Marketing leaders are facing budget cuts and unpredictable consumer behavior amid economic uncertainty this year. As US ad growth slows, marketers know there’s no silver bullet.
Uncertain economic environments demand a smarter marketing approach – one that turns these challenges into opportunities by prioritizing efficiency, strategic agility, and ROI.
Rather than pulling back and risking lost market share, marketing leaders should view uncertainty as an opportunity to outmaneuver competitors with a sharper strategy and innovative thinking.
The big picture:
- Economic uncertainty isn’t a stop sign. It’s a green light to evolve your marketing strategy and seize market share while competitors scale back.
- Performance marketing isn’t just about quick wins, it’s about how you create a smarter and more resilient business
- Being a nimble marketer helps you stay sharp, pivot quickly, and stay ahead when the market is in a constant state of change
- Brands that prioritize understanding and serving their audience’s real needs will build stronger trust and loyalty, and are more likely to see long-term growth
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What are the factors driving the market’s volatility?
The current marketing uncertainty is being driven by a perfect storm of factors—from economic volatility and tighter budgets to rapidly evolving consumer behavior.
As global ad investment slows, marketers are under increasing pressure to prove ROI while also navigating unpredictable shifts in consumer needs that make it harder to forecast demand. At the same time, the overall media landscape is consistently in flux: platform bans, the increased popularity of forums like Reddit, and the evolution of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) are forcing constant adjustments in channel strategy.
These shifts are only made more complicated by fragmented measurement systems and siloed data, which make it difficult for brands to get a clear view of what’s working. Rising ad costs and fluctuating KPIs are raising the stakes for marketers, demanding smarter, high-impact investment.
Marketers need to build agility into their strategies, and can pivot as conditions change. In this environment, success depends on being audience-first, data-savvy, and nimble enough to thrive in times of economic uncertainty.
Why should we continue investing in marketing during periods of volatility?
Periods of economic uncertainty can feel like the wrong time to invest in marketing—but in reality, they present critical opportunities for brands to remain relevant, build trust, and drive long-term growth. Consumer needs and behaviors are shifting more rapidly than ever, and marketers are feeling the effects of this ongoing uncertainty.
- 42% of consumers reported waiting to make major purchases in early 2025
- 56% of marketers are lowering their marketing budgets as a result of economic uncertainty
- Marketing spend is expected to grow by 8.6% in 2025, as opposed to the 9.4% that it grew in 2024
Despite these challenges, pulling back on marketing can be a risky move. Brands that continue to invest strategically during downturns tend to come out stronger, with increased market share and consumer loyalty. By leveraging audience insights, data, and keeping a nimble investment mindset, marketers can refine their messaging and adjust offers to align with shifting consumer priorities—whether that means emphasizing value, sustainability, or reassurance. In times of uncertainty, relevance is everything.
The brands that stay connected, empathetic, and visible are the ones that will be best positioned for recovery and future success.
Strategies for marketing through times of economic uncertainty
1. Put consumer needs front-and-center to build trust and stay relevant
In times of market uncertainty, an audience-first strategy is key to staying resilient. By truly understanding consumers, brands can adapt quickly, build trust, and stay relevant—something Amsive believes is at the heart of strong performance.
Focus on your highest-value consumers and segments, tailoring campaigns to show how your brand provides value and solves their problems. By identifying distinct segments, marketers can craft messaging that speaks directly to those concerns. Highlighting specific brand or product benefits, such as convenience or cost savings, shows your brand understands and can solve your consumer’s real problems. This consumer-centric approach builds trust and keeps your marketing relevant, ensuring that even as markets fluctuate, your brand stays aligned with what matters most to your audience.
Strategy: Analyzing data in real time allows you to adjust your marketing efforts quickly, ensuring you stay relevant to your audience without overcommitting to strategies that no longer resonate.
Next step: By testing personalized messaging and honing in on pain points, you increase the likelihood of higher engagement and conversions. This results in a more effective spend that delivers a higher return, even when the market is unpredictable
2. Maximize ROI by focusing on high-impact channels for smarter marketing investment
When every dollar counts, a performance-led approach to marketing maximizes your investment. This means doubling down on channels and tactics that drive measurable results, and routinely cutting out wasteful spend.
