Marketing when cutting the budget by 30–50%: what to cut, what to leave, what to strengthen

The budget was cut by 40%. In my practice, such letters arrive without warning - on Friday evening, marked “from Monday”. Most marketers at this moment have a reflex: we cut everything proportionally so that it is “fair.” This is a mistake that costs revenue.

Uniform cutting is a guaranteed failure. If you have three channels and you cut each one by 40%, none will work properly. The Yandex Direct algorithm loses training, VK Ads does not collect statistics for optimization, and outreach campaigns stop generating frequency. As a result, you spend 60% of your budget with 30% efficiency. We need different logic.

Budget cuts are not a disaster. This is forced prioritization. Those who know how to prioritize come out of the crisis with better unit economics than they had before.

Why do marketers cut the wrong things?

Intuition says: cut what is “visible” - expensive media, large placements, noticeable expense items. Analytics says something else: cut what cannot be protected with numbers.

In my practice, the first candidate for output is always something that does not have UTM markup and measurable CPL. Influencers without tracking links, banner networks without conversion goals, branded campaigns “for reach”. Not because they are useless - it’s just that with a limited budget you can’t keep something that can’t be defended to management.

The second mistake is cutting off what psychologically seems “unnecessary.” Email newsletters, CRM segments, content updates. And these are exactly the tools with the highest ROAS at zero or minimal additional costs.

Channel audit: “ROI × controllability” matrix

Before cutting anything, you need to spend two hours on the table. Take the last 90 days for each channel and look at two parameters:

ROI/ROAS - how many rubles of income each ruble spent brings. This is the main axis.

Manageability - how quickly you can change the budget without losing efficiency. Search in Direct is controlled: we reduced the bids - fewer clicks, but the quality does not drop. An automatic conversion strategy with a small budget is poorly managed: remove 30% of the budget and the algorithm will “break” and lose training.

Channels with high ROI and good manageability - save and, if possible, strengthen them at the expense of disabled ones. Channels with low ROI and poor controllability are the first to be disabled.

More information about calculating ROAS and CPL: How to calculate ROAS, CPL and LTV/CAC: formulas and errors.

Table: what to cut, what to leave, what to strengthen

The table is conditional - your numbers will be different. But the logic is the same: you turn off what cannot be measured. You keep what works. You make decisions about the average based on data.

Organic and content: an asset that grows while you cut

This is the only marketing tool with increasing returns while reducing investments. An article you wrote three months ago gets more traffic today than the day it was published. Advertising is the opposite: they stopped paying, traffic stopped.

In my projects, when budget is being cut, I always allocate 3-4 hours a week to refine existing content: updating data, adding FAQ blocks, improving internal linking. It's free and produces noticeable organic growth in 4-8 weeks.

One more point: SEO during a crisis is often underestimated, because the returns are not immediate. Competitors are cutting their SEO budgets - your positions are growing simply because you stayed in the game. This is a countercyclical asset.

Learn more about competitor analysis and their SEO strategy: Competitor Analysis in Marketing 2026: Tools and Template.

Retention during cuts: email and CRM as an anti-crisis reserve

When the budget for attracting new clients is reduced, retention becomes the main tool for retaining revenue. You already have a base - this is an audience for which you have already paid.

In one of the projects - EdTech, the budget was cut by 35% - we redistributed 15% of the freed-up funds to email automation by segment. Trigger series for “sleeping” users (haven’t logged in for 30+ days), promotional mailings for cohorts of buyers, cross-sell for purchased courses. Result in 8 weeks: +22% to revenue from the existing base. In total, we lost 35% of the budget, lost 12% of the volume of new leads, but retained almost all of our revenue.

Minimum retention tools for a small budget: email newsletters via Unisender or SendPulse (from RUB 1,000/month), push notifications via OneSignal (free up to 10K subscribers), CRM segments for sales managers with priority on hot unconverted leads.

