Resist the cuts and reap the rewards
The marketing budget is often the first outgoing to be cut during an economic downturn, but it is almost always the case that any immediate savings will be massively overshadowed by the imminent problems that reduced marketing will cause.
Marketing is absolutely key to your company’s performance, so if anything a financial nosedive like the one that is happening right now should make your marketing budget more important than ever. Your competitors will be cutting their own marketing spend, and when that happens you’ll find voids opening up. It’s up to you to fill these voids and benefit. Cutting your marketing budget leaves the gaps for your competitors to fill, and isolates you even further from your goals.
Your customers and prospects haven’t disappeared - they still exist, they’re perhaps just more discerning than they were earlier. Again, it’s up to you to react to this.
Refocus on what you’re trying to achieve from your marketing. It’s likely that you’ll need to adapt your approach or even your offering, but giving up altogether simply cannot lead to a positive outcome.
Riding out the turbulence can empower your brand in other ways, particularly expanding and consolidating your share of voice (SOV). Eventually once the financial storm has settled, if you’ve stayed the course and been ever-present throughout then this will be abundantly clear to customers and market observers - you’re not meekly emerging from a wreckage like competitors who disappeared by cutting their marketing, you’ve never been away.