Our Campaign Ran Too Long: Using the 70/30 Rule in Marketing

A few months after we rebuilt our entire data system, Jake Baadsgaard, our CEO, found a campaign that should have ended weeks earlier.

Still spending. Still targeting an audience we had deliberately decided to walk away from.

His first reaction was fury. We just fixed this. How is something still falling through the cracks?

But it wasn’t the same problem, and the difference mattered.

The old problem was that we couldn’t see what was breaking. We’d fixed that. This one was that nobody had defined when things were supposed to happen or who owned them.

We had visibility without rhythm. A dashboard with no calendar behind it. 

What closed the gap was the 70/30 rule in marketing, a way of splitting your team’s capacity between maintenance and projects.

The Problem: Effort Isn’t A Strategy

Most marketing leaders I talk to aren’t short on effort. They’re drowning in it.

Results are slow, so they work harder. Answer everything. Chase every fire. Say yes to every new idea. And the numbers still don’t move, because the hours were never connected to an outcome in the first place.

Here’s why that happens:

Revenue, leads, and purchases are lagging indicators. They’re the score, and you can’t manage the score directly. You can only manage the leading activities that produce it.

Most teams have never written those activities down. So the work that reliably produces results competes for attention with whatever landed in the inbox that morning, and the inbox usually wins, because the inbox is louder.

That’s not a discipline problem. It’s a definition problem. You can’t protect what you’ve never named.

The Framework: The 70/30 Rule in Marketing

As a digital marketing strategy agency, when we work for a client, this is one of the first things we pressure-test. Not the campaigns. Where the time actually goes.

The 70/30 rule in marketing isn’t a budget split. It’s a capacity split: 70% of your team’s time goes to recurring maintenance, 30% to projects with a start and end date.

Your 70: Marketing Maintenance

The rule we use internally is 70/30. It’s a working rule, but that split is a starting point. 

Seventy percent of marketing capacity goes to marketing maintenance, the recurring work that keeps sales flowing. Optimization, reporting, audits, ad refreshes, content cadence. It’s boring, but the boredom is the point. Skip it and the engine stalls. In our experience, this is usually about six weeks after you stop paying attention.

To build your 70, walk every stage of your customer journey and ask one question at each stage: what specific, repeatable action keeps this healthy?

Then give every answer three things: an owner, a cadence, and a definition of done. Without all three it isn’t an activity, it’s an intention.

The campaign Jake found didn’t slip through because someone was careless. Nothing on our list made it anyone’s job to check. The fix is a weekly end-date review of every live campaign, with a named owner and a clear definition of done. That’s a 70 activity, and it takes minutes.

Your 30: Projects

Thirty percent goes to projects. Work with a start date and an end date. Launches, tests, new channels, the website relaunch. Skip these and you never grow.

Save Your Week: Protect Your Marketing Capacity

Defining the 70 is the easy half. Protecting it is where marketing leaders lose.

The CEO walks in with a new idea. A competitor is on TikTok. Shouldn’t we be?

The instinct is to say yes and figure it out. The idea is usually good. The energy in the room is real. And saying yes feels like ownership.

I say yes in meetings more than I should, and around here we have a name for what happens when the energy makes the decision for you. We call it getting Jaked.

The fix isn’t saying no. It’s refusing to say yes in the meeting. And it’s a hard rule for me now.

Take the idea. Go look at where your marketing capacity actually sits. Then come back with the tradeoff.

“Here’s where my 30% is right now. It’s on the website relaunch. Do we pause that, or do we backlog TikTok for next quarter?”

That isn’t a no. It’s an informed decision your CEO gets to make with you, which is a fundamentally different relationship than one where you absorb every new idea silently and the cost shows up two quarters later in a number nobody can explain.

Build It Into A System

Don’t try to do your marketing capacity planning all in your head.

Every baseline activity becomes a recurring task in your project management tool, with an owner and a due date. We use Asana. The tool matters far less than the rule: the system surfaces what needs attention whether or not anybody remembers it exists.

A warning in both directions:

Too much process kills creative energy. Your team starts working the system instead of the market, and the best people get quietly frustrated.

Too little is worse, because you’re always one forgotten task away from your CEO finding something broken before you do. We overbuilt at first, deliberately, because trust was low and I needed the visibility more than I needed the elegance. Then we cut back to the essentials once we’d earned it.

One more thing: Once activities are defined this clearly, the repeatable ones can be handed to automation and AI. That’s the actual prerequisite everyone skips. You cannot automate what you have never defined.

Take This And Use It Monday

🎯 For Marketing Leaders: List everything you did last week. Mark each item maintenance or project. Anything you can’t categorize probably wasn’t defined, and that’s your answer about where the leaks are. Then pick one recurring activity, put it in your PM tool with an owner and a cadence, and leave it there. Next time a new idea arrives, don’t answer in the meeting. Come back the following day with what it would displace.

📊 For CEOs: Before you walk in with the next big idea, ask one question: what does this replace? Your marketing leader can almost always find the hours, and that’s the problem. The cost shows up later, somewhere you won’t be looking, and by then nobody remembers how it started.

The Truth

Nobody gets promoted for the maintenance they do. That’s exactly why it gets dropped first, and exactly why dropping it is the thing that catches up with you.

Most of your week should be boring. I’m not kidding. That’s the job done right.

So, honest question, honest answer: When a new idea lands mid-quarter and something has to give, who should be making that call?

Watch the full episode on YouTube. 

— Chad de Lisle
Head of Marketing, Disruptive Advertising

P.S. The next Indispensable Marketer cohort starts January 8th. Eight weeks, live, small group, building VSET on your own business rather than reading about ours.