Marketing leaders face a difficult budget situation in 2025, as budget reductions and shifting economic conditions redefine strategic priorities. A recent report by Bospar, CMO Huddles, and Redpoint found that 77% of marketing leaders across North America and Europe are managing stagnant or declining budgets, with 38% experiencing cuts of at least *3%. This comes as CMOs grapple with a hidden recession where businesses remain cautious despite continued economic growth, as well as an ever-expanding **B2B buying journey.

A budget cut in a bad economy doesn’t have to be a crisis. Finding the right channels to cut back on, or knowing which audience may need the most attention requires work to look into your data and figure out where the most profit is coming from. Chartis teams focus on using your data to align with your business needs and provide meaningful recommendations to drive profitable conversions across all channels.

Key Takeaways

• Align marketing with economic realities by understanding where clients are currently at, optimizing budgets and channels, improving efficiency, and adapting strategies to shifting consumer behavior.
• Understand prospects' digital journey and ensure you will be there for every step of the way.
• Focus on high-ROI strategies such as paid search, organic content, email campaigns, and automation to drive sustainable growth.
• Leverage AI and analytics to quickly analyze data, enhance ad and website copy, improve competitor and industry analysis, and improve campaign targeting.

Understanding Shifting Consumer Behavior

It’s been happening for years now; potential clients are now more cautious, ¹extending sales cycles, conducting extensive research via digital platforms, and prioritizing cost-effectiveness. This shift in behavior means that traditional marketing approaches may be less effective. Marketers must adapt by focusing on customer needs, addressing financial concerns, and providing reassurance through strategic communication. To remain relevant, companies should analyze changing patterns in purchasing decisions, ensuring that their messaging aligns with the current market reality while acknowledging that the same reality is affecting prospects and clients. 

Reevaluating audience segments is critical, as some client segments may continue spending while others scale back or disappear entirely. Understanding these shifts allows for tailored messaging that resonates with current buyer priorities, emphasizing value, ROI, and risk mitigation. With consumers spending more time in research phases, brands should provide robust educational content, such as in-depth guides, case studies, and testimonials, to support their decision-making process and build trust. Retaining and upselling existing clients should be one of your primary focuses, utilizing email and owned content to maintain your company’s status.

• Reevaluate audience segments: Who continues to buy, who is delaying purchases, and who is disengaging entirely? Are sales cycles getting shorter or longer? Which customer segment has the highest Lifetime Value? Where are the touchpoints online and in person? Using these and other similar questions in adjusting customer profiles ensures campaigns remain relevant and focused on the most profitable possibilities.
• Shift messaging: Clients prioritize ROI, cost-effectiveness, and risk mitigation. Messaging should emphasize value, practical benefits, and social proof through case studies and testimonials while acknowledging the current downturn.
• ²Extend decision-making support: B2B buyers are taking longer to make purchasing decisions, requiring enhanced content strategies that address pain points and reassure potential clients.
• Prioritize retention: As everyone knows, retaining existing clients is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Email, owned content, and targeted upsell strategies should be central to marketing and sales efforts.

Maximizing Impact: High-ROI Marketing Strategies

When budgets shrink, strategic efficiency becomes the primary focus. Channels may need to be cut back. As a marketing leader, you should allocate resources and maybe even cut back channels to proven, high-impact channels while ensuring long-term brand strength. Digital channels are one of the clearest to connect to profits, thanks to online touchpoints and tracking, so they should be a key focus of your efforts when seeking efficiency.

1. Optimize Paid Search for High-Intent Leads
   You'll find paid search a crucial component of your low-funnel marketing strategy, particularly when your budgets are constrained because it directly captures active buyers at their moment of highest purchase intent. You can efficiently connect with prospects actively seeking solutions by targeting specific keywords that signal readiness to buy. 
   
   Using Google Ads and Microsoft Ads to precisely target these high-intent search terms while providing granular control over your spend and immediate performance feedback through connected analytics. This approach aligns with your tighter budgets since you're focusing resources on prospects most likely to convert, effectively reducing your cost per acquisition while maintaining or improving conversion rates. Your ability to adjust bids in real-time, A/B test ad copy, ensure conversion actions connect to a source of revenue, and optimize landing pages makes paid search particularly valuable during economic uncertainty, as you can quickly adapt to changing market conditions and buyer behavior while maintaining clear ROI visibility. 

• • • Prioritize high-intent keywords and focus ad spend on those campaigns so that marketing dollars translate into measurable conversions.
    • Implement A/B testing or experimentation on ad copy, CTAs, and landing pages to maximize ROI without increasing costs. Shortening testing cycles may be required so that the effects of uncertainty are lessened.
    • Confirm all your conversion actions connect to a source of revenue within your company 
      • • Ex. A PDF download conversion should not cost the same as a sales demo form fill conversion); adjust the cost and strategy accordingly for each type of action you want prospects to take.

