The Marketing Strategies That Actually Work in 2026
In this 2026 marketing video, Ryan Deiss argues that most current tactics are becoming obsolete and outlines three dominant trends that will shape successful marketing over the next 12 months. The first trend is "embedded influencers" – internal brand voices (founders, executives, team members) who act as trusted content creators. Deiss provides a three‑step framework: (1) define a character with a contrarian point of view, brandable hooks, and authentic flaws; (2) pick a single platform where the audience hangs out and master it; (3) integrate the character into the business funnel to drive traffic and sales. He backs the claim with PwC, Forbes/G2, and case studies of Gary Vaynerchuk, Alex Hormozi, and Warren Buffett. The second trend is publishing long‑form content on short‑form channels and releasing it as serialized series, turning “glances” into “stares” and generating massive engagement and subscriber growth. He shares his own experiments on X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, showing orders‑of‑magnitude lift in views, comments, and leads. The third trend is consumer rejection of generic AI‑generated content. Deiss proposes a 10‑80‑10 workflow: 10 % human story‑setting, 80 % AI drafting, and a final 10 % human polish to retain humanity. He warns that brands that lean into authentic human storytelling will outcompete those that rely on bland AI output. Finally, he hints at a bonus trend—advertising on emerging AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.)—as a massive early‑adopter opportunity. Throughout, he delivers data‑backed claims, concrete action steps, and a persuasive, confident tone aimed at business owners and marketers seeking immediate, implementable tactics.
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Most of what's working in your marketing right now is about to stop working. We spent over $8 million on marketing tests across our 17-company portfolio, and I would bet that much and more that these 3 trends I'm about to show you will dominate marketing over the next 12 months. And the thing is, almost nobody else is talking about these yet. But by the end of this video, you're going to have a specific action plan for each one. Not theory, not predictions, things you can actually implement today to break through the noise and get more sales. So let's get into it. Trend number 1, embedded influencers. If you run a business and you're still relying on traditional influencer marketing where you're paying somebody with a big following to hold up your product and say nice things about it, that model is dying. We've got to have something that represents our brand today. Faceless brands are gone, and here's why. Consumer trust is at an all-time low. They just don't trust brands anymore, and this is not just My opinion: according to the most recent PricewaterhouseCooper Business Trust Survey, 90% of executives think that customers highly trust their brands, while less than 30% of consumers who were polled actually do trust those brands. Think about that. So the data is clear. Despite what a lot of business owners and marketing executives think, people just don't trust their brands. They just don't. And increasingly, they don't trust influencers either. You and everyone else knows that Matthew McConaughey doesn't drive a Lincoln and he sure as crap doesn't use Salesforce, okay? And here's how the market has been responding. So first there were the macro-influencers, the really big influencers, the Kardashians, the MrBeasts, the folks with the really massive audiences. And for a while, that worked. It worked when brands would collaborate with these folks, but then it got expensive and then the trust eroded. Because everyone knew that it was just pay for play. And then a lot of these big influencers got smart and they started building their own brands where they have actual equity instead of just taking an endorsement fee. So then the market shifted to the micro-influencers. Now, these folks have a smaller following, but frequently they are more engaged. They also seemed more authentic, and that worked better too, for a while. But even micro-influencers are still external. Plus, do you really want to manage a dozen micro-influencer relationships? So what comes next? Well, in our tests, we're finding that embedded influencers are outperforming micro-influencers and macro-influencers. So what's an embedded influencer? An embedded influencer is a trusted internal voice within a company. It could be a founder, it could be an executive, it could be a team member who creates audience-facing content that builds trust, drives traffic, and hopefully generates some sales. So this is not a hired endorser. This is not an external creator. This is someone inside the brand who embodies its values and who's communicating their messages directly. Now, here's why this matters. There is one strategy that every brand can implement that is statistically proven to increase trust scores. You see, according to a research study by Forbes and G2, 82% of consumers surveyed said that they're actually more likely to trust a company whose leaders are active on social media. In other words, if you want people to start trusting your brand, you need to get people inside the company and ideally the founder, the CEO, on social media. Now, this isn't new, by the way. This is how people like Gary Vaynerchuk got his start. I mean, before he was Gary Vee, the social media celebrity, he was the embedded influencer for his family's wine business, Wine Library. He got on camera, he talked about wine, he was real, sometimes a little too real. But I just don't see a lot of people really enjoying this wine Whatsoever. And he turned a $3 million family wine shop into a $60 million a year business. Warren Buffett has been doing this for Berkshire Hathaway for literally decades. The difference is back then, we just called them celebrity CEOs. Now it's a system. And now it's something that any company can build, frankly, even if the founder isn't that charismatic. Let's be honest, not all of us are as sexy as Warren Buffett. And by the way, if you're the founder and you're thinking, "there is no freaking way that I'm going to do this," fine, please stick around. My question to you is going to be, "If not you, then who?" Because it needs to be someone. Alright, so there are 3 steps to building an embedded influencer for your brand. Step 