Last Updated on November 14, 2026 by Nora Ramirez

If you work in marketing in any vertical, you know that the market has been weird in the last couple of years, to say the least. Marketing is sometimes the first to feel the brunt of budget cuts when downturns arrive, but it’s also the department that needs to be working to ensure the downturn doesn’t last. Sometimes growth targets survive budget planning while the headcount to actually make those targets happen… doesn’t. 

As a fractional marketer, I’ve seen this happen too often: leadership wants to do more with less, maybe for valid reasons. But you can’t get blood from a stone, as the saying goes. 

So how do you scale marketing initiatives during a hiring freeze? I’ve got an order of operations for you to follow to ensure that you protect what you’ve already built and plan for the future. 

The order of operations

When you’re trying to scale marketing without hiring new in-house talent, it’s important to follow this specific order of operations:

• Protect what you’ve already built
• Pause decide what to pause beyond just a blanket “underperforming channels” declaration
• Flex find flexible help that can fill the gaps in the short term
• Plan the thaw and plan ahead for what happens when things inevitably improve. 

If you add capacity before you’ve protected the strategy and cleared your plate, you’ve just given a team that’s already stretched thin even more to manage. 

What kind of freeze are you in? 

Before you do anything else, step zero, if you will, is to figure out exactly what kind of freeze you’re in.  Does the freeze apply only to new in-house hires? Are freelancers or fractional consultants included? Or is this a complete spending freeze?

Questions to settle with finance or leadership before you make any other decisions might include: 

• Is this a headcount freeze or a full spending freeze?
• Are backfills allowed for open positions?
• How is contractor or contingent labor spend being categorized?
• Is there an expected end date to the freeze?

The answers to these questions decide which options you can even consider when you’re moving forward. 

And as a note of caution: if the answer comes back that it’s a full spending freeze, and your existing staff can’t handle the scale-up or growth targets you’ve been handed, now is the time to push back. Go into that conversation well prepared with multiple options. That might include: scaled back expectations and targets, a minimum viable spending plan to get you the help you need, or some combination of the two. 

In my opinion, it’s better to flag the problem now than work nights and weekends and still miss your targets, only to be asked, “Why didn’t you let us know there was a problem?”

Protect the strategy before you add capacity

In my experience, when teams get stretched, strategy is usually the first thing that starts to slip (or gets ignored entirely). And that’s understandable. All that execution work that’s suddenly landed on everyone’s to-do list is louder and more urgent than the big picture stuff. 

But now is the time to be very clear about the big picture so that you can protect that strategy even as roles, capacity, and responsibilities might be shifting. 

Practically speaking, start by making sure you have these things covered:

• Name exactly who on the team owns growth strategy and document what it is. 
• Document two or three moves that you have proof move the needle for the brand. (ie: If ads have worked well in the past, it’s a good bet they could work well again in the future.) 
• Decide and document who has authority over what decisions. This is especially important if you’re dealing with a reduced team, or if people are taking over new responsibilities. 

When nobody owns the plan, lots of things still get done, but they don’t add up to much. I once actually lost a gig because there was nobody in leadership to approve my ideas or drive the strategy, so I was relegated to writing SEO articles for the blog that never moved the right needles. I improved their search rankings, but because there were other problems, that never translated into more leads and revenue. 

Decide what to pause and communicate the decision

When you’re deciding what initiatives or programs get put on pause, there are actually three categories that a program can fall into:

• Pause is something that will come back after the freeze lifts and you can hire more help
• Downgrade is something that keeps running, but at a lower effort 
• Cut is something that stops for good. 

For example, if you choose to pause your YouTube strategy, it means nothing is going to happen with YouTube until after the hiring freeze is over.  If you choose to downgrade it, it might mean that someone is periodically reposting videos that have done well in the past, or sharing shorts from another platform, but nothing new is being created for the channel.  If you decide to cut the strategy altogether, that means you’re not going to continue with YouTube now or in the future. 

In order to sort work and initiatives into these three categories, you’re going to need some clear criteria.  I suggest asking things like, is this tied to the current targets? Is it easy to restart later? Does it have a long lag before we see results? 

But be careful: pausing work with long lead times now might not show up in your metrics right away, but you might find yourself paying for it two quarters later.  Likewise, be careful about pausing measurement, reporting, or ops tasks in the first round of cuts. 

Once you’ve made a list of what to keep, what to pause or downgrade, and what to cut, this is another good opportunity to bring leadership into your decision making process with the rationale behind each decision clearly stated. This ensures that your priorities and leadership’s align, and also makes sure the tradeoff that goes with the freeze is on record. 

Add flexible capacity where it matters most

Once you’ve got some of these things figured out, it will be much easier to see where you need help. The type of help you hire will depend on where your gaps are. 

• A fractional specialist fits well when you have a missing skill on your team or you need ongoing part-time work. For example, if you had been planning to hire someone to manage social media growth before the freeze, this could be a smart fractional hire. 
• An agency or custom team is best when you need a proven playbook or fast, tactical scale in a certain area. Bringing in an agency to manage paid media is a good example of a place where a proven playbook makes a big difference. 
• A project contractor is the best fit when you need individual deliverables. If you need to produce merch, design flyers, write a white paper, or develop a new website, these would all be examples of discrete deliverables suitable to a contractor. 

You can find these types of flexible support on talent marketplaces like Upwork, through your own referral networks, or through traditional agencies.  I like a hybrid talent platform like Right Side Up; it vets its talent pool and then helps match the perfect person for your needs. It’s perfect for support during a hiring freeze because they offer flexible terms and ways to scale hours up or down easily.

Of course, there are always downsides to flexible support, as well. Contractors still need onboarding, briefs, and management, which your team has to find time for somewhere, even when they’re already stretched. 

Once you’ve decided to bring in fractional support, getting it approved during a hiring freeze involves presenting it with a defined scope and duration for the role, as well as clear exit terms. 

Plan for the thaw

A hiring freeze will inevitably thaw eventually, so you want to plan ahead now for how you will handle it.  

The freeze period is a great opportunity to test which roles you want to fill deserve a full-time hire.  You can validate not just a particular person but the entire role within your team before committing to a full-time hire. 

Contract-to-hire may be a possible path when hiring reopens, so it’s a good idea to confirm that whatever talent agency or marketplace you use is open to that sort of eventuality. It’s no good to find your unicorn only to discover they’re covered by a do-not-compete clause and can’t come to work for you full time. 

You’ll also want to have a restart plan for everything you chose to pause or downgrade during the freeze.  Will you immediately restart paused projects, or bring things back in stages?  Will you reassess or trust your earlier judgement about what should be brought back at all? If you downgraded an initiative, how will you determine whether or not it deserves to be ramped back up. 

Hopefully by following this order of operations you can navigate your next hiring freeze and still deliver strong results for your brand.