In fact, as budgets tighten, brands are stretching their dollars by emphasizing high-ROI performance campaigns and efficient media mixes. A performance-led strategy uses robust analytics and KPIs—like cost per acquisition, ROAS, and consumer lifetime value—to continually optimize marketing spend.
In this climate, every dollar that goes toward marketing investment is under scrutiny. With tighter budgets and higher expectations from leadership and consumers alike, delivering measurable impact is more important than ever. That means using data to guide decisions, focusing spend on high-performing channels, and continuously optimizing to improve efficiency to turn smarter investment into sustained growth. This can be done by:
- Closely monitoring performance across all channels to identify what’s working
- Reallocating budget to the best-performing tactics to avoid wasted spend and maximize ROI
- Leveraging advanced tools such as:
- Comprehensive media mix measurement strategies
- Programmatic advertising
- Direct mail retargeting
These approaches enable brands to be smarter about their spend, ensuring that every dollar works harder without being short-sighted or focused only on immediate returns. The result is leaner, smarter marketing that adapts to both short-term needs and long-term goals, turning budget constraints into an opportunity to improve overall efficiency.
Importantly, this approach balances short-term results with long-term growth by avoiding blunt cuts, which can depress ROI. A 50-60% brand building to 40-50% performance allocation, per Google, can ensure you’re investing in what truly moves the needle.
Strategy: Optimize spend by focusing on high-ROI channels and continuously tracking key performance metrics to eliminate wasted investment.
Next step: Continuously monitor KPIs like ROAS and consumer lifetime value to reallocate budget in real-time toward the most effective channels and tactics.
3. Build agility into your strategy to adjust to market changes and consumer shifts
From the potential TikTok ban and the increased use of AI Overviews to the rapid growth of platforms like Bluesky, marketers have been dealing with volatility since the start of 2025. An agile, responsive strategy allows your team to pivot quickly as market conditions, consumer sentiment, or competitive pressures evolve. That’s why building flexibility into your budgets and workflows is essential—so you can make informed, real-time adjustments without sacrificing long-term strategy. This can be done by:
- Building flexible budgets and workflows to enable quick adjustments to spend and campaigns
- Replacing rigid annual plans with agile, responsive strategies
- Adding test-and-learn budgets to annual plans to support ongoing experimentation
- Using real-time performance data to guide optimizations and strategic shifts
- Staying aligned with long-term goals while making informed, data-driven decisions
- Avoiding impulsive, reactionary changes that could undermine sustained success
Effective agile marketing involves scenario planning (modeling best/worst-case outcomes), rapid experimentation, and cross-functional “war rooms” or “win rooms” that enable quick decision-making.
Here’s just one example: Amsive helped a socially conscious accessories brand realize opportunity and pivot its business away from retail and toward a direct-to-consumer eCommerce model during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amsive led the digital transformation—revamping strategy across paid, social, Amazon, SEO, and web—to drive a +540% increase in new users and +900% growth in revenue year-over-year.
By being prepared to course-correct in real time, you can capitalize on emerging opportunities (or mitigate risks) more quickly than less nimble competitors.
Strategy: Build flexibility into your marketing strategy to quickly respond to changing market conditions and consumer sentiment.
Next step: Set up flexible budgets and cross-functional “war rooms” to enable rapid testing and swift pivots based on new market data or shifts in consumer interest.
4. Supercharge your data-driven marketing with AI
An audience-first, performance-led approach relies on data as its compass. In a fragmented, omnichannel world, marketers must harness data to guide every decision —from pinpointing the right audience segments to optimizing creative and media spend. According to Forrester, agencies use GenAI to analyze and interpret data (84%) and improve creative ideation and production speed (80%), enabling marketers to have better, faster insights to inform their choices.
Yet many organizations still struggle with siloed measurement; barely one-third of marketers measure their traditional and digital efforts together, which means they might miss the full picture.
