AI Search
Don’t let LLMs summarize your journalism. Launch your own AI answer experience with DeeperDive.
Industry Trends
By Holly Landis 10 Minutes read
Marketing as a small business in 2026 looks very different to how it used to. Rising advertising costs, increased competition for attention, and the rapid shift toward AI-driven discovery mean small businesses must be more intentional about where and how they show up online.
Whether you’re running marketing solo or as part of a small team, staying competitive in 2026 isn’t about being everywhere at once: It’s about understanding how customers discover, research, and decide which brands to purchase from, and building marketing strategies that support that journey.
Local SEO remains foundational in 2026, but it’s evolved into something broader: local discovery across search engines, maps, social platforms, and AI-generated answers. Consumers are increasingly searching for “near me” businesses while browsing on their mobile devices, and search engines are increasingly favoring businesses with strong, local relevance. 32% of Americans look up information about local businesses online at least once a day, so it’s vital that your business is discoverable by those users.
An important change here, though, is that many of these searches now result in no-click actions from users, with search engine AI overviews often meaning that browsers don’t have to visit a website at all to find the information they’re looking for.
This makes the basics even more important. Start with accurate NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) listings online, especially on your Google Business Profile. Optimizing your website for localized keywords that include your city or town, or creating location-specific landing pages, can be helpful in driving organic traffic to your business online. Using structured data markup on your site can also help your business to appear in local search results pages and maps.
This information doesn’t only impact rankings in search results, but also shapes how AI tools summarize and recommend local businesses. Local website optimization still plays a vital role in this, too, as location-specific landing pages and localized keywords help reinforce geographic relevance.
For businesses using digital advertising, hyperlocal targeting can go a step further with ads being served to specific neighborhoods via geofencing. Combining this approach with intent-based targeting can help you serve ads to customers who are ready to convert in your target locations. This is an especially strong strategy to use if you’re running a brick and mortar business.
Don’t forget about reviews, too: Recent reports suggest that over 83% of customers use Google to search for local business reviews, per Bright Local’s 2025 Local Consumer Survey. Responding to any reviews that come in, regardless of where, is an important way to build trust with both search engines and customers. Reviews are also an important way for AI tools to better understand your business and produce recommendations based on what others are saying about your business online.
Other key stats from the same survey:
Outside of managing your own website with an effective SEO strategy, social media remains one of the best small business marketing avenues in 2026, but it’s important to remember that not every platform will offer the same kind of return.
For most small to medium businesses, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook continue to provide the best return on investment (ROI), particularly when your content is tailored to each audience. The most cost-effective way to produce content for these platforms as a small business is repurposing where possible. For instance, turning product ads into reels or a carousel ad on Facebook or Instagram means that you can maximize the shelf-life of your creative.
Short-form content still performs well in 2026, with most social media platforms prioritizing quick, engaging clips that can entertain or inform your audience. Livestreams also offer you the opportunity to connect with and build your community, with real-time interaction that increases trust with new and potential customers. Alongside this, however, you should also provide educational and explanatory content, as we begin to see a return to longform video and written content through platforms like YouTube and Substack.
User-generated content (UGC) is also a powerful tool for small businesses. Encourage customers to tag your business in their content or share their genuine reviews of your products or services. Resharing this content can also naturally integrate into your existing content calendar, helping you stay visible and relevant across social platforms. UGC is also performing well when incorporated into paid campaigns, reinforcing credibility during the customer consideration phase.
Not only that, but this approach fosters community for long-term success in a way that chasing virality doesn’t. Directly engaging with your customers through responding to comments and sharing customer posts increases engagement and sustained growth.
Even for those working on a limited budget, social media can be very effective, both paid and organic. Users in the middle of the sales funnel, with awareness of your brand but not quite at a purchase decision, are often the best group to target with paid social ads. Many small businesses can see an average of ROI of around $5 for every dollar spent on social advertising.
Social media marketing stats you should know in 2026:
Email marketing has stood the test of time as one of the most powerful tools in small business marketing. With direct access to your audience, there are no algorithms to worry about, but you have to get it right to be effective. In 2026, that means personalization and segmentation with a broader owned-audience strategy.
With over half of consumers saying that marketing emails impact their purchase decisions, tailoring your email content to customer behavior and preferences can make a significant impact. You can speak to your customers directly by breaking them into relevant groups like past purchasers, first-time site visitors, or abandoned cart users to see better open rates, improved click-through rates, and more conversions. Using smart automation tools can support this even further, without needing a large marketing team manually programming it all.
Messaging is still the most important part of any successful email marketing campaign, whether you’re using automation or not. Educational content, seasonal offers, and new product announcements should all be shared with a personal feeling and provide real value to your customers. Including first names, location information, or purchase history insights can make these emails feel highly tailored to the individual recipient. No matter what type of content you create, it should always be value-driven to help maintain engagement and build long-term customer relationships.
