We asked agency founders and marketing leaders one question: when budgets get tighter, what do you invest more in and what do you stop doing? Not for one right answer, but to see what patterns hold across very different businesses.
Every company has a budget story from the past year. Fewer leaders are willing to say out loud what they actually cut to keep growing. So we skipped the theory and went straight to the people making the trade-offs in real time.
Their answers landed in four clear patterns. Here’s what they told us.
Organic and earned authority replaced paid reach
When budgets got tight, the most common move wasn’t cutting spend evenly across the board. It was pulling money out of anything rented and putting it into anything owned.
1. Randy Roberts
Local SEO doesn’t disappear the moment you stop paying attention to it, which is exactly why Randy moved his budget there first.
We doubled down significantly on Google Maps optimizations, and we have dropped social media posting for pretty much all clients.
Social posting needed constant feeding. Google Maps optimization kept working in the background, so that’s where the budget went.
2. Adrian Crismaru
When paid ads stopped being an option, Adrian didn’t scale back. He rebuilt the funnel around something that didn’t need a media budget at all.
Cash flow was tight, so paid ads weren’t really an option. Instead, I focused on creating expert content and building a unified ecosystem of free Local SEO tools, like Free GBP Audit and Free Website Audit. Today, AI manages the entire funnel, nurturing leads and introducing our Local SEO services at the right time which has become a much more sustainable growth engine than buying traffic.
Free tools plus AI-managed nurturing turned out to be a sturdier growth engine than the traffic he used to buy.
3. Asia Parveen
Not every budget cut is about spending less. For Asia, it was about spending on something that keeps paying you back after the invoice is gone.
The one growth lever we leaned on hardest was guest posting and strategic link building, it kept our organic pipeline active without increasing ad spend. To fund it, we pulled back on paid social; the ROI simply didn’t justify the cost compared to earned authority.
Paid social stopped justifying its cost, the return just wasn’t there anymore. Earned authority didn’t have that problem. It kept paying off long after the work was done. That difference alone was enough to move the budget.
4. Suraj Grover
Instead of testing wider, Suraj went narrower, funneling budget only toward what already had a track record.
Rather than dividing our budget over wide paid campaign testing, we concentrated on channels and campaigns that we know have a proven ROI, while spending more on content that compounds over time via SEO, customer education, and thought leadership.
Proven channels got the spend, the ones with a track record he could already point to. Everything speculative, anything still unproven, got cut without hesitation. If it couldn’t already show its work, it didn’t make it into the budget.
Narrowing who you’re trying to reach
A second group didn’t change channels so much as change targets, deciding that trying to be relevant to everyone was the real budget leak.
5. Youri van den Hurk
The budget leak wasn’t a channel. It was trying to be relevant to too many people at once. One ICP, no cold outreach, no mass campaigns. If it didn’t sharpen the offer or reach the right founder, it didn’t get funded.
I stopped treating anyone with a budget as a fit and went all-in on one ICP; funded founders at tech and SaaS scaleups, who find me through organic content rather than ad spend or automation. That ICP comes to me already convinced. No cold outreach, no having to convince them. What I refuse to fund it with: chasing volume through mass outreach, and hourly work that quietly expands. If it doesn’t sharpen the offer or put me in front of the right founder, it doesn’t get my time.
Youri stopped treating anyone with a budget as a fit and went all-in on one ICP: funded founders at tech and SaaS scaleups who find him through organic content rather than ad spend or automation. That ICP comes to him already convinced, no cold outreach, no having to win them over. What he refuses to fund: chasing volume through mass outreach, and hourly work that quietly expands. If it doesn’t sharpen the offer or put him in front of the right founder, it doesn’t get his time.
6. Romana Kuts
Romana’s rule isn’t about the channel either. It’s about whichever constraint is actually holding the business back right now.
Things that move the needle stay. Things that are ‘for fun’ or ‘for experiments’ go. If we’re out of capacity, hiring new people moves the needle. If we don’t have enough capacity in the first place, investing in finding new clients moves the needle.
Romana keeps things that move the needle and cuts things that are “for fun” or “for experiments.” If she’s out of capacity, hiring new people moves the needle. If she doesn’t have enough capacity in the first place, investing in finding new clients moves the needle.
Letting AI absorb the volume work
A third pattern: using AI not to cut headcount, but to free up budget that used to go toward manual production and testing at scale.
7. Alex Puryk
Most ad variations never win. Alex stopped paying to produce more of them and started paying for genuinely different ideas instead.
Only 5 to 8 percent of ads ever become winners, and Meta groups similar ads together, so forty variations of one idea count as one try, not forty. AI made new concepts cheap to produce, so we stopped paying for expensive production and manual account work and put that money into truly different ideas.
Only 5 to 8 percent of ads ever become winners, and Meta groups similar ads together, so Alex knew forty variations of one idea would count as one try, not forty. AI made new concepts cheap to produce, so he stopped paying for expensive production and manual account work and put that money into truly different ideas instead.
8. Brendan Short
Brendan cut the middle ground entirely; everything in his budget now sits at one extreme or the other.
Barbell: AI and automation on one end, humans — cold calling, small curated events, warm intros — on the other end.
AI and automation on one end. Real human contact on the other. Nothing in between survived the cut.
9. Sona Mamyan
One-off influencer deals stopped making the cut. What replaced them had to keep working long after the first post.
We rethought most of what we do on performance marketing and one-time influencer collaborations and allocated budgets towards ongoing creator partnerships. All platforms favor genuine helpful content and no advertisement can beat it today.
Sona rethought most of what her team does on performance marketing and one-time influencer collaborations, and reallocated the budget toward ongoing creator partnerships instead. Her reasoning: all platforms favor genuine, helpful content, and no advertisement can beat it today.
Protecting value over chasing acquisitio
Not every answer was a new lever. Sometimes the discipline is just refusing to get distracted from the one that already works.
10. Stefan Chekanov
Stefan didn’t chase new customers harder when things got tight. He went the other direction entirely.
The growth lever we have leaned on hardest is delivering more value to our existing and prospective customers, preferably without increasing the price. To fund that focus, we’ve become much more selective about where we invest our limited resources, and we’ve stopped pursuing initiatives that create activity but little measurable customer value9
The growth lever Stefan has leaned on hardest is delivering more value to existing and prospective customers, preferably without increasing the price. To fund that focus, his team has become much more selective about where they invest their limited resources, and they’ve stopped pursuing initiatives that create activity but little measurable customer value.
11. Amir Salihefendic
Not every answer was a new lever. Sometimes the discipline is just refusing to get distracted from the one that already works.
Not much has changed on our end. We’re still hyper-focused on creating an amazing user experience and empowering people with simple yet powerful tools. The only real change is that we’re moving much faster.
Not much has changed on Amir’s end. His team is still hyper-focused on creating an amazing user experience and empowering people with simple yet powerful tools. The only real change is that they’re moving much faster.
Sometimes the discipline isn’t a new lever. It’s refusing to be distracted from the one that already works.
The pattern underneath the pattern
Eleven companies, eleven different budgets and almost no overlap in the specific tactic each one picked. But look at what they all cut: paid social, mass cold outreach, one-off influencer deals, wide-net paid testing, and initiatives that generate activity without generating value.
And look at what they all funded instead: content and authority that keeps working after the money stops, a tighter definition of who’s actually worth talking to, AI doing the repetitive work so humans can do the relational work, and existing customers getting more attention than new ones.
The lesson isn’t “spend less.” It’s “stop spending on anything that only pays you back once.”
Got a growth trade-off worth sharing? We’d love to include you next time.
Don’t let your competitors take the lead!
