7 top marketing trends I’m seeing in 2026

I started off as a pee-wee intern doing things like SEO, social media, and email marketing at a small startup in Santa Monica.

I then went on to work at a fast-growing marketing agency on Abbot Kinney in Venice, California, running ads for SaaS and ecommerce companies.

Then by a stroke of luck, I got an opportunity to work at an emerging startup in San Francisco. I packed up all my stuff in my little two-door Scion tC, and for the next few years I found myself leading SEO initiatives and affiliate marketing partnerships at Webflow.

During my time in San Francisco is where I started to become obsessed with marketing trends and what was happening in the industry. I went on to start this blog (and also newsletter) to document it all.

And through that, I became so obsessed with marketing (friends and family would say in an unhealthy way) that I quit my job and moved to NYC to fulfill some sort of Mad Men dream.

And for the next several years, I found myself consulting, freelancing, blogging, and creating content for multiple different companies and even for my own projects.

Then AI came around and changed everything.

And for the past 3 years, I've been trying to become an AI-powered marketer and build a one-person business to multiple seven figures in revenue. By doing so, I've been able to quickly catch up on what's happening in the trenches of marketing.

So as I sit at my kitchen dining table, and type away at my laptop while sipping on a Philz Americano, I'm going to give you my top marketing trends of 2026 that I'm seeing.

7 marketing trends for 2026

In a fast-paced digital... ahh gotcha! Did you really think I use AI to write my content? Insanity.

All jokes aside, these marketing trends I'm going to go over are not the basic things like "personalization is key!" or "omnichannel marketing is growing!"

This is from someone who lives and breathes marketing every day. I have to. I literally run a marketing curation newsletter.

Okay, no more rambling.

Here are the top marketing trends of 2026:

1. Marketers become product managers
2. SEO blogging makes a comeback for AEO
3. Marketers become internal influencers
4. AI video ads keep getting better
5. Network effects become a marketing MOAT
6. Design taste becomes the #1 marketing skill
7. Human-first media becomes top ad real estate

Yeah, I told you it wasn't going to be generic. Let's go over each of these.

1. Marketers become product managers

In 2026, being a marketer means that you are going to become more valuable for businesses.

With AI vibe coding tools and the barrier to entry to creating products just constantly getting lower and cheaper, winning the hearts and attention of your target customers is going to be the most important thing for every business.

In other words, marketing is going to become the most valuable organization within a company.

And if this continues to be the case, this means that marketers are no longer just people that launch ad campaigns or write case studies or post things on social media.

It goes beyond just doing things that get a brand in front of the right people.

The biggest shift I am seeing in 2026 is that us marketers need to become product managers and product builders.

AI tools like v0 (my favorite), Lovable, Google AI Studio, Cursor, and more are not just for developers. These tools allow marketers to take their product ideas and turn them into prototypes.

Historically, at least in the tech world, PMs (product managers) have gotten a bad rap. They tell engineers what to do and what to build and why to build it. But a lot of them don't really have specific knowledge in a particular domain.

Marketers, on the other hand, do have specific knowledge. And these AI tools can now empower us to create those prototypes based off of the knowledge that we have. This means that the scope of a marketer will start to include prototyping as a core job function.

Because building product is getting easier, and marketing is getting harder, this means that marketing must be embedded into the product building process.

And while these vibe coding tools don't necessarily create the best production-ready code, what they can do is create a good enough prototype that can be handed off to a professional developer on your team.

So in 2026, marketers are going to turn into product managers. Where they create prototypes and give input on how a product or feature should be developed (this will matter in Trend 5). And at the same time, they’ll create AI workflows that help distribute those products and features that they initially helped come up with.

We're already seeing this with companies like Ramp, where they now have a job role called the “Vibe Growth Marketing Manager”. And some other companies are also reemerging this role and calling it the full stack marketer.

So embrace these tools and get excited because marketing is going to become even more valuable as a skill set. And with these new tools, you will become one of the most valuable people within a company (so don't sell yourself short or accept lowball offers).

2. SEO blogging makes a comeback for AEO

In 2024, and a little bit of 2025, the whole "SEO is dead" propaganda resurfaced as it normally does every few years. I'll be honest that this time it did scare me a little bit because there was a good reason to be afraid.

AI search through ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Perplexity really made a lot of us question if our SEO efforts really matter anymore.

The companies that got hit really hard and lost SEO traffic were very vocal about it on X and LinkedIn. And this made it seem like the entire industry was falling apart. But there were many people (like myself) who were quietly crushing it and still are and just don't boast about it that much.

