105: Marketing Success in 2026: Mastering the Ebb and the Flow (Office Hours)

Danny Gavin, Host: 00:05

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor. I’m your host, Danny Gavin, and together with industry leaders and marketing experts, we’ll explore the meeting point of mentorship and marketing. We’ll discover how these connections have affected careers, marketing strategies, and lives. Now get ready to get human. Welcome back to the Digital Marketing Mentor. 

Today we’re diving into three shifts that are already reshaping how companies grow. And by 2026, we’ll separate brands that scale profitably from those that keep spending more just to stand still. And I want to be very clear up front. These are not shiny objects, they’re not new tactics, they’re structural changes in how discovery happens, how trust is formed, and how performance is actually measured. 

We’re going to talk about why being referenced by AI matters more than ranking alone, why unpolished human communities are outperforming polished brand campaigns, and why paid media without a real CRM backbone is no longer performance marketing, it’s just paid traffic. This episode is about what’s changing and how companies need to adapt now so they’re not caught flat-footed heading into 2026. One quick expectation setter. If you’re looking for growth hacks, platform tricks, or tactics you can copy and paste tomorrow, this episode is not that. Instead, we’re zooming out to look at what’s changing underneath the platforms, why traditional metrics are becoming misleading, and how companies need to rethink what performance actually means. Because performance hasn’t disappeared. It’s just moved. And this is why so many teams feel frustrated. They’re doing more marketing, more spend, more channels, more content, but getting less impact. Not because marketing stopped working, but because they’re measuring the wrong things in the wrong places. 

Here’s the question I want you to sit with. Why do strategies that worked in 2023, 2024, or even 2025 feel weaker today, even with bigger budgets? The answer is simple, but uncomfortable. Performance has quietly moved upstream and downstream at the same time. Upstream, discovery and trust are happening before someone ever clicks a website. And downstream, ROI is decided after the form fill, not at it. Most teams are still measuring the middle like nothing changed. I’ve seen cases where budgets increased, lead volume didn’t, and cost per acquisition skyrocketed. 

On the surface, it looks like marketing is broken. But once PPC activity was tied back to CRM data, a different story emerged. We could finally see which leads actually turned into revenue, which keywords mattered, and where the real budget sweet spot was. Performance didn’t stop working. The dashboard stopped telling the truth. Okay, let’s start at the top of the funnel. Search is no longer just about ranking pages, it’s about being referenced. I call this AIO, AI optimization. Not optimizing prompts, not chasing tools, but optimizing your content, positioning, and structure so AI systems can clearly understand and confidently reference your brand. The shift looks like this. Instead of how do we drive traffic, it’s how do we become the source AI models site. AI tools don’t return lists of links, they return summaries. And decisions are being influenced before a site visit ever happens. So the difference now isn’t visibility versus invisibility. It’s visibility versus authority. If that’s the case, what happens to your funnel if the buyer never clicks but still forms an opinion? I’ve seen this firsthand. A company didn’t find us through Google at all. They asked an AI tool a question like, who actually understands this problem end to end? Instead of ads or rankings, the AI summarized a few sources and referenced us as the team that understood the full system, not just one tactic. They showed up already trusting us, not because they read everything, but because we were positioned as the source in the answer. That’s AIO, not gaming AI, but structuring your thinking so clearly that AI can’t misunderstand you. So what needs to change? Long content without clear answers? Nope. You want to have clear, direct responses. Pages that are written to rank, nah. Pages that are written to teach. And finally, content optimized for bots, no. Content optimized for comprehension. So here’s the test. If an AI had to summarize this page in three sentences, would it understand what you do and why you matter? So why does this matter? 

Because authority now compounds before demand is captured. If your brand isn’t present in AI-generated answers, you’re invisible at the exact moment trust is formed. Now let’s move to the middle of the funnel where trust is formed. AI-generated content is everywhere, which means people are craving the opposite. They want human, imperfect, real. That’s why microcommunities are outperforming mass broadcast marketing. We’re talking about Slack groups, Discord servers, Reddit threads, private forums. Where are your buyers actually forming opinions in ads or in conversations you don’t control? I hear this constantly. A brand says our ads aren’t converting like they used to. And almost casually, they mention prospects referencing a Slack group, a Discord server, a Reddit comparison thread. The buying decision was often made before the ad ever appeared. The ad didn’t persuade them. It just confirms something they already believed. So what needs to change? No longer are we having one-off influencer posts, but we need long-term microrelationships. Polished brand content? Nope. UGC that feels unscripted. And finally, selling to audiences? No. We need to co-create with them. The brands that win here aren’t louder. They’re more present. So why does this matter? Because trust earned sideways leads to higher intent leads, shorter sales cycles, and lower acquisition costs. This kind of ROI compounds, it doesn’t spike and disappear. 

Now let’s get to the bottom of the funnel, where most performance strategies quietly fall apart. By 2026, performance isn’t defined by leads, it’s defined by outcomes. Let me show you how this breaks down in the real world. Two campaigns can generate the same cost per lead. On paper, they look identical, but once paid media is connected to a CRM, the truth shows up. In one case, we launched a LinkedIn document ad. On platform, they looked slower. Fewer leads, a higher cost per lead. But in the CRM, those leads were consistently high quality. Then we tested in mail. On LinkedIn, it looked amazing. It was a much higher volume, much lower cost per lead, but in the CRM, most of those leads were spam or low quality. So instead of scaling what looked better, we kept spend on what actually drove the pipeline. Without CRM data, we would have optimized towards the wrong thing. Here’s another example. We had a client where leads scheduled through a third-party tool, but UTM data was breaking after the click because of URL fragments. The ads were working, but attribution wasn’t. Once we fixed how campaign data flowed through the system, suddenly we could see which campaigns drove real appointments, which ads survived the full journey, and which ones just looked good on the surface. Now, that’s not advanced marketing. 

That’s making performance visible. And finally, I’ve seen cases where increasing budget didn’t increase leads, it just increased costs. But once revenue was tied back to PPC leads in the CRM, we could identify which keywords actually produced revenue, find the real budget sweet spot, and dominate impression share where it mattered. That’s optimization based on outcomes, not volume. This is why I always say CRMs aren’t about attribution, they’re actually about decision clarity. When you can see what happens after the click, optimization stops being emotional, it becomes obvious. 

So step back and you’ll see the full system. Someone hears about you in a community, they validate it with AI, they click on an ad, not to learn, but to act. So if your systems aren’t connected end to end, marketing looks broken. When really the measurement is. If you’re looking toward 2026 and asking, where do we start? Fix post-click tracking and CRM visibility. Audit where trust is actually formed. And adopt this mindset. 

Performance is a system, not a channel. 

When these systems are connected, performance becomes manageable, not stressful. Marketing isn’t changing in how big it gets, it’s changing in how it works. The companies that win in 2026 will be discoverable in AI-driven answers, trusted through real human communities, and measured by what happens after the click. They’ll know what’s working, why it’s working, and where to double down. That’s what real performance looks like next. Thanks for joining me on the Digital Marketing Mentor. If this helped, subscribe and I’ll see you next time. Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast. Be sure to check us out online at thedmentor.com and at the DM Mentor on Instagram. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts for more Marketing Mentor magic. See you next time.