Your business has its doors open, you’ve got a website up and running, and you’re ready to get to work. That’s all it takes to be a successful business owner in 2026, right? Not quite. You need people to know you’re there as well – even in a hyperconnected, digital world where everyone can be discovered.
That’s where your marketing focus comes in. The cost can be heavy, with small businesses spending up to 20% of their total revenue on marketing year by year. But when you don’t invest in your marketing, your business can feel like it exists in a vacuum.
So it’s key to strike a balance between this cost and marketing methods that feel like they’re actually worth your time, effort, and investment. And in 2026, these practices may just be more worth the cash than any other.
Social media is a landscape that’s noisy and fast. Content schedules tend to prioritize quantity over quality, and there’s a real issue of FOMO affecting both individual and business accounts. There’s so much to see, and also so much to miss.
But social media is a personal landscape. It’s the kind of place where both your closest friends and your favorite brands post in equal measure. That meshes these two sides of life together, and allows for a greater content scope.
As such, there’s more room for creativity on social media. There’s room for video content as well as static posts. Content can also be time-limited, in the case of stories. And it’s much easier to both find and share user generated content from your customer base.
Plus, social media is a great place to repost the content you’ve made elsewhere. You can recycle and reuse well performing pieces from your blog or Youtube channel, allowing you to engage a whole new audience at a very low cost.
SEO is always going to be worth the investment, thanks to its long term success model that means you build up bit by bit.
However, in the current search engine landscape that prioritizes AI overviews, as well as many ChatGPT users directly asking for recommendations on where to find the product they’re looking for, link building is the number one SEO practice to invest in this year.
Why? Because link building builds authority. A strong digital PR campaign will have you front and center, where you’re mentioned time and time again on high traffic pages. And when you’re positioned as this expert in multiple places, you’re hard to ignore.
That’ll get search engines noticing your website, and all due to your expertise – no one would have linked to you otherwise.
When you invest in your marketing, you want some guarantee that you’re going to make a good return. And in 2026, it’s easier than ever to waste your marketing budget chasing traffic down channels that don’t work. Instead, focus on where your customers are, and what they want to see.
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