How Marketing Will Completely Change in 2026

All right guys, it's Christmas Eve. Neil's in Vegas. He doesn't have his microphone, but it doesn't matter. We're here to record. We're here to bring the value. It doesn't matter if someone's sick, someone's having a baby, someone's traveling. We make this podcast happen no matter what. So Neil, I thought it might make sense for us to also talk about predictions for 2026 too, because we did, we kind of did a review for the last episode. I think it's good to maybe talk about trends or predictions that we see for the next year?

Yeah, and some of them I'm already starting to see towards the, you know, November, December of 2025, and we know they're going to carry in. Like one of the big things that we saw is in the agency world, there was a slowdown because of SEO. And what I mean because of SEO is the uncertainty of SEO and AI and what's going to happen. So if you look at 2024, a lot of agencies were impacted who were performing SEO. 2025 as well, to some extent, not as bad as 2024. The second half was much better. But if I look at Q4 of 2025, honestly, a lot of companies are getting back into SEO and they're like, oh, it's not dead. It's still a valid channel and they're doubling down on it. And we saw budget cuts in 2024 for some companies, not all, of course. I'm not even talking about the majority, but a lot of people had that sentiment that AI is going to screw up SEO. And we saw issues there. We also saw issues with social media. And what I mean with social media is people are just like, oh, organic social's not going to work the same now that they're monetizing through selling products specifically on Instagram and TikTok. You know, when you're shopping, people are just like, oh, organic social, it's not going to be as important. If they want you to monetize, they want you to monetize by selling stuff so they can end up making money. We're seeing companies go back into organic social because if you don't have that communication channel with your potential customers, you're missing out on what people feel, hear, say about your brand versus, you know, if you don't leverage that channel, people just assume whatever they want to assume. So companies want to make sure they're controlling their own narrative.

Yeah. So what I would say is in terms of predictions for 2026 on the marketing side, One thing is what Neil said, we are getting more and more people are coming back. Sometimes it's SEO, sometimes people are looking for AEO, but when we send outbound emails, there's a lot of people that respond and say, hey, we're actually looking to revisit our strategy for the next year. And so we're both seeing that right now, but I think we're also going to see, and we kind of talked about this a little bit, but more in-person events. So whether they're small events like dinners, maybe 8 to 10 people or so, or if we're talking mini events, which Neil talked about, maybe that's 10 to 30 people or so, or Even larger events where 150 to 200 people or so, which I did earlier this year for the YPO Global Marketing Summit, in-person events, people always remember those. And if there's one thing people text me about randomly, it's like, hey Eric, when are you doing another event? Hey Eric, when are you doing another dinner? Right? And so we've both managed to, you know, I think we're going to continue to double down on that, whether that's speaking at events. And also, if I'm speaking at events, sometimes I'll try to figure out, can I throw a dinner or, you know, can we, Can we make sure that they're putting in touch with people that seem to fit our ICP? So in-person events make sense. Online events, that's just going to continue to happen. I mean, this is an online event right now. Those of you that are watching, this is why we started doing these lives again, because it allows us to interact with you guys as well. I think we're going to see a rise in go-to-market engineers. So Neil, do you guys have any go-to-market engineers on your team yet?

No, I don't know what the term go-to-market engineer is.

Yeah, I mean, it's really, an engineer who understands automations and understands, even engineer might be a little bit of a too senior of a term. I was talking to Wade Foster from Zapier the other day and they do well, you know, about 700 employees or so, maybe $400 million ARR. And go-to-market engineers are people who they understand go-to-market. So they understand marketing, they understand these automations, they understand these agentic workflows that you can build, and they kind of go around your company figuring out how to, you know, just make your go-to-market, honestly, just your marketing more effective. And you're probably paying anywhere from, you know, $100,000 to $150,000, maybe $200,000 a year if you're in America for this type of role. I think we're going to see a rise in the hiring of vibe coders. We're going to see more hiring of vibe coders because these people are the ones who can help you put these agentic workflows or these agents or these MCPs together. I think one more thing before I flip it over to you, I have a couple more, but one more thing I'll say is, When you look at companies like Lovable, so $200 million in ARR right now, growing 10%. I don't know if it's 10% month over month, but it's pretty fast. But they're— I listened to a podcast recently, and they're scared that they might go out of business soon because things are changing so quickly, right? And so the way they ship, because features are so easy to copy now, companies like Lovable will continue to rely maybe 90 to 95% of their efforts more on building new marketable features. So their directive is they need to ship one new marketable feature per week. So they can keep up with the market because everyone's just copying each other right now. I'll flip it over to you for a second.

Yeah, so you talked about go-to-market engineers. We have internally something called workflow automation engineers, which may be similar or the same thing. I don't know.

Same thing. Yeah.

