10 Marketing Trends You NEED to Know for 2026

These are the marketing trends that are actually worth paying attention to this year. So let's start with the more obvious one. Everyone talks about generative AI, and it started with written content, but it's already moved past that. So there are already creators who have duplicated themselves into AI versions. And a good example of this is Rowan Chung, and he built 100,000 followers just in a week using his AI avatars. And you can use AI avatars using HeyGen. You can port over your voice using ElevenLabs. The images that you can create using ChatGPT Images. Imagine being able to have an AI figure out what the topics are, create a script every single day, and use all the products I'm talking about right here. Generative AI is going to get to the point where you're not going to be able to recognize that it's an AI. AI has drastically been impacting marketing. Now there are AI tools that can automate anything you want, making the marketing world move at a much faster pace. Let's talk about these super agents that I think are getting to the point where they are going to be fully autonomous. When you think about super agents, I look at Manus, for example. Manus is fantastic. I'm able to quickly figure out what are high-intent keywords that we should be optimizing for using Manus with one prompt. Manus will then scan my blog post to figure out what the writer guidelines are. And then what it'll do after that is it will come up with 21 different blog posts and it'll do it all in one shot. And it does it in 30 minutes. And usually that would take weeks to get done and it does it in 30 minutes. So also it's now easier than ever to get into the creative space with no past experience. So you can now use ChatGPT to make YouTube thumbnails, which that matters quite a bit when it comes to packaging. You can ask it to make ads for you. So you can have a blind version of maybe this water bottle, for example, and it can create these concepts and then send it over to your designers. And your creative process is just going to move a lot faster and you're going to get better results because you're iterating a lot faster. Now here's the other thing. Anthropic CEO has said that we're going to see 99% of code be generated by machines. And I believe that the Replit CEO has also said the same thing. If you use products like Cursor or Replit to vibe code products, vibe code just means that if you're feeling a certain way, you can just go in there, you can basically prompt a product that you like to craft into existence. If you're at a loss for where to start in terms of product creation, go to your ChatGPT or whatever LLM that you use the most. ChatGPT now has memory of all the conversations that you've had. Just go to it and say, hey, based on what you know about me, what should I go out there and what should I go vibe code? And it'll come up with ideas for you. My point of saying all this is that you no longer need to be able to code to get 80 to 90% of of the way there with the product. And even when you take this over to developers on your team, they at least know what you're trying to do. So if you do that, your developers or whoever you're working with, they're going to respect you a lot more. Okay, another big trend that I want to talk about here is that organic reach is no longer exclusive to Google. So traditional SEO is now being replaced by search everywhere optimization. And that means that, you know, 15 years ago or so, the organic game was very much Google, right? But when you look at your mobile phone now, you have so many different apps on there. You might be using YouTube, you might be using Amazon. Search attention now is so fragmented that you have to optimize for wherever your customers are hanging out. So I look at website traffic as continuing to die. It's not quite dead yet, so it's definitely still worth investing in if your customers are hanging out there. But why am I even creating this content right now? It's for YouTube. Perhaps it'll go into Shorts as well, but I am trying to play the long game here, not only for YouTube but also for podcasting on Spotify or Apple. And so you have to think about optimizing not just for search engines but for search everywhere. Now continuing on the Gen-I piece, ad creation is about to massively change. We've already seen tools— I just talked about ChatGPT. Sora is owned by ChatGPT as well, but it's easier than ever to create ad creatives and even with our product Carrot, we're gonna have a big repository of all the creatives that are working well for each client. We're going to be able to detect all the templates that work well for a specific period of time, and we're just gonna say, hey, do you want us to just make new ad templates based on what's performing well for you? And so we're not going to reveal everyone's ads necessarily, but we'll show templates that work well. They can just hit a button and they can create a bunch of templates at once. What's going to happen is you're going to be able to test thousands of ad variations at once. You're going to quickly find the one that outperforms and You're hearing the theme here. You're just going to be able to move a lot faster. Okay, so now think about this. I just talked to a friend. They paid tens of millions of dollars to a large consulting firm, and these large consulting firms spend a lot of time doing these pages and pages, maybe hundreds of pages of deep research. Now, here's the thing. Deep research just replaced traditional market research. You can now get a report that would typically take days or weeks to get done and cost you tens of thousands of dollars, maybe millions of dollars like I just mentioned to you. So ChatGPT has a deep research option. When you use Grok, it has a think option. Gemini, it has a deep research feature as well. My point of saying all this is when you use deep research, it does a lot of the thinking for you. It might take 5, 10 minutes to think. It might take 30 minutes to think or so. So you have no excuse now not to do this for whatever your industry is. It's all in there. You can now do this using deep research. All right. So marketing funnels, marketing funnels are going to change. Think about how yours is set up now. It's likely made up of rigid workflows, moves leads through different funnels based on specific triggers. That's all going to disappear. You're going to be using agentic workflows where it thinks for you at each stage. So you're still going to have funnels, but your agents are going to be a lot more dynamic. That's what we've done for our product ClickFlow. So we think about all the thankless jobs an SEO manager needs to do. And then voice and video search are continuing to grow, changing the way marketers write their content. So the future of search will involve more voice and video optimization requiring AI-driven strategies to stay ahead of the curve. And so I'm recording right now. You're hearing my voice. You're seeing video optimization too. I'm probably going to take this video in the future. I'm going to use a product like Overlap, and Overlap will find all the moments from this video and I can share So we're going to see a continued rise in video and voice search, and we're going to see a lot more repurposing of content. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Karat. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com. And we'll see you on the other side. And then marketing attribution is going to become more accurate. Marketers have always had challenges with measurement and attribution. You know, people like to talk about influence pipeline. We are just going to be able to do things in a fraction of a section, right? That's why I look at someone that's enabled by AI, someone that's very enhanced that understands AI. They're going to be— this human is going to oversee a lot of AI marketing managers, right? And then these AI marketing managers are going to be managing a ton of AI agents. We're talking hundreds, if not thousands of these, right? And that's how marketing is going to move a lot faster, and that's how you're going to drive results a lot All right. So that's a wrap on AI marketing trends for 2025. Remember, AI isn't here to replace you. It's here to replace mediocrity and make marketing smarter, faster, and more impactful. All right. So if you want to understand how AI is going to affect service-based businesses, they're going to change completely forever. Watch this video over here.