Your marketing budget just got cut by 15%, and leadership wants a revised plan by Friday.
The easiest response is to take 15% off every campaign and vendor. It looks fair on a spreadsheet, and nobody has to make a tough call. Unfortunately, marketing rarely cooperates with the spreadsheet.
Some activities stop producing inquiries when the funding stops. Others keep helping buyers long after the original work is done. And some may be using budget without contributing much to the business at all.
A smarter cut starts by recognizing the difference. Every dollar needs a job.
What Do Companies Typically Budget for Marketing?
Before making cuts, it helps to put your marketing spend in context. If you’re wondering how much to spend on marketing, industry benchmarks offer a starting point, although they can’t tell you exactly what your unique company needs.
According to Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, marketing budgets averaged 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, up from 7.7% in 2025. The survey covered 401 marketing leaders across North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Most represented companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue, so this is primarily a large-enterprise benchmark.
The CMO Survey’s 2026 Highlights and Insights Report, based on a January 2026 survey of 308 senior marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies, found:
- 9.0% of revenue on average across responding companies.
- 7.0% of revenue for B2B product companies.
- 10.1% of revenue for B2B service companies.
These are percentages of revenue, not of the total operating budget. And a marketing budget percentage is context, not a prescription. A mature manufacturer with a relationship-driven sales process may need a very different program from a fast-growing software business.
Benchmarks can help explain the investment to leadership. Once the budget has been cut, though, the more useful question is what the remaining dollars need to accomplish.
Why Equal Cuts Can Cause Unequal Damage
Marketing activities deliver value on different timelines. Paid advertising may bring in qualified inquiries while a campaign is running, then slow when funding is reduced. A helpful product page or customer resource can support buying decisions for months or years, provided someone keeps it accurate.
And then there are the things nobody talks about until they break: website forms, CRM connections, tracking, and reporting. You can trim a dashboard, but losing the ability to capture an inquiry or understand campaign performance is a different matter.
Consider a hypothetical manufacturer that has spent time building website content around technical questions buyers ask before contacting sales. When the budget shrinks, ongoing content and search support seem like easy cuts. The website already exists, after all.
But product pages still need updates, competitors keep publishing, and sales relies on those resources to help buyers evaluate options. Months later, the company could be left with stale information, weaker search visibility, or fewer useful materials for sales. Restoring that progress may require more work than maintaining it would have.
That doesn’t give content a free pass. If it isn’t reaching the right buyers or helping sales, it deserves scrutiny. The point is to judge what a cut will affect, not just how much it saves today.
What Should You Protect First?
Start with the foundations that keep marketing working, then protect the activities tied to qualified opportunities and the assets that continue earning their keep. The exact mix depends on the business, but the order gives you somewhere sensible to start.
Protect the systems buyers and sales rely on
Keep the website, inquiry forms, landing pages, lead routing, tracking, and core reporting functional. They’re easy to overlook because they aren’t the shiny parts of marketing. They’re also what make many of the other investments useful.
You may be able to simplify reports, reduce update frequency, or postpone a nonessential website improvement. But if a prospect can’t reach sales, or your team can’t tell which campaigns are working, the savings come with a real cost.
Protect work that brings in the right opportunities
Look at the campaigns and resources helping appropriate buyers find the company and move toward a sales conversation. That might be paid search, targeted email, technical content, or another program with a credible connection to qualified opportunities.
Lead volume alone can be misleading. For a sales-led industrial company, ten inquiries from the right engineers or purchasing managers may matter more than a hundred from poor-fit prospects. Bring sales into the discussion.
Attribution won’t always be perfect. Use campaign inquiries, CRM notes, sales feedback, and the questions buyers ask. Be honest about gaps in the data, but don’t assume something has no value simply because it isn’t neatly attributed.
Maintain the assets that keep providing value
Useful website content, established search visibility, customer education, and sales resources can continue supporting a long buying process after they’re created.
Maintaining them doesn’t mean keeping production at full speed. If the plan called for four new articles a month, perhaps fewer new pieces make sense while the team keeps important pages current and improves resources buyers already use. Protect the progress you’ve made without pretending every project is essential.
Where Can You Scale Back?
Once the essentials are covered, look for work that can pause without creating disproportionate damage.
An experiment on a new social platform with little meaningful engagement may be one candidate. An event that duplicates another effort, unnecessary creative variations, or a website enhancement that can wait may be others. If several vendors are producing materials without a shared plan for sales to use them, that’s worth examining too.
You might also delay a new-market campaign while the business focuses on current customers and near-term opportunities. However, that trade-off could slow expansion, and leadership should understand it fully before making the adjustment.
Check contracts and commitments before counting savings as immediately available. And don’t cut a productive program just because its cost is easy to see. Start with work whose business purpose is least clear.
Explain What the Smaller Marketing Spend Can Actually Deliver
Here’s where the conversation gets tricky: leadership can cut the budget without changing the targets. Sales still needs leads, and the business still wants growth.
A revised spreadsheet won’t resolve that mismatch. Show what you’re protecting, what you’re reducing, and which outcomes may change. For example:
“With 15% less, we can keep our core website and tracking working, continue the campaigns bringing qualified opportunities, and maintain key sales resources. We’ll delay the new-market launch and produce less new content. That protects today’s pipeline priorities, but it means slower progress in expanding our reach.”
Now leadership can evaluate an actual business choice. Less advertising may mean fewer inquiries. Less content production may slow future visibility. Pausing a new-market effort means learning about that audience later. Better focus can help, but it isn’t a promise of identical results for less money.
If the original plan no longer fits the revised investment, Planning Your 2027 Marketing Program: What to Budget (and What to Change) offers a useful framework for resetting expectations.
Set a practical review cadence with sales and leadership. Watch qualified inquiries, pipeline contribution, conversion activity, and early signs that reduced work is affecting performance. The goal is to make the next decision with better information.
What Should You Restart When Funding Returns?
Don’t automatically bring every paused project back. First, look at what changed while the budget was smaller. Did qualified inquiries decline? Did sales lose resources it needed? Did a customer segment go underserved? Just as important, what did the team discover it could do without?
Restore a productive campaign if demand is there. Catch up on important website or content maintenance if it slipped. Leave low-value activity off the list, even if it’s been there for years.
The order matters because not everything regains momentum at the same speed. A paid campaign may resume activity when restarted; neglected content, broken processes, or lost internal capability can take longer to rebuild.
Keep the Program Connected
A smaller budget can still support useful marketing, provided the remaining pieces work together, and everyone understands the trade-offs. That takes clear priorities, communication with sales, and a willingness to stop work that isn’t pulling its weight.
Through Marketing Management, Marketing Refresh helps organizations plan, coordinate, and review marketing programs alongside their internal teams.
If you’re trying to keep the right work moving with fewer resources, read our guide to running a multi-channel marketing program in a changing industry for practical ways to keep priorities and channels connected.
