Rev & Reach Episode 21 – 3 Marketing Predictions We’re Putting on the Record for 2026

00:08
Hello. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Rev & Reach. What we are talking about today is marketing predictions that we’re putting on the record for the 2026 new year. There are three things that we are seeing that we think will help marketers do better in 2026. These may seem to be obvious, but if you pay close attention and incorporate these into what you do in 2026, I guarantee you will see better results. One of the things that happens this time of year is everybody starts coming out with their marketing predictions—”You know, we’re going to see more of this, less of that…” I really don’t want to do that as much as I want to tell you what we’re already seeing, so that you can take advantage of the trends that are going to make a difference. And these three shifts, I’m pretty sure, will separate brands that grow from the brands that fade.

01:06
Prediction number one: authenticity becomes a differentiator in an AI-heavy world. How much AI slop are you seeing in your social feeds these days? As AI content floods our feeds on all the different channels, human signals are going to become even more important. So let’s talk about that. AI makes volume really easy, but it’s generic in most cases. Audiences are actually developing AI fatigue, so your audience is already tired of seeing AI slop out there in their feeds. Imperfect, specific human stories are going to outperform those polished generics every single time. So in your marketing, you want to use faces, voices, opinions, lived experiences, testimonials—but you want to record those on video or take photos that are really natural and authentic and use the real quotes. Don’t write testimonial quotes or quotes for your founders or your leadership team that sound like AI or sound like corporate speak. Don’t do that. Legit, authentic human connection and conversation are what’s going to sell in the new year.

02:27
And I’ll give you an example. We’ve had several different types of dental clients on our roster, and because of that, I get a ton of dental ads that are geographically targeted to me because I obviously have an interest in dentists. There was a time a few months ago where I was getting three ads from three different practices—and they were probably part of a Dental Group or something—three different practices with the same stock image, the same generic copy. And it was just not compelling in the least. Wasn’t their patient, wasn’t their person, was staged, wasn’t authentic. What we do with dentists is we serve up the real deal. We take pictures of patients. We get that little boy at the toy cart who’s getting the prize for behaving really well and having a great dental hygiene checkup. We get the dentist talking about why they’re passionate about Invisalign and how easy it makes it for them to help correct your bite or really enhance your smile. Those are the things that get people to click and say, “I want to go to this practice,” not generic stock images of a family grinning—and no one knows who they are—and it’s obvious that they’re not real. So more founder voices, more experts, more real employees, more real customers, less stock, fewer vague claims. Say less and mean more. Because another thing that we see with AI is people I know who are not writers—and that I know don’t speak in corporate speak or flowery language—and they’ll be on LinkedIn with a three-paragraph flowery post, and it’s just inauthentic and it’s kind of offensive—like, do you think we’re dumb, that we think that’s you? It’s not, and we know it. So it takes away your credibility when you are inauthentic because you’re relying too heavily on AI. So stop it. Don’t do it. AI is great for ideation, but authenticity rules, and that’s always where you should start: with the real deal. Bring in AI as a tool to help you with titles and maybe series and things like that, but not to create the content itself. It’s just not a good idea. AI is actually raising the floor of content quality and will completely expose anybody who doesn’t really have anything real to say. So keep that in mind. Put a pin in that one.

05:05
So our next prediction: creative will become the new competitive advantage. What I mean is platforms reward engagement. So if you’re creating generic content, it’s not going to work. And then you’ll come back to an agency like mine and say, “Well, we tried social media. It didn’t work.” You know, social does work, but you’ve got to work at it. You’ve got to put the time and effort into it to figure it out. The same tools, the same output, is not effective. Creativity, human interaction, human ideas, human ideation—that’s what really gets great creative to come, and it’s not always pretty, but I can guarantee, if it is effective, it’s clear, it’s a little surprising, and it’s relevant to the audience. It’s the most important thing. Boring brands will pay more for worse results, because we see a ton of really bad creative because somebody says, “Get that out on social.” Don’t ever do your social in a way that’s just “put something out there.” Be strategic—and strategic creative, even better. I have a client that we’ve already decided for next year, a series that we’re going to do that’s going to allow us to cover six different topics with three different posts each. We’ve got 18 posts with a really cool series slogan that we’re going to use next year. And it’ll allow us to be creative, you know, and we can use this campaign—we can have video, we can have carousels and all kinds of different things and put it up on YouTube, and it can be, you know, very YouTube-oriented. It’s important that you spend the time to plan out your creative so that you know it’s what your audience likes, and you know it’s something that they’re going to react to.

06:58
The other thing I will tell you, as far as creative, is strong hooks matter more than perfect funnels. If you can’t get the attention of your consumer right away, I would tell people one of the best ways to make sure that your marketing is clear is to be very brief and to the point; tell them what you want to tell them right away. Don’t bury your lead three sentences down, because you’ve already lost your consumer by then. Tell them what’s exciting immediately. And creative isn’t something that’s just nice to have anymore; it’s a lever. It’s what’s going to help your content perform. Does it stand out in the feed? Is it colorful and unique? Is it—You know, is there a person talking and they’re emotional? Is it, “Guess what? You’re never going to believe what we learned about that”? I mean, is it some kind of hook like that that makes people want to keep listening or keep reading? So creative is not a nice-to-have; it’s a performance lever. Pay attention. I’ll give you one more example before we move on to the next one. Met with a client, and we were talking about all of the different tools that they use to promote the content of one of their clients. The client is very tied in to making sure that they identify with their target audience. The client and the agency know how the audience uses the product. They come into the office, they sit down at their laptop or their computer desk, and they drink their coffee and they log in and they start their day. Well, they created creative for their social content that was like a computer and a cup of coffee, because that’s where they thought the audience would see themselves. Well, they’re not selling computers and they’re not selling coffee, and nowhere in their creative did it say exactly what they did. So you really have to look at your creative, pay close attention to it, and make sure it’s not just “here’s what my audience identifies with,” but here’s something my audience identifies with—it’s really cool or really interesting or really funny, or makes them want to learn more about us. So creative is really important this year.

