Marketing in the Age of AI

In this episode of Torch Talk, Lindsey Chupp takes a look at the marketing trends shaping 2026 and what business owners need to understand to stay competitive in a rapidly changing landscape.

Lindsey breaks down the real-world changes businesses are already experiencing, from AI-powered search and content creation to shifting social media algorithms and evolving consumer behavior. Rather than focusing on predictions alone, the conversation explores what Fierce Creative Solutions is seeing firsthand through client campaigns, website performance, advertising, and content strategy.

The episode also examines how businesses can adapt their marketing strategies, strengthen their brands, and create more meaningful connections with customers as technology continues to reshape the industry.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• How AI is changing marketing and search

• Why brand voice matters more than ever

• The rise of creator-led and personal brand content

• What’s working on social media in 2026

• Why omnichannel marketing is becoming essential

• The importance of first-party data and CRM systems

• How businesses can prepare for future marketing shifts

• Why trust and branding are becoming competitive advantages

This episode offers a practical look at where marketing is headed and how businesses can position themselves for success in 2027 and beyond.

Transcript

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It seems very tempting to use AI to create your content, but it all looks the same. Welcome back to Torch Talk, the show where we spotlight bold leaders, growing businesses, and communities with grit and purpose. Today's guest is me. I wanted to dive into some of the 2026 marketing updates and discuss what we see happening with our clients in real time. So marketing right now feels a little bit like the Wild Wild West. There is a lot changing really quickly. Sometimes so quickly it feels like we can't stay up to date with all of the updates at one time. Like it just feels a little overwhelming if I'm being totally honest. We could dive into how AI is impacting each individual service that we have, and it would really take us down a rabbit trail of what we think is going to happen, what we see happening right now. What I want to do is go ahead and just highlight some of the key pieces that we see impacting direct marketing right now, what we see happening with our clients, with our services in real time. So, key topic first, AI. AI is obviously impacting marketing. It is something people cannot stop talking about. Everybody says AI is going to take our jobs. Not happening yet. However, it is impacting and changing the way that we do our jobs, some for the good and some not for the good. One of the things that we see happening right now is AI is becoming the operating system of marketing. And what does that actually mean? So that means, for example, running Google ads and Facebook ads instead of, you know, just going in and running and setting up our campaigns the way we normally have. AI is built into the Google and Facebook platforms and it's changing the way that the ads are actually served. Number one, to the audience. So the platforms are using AI to match their audiences. It's also using the AI to create different content types, mixing up the visuals, the wording. We actually had for one of our clients, uh, we weren't even running a paid ad, but it it took a piece of content that we had served and created a different version of it with a misspelling. So thank you, Facebook, for doing that for us. But we didn't even realize that Facebook was doing that until the client actually screenshot, you know, the misspelling, thought that we had made an error, and we went in to correct it and realized this was something that the AI had done on its own. So changing the way that we are serving ads, changing the way that uh we are doing organic social media as well, because there's just a natural integration of the AI. We are also seeing and have been talking about for a very long time the change of optimizing content for AI search. So we began this conversation with our clients in probably 2024. Definitely it was on our radar with our SEO strategies in all of 2025, and it is continuing to be on the radar moving forward, probably even more relevant. We're actually seeing it come to life now, where we can measure your AI overviews, how often are you showing up in AI search, and what type of content are we writing for websites and for social media so that you, our clients, are showing up in all of the search platforms. So Google's still out there. We still want to optimize content for Google as well, but we definitely see the impact of AI coming into search, and the optimization for that is on the radar. In our local market, what I am hearing from our clients who are coming to us now is they're having a hard time finding a resource or a marketing agency partner that is ahead of them and really understands what is coming down the pipe with the SEO AI optimization strategies. So if you're working with somebody who isn't, who wasn't talking to you about this a year ago, that's definitely something I would be paying attention to. If you have not already gone through and had your website audited for how well it's showing up on the AI search engines, then I think that you need to have that looked at right away and be asking your marketing partner about that, your marketing agency about that, your SEO agency. And if if they don't give you a good answer, I'd be looking for another solution. Another way that AI is impacting marketing just overall is that your brand voice is really becoming a signal for AI platforms. And where this is really critical is most of the clients that we talk to don't even know what their brand voice is. Most of the time, they love what they do. They're a really good roofer, they're really great at flooring, they're really good at installing windows. What does that mean from for their brand voice? They don't really understand what that what that means in real life. And what that's a conversation we've always had. It's, you know, when we're creating social media, when we're writing content for a website, we want to pay attention to what the brand voice is. But really