2026 Marketing outlook: More leads, better leads, and less time wasted

What are you thinking about your business for 2026?

If I’m honest about what I’m thinking about this year, it isn’t “brand archetypes” or the latest trendy acronym. It’s leads. It’s pipeline. It’s whether the enquiries coming in are the kind you can actually turn into revenue, without your team spending half their week answering the wrong questions from the wrong people.

Because that’s the real pain for most business owners and directors. It’s not just the quantity of enquiries. It’s the quality. It’s whether the calls are coming from buyers, or from people who were never going to buy, but fancied an afternoon of price-shopping.

The search landscape is shifting in a way that’s easy to overcomplicate, but the practical impact is simple. Customers are still searching. They’re still comparing. They still want reassurance. The difference is that they’re increasingly being given answers before they click anywhere. As SEO.com puts it, “Google’s AI Overviews are reshaping how users search and ultimately click on search results.” SEO.com When the “first impression” of your business becomes a short summary, a map result, or an AI-generated answer, clarity starts to matter more than cleverness.

This is where people start hearing terms like AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation, and immediately feel like they need to hire someone in a hoodie to explain it. You don’t. Semrush defines AEO as “a set of marketing practices used to increase your brand’s visibility in AI-generated answers.” Semrush In normal language, it’s about making your business easier to understand, easier to trust, and easier to choose when someone asks a question and the search experience tries to answer it quickly.

Sunrise 2026 a new dawn a sun rising over the horizon

What is the biggest question for business owners this year?

Now, I want to bring this down to earth, because the question most CEOs and directors are really asking is: what actually moves the needle?

In 2025 we worked with a few substantial manufacturing businesses. Proper operations, serious capability, real sales cycles, and no appetite for marketing fluff. What we found wasn’t surprising, but it was a good reminder. Their websites weren’t necessarily “bad” they just weren’t clear. They described everything in internal language, the sort of wording that makes perfect sense inside the building, but doesn’t match how customers search or how customers decide.

So we took a straight-talking approach. We didn’t turn them into a different company. We simply made the offer easier to understand. We clarified who they served, what problems they solved, what buyers should expect, and what made them credible. We made the content more direct, and we structured it so that someone skimming it could still get the point in seconds.

At the same time, we aligned that clarity with the newer “AI search” reality. Not by doing anything gimmicky, but by making the site more answer-friendly. We tightened up the way key services were explained, we strengthened proof in the right places, and we made the journey from “interest” to “enquiry” feel obvious and low-friction.

The outcome was exactly what you’d hope for: not just more enquiries, but better ones. The sales conversations became sharper. Fewer time-wasters. More people who actually understood what the business did before picking up the phone, which meant the team spent more time quoting for real opportunities and less time educating strangers who were never a fit in the first place. That’s the bit many businesses miss. Marketing isn’t always about generating more noise; sometimes it’s about reducing waste.

This is also why the whole “AI SEO” conversation is worth paying attention to, without turning it into a science project. Semrush talks about Generative Engine Optimisation, GEO, as the practice of optimising content so it can appear in AI-powered search responses. Semrush You can read that and think it’s a new discipline. In practice, it comes back to the same principles that work in any economy: be clear, be credible, and make it easy for people to take the next step.

What’s changed is that those principles now need to work not only for humans, but for the systems helping humans make decisions. And these systems are not a tiny niche anymore. Semrush’s AI Overviews study describes analysing millions of keywords to understand how often AI Overviews appear and how this is shifting, which tells you this isn’t a passing experiment. Semrush Whether the percentages move up or down month to month, the direction of travel is clear: answer-led search is now part of the mainstream.

At this point, some people panic and assume they need a complicated strategy. Most don’t. If you want a simple way to think about it, ask yourself this: if a customer asked a basic question about what you do, could your website answer it quickly, plainly, and with proof? And could someone who knows nothing about your industry understand it without having to translate your jargon?

That’s where “humanistic” marketing actually lives. It’s not about being soft. It’s about being understood. People buy when they feel confident. Confidence comes from clarity, and clarity comes from saying things plainly.

There’s another part of the pipeline that’s unglamorous but massively important: follow-up. Even with improved visibility, most businesses leak revenue because leads aren’t handled consistently. Someone enquires, then waits. Or gets a reply that doesn’t answer the obvious questions. Or gets a reply two days later when they’ve already gone elsewhere. This is why simple email automation is so valuable. Not “spam sequences” just a professional, reassuring, timely response system that sets expectations and guides people forward.

When we pair clearer search visibility with better follow-up, you get a compounding effect. You attract better-fit prospects because your message is clearer. You convert more of them because your response is faster and more consistent. And you lift the overall quality of your pipeline because fewer people are wandering in by accident.

And yes, I’ll still defend leaflets when they’re done properly. Particularly for local and regional businesses, physical marketing can cut through simply because it isn’t fighting for attention on a screen. But the same rule applies: simplicity wins. If the message is clear, if the offer makes sense, and if the next step is obvious, it works. If it tries to say everything, it becomes expensive recycling.

So that’s the focus for 2026. Not marketing theatre. Not complicated tactics for the sake of sounding modern. Just clear positioning, modern search visibility that reflects how customers now discover suppliers, and systems that turn interest into action.

Because in the end, most business owners aren’t trying to “do marketing.” They’re trying to grow. They want more opportunities. They want better opportunities. And they want a pipeline they can trust.