09:14
Prediction number three: social media keeps splintering, and brands need to adapt with bots. I’ve been on social a lot. I spend my personal time there too. I’ve got lots of friends all over the place, and what I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of bots out there that will come onto a post, attack you or somebody else, and when you go look at who they are, it’s obviously not a real account. It turns off a lot of people, and people are actually kind of signing out—not being on social quite as often. Broken algorithms—algorithms these days are more likely to grab a hold of a post through a filter and say, “Oh, this promotes violence, so we didn’t let you post it. We took it down,” or, “this promotes violence and we shut down your account.” And it’s happening to people that aren’t promoting violence. I mean, we had it happen to a dental post. Dentistry is not violent; we were not saying anything violent, but one of the words we used was in their filter in a totally different context, and it grabbed that post and took it down. So it’s kind of making people angry. I know, as people get restricted on the Meta platforms, they may become more likely to go over to YouTube or to use TikTok or to pay more attention to LinkedIn. So feeds are becoming less personal and more targeted—so there’s a ton of promotion. So, believe it or not, some people are actually going back to the OG platforms like Tumblr. Tumblr is still out there; still got a lot of users. Pinterest is still out there, got a ton of users. They’re targeted to different aspects and different types of consumers, so engagement can be a little harder to read.

11:07
The other thing that’s happening is the platforms are shifting how they reward the content creators: how many likes, how many shares, that kind of thing do you need before you actually get some ROI on your content? And what that means, basically, is the one-size-fits-all strategies just do not work. It never works to take the same content and throw it up on seventeen different social platforms; it’s just not something that’s effective. Pick the social channels that you know your audience is more likely to engage with. If Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn are it for you, stay there. You don’t have to be on Snapchat and, you know, Tumblr and Pinterest and YouTube. Pick a couple of great, really engaging audience platforms that work for your target, and then also build owned audiences. And what that means is your mailing list. Any opportunity you have, take advantage of the ask of “Sign up for our monthly missives,” where you can find special offers and helpful information and news about our industry, or whatever it is that you’re doing that would help people be able to do their jobs better or help them engage with your product better. Get that email list going. If you have twenty-five people on your email list, awesome. You gotta start somewhere, so start your list—and that’s your own list. Those are your people. That’s a list that you can use to send emails out, as long as you’re not crazy and sending them two and three times a week. You can build an audience that’s really impactful for yourself and your brand. YouTube is another great place to build a community. Get some subscribers going, get in there with some really solid content, a lot of really good shorts. Before you know it, you’re going to see comments and your channel grows, and you get more shares and comments and engagement and things like that that you may not have been able to get on, let’s say, Facebook or, you know, Twitter—right? Or X, they call it X now, but we still call it Twitter. But it’s one of those things that you can’t chase every platform, and you really need to pay attention to the idea that you don’t own a lot of the social platforms.

13:32
You can get kicked off the platform, make a mistake and get cut off that channel forever. I’ve had it happen—not to me personally, but I watched a client go through it. She never got her 3,500 followers back, she never got access to all her photo albums that she had on Meta. She fought for months and months and just got no response at all. It was gone. Don’t let that happen to you. Make sure you’ve got an email list and a couple other places that you build strong communities, because that’s what’s going to keep you going if one of your platforms goes sideways. Focus on fewer channels, better content, and build deeper trust. That’s how you do it. You don’t just throw your content out there. You put your content up intentionally, strategically, and you look for ways to engage. And I’ll give you another example. We have a client that promotes to engineers, and in the last six months, we have started doing more really engineering-specific technical information, and it’s targeted to young engineers. We didn’t know really what was going to happen, but we started digging deeper into the technical instead of more generic posts that led them to the article, we started pulling those technical details into the content and then leading to the article. And what’s happened is we’ve gotten lots more comments, lots more engagement, lots more click throughs. Now if we weren’t getting those results, we’d stop doing that. We’d start doing something different. But since we’re seeing that they’re reacting to it, we’re going to keep doing that and keep doing more of it, and that’s going to help us become more memorable on LinkedIn. And that’s what it’s all about—is making sure that people look forward to seeing your content. They know what to expect. They can identify it when they see it, and that it’s human. It’s one of the most important things that you can do these days is be human.

15:32
So what should you do with these predictions? I’ve already told you some of it, but I would suggest you double down on that human voice. When you’re writing your content, read it out loud. Would I say this to someone if I met them on the street? If it’s corporate speak when you talk it out loud, it’s going to sound really awkward. Speak your content so you can determine whether it’s actually something you would say, and if you do find it something that you would normally say, I’m willing to bet it’s more authentic. Keep working on all the different social platforms and build your audience, but also make sure that you’ve got an email list going, because that’s one of your most important assets as a business, and 2026 favors clarity over chaos. So whatever you’re doing, be clear. Be clear, be brief, be engaging, be different, be unique, and most of all, be authentic. So that’s what I’ve got for you. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Rev & Reach today. We will be back in a few weeks, but if you are watching us on YouTube, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button, give me a like, ask a question. We’d love to hear from you. I’m also on LinkedIn as Lori Jo Vest. I’m an open networker there, would love to hear from you. So let me know that you listen to Rev & Reach and head on over to LinkedIn to connect with me. I’d love to hear your ideas on what kinds of content we can provide for you to help you get more ROI from your digital marketing efforts. So, signing off—Lori Jo Vest will be back again soon with more helpful information. Take care.