1, you've got to choose the character that you're going to play. Now, I don't mean that you're being fake, I mean that you're being intentional about how you show up. Every great content creator, whether they realize it or not, has a chosen character that they're playing on screen. And that character has 3 critical components that you're going to want to get clear on before you release this character to the wild. So component number 1 is your unique points of view. These are your contrarian beliefs. These are the hills that you are prepared to die on. So let me give you an example by telling you some of mine. I say things like I believe that Visionary and Integrator are fake job titles. And I say things like I believe that most company mission and vision statements are just entrepreneurial arts and crafts. Those are my unique points of view, and frankly, some of them make people uncomfortable. Some of them will likely create angry comments from haters wanting to tell me why I'm the world's biggest moron. Good. That's the point. If your unique point of view doesn't make someone disagree, if it doesn't make someone a little bit angry, it's not really a point of view. You need to know what they are before you ever turn on a camera. Now, component number 2, your brandable hooks. So these are the visual and verbal signals that make you stand out. So my buddy Alex Hormozi, he's rocking the nose strip and before that it was kind of the creepy mustache. Love you, Alex. Now, I'll be honest, this is an area that I need to work on. I'm kind of always in this same place, it kind of looks like a lot of other ones. I'm a generic, I don't know, white guy who looks like everybody else. So yeah, I'm still figuring this stuff out and I'm telling you That because I want you to hear something that's important. You don't have to get every single piece of this perfect to start. You just have to get started. Component 3 of your character, you need to acknowledge your flaws and quirks. So these are the things that make you human, your warts, all the stuff. So going back to Gary Vaynerchuk, the dude cusses like a sailor. Motherfucker, what the fuck are you crying about? He also likes blueberries. A little too much. Those aren't bugs, those are features, and they make him human. Oh yeah, if you know anything about my story, you know that I nearly ruined my marriage because I'm a bit of a workaholic. It's the reason that I do what I do and talk about what I do. It's because I don't want people to make the same mistakes. And if you think about it, we kind of like characters who are good at what they do while also being workaholics, while also kind of being a walking dad joke. If you don't believe me, just look at the success of the TV show Ted Lasso. That's the character that I'm playing. What's yours? I'll tell you, you'll only find it if you're willing to reveal your flaws because while your unique point of view will grow your authority and your brandable hooks will enable you to stand out in a crowd, it's your flaws that will actually make you trustworthy. It's your flaws that will bond your audience to you because perfect people aren't real and Consumers know that. Step 2, you gotta choose the stage, and by stage I mean what platform are you going to show up on? Are you going to be on YouTube like I am right now? Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok? You can have a podcast. My advice, start with one, just one, and if you're having a hard time deciding, pick the channel where your people are already hanging out, where your ideal customers and clients, they're already there. But whichever channel you choose, you gotta master it. You You've gotta build the habit, you've gotta build the audience, then you can expand. And my advice also is once you've picked your channel, get somebody to help you who specializes in that channel. Don't try to get a catch-all marketing person who's supposedly good at everything, those people don't exist. Find a single channel manager who's an expert at just that channel and go all in. Step 3, we've got to integrate the character into the business. This is where embedded influencers become a marketing channel and not just some personal branding play. So here's the question: once you have people's attention, where do you want to direct it? Are you gonna send them to your homepage, to a lead magnet, other social posts, a product? The point is, the goal isn't just to build a following, it's to drive awareness and traffic back to your brand. So know where you're sending people, whether it's a link in a post, whether it's a link in your bio, or just a casual mention to comments or to direct message you for details. You gotta have something. I mean, if you watch my videos, you know I'm frequently pointing people back to the description to check out other things that are getting them on our list. The point is, you don't need a million followers. You need one voice that people trust, and that voice should be inside your company. That's embedded influencer marketing. If you're a CEO and founder and you don't wanna do this, then the process I just described, you should go through for somebody else in the company, 'cause again, if it's not you, then it needs to be someone because this is the future, this is the trend, this is frankly where influencer marketing and authority marketing is going. Trend number 2, long-form content in short-form channels. I need to be honest with you about something. About a year ago, I was pretty much ready to give up on social media. I was doing the stuff that everybody told you to do. I was posting, I was consistent, I was putting out what I thought was frankly pretty good content. The engagement was flat, the the reach was basically my mom and some random dude eating Cheetos on his couch, and frankly, it just sucked up a lot of my time. And I wanna be clear, I'm not an influencer, I'm not a YouTuber, I'm a business owner who posts content. So one day out of frustration, I did something that I thought was frankly kind of stupid. I had a YouTube video that I knew a lot of people loved. We had a lot of views, got a lot of great engagement, and I was thinking, you know, I should probably take this video, I should probably chop it up, I should probably redo different portions, it's like Reels, and turn into tweets and all this other stuff. I was like, you know what, screw that. I don't wanna do that anymore. I'm sick of all that. So I just downloaded the