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.
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.
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?
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?
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:
Every piece of your content marketing should reinforce your position as a reliable, capable, and expert partner.
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:
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:
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.
AI tools like MarketMuse, or ChatGPT with custom prompts can help you:
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.
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
To make your website work harder:
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 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.
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 remains one of the highest ROI marketing channels, especially when personalised and segmented.
Go beyond newsletters with:
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.
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:
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.
Also take the time to develop more targeted content using tech in the most cost-effective way:
This approach reduces waste and improves the return on your marketing budget, even when operating under budget constraints.
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.
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.