6 Ways to Cut Marketing Costs (But Still Get Great Results)

In 2026, a lot of teams are feeling the pressure. 

Tighter budgets, frozen hiring, and every dollar is expected to work harder than ever. At the same time, marketers are juggling more channels and formats while operating under higher expectations from leadership and customers.

In this article, we’re breaking down six practical ways to cut your marketing costs—without sacrificing performance or growth.

Know your numbers

1. Know your numbers

Your marketing efforts cost money. Ad costs keep climbing, competition is fiercer than ever, and privacy updates mean your results are harder to see clearly in your ad dashboards than they were a few years ago. If you’re looking to decrease marketing cost across channels, you can’t afford to guess what’s working and what isn’t.

When you don’t have a clear handle on your numbers, you’ll end up cutting the wrong things and paying more for weaker performance. Start by understanding what’s really happening behind the numbers so you can cut marketing costs in the right places.

Start with three core metrics

For every major channel or campaign, make sure you can answer these three questions:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
How much does it cost you to acquire one new customer?

• Formula: Total marketing + sales costs ÷ number of new customers in that period.

If your CAC is creeping up every quarter, that’s your first warning sign.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

How much revenue do you get back for every dollar you spend on ads?

• Formula: Revenue from ads ÷ ad spend.

For example: spend $10,000 and generate $40,000 in tracked revenue and you’ve got a 4x ROAS.

With iOS privacy changes and shorter attribution windows, expect fewer conversions to show up in your dashboards—so use ROAS as a guide, not the full story.

Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)
How efficient is your marketing overall, not just per channel?

• Formula: Total revenue ÷ total marketing spend.

When your tracking is unclear, MER shows you whether your overall marketing spend is really working, even if some channels don’t seem to be getting full credit

Create a “numbers at a glance” view

Build a one-page overview you can check weekly. For each key channel or campaign, list:

• Spend (this period)
• Revenue (this period)
• CAC
• ROAS
• MER (at least at the overall level)
• Notes (e.g. “new audience”, “creative test”, “retargeting only”)

You can pull this from tools you probably already have:

• GA4 and ad platform dashboards (Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn) for traffic and conversions
• Looker Studio for simple blended reports
• An ecommerce or attribution tool (e.g. Triple Whale)
• HubSpot or your CRM for revenue, pipeline, and closed-won deals

The goal is to have a clear enough picture to decide what to cut, keep, or double down on.

By having a clear picture on what to cut, keep, or double down, you’ll know where to cut marketing costs without removing the initiatives that actually drive results.

Include the hidden costs

Your ad invoice isn’t the only number that matters. Some of the biggest leaks come tools and workflow:

• Creative bottlenecks: How long do you wait for new ads, landing pages, or email designs before a campaign can even launch?
• Slow approvals: How many days sit between “ready” and “signed off”?
• Manual work that AI could handle: Writing endless variations, resizing assets, building reports by hand.
• Tool overlap: Multiple subscriptions doing the same thing, or tools no one is really using.

Put a rough cost estimate beside each. For example: hours per month × average hourly cost, or “campaign delayed by 2 weeks” × estimated missed revenue. This is still “knowing your numbers”.

What to cut first vs. what to protect

With that data in hand, you’ll know what to cut or protect.

Know your audience

2. Know your audience

Understanding your target audience inside out is gold dust. Knowing what they want, need, and responding to best helps you only spend what you need to. The more you know who you’re talking to (and who you’re not), the less you waste on irrelevant or broad, generic marketing and you can decrease marketing cost over time.

Start with first-party data

With tracking getting murkier and third-party data less reliable, your best audience insight now comes from first-party data—the information you collect directly from your customers and prospects, including:

• CRM data (industry, company size, role, deal size, win/loss reasons)
• Website behaviour (pages visited, resources downloaded, forms submitted)
• Email data (opens, clicks, replies, unsubscribes)
• Product usage (for SaaS or apps: features used, login frequency, plan types)
  Forms, surveys, and feedback (stated needs, goals, challenges)

Once you have that information, utilize it to craft better targeting and messaging. Ask questions like:

• Who are our most profitable customers?
• Which types of customers close the fastest?
• Which channels and content usually show up before they convert?

This becomes the foundation of everything else you do.

Use AI to refine personas

AI is a powerful tool to use to speed up workflows, but only if you feed it real data. Here are some ways to use it:

• Ask it to group recurring pains and objections, and to highlight the exact phrases customers use to describe their problems—these often become great copy hooks later on.
• Export a slice of your CRM data (for example, closed-won deals from the last 6–12 months) and ask it to summarise common traits such as industry, role, company size, and use case. From there, it can suggest three to five “best-fit” persona profiles based on those patterns.
• Take your high-performing emails, landing pages, or ads and have AI analyse which messages and angles show up most often in the winners. Then, ask it to propose a few variations tailored to specific segments, so you have a starting point for more targeted messaging.