entire fully edited video from YouTube and I uploaded the whole dang thing directly to X, directly to Twitter. Then I took a longer newsletter that I'd written that had done well that I looked at. I was like, this is pretty good stuff. And again, instead of shortening it up, chopping it up, I posted just a slightly shorter version to LinkedIn just to get under their word count. And both of them work. They significantly outperformed everything else I'd been doing by an order of magnitude, and that's when the light bulb went on in my brain. So I took it further. I took that YouTube video that was doing well, and I said, what if instead of releasing it as individual standalone Reels and short-form video on, you know, Instagram and TikTok, what if instead I release it as a series? So check this out. So if you go to my Instagram channel, you'll see a lot of different videos, and, you know, some of them do better than others. I mean, some of them, if I go and look at it, this one's got 235 likes and 30 comments. This one's only got 77 and 5. This one's me hitting great golf shots. I can see why that one didn't do well. You know, so you can kind of see the range. But then if we scroll down, and specifically if you look at this series, and this is the one that I was referring to, this series right here, check it out. Almost 12,000 likes and 7,000 comments. And then this one, Part 2, 8,000, and 3,000. You know, even going all the way up to Part 4, it started off obviously with Part 5, but even by Part 4, we're talking like 12,000 views. This thing took off like a rocket, and specifically, that one 5-part series got, at the time of this recording, 973,000 views, 33,000+ likes, over 13,000 comments, and most importantly, it generated 5,255 subscribers. Leads and counting from my little account. Now for comparison, a typical reel for us gets somewhere between 5,000 and 45,000 views. That's not a small improvement, that is a completely different category of results. And on X, Twitter, longer posts right now are getting 5 to 7 times more views and engagement than short-form posts. So short-form might get you a glance, it might get you a lot of notices, but it's long-form that gets you stares. And that's the goal. We want to turn the glances on social media into stares, because if you can get them to stay and binge, you can get them to bounce around to your other content. And if you can get them to bounce, you can eventually get them to buy. That's the flywheel. But there is one more piece to this puzzle, because at the end of the day, you can have the right person delivering the most amazing long-form content on every single platform, and you can still get ignored. Trend number 3: AI slop rejection. Consumers are starting to notice AI-generated content. They are, and they don't like it. You probably don't like it. It started again with the obvious stuff: the em dashes that were everywhere, the emojis that were all over the place, overly polished language, corporate— that kind of bland, stilted corporate AI voice that all sounds the same. But now they're getting even more savvy. Fast. They can feel it now. Even when you can't necessarily point to the exact reason, you can tell when something just feels off. Any business can pump out quote-unquote great content at scale, and most businesses are, but if there's not a real human story behind it, people are going to scroll right past it because content is everywhere. So the scarce resource is no longer quantity, and the scarce resource is no longer quality. The scarce resource in content today is humanity, real human stories, real human experiences, the kind of things that AI can't possibly replicate. So what do you do? How do you take advantage of this trend? First, you don't abandon AI. That's not what I'm suggesting that you do. That would be stupid. AI is an incredible tool for researching and drafting and ideation, but use it differently than most people are using it. I use a model called 10-80-10. It's really simple. The first 10% is human. This is you, this is me, this is us. That's when the idea, the concept, the scope, the story, the unique point of view that we talked about, That all has to come from you because AI doesn't have your stories. It doesn't have your scars. It never owed the IRS $248,000. Now that middle 80%, once you've given it the 10% of humanity and story and narrative and scope, it can then take the middle 80%. That part's all AI. Let it do the heavy lifting. Let it do the research. Let it do the first drafts, create the structure, the outline, the formatting, all of it. And that last 10%, this is where we get human again. This is when you come back to the material and you plus it, you rewrite it in your voice, you add in stories that might have got left out, you add the details that only you would know because you were there and it isn't because it's a freaking robot. You make it sound like something that a real person said because wait for it, a real person actually did say it and that real person should be you. And I'll tell you, the brands that win over the next 12 months are going to be the brands that lean into human while everybody else is leaning into AI. And most are frankly gonna be too lazy or they're just not gonna have the chops. They're not gonna have the stories. They're not gonna have the experience to pull this stuff off. So this is your edge. Now, speaking of AI, there is one more bonus trend that I want to discuss, and that is ads in AI. Now, as of this recording, ads haven't officially come to any of the AI platforms in any meaningful way yet, but they will. Trust me, they will. AI companies need to monetize, and ads are ultimately how they're going to do it. ChatGPT has already announced that ads are coming. Now, again, Claude and some of the other AI companies, they're positioning themselves as ad-free, and maybe it'll stay that way. But new ad platforms are a massive opportunity. Think about when Google first launched ads, if you were around then, or when Facebook— we're talking nickel clicks, dime clicks, amazing traffic. And cheap as could be. And I'll tell you, the early adopters who figured out those platforms while the big brands were still evaluating and getting budget for that, they made fortunes. Look, if you want more content like this, be sure to subscribe. This is what we do here, and I'd love to do a little bit more of it with you. So with that said, thanks for watching. See you in the next one.
