‘Always On’ Marketing versus Campaigns: Why you need both (but not equally)
Jul 09, 2025
The number one question I get asked is also my favourite: what is a marketing campaign?
A campaign is a connected series of actions designed to achieve a specific result.
Think about a politician running for office. Their goal is to win the election. Their campaign isn’t just one ad or one debate. It’s a strategic, deliberate series of activities: speaking at town halls, booking media appearances, running targeted ads, getting out there to connect with the community, and calling undecided voters. All of it is tied together by a clear message, a unifying slogan, and strong visual identity.
That’s what a marketing campaign is. A considered, cohesive, focused effort.
Let’s unpack how campaigns differ from what most small businesses are doing day-to-day: always on marketing.
A campaign is a connected series of actions
leading to the desired outcome.
What is always on marketing?
Always on marketing is your regular programming. It includes the blog you publish each month, the podcast episode you drop every week, the behind-the-scenes stories on Instagram, and the fortnightly email you send to your list. It’s designed to keep you visible, build trust through repetition, and stay top of mind for your customers.
There are clear upsides. It’s relatively low-cost, good for SEO, and maintains your presence across platforms. It builds brand awareness and credibility over time.
But it has a big downside: it’s slow. You won’t publish a blog today and make five sales tomorrow. You won’t post a reel and suddenly be flooded with leads. Always on marketing works in the background. It’s the steady drip that keeps things moving.
It’s also exhausting. Always on means you need to be always on. The pressure to constantly feed the content machine and ever-changing algorithms is one of the main reasons small business owners burn out. Most solo operators can’t keep up with a strategy built on relentless output. It’s simply not sustainable.
What is a marketing campaign?
A campaign is the opposite of always on. It’s a high-intensity, time-bound burst of activity. A campaign focuses on one objective and one objective only: selling a new offer, driving sign-ups to your mailing list, or boosting attendance for an event.
Always on marketing is like background music. A campaign is the headline act.
Campaigns are fast-moving, deliberately loud, and designed to capture attention. They aren’t about consistency. They’re about conversion.
Campaigns give you permission to break from your usual style. You can shift your voice, stretch your visuals, and take up more space. They create a sense of urgency, build hype, and generate results quickly.
But they aren’t your ticket to easy street. Campaigns are more resource-intensive. They require planning, creativity, and coordination across your channels. And if you overuse them, your audience will get fatigued. If you run a sales campaign every month, people will start tuning you out so use them wisely.
The difference between always on vs campaigns
| Always On Marketing | Marketing Campaigns |
|---|---|
| Business as usualBusiness as usual | Focused, high output periods |
| Designed to fit in | Designed to stand out |
| Consistent, regular content | High-impact messaging |
| Builds long-term trust and affinity | Drives short-term conversion |
Both modes have a place. But they serve very different functions.
The smartest strategy: campaigns first, always on around them.
If you want your marketing to move the needle in your business, you need to stop leading with always on and hoping it gets results.
Start with your campaigns. Look at the year ahead and decide when your key pushes will happen. Are you launching a course? Running a seasonal promo? Hosting a big event? These become your anchor points.
Then, layer your always on activity around them.
During your campaign periods, go hard. Post daily. Centre all your content around your offer. That’s what we do at Campaign Del Mar. Right now, we’re running a mini campaign for our membership. Every post, email, and story points to one thing: Marketing Circle. We’re not sharing blogs. We’re not promoting podcast interviews or guest appearances. For a short, sharp period, all roads lead to Marketing Circle.
Between campaign periods, pull back. Reuse high-performing content. Stay visible, but don’t stretch yourself trying to go full throttle year-round.
If you feel like you’re stuck on the hamster wheel of pumping out content and nothing’s landing, you probably (definitely!) need a campaign. Always on marketing alone rarely delivers impact. It holds down the fort. It doesn’t drive spikes.
Deciding what type of marketing campaign you should run is often the hardest part.
Take our Campaign Quiz to find the best fit for
your business and marketing goals.
How to make this work for your brand
Start by planning your year. Plot your campaigns before anything else. Identify the offers, events, or products that matter most and block time in your calendar for those campaign periods.
Then, plan your always on content to bridge the gaps. Use that time to nurture, educate, and build relationships with your audience.
And don’t waste time creating everything from scratch. We reuse content every week. We use Asana to store and tag content so we can easily find what’s worked in the past. If a post got strong engagement last year, we tweak it and run it again.
This is the content strategy you can actually stick to. Campaigns drive results. Always on fills the gaps. And when you use both on your terms, you stop drowning in content creation and finally get traction from the effort you’re putting in.
Image via Campaign Del Mar.
Want to learn how to run campaigns that actually convert?
Inside Marketing Circle, we don’t just talk about campaigns. From distilling your big idea to launching it across your channels, you’ll get the strategy, structure, and support you need to confidently run a marketing campaign.
I didn’t earn the nickname The Campaign Lady for nothing.
We only have a couple of spots available. If you’re ready to stop spinning your wheels and start marketing with impact, apply to join us inside Marketing Circle.
Written By
Mia Fileman
Marketing Strategist
Author
Mia Fileman
Marketing Strategist and Founder
