What’s the true business cost of cutting marketing in 2026?

Gartner revealed that marketing budgets levelled out at around 7.7% of business revenue in 2025. On the surface, good, right? They haven’t dropped. 

However, the problem marketing teams face is that these budgets haven’t kept up with that old chestnut, inflation, giving them significantly less purchasing power to pull off campaigns and ideas. 

What does that leave us with? Marketing teams are consistently trying to achieve more with less.

But what’s not talked about so much is the actual long-term business impact this lack of investment in marketing is having. And never ones to shy away from an opinion, we want to talk about it. 

Let’s get on the same page about ‘marketing’

What is marketing when you boil it down? It’s lead generation and brand experience. Underneath those two figureheads, you have all the tactical bits, like advertising, social media, the website, SEO, etc. 

They’re ultimately all contributing to these two huge business functions that have a tangible impact on a business’s ROI. And yet, for whatever reason, marketing as a business function is one of the first to go when times get tough. 

What happens then?

Rebuilding brand trust 

If your marketing activity drops off, you become less visible. If you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind. 

When you pick marketing back up, you then have to rebuild all that brand equity and trust with consumers, which could take chuffing ages, and a hell of a lot of budget and resources. 

There are plenty of theories about how long it takes someone to fully trust a brand, ranging from 7 hours to over 2 years. 7 hours might look small on paper, but when you break that down into all the micro times you interact with a brand - looking at a billboard here, liking a social media post there - 7 hours is actually an insanely long time. You have to build up some seriously intense visibility to rack up those kinds of hours in front of someone. 

If you maintain a little and often approach to keep the brand top of mind, even if other activities have slowed down, you’ll probably find that brand recall and affiliation are a lot quicker off the mark when you’re ready to go at it all guns blazing.  

Making your sales team’s life harder

The buyer journey isn’t what it was 30 years ago. The point at which leads or potential customers want to get involved with sales is much later than in the traditional sales funnel. And the reason they come to sales is usually to qualify certain things, like price. They don’t need convincing as much as they want a demo or to get down to hard cash. 

Without any kind of marketing, watch your inbound leads disappear (remember, marketing is ultimately lead generation and nurture). That brand recognition and trust simply isn’t there, so your salespeople will be starting from scratch. In one study, it was found that businesses that maintained some level of marketing efforts in an economic downturn only saw a 7.54% decline in the number of leads. For the ones that stopped altogether, the decline was nearly 29%. 

If you take away marketing, you take away all that awareness and brand sentiment. In other words, you make life 10 x harder for salespeople. 

Prioritise the strategic and functional foundations when the going gets tough 

Economic downturns are going to happen. But when the going gets tough, the tough don’t have to immediately slash their entire marketing effort. It’s time to sh*t-storm-proof your marketing.

We’re talking messaging. We’re talking things like email nurture sequences, automations and segments. We’re talking all the front-loaded unsexy things that can keep ticking over, even when things get hard. When things are going well, take a look at your strategy and tactics and decide on an emergency plan. What are the non-negotiable actions that can keep going, even if you have to strip your marketing operation right back? 

Simply staying in someone’s inbox, maintaining an online presence and saying the same things on repeat keeps you at the top of someone’s mind. 

If you need help nailing down your messaging, writing emails that get opened, or building a bank of evergreen content that keeps customers locked in, we’re all ears ☺️