How to keep your job when facing marketing budget cuts

I’ve been around long enough to know that at one point or another, all of us will face marketing budget cuts. In a downturn, marketing and marketers are often on the chopping block.

When leaders and companies start to worry about demand, they might think, “If there’s less demand to get, we’ll spend less to try to get it.” It’s a consistent behavior and phenomenon we see across industries.

I know a lot of blog posts might claim this view is dumb, and advise that you need to double down on marketing in the face of hard times, but let’s deal with the hard, cold reality today. At some point in the life of any business, marketing budget cuts are inevitable.

If you’re not facing a cutback in this current budget season, you will someday, so let’s look at some timeless advice to hold things together when the axe comes down.

Are you creating customers?

When people ask me what marketing is about, I have a simple answer: Marketing creates customers.

Now, the execution of that ideal is insanely complex, but at its essence, marketers should work every day to create customers. You can’t have a business without them, which is why marketing is so important.