2. Strengthen Organic and Owned Media
   One of your most cost-effective paths to maintaining market visibility lies in refreshing and optimizing your owned media channels, particularly your website content and email campaigns. By updating existing content and developing new resources that align with Google's E-E-A-T guidelines, you can sustainably improve your organic search rankings without relying on paid advertising. This approach becomes especially valuable during budget constraints because you're leveraging assets you already own.
   
   Your email marketing can similarly benefit from a refresh, using customer data to create more personalized, targeted communications that nurture relationships without requiring additional media spend. If you’re not already cleaning your lists every few months, it’s a great time to purge them of old or outdated contacts, non-responsive prospects, and others who may negatively affect your email campaigns. By focusing on these owned channels, you're building long-term equity in your digital presence while maintaining consistent touchpoints with your audience, all while keeping costs under control.

• • • Refreshing old content and developing new content that adheres to Google’s E-E-A-T content recommendations so that it answers your customer’s questions, supports decision-making, and improves brand trust over time.
    • Provide in-depth content, since prospects are spending more time researching purchases, such as comparison guides and long-form educational resources to meet that demand and ensure you are engaging with prospects at every step of the buying journey.
    • Updating your email copy and contact list will increase your reputation with key email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.

3. Adjust Budget Allocation by Funnel Stage
   You might feel tempted to shift your entire marketing budget toward bottom-funnel activities when the pressure hits, but research suggests a more balanced approach will serve you better long-term. You'll want to maintain a strategic presence across your entire funnel, as Les Binet stated, “Long-term brand building is the key to firmer pricing” -Spoken at Kantar’s Ignite 2023 Event.
   
   This way, you're capturing immediate opportunities while still nurturing your brand's market position for future growth and not losing your market share for a few extra temporary leads. By maintaining a balanced approach, you're positioning yourself to not just weather the downturn but to emerge stronger when market conditions improve. 

• • • ³“A good rule of thumb is to spend 10% to 20% of your overall budget on brand awareness, 10% to 20% on lead nurturing and remarketing, and 60% to 80% on direct response.”
    • Maintain brand awareness through cost-effective channels like website content, LinkedIn thought leadership, social and display prospecting campaigns, and retargeting campaigns.

4. Leverage AI to Maximize Efficiency
   You can significantly stretch your limited marketing resources by strategically implementing AI-powered tools into your workflow. By leveraging AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you're able to automate time-consuming tasks while maintaining high-quality output. These AI assistants can help you draft initial content variations, generate creative campaign concepts, and even analyze customer feedback at scale.
   
   Your marketing operations can become more efficient as you use AI to refresh content ideas, segment audiences more precisely, track industry and competitor trends, and identify patterns in your own campaign data that might otherwise go unnoticed. By using AI and subscribing to competitor emails, you can even get a detailed analysis of the strategies they are using and get some content ideas of what to do and what not to do.
   
   Beyond content creation, you'll find that AI can enhance your customer service through intelligent chatbots that handle routine inquiries, freeing your team to focus on complex customer needs. This automation doesn't just save you time, it allows you to deliver more personalized experiences to your customers while operating with a leaner budget. 

• • • Chatbots and customer service automation can be used to streamline engagement - The 6 best chatbot builders, Zapier
    • Use predictive analytics within AI tools to refine audience targeting and lead scoring based on your conversion data.
    • Upload your old non-ranking content into an LLM alongside desirable keywords to get ideas on how to refresh it for a more relevant audience.
    • Competitor analysis using AI to track industry shifts and adapt strategies accordingly with an AI Agent or automated competitor scraping bot from sources like: Browse AI, Bright Data, Hexomatic
      
    
    

To remain competitive, marketing teams must prioritize strategic spending, increase operational efficiency, and drive measurable outcomes. Rather than applying blanket budget cuts equally across all efforts, leaders should focus on optimizing performance across marketing channels, refining targeting strategies, and leveraging data-driven insights to guide decision-making. 

Chartis teams excel at leveraging your own data to find out where to prioritize efforts to maximize your profits Contact us today to see how we can help you navigate your budget, whether or not you may have had it cut.

References

*Underground Recession: The Hidden Strain on B2B CMO

**B2B Buying: How Top CSOs and CMOs Optimize the Journey

¹CSO Update: The New B2B Buying Journey and Its Implication for Sales

 ²B2B Buying: How Top CSOs and CMOs Optimize the Journey

 ³How to create a marketing budget, Salesforce