To avoid this, invest in data-driven marketing and unified analytics that show how each channel contributes to overall ROI. Lean into first-party consumer data and market research to anticipate shifts in demand or sentiment.
GenAI can help marketers make more confident decisions. 53% of respondents from a recent McKinsey survey, representing marketing and sales functions, reported measurable revenue increases due to the use of generative AI over the past year.
Data-driven decision-making ensures that every marketing move is backed by evidence and aligned with performance goals.
Strategy: Leverage unified, data-driven insights to guide precise targeting and maximize the effectiveness of every marketing dollar.
Next step: Integrate first-party and third-party data into a unified analytics dashboard to evaluate performance across all channels and guide smarter investment decisions.
5. Leverage search, direct marketing, and AEO to reach high-intent consumers
During uncertain times, choosing the right mix of marketing channels is more important than ever, and it requires an audience-first mindset. Meet your consumers where they are: for many, that means doubling down on tactics that best reach high-intent consumers, while also focusing on full-funnel strategies that drive awareness and conversion throughout the marketing funnel.
At the same time, don’t overlook direct marketing channels that can efficiently engage your audience. Tactics like personalized email, SMS, and direct mail can deliver exceptional ROI while cutting through digital clutter. In fact, 84% of marketers believe direct mail provides the highest ROI, underscoring the enduring value of a tangible, personalized, targeted touch.
The key challenge is to remain agile and data-driven across the funnel: using real-time insights to adjust your tactics quickly, while staying focused on performance outcomes, whether you’re driving top-of-funnel awareness or bottom-of-funnel conversion.
It also means using answer engine optimization (AEO)—optimizing content for voice search and AI-driven answer platforms. Your brand’s expertise surfaces in featured snippets, voice assistant answers, and emerging AI search results.
The key is an integrated, multichannel strategy: use each channel for its strengths (search for intent capture, direct mail for personal impact, AEO for improved likelihood of visibility in answer engines) and ensure they work in concert. By leveraging broad reach and precision targeting across channels, you create a resilient marketing engine that can efficiently acquire and retain consumers even in volatile markets.
Strategy: Pair high-intent channels like search and AEO with personalized direct marketing (e.g., SMS, direct mail) to drive both visibility and conversion efficiently.
Next step: Use an integrated, omnichannel approach that optimizes each channel’s strengths. Blend search for intent, AEO for visibility, and direct marketing for personal engagement.
FAQs: building a resilient strategy
What’s the smartest way to market when things are uncertain?
To market effectively during economic uncertainty, adopt an audience-first, performance-led strategy. Focus on your highest-value segments, optimize channel mix for ROI, and rely on real-time data to inform agile decision-making. This ensures you’re spending wisely and maintaining relevance even as consumer behavior shifts.
What is the best marketing strategy in a downturn?
The best strategy during a downturn emphasizes agility, consumer insight, and measurable performance. Avoid across-the-board cuts and instead double down on high-performing tactics like search, direct marketing, and personalized engagement. Smart brands reallocate, rather than retreat.
Should I cut my marketing budget in a recession?
Rather than cutting budgets indiscriminately, marketers should optimize spend based on performance data. Studies show that brands that maintain or strategically reallocate budgets during recessions often gain market share and experience stronger post-downturn growth.
What are some strategies to improve marketing during periods of economic uncertainty?
Marketing can be optimized during volatility by:
- Using first-party and market data to guide strategy
- Prioritizing high-ROI channels (like search and direct mail)
- Implementing agile workflows that allow rapid response
- Aligning messaging to current consumer needs and financial sentiment
Together, these practices create a resilient, efficient marketing engine designed to perform in any environment.
Drive success with data-driven, focused channel investment
Volatility doesn’t call for silence—it calls for a smarter strategy. Now more than ever, your brand needs to cut through uncertainty with clarity, precision, and confidence. An audience-first, performance-led marketing approach ensures every decision is backed by data, focused on outcomes, and agile enough to meet the moment.
Discover actionable takeaways to future-proof your marketing strategy with audience insights, dig into boosting brand visibility with AEO, or let’s talk about how Amsive can help you future-proof your marketing strategy.
