In today’s marketing landscape, the mandate is clear: Deliver the same, if not better, results with fewer resources. Whether marketing budgets are flat, shrinking or simply under more scrutiny, the pressure to achieve measurable impact is high.
Science marketers in particular face the tough challenge of reaching highly specialized audiences in an increasingly fragmented media environment while maintaining scientific credibility. This level of specificity takes an immense amount of planning to ensure budget efficiency.
Your budget submission should never be a surprise. It should be a shared plan for achieving the company’s most important goals.”
– Jennifer Therrien, Vice President of Marketing and Sales Operations, Cambrex
While pressures exist, I like to think about tight budgets as a way to sharpen strategy. By focusing on clear priorities, building programs around measurable goals and making every asset work harder, marketers can turn constraints into opportunities. Over the years, I’ve refined a set of principles that help me stretch every dollar without sacrificing results.
Here’s how to make your budget go further and prove its value.
Start with Unwavering Focus
When every dollar counts, the temptation is to try to be everywhere: promoting every product, using every channel, reaching every possible audience. But spreading your efforts too thin is one of the fastest ways to drain a budget without having much impact at all.
The first step is to get crystal clear on your company’s growth priorities: What must be achieved this year? Which products or services are growth engines? When marketing goals are directly tied to those priorities, your budget becomes a lever for business impact rather than a wish list of nice-to-have initiatives.
Takeaways for Marketers:
- Narrow your focus to a small set of high-impact priorities.
- Tie marketing goals directly to company growth targets.
Build Budgets Around Goals, Not Tactics
Once you’ve defined your priorities, structure your budget to reflect them. I organize my goals in a modular way: Each program ladders up to a marketing goal, which in turn ladders up to a company goal. This structure makes it far easier to defend the budget and adapt when cuts are required.
If leadership needs to trim spending, for example, I focus the discussion on which goal they prefer to remove. This centers the conversation on outcomes rather than identifying quick ways to reduce budget across multiple programs, which can result in scattered, underfunded initiatives.
When you’re presenting budgets, don’t forget to speak the language of the executive team. Swap out marketing jargon and vanity metrics for strategic business metrics like cost per lead, lead-to-opportunity conversion and yield. These tie directly to the company’s bottom line and position marketing as a growth partner, not just a cost center.
Takeaways for Marketers:
- Organize budgets so every dollar connects to a specific company goal.
- If you must cut, do it at the goal level, not at the tactic level.
- Use ROI-focused metrics your executives already value.
- Be mindful about the words you use to explain marketing’s goals and impact.
Test, Learn, and Fail Fast
With priorities set and a strategic budget in place, the next challenge is making sure every initiative delivers. That’s where experimentation comes in.
I’m a big believer in short, controlled tests to compare channels or tactics, especially when you’re working with a limited budget. One of the ways you can quickly experiment is by turning off one channel completely and testing another channel in isolation. This will show how overall results change based on a one- or two-week sample. The goal is to look for leading indicators, which allows you to quickly evaluate the impact a channel can have and helps avoid long-term investment in something that isn’t working.
Even the best idea needs to be re-evaluated and experimented with before being repeated.”
The trick is to monitor results closely and act quickly. When you consistently monitor campaigns, you can reallocate funds before underperformance becomes a major loss.
One of my favorite examples of budget focus and experimentation was a Boston-based regional brand awareness campaign we ran in 2022. Instead of an annual national push, we concentrated resources into an eight- to 12-week period: coffee pop-ups in Kendall Square, local events, out-of-home ads on major highways, digital targeting and advertising on the T. We were just coming out of the pandemic, and people were finally out of their homes, so the message really resonated.
Sales reported stronger outreach traction, and brand recognition improved in the region. But when we tried a modified version in 2025, the results weren’t as strong — a reminder that timing, buyer behavior, and market context all affect outcomes. Even the best idea needs to be re-evaluated and experimented with before being repeated.
Takeaways for Marketers:
- Build testing into your campaign plans from the start.
- Use short timeframes to evaluate changes without overcommitting.
- Reallocate budget based on real performance, not assumptions.
- Reassess successful campaigns before re-running them, as buyer behavior is constantly evolving.
Make Every Content Asset Work Harder
Content is one of the most powerful ways to stretch a budget, but only if it’s used strategically. We start with a single cornerstone asset, like a research paper, and build from there: a webinar, a blog post, a series of social posts and ad copy all derived from the same source.
This approach ensures you’re not paying for one-off content that gets used once and forgotten. We rely heavily on in-house subject matter experts for accuracy, supplementing with specialized writers when we need multiple expert perspectives. The content must be relevant, timely and scientifically rigorous to resonate with technical audiences.
As part of our content creation efforts, we also leverage an internally developed AI model. The model indexes all of our scientific content so we can instantly pull an SME’s perspective from past materials without combing through countless files, allowing for faster creation of blog posts, articles and social content. This not only increases content production and budget efficiency, but gives our team more time for strategy and creative problem-solving.
Takeaways for Marketers:
- Anchor campaigns around one high-value content piece.
- Repurpose content across formats and channels.
- Maintain credibility with scientifically sound, audience-relevant topics.
My Golden Rule for 2026: Stay Laser-Focused on Company Goals
If there’s one principle that I always go back to, it’s this: Budget success comes from alignment. Marketing must be in lock-step with company objectives and with peers in sales, operations and beyond.
That alignment starts long before budget season. It begins with early, one-on-one stakeholder conversations about priorities, desired outcomes and the role marketing will play in achieving them. When everyone agrees on the “why” and the “what,” resourcing questions like “how we’ll get it done” fall into place.
Your budget submission should never be a surprise. It should be a shared plan for achieving the company’s most important goals.
