How Marketing Will Completely Change in 2026

0:00All 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 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 November, December of 2025, and we know they're going to carry in.

0:37One 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.

1:18I'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 is not going to work the same now that they're monetizing through selling products, specifically on Instagram and TikTok. When you're shopping, people are just like, oh, organic social is not going to be as important. 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.

2:09So 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 eight 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.

2:49In-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 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.

3:16I 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 too senior of a term. I was talking to Wade Foster from Zapier the other day. They do well, about 700 employees or so, maybe 400 million ARR.

3:49Go-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 just make your go-to-market, honestly, just your marketing more effective. And you're probably paying anywhere from$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.

4:25there um 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 uh when you look at companies like lovable so 200 million dollars in arr right now growing 10 percent um i don't know if it's 10 percent 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 um companies like lovable will continue to rely maybe 90 to 95 percent of their efforts more on building new marketable features.

4:55So 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.

5:31We're more so seeing it where you just need less humans, right? But things still need to be double-checked. Also with AEO or AISU 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 believe, 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.

6:16And 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. It's going to 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. But it's at this moment, Gemini is growing at a faster clip than ChatGPT.

6:52ChatGPT 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. Yeah. 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, you have to make sure you're listed on Forbes or G2 or these authoritative websites.

7:26Isn't that just like guest blog posting or making sure? 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 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 is actually passing traffic over to you.

7:53So, 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, 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 and say, hey, can we get some credits?

8:21We 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, you know, 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.

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10:59That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. 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. And here's a prime example.

11:33I won't name the brand, but we work with a company and they're like, oh, to build a community, we're going to do more events at things like Formula One 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. So when you look at it, it's like doing parties at Formula One 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. Just call it what it is.

12:15It'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. People are looking to get drunk and have fun. Okay, so I want to talk about 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 in AI now, right?

12:46You must find product market fit every three 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 to 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. I was like, how much more code did you write this year? He's like 10 times the level of code 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.

13:19a lot of these things, replet versus lovable, a lot of them, it's pretty similar. So you have to rediscover product market fit every three 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. 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.

13:54And 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, 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 work. 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 you.

14:35That's what we call switching costs. 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 release it for free. It's not as good of a product.

15:12In 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.

15:44But 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. 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 Uber Suggest right now, actually, I saw you actually bought a tool from Acquire.com. And so what I would say, if you want to say. Wait, how did you know I bought a tool from Acquire.com?

16:18Some guy, 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 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. Two, 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.

16:49And 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. I've signed up for their free trials and they're pretty damn good. And so what do you do to stand out? 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 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, the whole chain, they tend to be more stickier companies and it's easier to penetrate.

17:22Because 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? 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.

17:54might as well sell it all and have the whole, you know, um, 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 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 years.

18:31Eric and I wish you amazing 2026. Yeah, we'll see you in the new year. Bye.