Details about the sales funnel and retention mechanics: How to build a sales funnel in 2026: from traffic to repeat purchase.

Negotiations with the CEO: how to justify the performance threshold

The main mistake when talking to management is to defend “marketing in general.” It is necessary to protect specific numbers with specific arguments.

There is one argument that almost always works: the autostrategy learning threshold. Yandex Direct's automatic conversion strategy requires a minimum of 10–20 conversions per week for stable operation. If the budget falls below the threshold at which this number is reached, efficiency falls non-linearly - not by 40%, but by 60-80%. A CEO who understands this will not cut Direct below this point.

The security format that worked for me was a table with three scenarios. Scenario A (−30% of the budget): we lose coverage, retain leads by focusing on Direct and email. Scenario B (−50%): we lose some of the leads, but maintain the unit economy on Direct. Scenario C (−70%): point of no return, disabling autostrategies, manual control with CPL degradation by 40–60%. Management usually chooses A or B - the main thing is that they see the consequences of each option in numbers, not in words.

About calculating the budget from unit economics: Marketing budget 2026: calculation formula and defense to the CEO.

Case: −40% of the budget without loss of leads

Project: e-commerce, average bill 4,200 ₽, niche of household goods. Cut in February 2025 - from 480K to 290K ₽/month. Duration: 6 weeks.

What was before the cut: Yandex Direct search 180K ₽, YAN 80K ₽, VK Ads 100K ₽, TG influence 70K ₽, email 15K ₽ (service + designer), Avito 35K ₽.

What I did first: disabled TG influence (70K ₽) - three out of four integrations did not have UTM, ROAS is unknown. I cut YAN from 80K to 30K ₽ - ROAS is two times lower than search for a comparable budget. I cut VK Ads from 100K to 60K ₽ - I kept conversion retargeting campaigns and turned off cold traffic.

What I did instead: added 20K ₽ to Direct search (total 200K ₽ - the main channel received a slight increase), launched a trigger email series for abandoned carts through Unisender (additional 5K ₽/month), increased the frequency of content publications on Avito without increasing the budget.

Result after 6 weeks: budget 295K ₽ (−38.5% of the original), leads - 91% of the level before the cut. CPL increased from RUB 1,840 to RUB 2,010 (+9.2%), which was within the acceptable range. Email for abandoned carts separately brought in +140K ₽ in revenue for the period.

Key numbers before and after: released 190K ₽ from ineffective channels, redistributed 15K ₽ of them back to measurable tools, “saved” 175K ₽ while maintaining 91% of the lead volume.

About diagnostics of performance campaigns: What to do when a performance campaign doesn’t work: 6-step checklist.

Checklist 48 hours in advance for emergency cuts

If the budget is being cut right now and you have two days, here is the sequence of actions:

First 4 hours: upload data on all channels for the last 60–90 days. Minimum set: expense, leads, CPL, conversion to deal. If something is missing, then this channel is a prime candidate for shutdown.

Next 2 hours: create a matrix along two axes - ROAS and controllability. Set priorities: what we turn off, what we save, what can be strengthened through redistribution.

Until the end of the first day: disable everything with an unknown CPL. It's not a risk—it's a guaranteed way to save money without demonstrable harm. Notify contractors and agencies of the pause.

Second day: collect scenarios for the CEO (three options with numbers - as described above). Launch or strengthen email communications across the existing database. Check that Direct has not fallen below the conversion threshold for the auto strategy.

A week later: the first section based on new data. If CPL has increased by more than 25%, look at which channel has dropped and whether it needs to be redistributed more.

On the competitive situation during the crisis: How to analyze competitors: tools and template in 3 hours.

If you want to understand the situation with your specific budget, write to Telegram @dipustovalov or through form on the website. I look at your channels and tell you what to cut, what to leave. The first consultation is free of charge.

Related materials: ROAS/ROMI calculator, break-even ROAS calculator, media plan template.