Once you’ve put in a mammoth amount of effort to reach an engagement target for, let’s say, social content, it’s easy to say: ‘That’ll do, let’s maintain performance at this level.’

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Without realizing it, at this moment you’ve decided that you’ve opened the door to declining campaign performance.

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That’s because maintaining performance for any content campaign is a very hard thing to do. It’s honestly harder than improving performance. By trying to maintain performance, you’re ignoring the fact that your audience will get bored of your content and move on. So there’s this awkward imbalance where you’re putting equivalent time and resources into doing the same stuff, but your results dwindle.

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Compare that to a growth-focused campaign, where you’re throwing out what doesn’t work, doubling down on what does, and throwing in new ideas. Even if most of those new ideas don’t work out, the framework is likely to absorb those blips as part of net improvement.

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At ContentCal I introduced this framework as a biweekly sprint format that tracked the progress of impressions, likes, and follower growth across three social channels. Every two weeks I would identify three well-performing content formats to do more of, three underperforming formats to kill off and introduce three new formats we’d not tried before. When the numbers came in every two weeks, I was surprised at how predictable the improvements were.

I’ve used the same approach for other clients since and experienced the same thing. Although these other case studies have more impressive numbers, the ContentCal example is still my favorite because it clearly shows how quickly the sprint method can grow a company social account from almost zero engagement.

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So what’s happening here? By producing quality stuff every week, we set in motion a neat feedback loop that pushed ContentCal’s audience to engage more with successful posts and guide what to produce next.

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When your audience notices that you’re always stepping up your content’s quality and relevance, they become excited to see what you put out next. You bring the momentum, they pay attention. On channels like social, the algorithm notices this behavior and pushes you to the top of your audience’s feeds. Before long you’re achieving more with one post than you previously did in a week.

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Next time you find yourself agreeing to maintain a campaign or a channel, remind yourself that ‘maintain’ is code for ‘decline’. Ask your team, ‘Do we grow it, or do we kill it?’ By refusing to maintain, you’ll work on fewer, more impactful campaigns, and you’ll feel happier at work for it.