You still decide what’s true and useful. AI just accelerates the analysis and drafting so you have more time for strategy and execution—and more capacity to cut cost in creative testing without burning your team out.

Treat retention as your biggest cost saver

Acquiring new customers is getting more expensive every year. One of the fastest ways to cut marketing costs without shrinking revenue is to improve retention and expansion with the customers you already have.

Once you’ve identified your best segments using first-party data, focus on:

• Onboarding and education: Make sure new customers understand how to get value quickly (tutorials, welcome sequences, checklists).
• Segmented retention journeys: Send different emails, prompts, or offers based on plan type, product usage, or lifecycle stage.
  Expansion and upsell paths: Identify natural upgrade moments (usage thresholds, feature interest, contract renewals) and speak to them directly.

Be strategic

3. Be strategic

It’s tempting to copy whatever tactic seems to be working for someone else: a competitor’s new channel, a trendy ad format, a new tool everyone’s talking about. That kind of reactive marketing is one of the fastest ways to burn money instead of helping you cut marketing costs.

Winning on cost and performance now is less about doing more, and more about choosing a clear direction—and sticking to it long enough to see results.

Don’t copy your competitors’ homework

It’s never been easier to see what your competitors are doing. But it’s also never been more dangerous to copy it.

What you can’t see from the outside:

• Their attribution model (first touch, last touch, multi-touch, blended)
• Their budget and risk appetite
• Their sales cycle length and deal sizes
  Their internal goals (brand awareness? revenue? market share? fundraising story?)

Use competitors as inspiration, not instruction. Instead of copying, ask: “Given our audience, product, and numbers, does this actually make sense for us?”

If the answer is vague, don’t pay to find out.

Resist channel hopping

Another expensive habit: jumping from channel to channel every time performance dips. One quarter it’s Meta, then you rush to LinkedIn, then YouTube, then back to Meta with a new campaign structure and three new tools glued on. Every switch has a cost:

• Learning curves for your team
• Time spent rebuilding campaigns and tracking
• Creative rework for new specs and formats
  Lost learnings (you reset your history before you’ve really understood it)

Most channels need consistent data, creative iteration, and time before they stabilise. If you’re constantly resetting, you’re paying the “getting started” tax over and over again instead of using that effort to cut marketing costs in smarter ways.

Anchor your year around a clear strategic thesis

Instead of reacting week by week, decide on a yearly strategic thesis. This is a simple statement that defines what you’re betting on and why.

Your thesis should answer:

• Who you’re prioritising
• Where you’ll show up
• How you’ll win

Once that’s defined, use it as a filter for any campaign or budget changes that may arise:

• Does this new campaign support the thesis?
• Does this shiny new channel help us reach the segments we’ve chosen?
• Does this budget request move the needle on our biggest goal?

If not, it’s probably a distraction—especially when money is tight.

Here are some examples:

• This quarter, our growth will come primarily from expanding existing customers, so we’re prioritising upsell and renewal campaigns over cold acquisition.
• This year, we’re focusing on improving ROAS by tightening our targeting and levelling up our ad creative and landing pages, instead of adding more channels.
• This quarter, we’re going to turn our best-performing content into a stronger inbound engine and reduce our reliance on cold paid campaigns.

Get your customers to market your company for you

4. Get your customers to market your company for you

Your happiest customers can become one of your most reliable marketing channels without having to spend a lot. Referrals, reviews, user-generated content, and case studies help you acquire new customers and cut marketing costs compared to spending on cold ads. 

Here’s how to build a simple and repeatable system that turns customer loyalty into a pipeline.

Turn happy customers into referrers

Once you’ve nailed the customer experience, make it easy for happy customers to spread the word. You can weave a straightforward referral ask into post-onboarding or milestone emails—something as simple as, “Know someone else who’d benefit from this? Here’s your personal link.” Offer fair rewards, such as credits, discounts or even donations to a cause that fits your brand.

Systemise social proof

Customers in 2026 expect proof from people like them before they commit—especially in B2B. Use your existing customers to answer the questions your prospects are asking:

• Logos and quick wins on your website (“Trusted by…”, “Helped X company cut production time by 30%”)
• Short testimonial quotes that speak to specific pains (“We were struggling with X, now we’re seeing Y”)
• Case studies tailored to your key segments (by industry, company size, or use case)
• Review platforms (Trustpilot, Google Reviews, etc.) where future buyers are already researching

The more targeted your social proof, the less you have to “convince” people with generic messaging.

