and fund embezzlement with customizable spending controls and real-time tracking. 
• Easy integrations: Seamlessly connect Xoxoday Plum with your CRM, accounting, and marketing systems for automatic expense tracking. 
• DIY simplicity: Set up your account, issue cards, monitor spending—all from an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard, without depending on support teams. 
• Compliance and control: Maintain full visibility and governance over your financial operations with audit trails, spend limits, and approval workflows built-in. 

Xoxoday Plum isn't just another platform—it’s a smarter way to power your marketing and operations with speed, security, and savings.