When the month goes badly, the list of cuts always looks similar, and marketing sits at the top. Not because it's the least important — because it's the easiest. It cancels with one email, has no employment contract, and never complains.
Everyone on our side of the fence will tell you cutting it is a mistake. It isn't quite that simple — sometimes it's the only responsible decision. What changes everything is what gets cut.
There are two budgets, and they're different things
What gets called "the marketing budget" is usually two things mixed into the same line of the accounts.
What brings in sales this week. Search ads to people already looking for what you sell, campaigns for a promotion, emails to the customer list. Switch it off on Monday and you'll notice by Friday.
What builds demand a year from now. The brand, the website, the content, the presence. Switch it off on Monday and nothing happens — for months. It's precisely because nothing happens that it's the first to go.
Cutting the first is a brake: it reduces sales almost immediately, and sometimes it genuinely has to happen. Cutting the second is a debt: it costs nothing today and comes due when demand returns and the company is no longer on anyone's mind.
Why whoever stays gains ground
In a squeeze, everyone in the sector does the same sums at the same time. The result is that the space empties out: fewer advertisers in the same auction, less noise in inboxes, fewer companies posting.
Whoever keeps up even a modest presence through that period shows up more, for less money, to a market that hasn't gone anywhere — because people don't stop needing garages, accountants or building work; they postpone, compare more, and decide more slowly.
You don't need to keep everything going. Keeping something going, consistently, is what separates whoever comes back to the market with a name already made from whoever comes back from zero.
What to cut first, if you have to cut
- Whatever you can't measure. If you don't know how many enquiries it brought in over the past year, it's the first candidate — and not knowing is, in itself, information.
- Expensive production for small audiences. Elaborate video, large photo shoots, visibility sponsorships.
- Presence on channels where your customer isn't. Posting for the sake of posting, on a network that's never produced a single enquiry.
- Whatever is pride and not sales. Every business has a line item like this. You know which one it is.
And what doesn't get cut: whatever already brings in measured enquiries, the website that's working, and the relationship with existing customers — the cheapest money there is.
Change the tone before you change the budget
There's one thing that costs nothing and counts for a lot: what you actually say.
At a time when customers are putting off decisions, the messaging that works isn't the one that pushes hardest. It's the one that helps them decide — explaining what genuinely needs doing now and what can wait, giving a ballpark price, saying plainly when a cheaper option will do the job.
Telling a customer to spend less feels counter-intuitive. In practice, it's what brings back whoever postponed, and it's one of the few things a small company can do better than a large one.
If you want to review where you're spending and what's worth keeping, that's a digital marketing conversation.
Need to cut without hurting yourself?
Tell us where you're currently investing and what each thing returns. We'll help separate the brake from the debt.