Use UGC and community as low-cost reach

User-generated content and community content give you more creativity, credibility, and reach without the production costs of traditional campaigns.

Make it easy (and fun) for customers to create content around your brand:

• Run simple challenges or prompts (e.g. “Show us your setup”, “Before/after using X”, “Your best tip with our product”) and encourage tagging your brand.
• Ask permission to repost the best content on your own channels, ads, or website. Don’t forget to credit customers clearly when you feature them.

Think of UGC as your creative library. Instead of paying for every new asset from scratch, you’re curating and amplifying what your customers are already making—one of the most efficient ways to cut cost in creative production.

Outsource to double (or triple!) your output in less time

5. Outsource to double (or triple!) your output in less time

If you’re looking to reduce your marketing costs, outsourcing can save you money while drastically increasing your output. For example, one designer in-house might produce all the campaign assets in two weeks.

If you outsource a team of designers, you could potentially have all of your assets in just two days thanks to the extra hands on deck. This will cost much less than hiring multiple new in-house designers and helps you manage both design cost and creative cost more predictably.

Where outsourcing fits in your team

More teams are shifting from a purely in-house model to a hybrid setup—a lean internal core supported by flexible, subscription-based creative partners. Instead of hiring multiple full-time specialists (and carrying that cost even in slower months), subscription partners let you:

• Scale up or down based on campaign volume, seasonality, and launches
• Turn fixed headcount into flexible capacity
• Get access to a full creative team (design, illustration, motion, sometimes copy) without recruiting for each role
• Keep costs more predictable than ad-hoc freelancing or large project fees

A fully managed creative production team like Design Force is built for this. You plug into a subscription, send in briefs, and get assets turned around quickly. Done right, this gives you more output faster, without the long-term cost and risk of constantly hiring.

 Why subscription-based creative partners make sense

Instead of hiring multiple full-time specialists and carrying that cost even in slower months, subscription partners let you scale up or down based on campaign volume, seasonality, and launches.

You turn fixed headcount into flexible capacity and get access to a full creative team (design, illustration, motion, sometimes copy) without recruiting for each role. You also keep costs more predictable than ad-hoc freelancing or large project fees.

A fully managed creative production team like Design Force is built for this. You plug into a subscription, send in briefs, and get assets turned around quickly.

What costs you actually save

Here’s a simple comparison of where the cost savings come from when you outsource versus keeping everything in-house:

The upfront cost may feel scary when you’re aiming to lower overall, but consider onboarding a fully managed creative production team, like Design Force, when budgets and timelines are tight. It’s a tried and tested model to help companies scale and cut marketing costs without slowing down.

Use “free-ish” content marketing that compounds over time

6. Use “free-ish” content marketing that compounds over time

Relying only on paid channels is a risky and expensive strategy. That’s where content marketing comes in. While it’s not truly “free” (you still invest time and talent), it keeps working long after the campaign ends.

Over time, it turns into an owned asset library that:

• Attracts the right people organically
• Warms up prospects before they ever talk to sales
• Supports retention by educating existing customers
• Reduces your dependence on ever-more-expensive ads

Done well, that compounding effect makes content marketing one of the most important cost savers in your entire mix.

Pick a home base, not “everywhere”

You don’t need to be on every channel. You need one strong home base plus a few smart distribution lanes. Start by choosing your primary format based on your audience and strengths:

• Blog / resource hub – Great if your buyers Google their questions or need education.
• YouTube – Ideal if your product is visual or benefits from walkthroughs, demos, or tutorials.
• Podcast – Useful for relationship-driven industries or thought leadership plays.
• Newsletter – Best when staying top-of-mind over time is key (especially in B2B).

Consistency beats ubiquity. It’s cheaper to show up reliably in a few places than to spread yourself thin everywhere. Over time, it can be a sustainable way to decrease marketing cost per lead over time.

Make each piece do more than one job

To keep costs down, think in content systems, not one-off posts.

For example:

• Start with one pillar piece:  a long-form guide, webinar, in-depth video, or report.
  
• Then break it down into smaller assets, such as:
  
  • 3–6 short social posts
  • 1–2 email newsletters
  • A one-pager or checklist for sales
  • A slide or visual for presentations
  • A short landing page or resource hub section
    
• Later, group related content into:
  
  • Simple ebooks or playbooks
  • Email nurture sequences
  • Resource collections for specific industries or personas

The more mileage you get from each core idea, the lower your effective cost per asset.

Conclusion

You don’t have to choose between slashing your marketing budget and hitting your targets.  Which of these will you test out first in 2026 to cut marketing costs? If outsourcing sounds like the ideal solution for your business right now, we’re already excited to meet you. Get in touch today and let’s chat!