Marketing budget cuts? How to make every pound count

Marketing budgets are often the first to take a hit when times get tough. It’s an easy target – after all, the impact of marketing isn’t always immediately visible in the bottom line. But cutting back too much can have lasting consequences. Without marketing investment, lead generation can slow down, sales pipelines can dry up, while competitors who stay visible take the spotlight.

So how do you stretch your budget without losing momentum? The answer isn’t to stop marketing. It’s to prioritise strategies that deliver long-term value and reinforce the one asset that makes every marketing activity more efficient: your brand.

Why cutting marketing can cost more in the long run

It’s tempting to treat marketing as a cost centre during a downturn. But evidence shows that organisations that maintain visibility and continue communicating with their audience recover faster and build a stronger position post-crisis — protecting brand equity and market share.

A landmark study by Harvard Business Review, covering 4,700 companies across the 1980, 1990 and 2000 recessions, found that:

80% of companies that cut marketing budgets failed to return to their pre-recession growth trajectory for both sales and profits within three years.

Source: HBR, “Roaring Out of a Recession” (2010)

By contrast, companies that reduced operational costs while maintaining or reallocating marketing spend strategically were best positioned to lead the market as conditions improved.

For contract manufacturers, visibility is a long game

Unlike consumer brands, contract manufacturers don’t benefit from impulse buys. Relationships are built over time. Buyers — whether procurement leads or OEM engineers — are looking for signs of trust, reliability, and capability before they even start a conversation.

If you disappear from view, your competitors won’t hesitate to fill the gap.

So, what does smart digital marketing look like when the budget tightens?

Marketing on a budget? Go brand-first

With fewer resources, every marketing effort needs to reinforce your brand. The stronger your brand positioning, the less you’ll need to spend convincing potential customers to choose you.

When an OEM recognises your name, trusts your expertise, and sees you as a credible partner, the sales process becomes shorter, smoother, and less cost-intensive.

But brand-driven marketing isn’t just about logos or taglines. It’s about delivering consistent, confident messaging that answers one core question:

Why you?

Make brand the centre of every activity

You likely already have a website, sales decks, datasheets and blogs. But are they telling a cohesive, strategically aligned story – and are you making the most of them across available marketing channels?

Start with these three checks:

• Clarity: Are your messages consistent across all platforms?
• Relevance: Are you speaking to the needs your buyers have today?
• Differentiation: Is it easy for prospects to see how you stand out?

Every piece of your content marketing should reinforce your position as a reliable, capable, and expert partner.

Build momentum with strategic content

You may already be producing content, but is it driving meaningful engagement? Or is it just ticking boxes?

The most successful contract manufacturers map their content to real customer questions:

• Awareness: Can buyers find you when they’re researching?
• Consideration: Do you provide the technical depth and proof points they need?
• Decision: Do you make it easy to choose you, with case studies, ROI calculators or spec sheets?

If you already have blogs, webinars, datasheets or even tender responses, look for ways to repurpose that material to answer your buyer’s burning questions at key moments in their journey:

• A technical blog becomes a short video for LinkedIn
• A customer case study becomes a social post and email case study
• A slide deck becomes a downloadable guide

You don’t necessarily need more content. You just need content that works harder.

This approach forms the basis of a strong content marketing strategy - focused on ROI, growth, and aligned to the buyer journey.

Use AI to plan and repurpose content efficiently

AI tools like MarketMuse, or ChatGPT with custom prompts can help you:

• Generate content outlines based on your customers’ search intent
• Create LinkedIn post drafts from long-form blogs
• Adapt technical content for non-technical personas
• Translate dense capability descriptions into plain-language sales materials

This reduces manual effort and speeds up content development plans – without sacrificing quality.

But, a word of warning, you shouldn't just 'prompt and publish'. Using AI to generate text wholesale can produce low-quality output that harms your reputation. We recommend using AI tools for marketing strategy support, ideation, content analysis, and supervised creation — not as a replacement for human judgment.

To get the most value from these tools, your marketing team needs to be properly trained and confident in the latest prompting techniques.    