defining who you want to be as a company and how you're gonna differentiate yourselves from your competitors is even more important because AI is going to scan your website and all of your social media content. It's picking up your tone, it's picking up your ability to be authoritative on the thing that you do. And if you don't, it's a way to differentiate yourself basically in a very competitive environment. AI is impacting our marketing on the trust and branding side as well. Social media platforms are being flooded right now with AI generated content, and that is everything from the marketing flyers that you can see to AI generated videos. I know personally I love TikTok, and there's AI generated product videos, and I just scroll right past them, they drive me nuts. I want to see a real person creating content whenever I'm consuming online. And I think that this is an area where it seems very tempting to use AI to create your content, but it all looks the same. So whether I'm making, I mean, I can tell you what an AI flyer looks like right away because the styles are so similar no matter what you're promoting. It's again, we're marketing is competitive, it's hard to capture people's attention. You it's tempting to use AI AI because you can create so much volume. However, if you want to stand out, if you want to look authentic, people want to connect more with people. So it is crucial to create that content individually, custom, whatever you want to call that. That's a shift that we're going to see happening over the next year. I would say the increase of AI generated content is going to create an opportunity for the people who are willing to invest in the custom created content and help your brand stand out. We've also seen a rise in creator-led marketing and personal brand platforms. It is really important for entrepreneurs, visionaries, leaders of companies to get out from just doing the work in the office and get in front of the camera. We we see an impact of that personal connection with people on social media, on the website. They want to understand who your company is. Like, for example, that it I we understand that it creates a very uh, you know, when you're already struggling to do social media for your company on your own to say that you need a personal brand channel can just seem a little bit overwhelming. There are ways to integrate it so that they're together. Um, but people want to connect with people, they want to understand the owner of the company, why they should buy from them, connecting with a person. And there's usually nobody better to speak on what you do as a company than the owner, the leader, the visionary, the person who's driving the strategy in the first place. So if you're back there thinking you're seeing other personal brands out there, you're wondering why they're doing it, and you're just wondering about like maybe I should do that too. I would encourage you to explore that as a strategy. Uh let me know if you have questions. We are learning from experience what works, what doesn't work, testing it, and just putting it out there so we can see how how to recommend this as a strategy for our clients as well, going definitely going into 2027. On that note, short form content continues to be a huge driver of success for our clients. So when it comes to creating content in 2026, short form has really risen to be the number one plat or the number one content format, and we don't see that going anywhere. What we do see happening is you know, Instagram and Facebook have really changed over the last year, year and a half to be competitive with TikTok, with YouTube Shorts, and Instagram is now in 2026 testing some new content formats. So Instagram's actually prioritizing carousels and video carousels over reels. And I think that they're doing that in a way so that they can differentiate the platform, create a different user experience. Um, and so that what that is looking like for us on a strategy end with clients is we are creating custom content for each individual platform and really deciding because people don't have unlimited budgets. So if you know you want if you need to be on LinkedIn, you need to be on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. Instead of creating 20 pieces of content and pushing it out to all of the platforms, maybe we'll create the right amount of content for each one of the platforms in the right content format as well. So maybe if we create a video for TikTok, we can take the video content and turn it into a carousel for Instagram. So it's not a whole new idea, but it is a different content format style so that it can still perform on the individual platform the way that it should. On the strategy and consumer experience side of marketing, some of the things that should be on the radar for service-based businesses is conversational AI. It is impacting the e-commerce side right now. What this looks like is if you shop a lot online, then you will know on the Amazon Prime app, there is a little roofish, you can use this to shop. A lot of the huge shopping platforms are making it easier for you to find products, to have a conversation about what you're looking for. You can just describe the product. How we see this coming later for our service-based businesses on the lead generation side is creating a more interactive website. So we don't have anybody who's willing to invest or has done, you know, built this into their strategy yet, but we can see in 2027 and really the years beyond building out a way for somebody who is looking for a service for a service like a home service product. Let's say I'm in the market for a new roof, creating an interactive AI integration so that I can describe my house, for example, or say the type of roof that I'm looking for, give it the information that I have, have it ask questions back so that we can, you know, the consumer could be looking for average price or what type of products would be the best for the type of roof that I have. Creating a conversation that a salesperson might naturally have with that client up front. It's softening them, it's getting them ready for that first sales meeting that you would be having. So, where it is impacting right now on the e-commerce side, we see this coming over the next year for our