5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Cut Your Marketing

This past year has been a tour de force in balancing budgets and keeping heads above water, especially as a small business. And when budgets need to be cut, a popular yet poorly advised move is to go M.I.A. when it comes to marketing and advertising. If you’re reading this with your business still intact, we have a feeling you didn’t do that.

When COVID-19 arrived on the scene in March 2020, our clients scrambled for solutions for the immediate and long-term future. Some chose to strategize our way through messaging together while some decided cuts to marketing were necessary. We’ve got a few reasons why there is a right and wrong answer:

1. Cutting marketing messaging leaves your entire audience in the dark, regardless of whether you sent out an update or not. It instills a lack of confidence and loyalty in your clientele you may never recover.

2. During tough times, creative solutions are the only way to climb out of a hole. And as professional creatives, our marketing services exist to find the path that differentiates you from anyone else. And if we’re not in on the operational process, we can at least communicate the new, optimistic solutions in place to turn it around.

3. Any competitors with which you’ve been toe-to-toe that kept their marketing services running are now lightyears ahead of your business. Everything from increased revenue to constant presence to simply building experience is lost when marketing communications are paused. And the audience that could’ve been yours is now focusing its attention right next door.

4. There are alternative, cost-effective solutions to sustaining marketing efforts. Strategies including social media, email marketing and event programming are all relatively less-expensive options that communicate strength, creativity and trust in the longevity and legitimacy of your brand.

5. If you’re in it for the right reasons, your business is ideally suited to last as long as possible. Any recession, pandemic or bump in the road is temporary and a bounce-back of major proportions is in line. We’re already starting to see the hospitality industry ramp up programming and spending again in anticipation of a post-pandemic boom. If you have a limited marketing team, the messaging needed to compete in turn-around efforts won’t be possible.

The most valuable thing you can do is stay top of mind and in front of eyes. Marketing will always push you in the right direction, no matter how unsure the future may seem.