Focus on high-impact channels

Website: your 24/7 sales tool

Your website is often the first impression buyers get — and it needs to perform. A slow or outdated site can damage trust and lose business. In fact:

• 79% of buyers prefer working with suppliers who have fast, user-friendly websites

• 36% have switched suppliers due to poor site performance

  Source: Industry research by Storyblok

To make your website work harder:

• Optimise for speed – Aim for load times under 2.5 seconds to reduce bounce rates and build trust
• Structure for buyers – Create industry-specific pages with clear, intuitive navigation
• Build trust – Showcase certifications, delivery KPIs, testimonials, and recognisable customer logos
• Use relevant CTAs – Go beyond “Contact Us.” Offer next-step CTAs aligned to buyer intent, such as:
  • “Request a Capabilities Overview”
  • “Book a Technical Discovery Call”
  • “Download a Quality & Compliance Pack”
  • “See How We Deliver for [Industry] OEMs”
• Repurpose content – Use AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT) to adapt technical content for different buyer personas
• Boost SEO – Use platforms like SurferSEO or SEMrush to identify keyword gaps and optimise copy
• Track performance – Use GA4 or Hotjar to monitor user behaviour and fix friction points

A well-structured, high-performing website doesn’t just showcase your capabilities — it acts as a trust-building tool and a lead-generation engine for your digital marketing strategy and overall marketing goals.

LinkedIn: your credibility engine

LinkedIn remains the most valuable social platform for B2B visibility — especially for sectors like contract manufacturing.

If you’re not active here, now’s the time to start. If you are, shift from company updates to value-driven content that reflects your expertise and supports your brand marketing efforts.

• Share behind-the-scenes process stories
• Highlight employee knowledge and industry experience
• Repurpose sales conversations as post ideas
• Get your leadership team posting and engaging, too — personal voices go further

Use AI to generate a steady stream of post ideas and captions

AI can help brainstorm post angles from your blogs, FAQs, or sales conversations. Even simple prompts like “Turn this capability statement into a LinkedIn post for procurement managers” will get you 80% of the way there; more bang for your buck.

Email: your relationship builder

Email remains one of the highest ROI marketing channels, especially when personalised and segmented.

Go beyond newsletters with:

• Re-engagement campaigns for dormant leads
• New lead welcome sequences
• Monthly insight emails with useful industry trends, compliance updates or success stories

Most platforms (like HubSpot) offer automation and personalisation features — even on starter plans.

AI can also generate different variations of subject lines, preview text, or messaging tailored to different buyer roles or industries — saving time while boosting relevance and campaign performance.

Prepare for the future: think beyond SEO

As AI-powered search changes how people discover suppliers, your content must be ready for new types of visibility.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is becoming more important to consider. Instead of just aiming to rank on Google, you're also writing for AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot — which summarise and recommend suppliers based on content quality, authority and structure.

To prepare:

• Create content that answers specific buyer questions clearly and confidently
• Use real language your customers use, not marketing jargon
• Invest in formats AI tools love — videos, expert blogs, original research

As marketing expert Rory Sutherland noted in a recent interview:

"In the future, companies looking for new partners may simply assemble their shortlist through AI-powered search."

Ensuring your offering and content are optimised for discovery through these routes is likely to be a better use of marketing spend than investing heavily in 'paid-for' clicks.

Marketing smarter, not smaller

• Google Analytics: Identify which content and pages drive the most engagement and conversions
• HubSpot CRM: Segment contacts, automate nurture journeys, and surface high-intent leads to sales

Also take the time to develop more targeted content using tech in the most cost-effective way:

• Realign your messaging to strengthen your brand
• Repurpose and reframe your existing content
• Invest in your best-performing channels (website, LinkedIn, email)
• Use data and automation tools to guide decision-making
• Tap into AI to strategise, customise, analyse and scale marketing activity — without inflating costs

This approach reduces waste and improves the return on your marketing budget, even when operating under budget constraints.

Research says - don't bin the brand work!

In a world where contract manufacturers find their services increasingly commodified in the supply chain, it's worth returning to the long-range research conducted by Field and Binet on the effectiveness of 'industrial marketing'.

Their conclusions are stark: B2B companies who focus only on short-term sales activation—tactical 'activation'—campaigns fail to build pricing power or long-term growth.

In contrast, those that invest in brand building through emotional, strategic messaging see sustained sales increases, stronger customer loyalty, and significantly amplified creative impact.

Without long-term brand thinking, businesses risk flatlining growth and becoming interchangeable in a crowded market.

Conclusion: cut waste, not visibility

The market will bounce back. The contract manufacturers who stay visible, keep nurturing their customer relationships, and continue showing value will be the ones best placed to win when it does.

Now’s not the time to disappear.

It’s time to make every marketing pound — and every tool at your disposal — count.