Marketing budget cuts? Drive ROI with creativity

By Claire Wych, Senior Content Director 

With shrinking marketing budgets in the energy sector, creativity has become more than decoration – it’s a growth engine. This post shows why dull campaigns lose money, how emotive, distinctive work outperforms, and what CMOs can do to ensure creativity is high impact and measurable, even under pressure.   

B2B marketing budget cuts. They are everywhere in the energy industry right now. The last six months have been a perfect storm of softening demand, rising customer arrears, and project delays and bottlenecks.  

Unfortunately, it’s a picture that many chief marketing officers are familiar with. Only this year has Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey found that, after several years of decline, marketing budgets are now stabilizing. To get the most from a constrained marketing budget, many CMOs are seeking to improve productivity by using data, technology, and strategic expertise. 

But there is another, rarely considered but highly valuable factor that drives business and brand growth in the energy industry, and it doesn’t cost a penny (or many pennies anyway). Creativity.     

Did you know that being boring costs money?    

Read that again. Boring marketing campaigns perform poorly against their creative counterparts. But two in five marketers see creativity as a risk, and most undervalue it as a tool for growth. Are you one of them?

In two statistics* here’s why you should trust creativity.  

• Boring campaigns generate 40 percent less in return on investment 
• Emotive and distinctive campaigns are 7.5 times more likely to achieve incremental growth 

This isn’t about trying to sell B2B products in a super outlandish way. At Aspectus, we champion considered creativity, where our brightest creative sparks are rooted in a deep understanding of our clients’ businesses, audiences and industries. It is not creativity for creativity’s sake but tied to our clients’ business objectives and crucially, measurable.   

What does ‘considered creativity’ look like in B2B?     

Sometimes it’s big, like taking never-seen-before data and creating an industry-leading report, and sometimes it’s small, like a fun headline tied to a pop culture moment. For example:      

• We created a data-driven campaign that analyzed pump data to highlight the cost of inefficiency. We then compared potential electricity savings to the consumption of countries such as Singapore and New Zealand – this not only made the data more accessible, but it also showed the scale of the opportunity while localizing the content.   

• We drafted an op-ed titled ‘Mind the Gap’ that explored what the hydrogen industry could learn from the development of subway systems to help address the gap between ambition and reality.  

• We ran an integrated campaign to highlight the potential to derive value from waste wood, playing with titles such as “From Waste to Wealth” and “From Kitchens to Carbon Capture” to support the UK’s first waste wood carbon capture and storage plant.  

We’re all just humans  

At the end of the day, we’re just humans selling to other humans – why should B2B marketing be any less creative and emotive than B2C? And whether our attention spans are decreasing or not, we all prefer 30 seconds of punchy, distinctive marketing to 30 seconds of dull, jargon-heavy ads that have you reaching for the matchsticks.     

Is adding creativity to B2B marketing difficult? Yes. But through years of hard graft, we’ve become experts in it. So, if you’re working with a reduced marketing budget (or even if you’re not), get in touch, and we will show you how considered creativity can improve your marketing ROI.    

*According to a study by System 1 of more than 1,250 campaigns, and over $14bn in market share studied.     

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Key takeaways 

Why does creativity matter when marketing budgets are cut?

Because creative, emotive, well branded campaigns outperform bland ones. They drive higher ROI, build distinction, and offer growth even with limited spend. 

What does “considered creativity” mean in B2B? 

It means creativity rooted in audience insight and business goals — using narrative, emotion and distinct brand assets, not just flashy visuals detached from the problem you’re solving. 

How can CMOs prove creative value under financial scrutiny? 

By choosing metrics tied to business (leads, revenue, retention, cost per acquisition), using small tests/pilots, measuring emotional response and brand distinctiveness, and showing long term gains from consistency.

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About the author 

Claire is a senior content director with over a decade of experience in the energy sector. Claire leads on crafting compelling and creative campaigns that deliver measurable business outcomes.