In 2025, I went to the Ahrefs conference in San Diego, CA and I met so many people that are just crushing it with niche blogs, and they tell nobody about it online. If you go through Reddit threads or look at LinkedIn, it sounds like blogging is dead, but it's clearly not. Especially if you're reading this right now.

In fact, ChatGPT and Perplexity love to cite blog articles. So in 2026, there's going to be a big SEO trend of focusing on blog posts that are from lived experience and written by real humans (more on this in trend 7). This will help not only influence traditional search results but also AI search results (AEO).

But what people are going to focus on more in 2026 is bottom-of-funnel blogging. So instead of writing content around "what is a CRM," it's going to be more like "10 best CRM platforms for lead generation agencies." Or things like, "HubSpot vs Attio: which is best for your agency?"

It's going to be a lot more long tail and conversion focused. Where the goal no longer is how can you get the most traffic from search engines, but how can you create content that is so specific and helpful to a very narrow niche that it influences and drives actual conversions because of its hyper-personalization.

If you want to learn more about this stuff, I have a ton of free content on my blog and YouTube channel.

3. Marketers become internal influencers

In 2025, we saw a huge trend of businesses using contracted content creators for their ads and organic social content. It was a huge wave of UGC initiatives and creators.

While I do believe this will continue on well into 2026, I am seeing the emergence of companies leveraging their existing employees to become these influencers.

Companies like Clay and Ahrefs both have a ton of internal employees that are active on social media, posting top of funnel content that helps spread their company brand. And this actually helps in two ways:

1. It cuts down cost of needing to hire external influencers
2. The messaging is stronger because it comes from somebody who actually works at the company and can explain the product well

This means that marketing and content creation sort of become the same thing. But the marketers that can do it the best are the ones that get really good at understanding product marketing.

Because at the end of the day, the best marketers deeply understand who they're trying to speak to, what their problems are, and how their product solves that problem better than the other alternatives out there.

The better you are at communicating that and being able to create content that is engaging and can convey that narrative, the better you'll be at being an internal marketer that becomes highly valued.

If you become the face of a product area within your company, it's how you're going to become defensible in your career. Because you can always point to the value that you're providing and companies will want to keep you around for longer, which could also lead to great promotions down the line.

4. AI video ads keep getting better

In 2025, we saw the launch of OpenAI's Sora. Besides all the funny videos of Jake Paul doing crazy stuff, we saw amazing use cases of it being used in ads.

And with all the other models for generative AI getting better, big companies are now experimenting with these types of ads. One being the famous Coca-Cola ad that was created with AI.

So one of the biggest marketing trends in 2026 is the use of generative AI. And while that sounds pretty obvious at the trajectory that we're going at currently, what matters most is how well you're able to guide these tools based off of a story and narrative that you create.

This feeds back into the first trend where marketers are becoming more like product managers. You need to think like a creator and have strong taste (something we'll dive into in Trend 6) in order to make GenAI actually work.

5. Network effects become a marketing MOAT

Everything is becoming a commodity. Vibe coding, vibe marketing, vibes everywhere. If everyone's shipping a bunch of the same products and everyone is posting daily online to help grow those products, who actually wins?

What is the actual MOAT?

In 2026, one of the biggest trends I'm seeing is that companies are embedding distribution into their products. Again, this goes back to the first trend on this list, which I think is the most important one. Marketers will have a seat at the table of product development.

And the way companies are going to stand out from the competitors is going to be how they create growth loops within their products.

Facebook grew really fast in the early days because of its friends feature. It created a network effect where people wanted to see what their friends were up to and they wanted to have a lot of friends so they would look cool. This meant more people signing up to Facebook and more people adding each other as friends.

This network effect causes more people to use the platform. And the more people use it, the better it gets. And the better it gets the stronger it stands against its competitors. This is how Facebook eventually surpassed Myspace.

Using a different example, look at n8n, a popular automation tool that has grown like crazy. There's a huge community of people building workflows and templates. The more these people create these templates, the more people discover them and use them on the platform.

And the bigger the library of community templates gets, the more useful n8n gets as a product.

The core idea here is that your customers become your greatest marketers. The more customers you have, the more those people help spread the word and drive more customers. It creates a growth loop where the output can be fed as an input and create a giant snowball effect.

6. Design taste becomes the #1 marketing skill

In 2026, design will become the number one marketing skill. And by design, I don't just mean a beautiful looking website. Even though people do judge a book by its cover, unfortunately.