We've been doing that for almost a year and a half now. We found that to be super effective in improving efficiencies, but not as much as people think. And here's what I mean by that. People believe you can hire these workflow automation engineers and they just automate everything and then you don't need humans. We're more so seeing it where you just need less humans, right? But things still need to be double-checked. Also with AEO or ASU or whatever you want to call it, we're seeing that companies are still pushing hard on it. But if you go back a year in time, they believed, oh, this is going to overtake SEO and traditional search. Now, most companies that we talk to believe that the worlds are going to coexist, which you and I have been talking about this for a long time now, but we're now starting to see enterprise brands also believe in the vision that they're both going to coexist. And instead of saying, hey, we're going to go all in on AEO, they're saying, we want to go in on AEO and we want to go in on traditional SEO and we still want to leverage other channels, but they're not seeing the growth in AEO that people predicted. I'm not talking about from a conversion standpoint. I'm talking about when you look at ChatGPT's growth rate and adoption, people had these hockey stick graphs showing that, hey, in a few years, by 2030, they'll be as popular as Google.

Overtake Google.

Exactly. And companies aren't seeing ChatGPT grow at that pace because there's a lot of third-party companies that talk about the penetration with their apps and they track app usage. It's at this moment, Gemini is growing at a faster clip than ChatGPT. ChatGPT is starting to slow down a bit. It doesn't mean that they won't be a bigger company or they won't make a lot more revenue from multiples where they're at. It's just more so companies aren't seeing a shift. Everyone's using ChatGPT and they stop using Google. So what they're doing is they're investing in both, but they're not going all in on any one platform.

Yep. One other thing I'll say, Google and ChatGPT, both of them are going to crack down more on this GEO spam, right? But like right now, a lot of it is Okay. Originally you can spam Reddit. Now it's like, oh, it's— you have to make sure you're listed on Forbes or G2 or these authoritative websites. Isn't that just like guest blog posting or making sure it's a lot of it's just the SEO stuff? And even Google's team has said this is more or less SEO. And we've kind of said this on this pod. SEO is good. SEO has always continued to evolve and this is just an evolution of SEO, I believe. And this is happening already. If you look at your Google Search Console, Google is looking more not just at websites, they're looking at entities. So they will look at your Search Console and say, hey, it looks like this YouTube channel is actually connected to you. and they'll look at if that YouTube channel's actually passing traffic over to you. So, you know, they know that it's not just all about websites anymore and they know they have to look at the entire graph. And with Gemini, the power of Gemini now, they have the ability to. One more thing I'll add from my side in terms of how marketing will change in 2026. This is not necessarily new to marketing, but when you look at like a Lovable, for example, or you look at a Clay, they actually give away a lot of credits and that is their form of marketing. Or when a company like our company, we want to push more AI fluency and we go to a Zapier or a, Lovable, they say, hey, can we get some credits? We want to run this through our organization. They actually like to give away those credits and they see that as a marketing cost. And so I believe when I look at the stuff we're building with ClickFlow and Carrot, we're going to give away credits and we want a way for people to continue to come back and use this stuff. And I think that's just a part of playing the game now.

Dude, I totally agree with you. And another interesting thing when we're looking at marketing going forward, we're seeing companies really double down on community more than everything else. And the reason I say that is they're worried that the algorithms, because they've seen it from every single channel, you've seen it from Google, you've seen it from social, it becomes harder and harder to control. So they're just like, man, we really need to own our own community. But at the same token, at least in the enterprise world, I'm seeing companies go around building their community the wrong way.

Yeah.

And here's a prime example. I won't name the brand, but we work with a company and there's like, oh, to build a community, we're going to do more events at things like Formula 1 and the US Open. And I'm like, your average consumer is just a random person in the world. Literally, their product is applicable to most adults. Okay? So when you look at it, it's like doing parties at Formula 1 and the US Open Isn't really a strong way to build community. It's a strong way to build community with the 1%, and the 1% doesn't even make up the majority of your revenue.

And by the way, that's a party too, guys. It's like, just call it what it is. It's a party.

Yes. I'm like, this is not community building. I'm like, this is—

Have you been to F1? I've been to a couple F1s and it's just a straight party. Sure, those people might be hanging out. They're not there to talk business, by the way.

No, people are there to get drunk. That's pretty much every time that I've been to one of those events.

Yeah.

People are looking to get drunk and have fun.

All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more. We'll see you on the other side. Okay, so I want to talk about, um, if you— this is kind of related. We're talking about Lovable for a second because I just mentioned them, right? So they basically said, look, in AI, if you have an AI product, I mean, a lot of people are, are in AI now, right? You must find product-market fit every 3 months. And I think that's interesting because back— SaaS back in the day, when you found product-market fit, it used to take a very long time, um, to, to, to, you know, build up to what you have. And I'll give you an example. So yesterday I was in office I was talking to my CTO, Sean, and he showed me— so Cursor gives you an end-of-year review, and he used close to a billion tokens. Okay, I was like, how much more code did you write this year? He's like 10 times the level of code, right, from before. So basically we're writing 10 times the amount of code than before. And so the point of saying this is that, again, everyone's able to copy these features pretty quickly. A lot of these things, Replit versus Lovable, a lot of them, it's pretty similar. So You have to rediscover product market fit every 3 months. And I thought that was an interesting quote because you can't, I don't feel like you can sit pat anymore because you can build so much faster.

