Marketing calendars are for brands that have already won

You're almost certainly too small to have a marketing calendar, here's why.

Feb 17, 2026

For a long time, if you said to someone you worked in marketing, the immediate image was of someone planning monthly events, launching campaigns, and so-called activations.

For some sectors and companies sizes, this is a great strategy. Apple events are a series of magical moments throughout the year. The Superbowl most recently on our minds, is a singular moment to make a splash for the richest zeitegestiest companies today. And if you’re in fashion, then steady and constant regeneration of product with Winter, Pre-Spring, Spring Transitional, Pre-Summer, Summer, British Summer, Pre-Autumn, Autumn Transitional, and Pre-Winter, is your bread and butter.

But for many, many brands, marketing calendars can do far more harm than good.

Today, I want to share why this is, what you should do instead, and when campaigns and calendars finally make sense.

The plight of the marketing calendar: the story of one brand’s stalled growth

Last year, we worked with a brand. We’ll call them Sage & Pepper. Now for the first two years this brand were on social, they focused on one thing relentlessly:

Getting the core product to sell.

Every week, every sprint, every creative they did was focused on this.

What that meant practically was:

Interviewing new customers
Understanding their customer journey
Learning what almost stopped them from buying.
Learning their Forces of Progress: the good and bad pushes and pulls that affect them
Producing ads that look like organic content
Learning what ads were winners and losers
Interviewing those new customers they acquired

The outcome was getting down to a series of single messages and creative approaches that worked and scaled. It’s getting your creative for paid social working.

Then, last year Sage & Pepper, a little bigger now with a bigger team started to think about the marketing calendar. They were at a food festival in July and wanted content to promote it. They were launching an online event series and wanted content to talk about it. When it was father’s day, they wanted Sage & Pepper to be talking about father’s day.

This is classic big marketing stuff.

Except there’s a big problem with it.

Meta only has so many ads you can launch at any given time. If you launch too many ads for too little spend, you simply won’t get good learnings. And so every campaign takes up the space that an evergreen ad could do.

The results were impacted too. This brand had a brilliant run from January to April, then started a heavy focus on campaigns, and the result was that April through to Black Friday when they began discounting heavily was flat.

Focusing on the marketing calendar meant:

25% fewer creative experiments
A stalled creative learning process as momentum slows down
A smaller % of lifetime winners – the number of ads that last more than 90 days
A faster ad decay rate – the rate that ads run out of steam

This year with said brand, we’re switching up to be back to focusing on evergreen – and every time there’s a request for a change, we interrogate it deeply.

Quick plug

I write a 7-minute read for Substack every week. We manage £20m of ad spend per year, I’ve helped grow eight consumer businesses from £0 to £10m, and have built creative engines that scale for 9-figure consumer brands. Before I ran Ballpoint, I was a DTC founder and ex-operator.

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The alternative – how one brand beat the nature of low seasonality

Flip this around and one of our biggest success stories last year was a brand who saw unusually strong growth.

Everyone who has ever sold anything in ecom knows that August is the time you may as well take off.

Everyone is on holiday, especially if you sell to premium customers. Teams are on holiday too. Europe maybe has the right idea basically shutting down for the month. I digress.

No-one ever thinks they will have a good August.

But we were working with one brand last year who had the best month of the year in August.

Here’s what happened.

At the start of the year, they were spending about £40k per month. They had gotten a first round of things working and felt like they had good momentum behind them. But it was January and January, like August, is never a good time. They weren’t expecting much.

But we plugged away and plugged away.

We did our process.

We spoke to customers. We learnt. We made diverse creatives. We tested methodically. And bit by bit we started to find more winners.

Creative win rate went from 15% to 25% to 35% and then hit 50% where it stayed. Not just that, but it also started producing rocketship ads. We define a rocketship was one of those rare ads that goes on to become a top 5% spender. Well we were making rocketships on an almost monthly basis. And they weren’t going away.

We pushed spend going into Feb, then again into March, and again, and again. By August we were spending £160k per month, four times what they were in Jan – and at better CPA.

All that we did? Relentless focus on the core customer, core problem, and making creative that speaks to them. Over, and over, and over again.

The psychology of why we like marketing calendars

Marketing calendars provide stability. They provide certainity.

They also give us work to do.

It’s comfortable to like a marketing calendar. It means that at the end of every month, you know what you’ll be doing the following month. Every Sunday you know what your week looks like.

They also give us checklists of things to tick off. And who doesn’t like a checklist?

But the problem is in that comfort, they hide the ability to grow at this level of a business.

If you’re in a mass-market sector, you can easily get to £5m of revenue a year without touching a marketing calendar, and it’s maybe $30m in the US.

If you’re truly struggling to get there at lower levels of spend, then you’re likely in a more niche vertical. Perhaps a premium good that doesn’t have mass appeal. In which case the thresholds might be lower, but the logic still applies.

You’re comfortable in this space. And you need to snap out of the comfort.

Growth is about embracing uncertainty.

How to grow your brand – through intense focus on solving one problem

The answer sounds so simple it can’t be true. But it is.

You need to understand your customer better than anyone on this planet. Did you know in 2015, Meta’s data algorithms outperformed spouses in answering questions about people? This is maybe too creepy for most, but the ethos is there.

There’s a really important stage to understand with customers:

What problem they’re trying to solve
How long they’ve had this problem
How they’ve tried solving it before
What it was about your product that caught their eye

Stop there. You don’t need anything beyond that.

Learn those things through customer interviewing.

Then go out and test relentlessly. Do social-first creative. Experiment with dozens of creative styles. Test every single way of describing that problem and use as many different routes to doing it.

Once you find stuff that works, keep going.

And after that, learn some more, speak to more customers, and repeat the process.

It’s simple – but it’s hard work. And it’s what you need to grow.

So if you’re planning your marketing calendar for the year, pause. Reflect, work out if you have grown as much as you can with just attacking your core problem first.

Early Stage Growth • Ballpoint

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