A brand spending £40,000 per month on paid media grew to £160,000 per month in seven months. They didn’t launch a viral campaign. They didn’t hire an agency. They deleted their marketing calendar.
This is the story of how evergreen campaigns beat the marketing calendar, and why you should ditch yours too.
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The brand that 4x’d by deleting their marketing calendar
Josh Lachkovic, founder of growth agency Ballpoint, tells the story of a DTC food brand he calls “Sage & Pepper.”
Early on, Sage & Pepper did everything right. They interviewed customers, understood their problems, and created organic-looking social ads to test different ways of describing those problems. Growth was strong.
Then they grew their team. And with a bigger team came a marketing calendar. Suddenly the focus shifted to planning campaigns around food festivals, Father’s Day, an online series launch, and seasonal promotions.
The result? Growth flatlined for eight months:
- 25% fewer creative experiments — marketing calendar campaigns consumed the team’s capacity
- Faster ad decay — seasonal creative had a short shelf life
- Stalled learning — the team stopped building on what was working
- Fragmented focus — Meta’s ad platform has capacity limits, and too many campaigns competing for limited spend reduced algorithmic learning
The marketing calendar destroyed the compounding advantage they’d built.
Why you should focus on evergreen campaigns
Meanwhile, another of Lachkovic’s clients took the opposite approach. No marketing calendar. No seasonal campaigns. Just relentless, evergreen creative testing rooted in customer research.
The results:
- Creative win rates climbed from 15% → 25% → 35% → 50%
- They produced “rocketship ads” (top 5% performers) every single month
- CPA improved despite spending 4x more
- Revenue grew from £40k to £160k per month in seven months
The data backs this up:
- HubSpot reports that over 75% of their blog traffic comes from evergreen content
- The Content Marketing Institute found that organisations using a 70% evergreen to 30% timely content ratio achieve 50% higher ROI
The pattern is clear. Evergreen campaigns compound. Marketing calendars fragment.
Pierre Herubel makes a related point about content: “No repurposing, no multi-channel distribution, no second life. That’s the recipe for exhausting content production (and zero ROI).” The same principle applies to paid campaigns — not just content.
Marketing calendars vs evergreen campaigns
Here are the trade-offs.
| Marketing Calendars | Evergreen Campaigns | |
|---|---|---|
| Planning | Easy to plan around key dates | Requires ongoing creative discipline |
| Team alignment | Aligns teams around shared deadlines | Aligns teams around shared learning |
| Demand capture | Leverages seasonal demand spikes | Captures demand consistently year-round |
| Creative output | Fewer, bigger creative bets | Many small, fast experiments |
| Learning | Resets with each campaign | Compounds over time |
| Budget efficiency | Feast-or-famine spending cycles | Consistent, optimisable spend |
| Stakeholder buy-in | Familiar and easy to present | Harder to pitch internally |
| Long-term ROI | Diminishing — each campaign starts from zero | Increasing — each test builds on the last |
The advantages of marketing calendars are organisational comfort. The advantages of evergreen campaigns are structural and economic.
The problems with marketing calendars — fragmented focus, reduced experimentation, feast-or-famine cycles, wasted budget on underperforming seasonal pushes — are baked into the model. You can’t fix them without changing the model.
The problems with evergreen campaigns — patience required, harder to pitch, less exciting internally — are solvable with discipline and good reporting. They’re people problems, not structural ones.
For most growing brands, the choice is clear.
The evergreen campaigns framework
The brand that 4x’d followed a disciplined, repeatable process. Here’s the framework, drawn from Lachkovic’s approach:
1. Research your customers deeply
Interview new customers about the problem your product solves. Understand their journey — what they tried before, what frustrated them, what finally pushed them to act. Research their “Forces of Progress”: the pushes (pain points driving change), pulls (aspirations drawing them forward), anxieties (fears holding them back), and habits (inertia keeping them stuck).
This isn’t a one-off exercise. It’s the fuel for everything that follows.
2. Test relentlessly with social-first creative
Take what you learn and turn it into dozens of creative experiments. Test as many ways of describing the problem as you can. Vary formats, styles, and angles:
- UGC-style videos
- Static images with bold claims
- Before/after comparisons
- Customer testimonial clips
- Problem-agitation hooks
- Educational content that leads to the product
The goal isn’t to find one winner. It’s to build a machine that finds winners consistently.
3. Find what works and keep going
When something works, double down. Increase spend on winners. Kill losers fast. But don’t stop testing — even your best-performing evergreen campaigns will eventually decay. The evergreen approach means you always have the next winner in the pipeline.
4. Learn more, speak to more customers, repeat
Go back to step one. Interview the customers you just acquired. What resonated? What almost stopped them? Feed these insights into your next round of creative testing.
This is the compounding loop that marketing calendars break. Every cycle makes you better at finding what works. Every campaign reset throws that learning away.
Ditch the marketing calendar
As Lachkovic puts it: “Growth is about embracing uncertainty.”
Marketing calendars feel safe because they give you a plan. But that plan costs you learning, momentum, and growth. The brands that win aren’t the ones with the best-planned Q4 campaign. They’re the ones that understand their customers deeply and test relentlessly to find what resonates.
Delete the marketing calendar. Build the evergreen machine.
Related reading: Always-on assets over one-off campaigns | Process over tactics