When I say design, I mean being able to tell the difference between when something is delightful and simple to understand, compared to when something is confusing and doesn't feel good to interact with.

Mark Schaefer, the author of Audacious, likes to refer to this using the word "awe."

Knowing how to create awe in your marketing efforts is how you stand out in a world where AI slop is everywhere and the dead internet theory hasn't been more apparent.

And to me, this is really about how you design things. Yes, the way a website looks is important and that does fit into this trend. But also how you design a prototype (think back to trend 1), how you design the structure of a blog article, how you design a script for an Instagram Reel or TikTok video. You get the point.

Get obsessed with design. Both form and function. Everyone is using vibe coding tools to build websites. Everyone is using ChatGPT to generate content.

If you want to win, you need to zig when others zag. Or zag when others zig, whatever that term is.

As Apple famously once said, "think different." And today it's even more important.

Think different about how you approach marketing strategy. Think different about how you craft customer experiences.

Of course, these are easier said than done. I'm fully aware of that. But the idea is that your competitive advantage as a marketer is in your taste. It's in how you think about the design of things, whether it's a logo, a content strategy, or a customer journey.

Be methodical in your thinking and actually care about your people. And design things in a way that allows you to make everyone feel like somebody.

7. Human-first media become top ad real estate

People buy things from people they trust, not from businesses. How many times have we heard some variation of that?

A lot.

And it's true. People tend to value the opinions of those that they care about. From employees becoming internal content creators to businesses buying media companies, the big digital marketing trend we're seeing is that media companies are becoming more valuable.

But not just faceless media companies. Human-first media businesses.

I think the business marketing world is finally catching up to the YouTube content creator world that has existed for almost two decades.

And if you're somebody who is passionate about a particular industry, now is the best time to start a side project along your full-time job where you build a media company around your specific knowledge.

Start a blog, start a YouTube channel, start a newsletter, create content on LinkedIn. I know some people will roll their eyes thinking that and believe that they don't want to be an influencer. But if you actually have something of value to teach and express, you'd be surprised how low the competition is.

Today, my blog is one of the biggest marketing blogs out there (at least that gets SEO traffic). It's in one of the most competitive spaces, and had I believed that I had no chance against the competition, I would not be where I'm at today.

Over the past couple years, this blog has grown to well over 100,000 readers per month. And through that, I probably get about 8 to 10 sponsorship inquiries per day. Some of them have been from huge companies that every single marketer would know about.

And all of this happened because I decided to start creating content around the things that I loved.

But through this, I realized that there's been a huge marketing trend in businesses trying to identify people who are building these media businesses. And they see it as an opportunity to get their brand in front of a highly engaged audience.

That creator has already built trust, and companies see it as an opportunity for new brand awareness. I've seen this happen on Substack, YouTube, and even bloggers that will charge companies a retainer to mention them in their "best of" roundup articles.

Some companies have even gone out and acquired these businesses. HubSpot acquired The Hustle (newsletter), Semrush acquired Backlinko and Third Door Media, Zapier acquired MakerPad, and I can go on and on.

So if you're a marketer, add these media businesses to one of your marketing channels. And if you're a marketer wanting to create a new income stream for yourself, build one of these.

2026 is the year of the marketer

I know I just threw a lot at you. And I know some of this might sound overwhelming or even a little out there.

But here's what I'm seeing as I talk to CMOs, marketing leaders, and people working real jobs in B2B marketing every single day. The playbook is slowly changing to human.

The days of optimizing for algorithms and running the same marketing campaigns over and over are done. Artificial intelligence and AI agents are changing everything about how we approach content marketing, customer engagement, and even how we measure our metrics.

We're moving into a world where AI-driven tools and chatbots are becoming the norm. Where it’s easier than every to make real-time adjustments to your marketing strategy with the help AI.

This means, in order to stand out, you need to do things others aren’t. For the first time, human centered content is not common. Can you believe it?! This means your marketing stands out by beautifully designed user experiences, video content that gives people chills, written content that shows you have your audiences’ best interests at heart.

And instead of using AI to generate marketing materials, we should be using it to prototype and have a seat at the product development table. 

This is the most exciting time to be in marketing.

Because while everyone else is freaking out about AI marketing taking their jobs, the smart marketers are learning how to use these tools to become more valuable. They're learning how to prototype products. They're building their own media businesses. They're getting really good at design and taste.

So yeah, 2026 is a wild year to be a marketer. But it’s also the best year so far.

If you focus on the marketing trends I just laid out, you're going to be way ahead of most marketers out there.

Now go build something the world needs.