How We Structure a Marketing Campaign in 2026

Hello, my name is Joshua Jacoby and I'm the owner of My Favorite Web Design. It's a digital marketing agency here in East Mesa. We've been doing web design, search engine optimization, and general marketing campaigns for companies in the East Valley for almost 20 years. And I wanted to talk a little bit today about how we structure a marketing campaign in 2026. So obviously, a ton has changed just over the last few years and the pace of change is accelerating insanely just over the last 12 months and every month in addition. A lot of the changes are related to AI, of course. It's making things happen at giant scales and really quickly. Some of the changes are also due to social media trends and the way that people are utilizing traditional media. And all of this makes it more complex put together a proper marketing plan for a small business. For large businesses, you might have enough budget to cover all your channels, and it kind of makes it less of a question of where do I spend. But for most of the businesses that we work with, you're going to have a marketing budget somewhere between $500 a month and let's say $5,000 a month, and you're going to need to make the best investment decisions you can based off the marketing budget that you have. For a lot of businesses, especially your service businesses, your number one asset is going to be your Google Maps location entity. That still ties into AI. It sources in Gemini and even the other AIs use a lot of that information in their decision-making. So that's going to be part of our initial profile build with any company in the initial marketing. But there's a lot more to the whole ecosystem now than there ever has been before. So we also need to make sure authorship is set up correctly on the website so that you have a chance of ranking inside of AI questions. We need to look at your local service ads for your business because those are paid ads that are pretty easy to set up and usually have the highest ROI depending on your vertical. So you definitely have to dial in those. It's also a ranking factor to be accepted into the LSA ecosystem. It comes with a background check. So it's a good ability to be a signal for Google on your business. So inside of a small business's budget, we're going to look at the content, The content we need to create on the website. We're going to look at the authorship, how it relates back to the expertise and how that relates back to our ranking inside of the AI so that we have a roadmap for how we're going to do that. We're going to look at the social media content. A lot of the time we like to work with clients, so we have them producing the social media content for us, and then we're simply helping with the rhythmic posting a bit. We're going to look at the video content. So if you notice, even here we're recording in an interview style format so that it's easy to produce video and it's not as glossy and high production value as green screen videos and a lot of what we've done in the past, but it allows us to create content at scale and we're able to hop onto video chats with clients and then end the last 10 minutes with a little bit of video. So we have fresh content for their social and their website, and we tie that video specifically to the landing pages that we're trying to increase the rank for. So that's a really good option for small and medium-sized businesses to create regular video content. There's a million other things that we're able to do for small and medium-sized businesses now with AI that we were not able to do before. So everyone's going to be a little bit different, but a lot of it is going to center around getting the Google Map into really good shape. Yelp is actually more important now than it's been in a while. OpenAI started feeding Yelp reviews and we're also seeing Yelp They surface onto Apple Maps a lot as the review count. So making sure your Yelp is updated and has fresh reviews on it is again more important than it was in the past. So yeah, depending on your service industry, we have to look at all these different factors when we put together your marketing game plan. If you're in an uber competitive industry like personal injury in a city like Phoenix, we might not even recommend a straight organic game plan. We might talk about alternative marketing methods and ways that you can use pay-per-click to get around that moat. So yeah, being a marketer in 2026 requires a ton of research. You really have to stay on top of what's happening in the ecosystem. You have to really know your AI game and have a well-developed skill around Claude Desktop to be able to employ a lot of the newer techniques. And you have to be able to think with different business models because it's It's not the same game plan for every business as it was. All in all, it's a little stressful for marketers. What we're doing now is completely different than what we were doing 12 months ago in terms of the scale, the speed, how exactly we go about it. And yet a lot of the deliverables are the same in terms of the content that we're producing and what Google needs to rank. So wild times and more to come. Thank you.