I'm not a product person, so take this with a grain of salt. I always thought product market fit was bullshit. Oh, here's why.

Here's why.

People talk about how if you have product market fit, your product grows really fast. I get it. But at the same time, I see products with terrible features, usability, and I wouldn't say they have product-market fit, yet they still grow. And here's a prime example of this. Does your company use HubSpot or Salesforce?

HubSpot.

Okay. So if we use Salesforce for sales CRM, and no joke, you know, I don't know what divisions use it, but we have some divisions that use Salesforce as a CRM. It is a terrible product. We had to hire a lot of engineers to end up making it where But you know why they keep doing well? Because it's a pain in the butt to rip out, right? And if you look at a lot of these solutions that integrate within companies and they integrate deep, even if they have a terrible product, the cost and the pain to rip it out in many cases is more expensive than just continually paying for it.

Pain costs, switching costs.

Yeah, it's—

That's why with products nowadays, I think you need to have as many integrations as possible so it's hard to rip it out.

And I believe that assuming you can figure out how to get people onboarded and integrated, but even if you don't have the best product, the switching costs really to me is more important than, look, we got this best usable product that has product market fit. Okay, Slack, great example, something with product market fit. You agree with this, right? Especially early on. Teams comes around. And they already have, they release it for free. It's not as good of a product in my opinion. We have both Teams and Slack. Why do we use it? It was free and then it was cheaper than Slack. Okay, sounds good. It's done. We use Microsoft. It's integrated into everything. All right, sounds good. Let's just leave it, whatever. It doesn't matter if people don't like it as much. That switching costs, I believe at least in bigger organizations, if that's what you're going after, is more important than product-market fit. Your product has to be good enough, right? But I'm with Eric and whatever that quote is in which if you have product-market fit, it doesn't mean you always have product-market fit, but if you've integrated deep and it's hard and painful and expensive to remove that product and to switch, I think that's very valuable in the long run, as bad as that sounds.

You have to— I believe that with product-market fit, people talk about monthly recurring revenue. I look at MRV, monthly recurring value, and you have to keep bringing the value over and over, but if everyone's getting the feature parity quickly, how do you stand out? And so even like what you have with Ubersuggest right now, actually I saw you bought, you actually bought the tool from acquire.com. And so what I would say, do you want to speak to that?

Wait, how'd you know I bought a tool from acquire.com?

Some guy tweet, the guy that sold it tweeted it and like somehow it showed up on my feed. I was like, oh, okay. I know who bought that.

Dude, it was dirt cheap. Yeah.

And so here's, that's exactly my point. So there's all these tools out there, ours included, yours included as well. that will help people generate content, right? There's a handful of these out there and I'm constantly like, okay, how do we stand out? So here's one way we can stand out. One, you have a services backend. 2, I have a services backend, right? Actually, that's not the same. That's both one. That's how you stand out. But on the other side of things, there's a bunch of other value add that we have and we're constantly thinking about how can we add other integrations in there. And it can't just be a content creation thing because I've looked at some of these other ones. I've kind of tested them and signed up for their free trials and they're pretty damn good.

Yeah.

And so what do you do to stand out? You got— here's where the human in the loop comes back in now. So I think that's part of how you stand out.

Yeah, and it's— if you look at businesses in general, the ones who try to provide everything from top to bottom or bottom to top, whatever you want to call it, like the whole chain, they tend to be more stickier companies and it's easier to penetrate because when you look at it from a marketing perspective, okay, let's just use something that everyone can relate to, toilet paper. I know it's an ugly product, but let's just say toilet paper.

It's a great product. What are you talking about?

It's— everyone needs it. I agree with you. It is a great product. But if you look at toilet paper, if you're P&G and you're selling toilet paper, the person who uses toilet paper, right? Think about that as personal care. They also need to brush their teeth. They need to floss. You know, they need to take showers and use shampoo and deodorant and all this stuff. Might as well sell it all and have the whole, you know, the whole control, the whole ecosystem from beginning to end, because the person who buys one of your products is the same person who should buy the other products because it's applicable to everyone. It's easier to cross-sell. It's easier to make more money when you do that versus if you're like, we're just going to be the best toilet paper provider out there. Well, I'd rather go buy toilet paper from the person who bundles it with toilet paper, laundry detergent, and all the things I need, and I get a better deal. Hope you guys have a happy holidays and amazing New Year's. Eric and I wish you amazing 2026.

Yeah, we'll see you in the new year. Bye.