Think about how you can organically grow your email marketing list. Discounts for first-time signups are a great strategy for product-based businesses, along with giveaways. Embedding sign-up forms throughout your site is also useful for capturing this data and starting a lead nurturing process that targets your users directly in their inbox.
2026 email marketing statistics you should know:
Content in any form continues to be a vital part of all effective digital marketing strategies in 2026, for businesses big and small, when it comes to attracting, educating, and converting customers. Success, though, depends now on quality, structure, and repurposing rather than simply volume of content alone. This is especially important when it comes to both AI-overviews in search results and AI-generated answers within tools such as ChatGPT. How-to guides, behind-the-scenes views, and customer stories are still some of the most successful pieces of content that resonate with both new and existing customers.
Creating without a large budget, though, is still a challenge for many small businesses. Planning and repurposing existing content can help combat some of these issues: For instance, a blog post could become a video script, while an ad could be turned into an organic social post or an email callout. AI-driven copy and image generators are now some of the most powerful tools for helping businesses repurpose this content and streamline the whole process. In 2025, 67% of small businesses were using AI tools for their content marketing, and that number will only continue to grow this year.
When it comes to sharing your newly-created content, both owned and paid channels can be effective. Social channels like Instagram and TikTok are ideal for short-form visual content, while written content is best on owned platforms like your website in the form of blogs and newsletters. Not only does this provide a home for your written content, but you can also benefit from SEO growth over time.
Discoverability is crucial for a successful SEO strategy, both in traditional search results and AI tools, and content is a critical part of supporting this. Even low-budget content should be optimized for both users and search engines, with focused keyword research, optimized titles and descriptions, image alt text, and internal linking. Alongside any local SEO you may be including, these basic SEO steps are essential for giving your content the best chance of being found and ranked in search engine results pages (SERPs).
But, remember the most important factor — at the heart of any good business content, you should be telling the story of your why, what, and how. People want to connect with people, not a faceless business, so every piece of content should be tied back to your brand’s mission and vision, along with providing real-life stories of your customers and how your products or services help them solve a specific problem.
Insights from the Content Marketing Institute’s 2025 research shows that:
Time is often one of the biggest barriers to entry when it comes to small business digital marketing, but using the right tools to support your goals means you’ll get back some of that time, while also exploring new avenues for growth online.
From social media schedulers to AI writing assistants and drag-and-drop landing page builders, there are endless tools out there to help you and your team move quickly and efficiently. Automating repetitive tasks like sending customer emails, advertising optimization and budget management, reporting, or even running A/B tests on your ad creative can all free up time for your team to focus more on the big picture strategy. Automation in 2026 is no longer optional, but an essential tool for saving time, improving efficiency, and making smarter marketing decisions.
AI tools are revolutionizing small business marketing and can give you a competitive edge that was previously only available to larger enterprises. CRM systems to consolidate customer data, track behavior, and manage outreach can be leveraged alongside AI tools to better target your customers and personalize every interaction they have with your business.
Analyzing performance has also become easier. Real-time dashboards that integrate data from various sources like your ads, website data, email, and social media channels mean that you can make fast, data-informed decisions that impact your bottom line. With the right performance marketing metrics, small businesses can finally move beyond last-click attribution and focus more on assisted conversion and engagement quality, reflecting how your customers actually move through the sales funnel.
Key stats around using the right tools that you should know:
Small business marketing in 2026 is all about working smarter, not harder. Local SEO, combined with focused content marketing and social media marketing strategies, can capture the attention of local, high-intent customers while building long-term relationships. Email marketing remains one of the most cost effective methods of reaching middle-of-the-funnel prospects as a small business. Incorporating AI tools into the mix can offer you a strategic advantage that many of your competitors are not yet experiencing.
Local SEO and email, along with social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, are the most effective digital marketing channels for small businesses in 2026. Additionally, longform channels like YouTube are also starting to see a resurgence.
A typical small business will spend, on average, 7-10% of their revenue on marketing every year.
Businesses who try to capture traffic from every platform often end up spreading themselves too thin. Instead, focused attention should be paid to a handful of channels. Neglecting basic SEO on your website and not paying attention to mobile optimization are also big issues that many small businesses overlook.
Authentic storytelling and niche targeting are the best ways to compete against larger businesses online. Remember, people buy from people — one of the biggest advantages of being a small business is the personal attention you can pay your customers in a way that a large enterprise struggles to replicate.
Conversion rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), return on ad spend (ROAS), email open and clicks, and engagement rates are some of the most critical metrics to track.
Related Articles
Performance Marketing
For performance marketers, the search mindset has always been the gold standard: reaching users exactly …
By Stas Slota 5 Minutes read
Creative
Today’s digital marketers must battle for a prospect’s attention, which is won or lost in …
By Jodi Ireland 19 Minutes read
Reporting & Analytics
Today’s consumers take complex journeys across multiple channels, with limited exposure to any one particular …
By Gosia Dabrowska 6 Minutes read
Create your first campaign with Realize
