This episode is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Today we teach you how you can still score a strong marketing budget in a recession. We also cover: * How to cut a marketing budget the right way * How to make the most of your marketing budget * Hacks on saving money on your marketing spends Key Takeaways * Know how your budget decision-maker ticks * Optimize your current campaigns for payback period * Reduce your ad budget for branded keywords * If your organization is facing a hiring freeze, propose to outsource those tasks to freelancers or contractors instead of employees * Narrow your focus down to best-performing market segments, geographies, product verticals, or customer segments. * Negotiate with your tool vendors for annual discounts, long-term contracts, or retainer prices * Repurpose the top 20% of the content or pages that are performing well. Understand the motivation behind the budget allocation Eli advises how as a first step, one should understand the motivation of the person allocating the budget – “I think anybody who wants to be successful at really maximizing budget and maximizing their effectiveness is to understand the motivations of whoever is giving that directive. So, for a public company, it might be the investor, for a private company, it might be the VCs, for a very small company, it might be the small business owner. So, it really comes down to how you position yourself most effectively and utilize that budget so that person is the happiest and feels like you're achieving their goals. It's not about I saved you a thousand dollars.” Take a look at the payback period of your customer acquisition costs Kevin shares how brands are becoming mindful of a campaign’s payback period as they look to save costs – “Right now, especially in the SaaS space, a lot of companies are looking at their payback period – (which is) how much money they spend to acquire the customer and how long it takes for those customers to spend enough money with the company so that they can recoup the acquisition cost. So, companies are looking to shorten the payback period – which basically means that they try to acquire the same customers with less money.  (For this) you may want to look at which campaigns drive the most customers. Where do we spend more than we get back? That sounds like something you would do anyway all the time, but it's not true. (That’s because) for the last maybe 15 years, the default has been growth – to just get in as many customers as possible. You still want to look at the payback period, but it's not the deciding factor. But now, it's a deciding factor. So, companies are trimming the edges of their ad budgets. They're trimming the fat and trying to reduce the spend it takes to get customers.” Reduce spend on your branded keywords Kevin advises reducing the budget on branding during tough market conditions – “One of the best practices that I noticed is to just reduce the spending on your brand. Companies spend a lot of money on bidding on their brands in Google Ads. The margins or the net benefits of that are not always that great. I think now is a good time to see, – hey, what happens when if we stop bidding on our brands? Or at least what happens when we cut our brand spend in half? How many customers do we still get versus how many would we lose potentially?” Outsource more by hiring freelancers Eli advises hiring freelancers or contractors instead of full-time people — “If you've been told that you have a hiring freeze, instead of not hiring people, just hire freelancers. I don't think there's a chance that the companies that went through the big layoffs, Google, Facebook, and all the other companies are not hiring freelancers or contractors. There are still jobs that need to be done and unfortunately, they need to cut full-time employees to make the street, their budget, and CFOs happy, – but they still need someone to do it. So they shift that bu