I don't post much. One of the joys of being on sabbatical is that I don't have to. Yet.
I get asked how to "do marketing" in 2026 often enough that I'd rather write it down once.
This is what I'd do to grow in 2026 → 2027 (from a marketer's perspective)
- •Build a brand that people mention unprompted. It's the only channel that compounds.
- •Talk to your customers, and I mean actual calls, ten or twenty of them, not a survey. Most marketing advice is a substitute for knowing what your customers would tell you if you asked.
- •Growth is easier when people stay. Call it churn or call it renewals depending on what you sell, but it's the same problem. Make sure your customers know what you are shipping / building / how it helps them.
- •Be everywhere on social, especially LinkedIn / Reddit / Bluesky / Threads and/or X. Your founders and execs most of all. Post what you're building, say what you actually think, jump into whatever people are arguing about that week. You want to seem like someone who's always online, even if you're not.
- •Eventually get your employees posting too. Don't just have them retweet / reshare.
- •Send email. Start a Substack, go build an onboarding sequence, all of it. People keep saying email is dead and it keeps not being dead. Nobody wants your cold outbound though.
- •Take advantage of the networks of influencers, ambassadors and affiliates. You'll probably get more return here than running boring display ads (but look at all those impressions! /s)
- •Get inside the tools your customers already use. Integrations, partnerships, marketplace listings. It's someone else's distribution and it's usually free.
- •Give your users a place to talk to each other. A Slack, a Discord, a group that meets. Slow to start but then very hard for a competitor to copy.
- •Make videos worth watching (YouTube not a gated video on your site!). Podcasts don't need to be real. Use clippers to seed to TikTok/Instagram/YouTube shorts/Linkedin video.
- •In the right markets and with the right timing offline activities like billboards can get people talking online.
- •Once you know which message works and where, put money behind it. Not before.
- •Do SEO. But also make sure you show up when someone asks whatever AI search they are using, because that's where a lot of searching happens now. A good SEO strategy will help you with AI search optimization.
→ The marketing team I'd build today (to do that playbook)