service-based businesses. Another area of marketing strategy that is being impacted is that attention is fragmented and discovery is everywhere. We have been saying for a long time, from day one of Fierce Creative Solutions, we have said that you need an omnichannel marketing strategy. We've always recommended that you be on multiple social media platforms, that you have a website, that you run ads, and that you do branding in real life as well. This is even more important now than ever. We have a lot of clients, due to budgeting reasons, choose to only be on a couple of platforms or choose to only do a little bit because that's just where their budget is at. And it, you know, it's really hard to get people's attention. Uh, consumers have different preferred platforms and even different ways to interact. So I might follow the same customer or the same business on TikTok as I do on Facebook and on Instagram versus watching a commercial on TV, and I expect to have a different experience depending on the platform that I'm on. So I you you know, we have like two seconds to catch somebody's attention. We look at scrolling behaviors on people on our websites. We actually have recordings and heat maps and things like that so we can measure how people actually act on websites. You know, if somebody has spent a minute and a half on a website, that's a feels like a long time now. That doesn't sound like a long time, but it is a long time. So really understanding how to maximize your marketing budget, maximize the strategy so you can be in as many places and show up as much as possible, catching people's attention quickly and catching their attention in a different way, depending on the platform, the content format. These are things that need to be built into the strategy. So it's not just how much money should I spend and where should I spend it, it's how does it look and what you know what content format is the best for my my marketing strategy now as well. Looking into the future, some industry shifts that we are seeing are that trust, brand, and purpose are going to become economic assets. So brand equity will be protecting you against misinformation. It's going to protect you by ensuring that your marketing strategy is solid, that you have a great print brand presence out there. Um, again, comparing your brand, the personalization compared to AI-generated content. It is more important to lean into your branding, who you are, why you are doing what you do, and how you differentiate yourself more than ever. This is going to be a lot of the conversations that we have for the rest of this year, so we can set our clients up for success in 2027. The more marketing organizations as a whole are being rebuilt. So obviously, uh team structures, roles, these are all changing roles and responsibilities based off the integration of building AI into our current the way that we do our jobs. So for SEO, looking at how AI is impacting, writing content, implementing content into the website, and then how it's ranking on AI. It's really uh a kind of a life cycle there with because we're utilizing AI both for the creation, but we're also utilizing AI to rank on the AI. And probably a really big one is creating a community-first platform, creating, you know, it used to be a big thing that you had a Facebook page, that was it, and you wanted to have as many followers on there. And so if you had 25,000, 50,000 followers, that was a big Facebook page, and you worked really, really hard to get everybody on there. Everybody knows that that's not a thing anymore. Followers are a vanity metric. However, we still have a lot of service-based businesses that have not started capturing their first party data, and you want to create a community with your clients, a community with your potential clients where they want to be engaged with you and follow along for the story. You want to keep, you know, catch their attention and then keep their attention, and you want to focus on niche groups rather than just mass social media audience. It's really cool to go viral. It's a lot better to reach 100 people that are your target audience. And so these are also conversations that we're having with our clients. We want to measure how well marketing is working across every single marketing channel, no matter what platform it's on, and connect that back to your goals. But we want to figure out how to capture that data and create a first-party audience that you can market to directly with or without any social media platform in whatever way that you want to. And that looks different. So, number one, that means that our service-based businesses need to be collecting their clients' data every single time, every single phone call, every single lead. And I cannot tell you how many I talk to that don't enter every single piece of information they're getting. They might have, you know, 20 phone calls a day and only 10 of those clients' information make it into their CRM, or they're still not even using a CRM. So we're too far into technology to not be utilizing tools that will help make your business more efficient and set you up for success better, especially if you're investing in a marketing. I cannot understate or over I cannot overstate how important that is for the coming future. So that was a lot to digest, a lot of different points to go through, and really I only touched on a few of the highlights and each of the areas for marketing. There's so much more that we could go into. Again, it feels like a you know a quickly shifting world with a lot changing very quickly. As always, Fierce Creative Solutions is here to be a marketing partner to help create clarity, to make it easy for our clients. We want to drive that strategy. We don't want, and we we really relate to just being out there, being confused about what to do and how do you build a great strategy. And even for the clients that we've already been working with for a long time, these these talking points will be going into our strategies that we're building for 2027. So if you're you know out there and you need help, always check us out, Fierce Creative Solutions.com. You can follow us on all of the social platforms, so TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. We'd love for you to participate in our content there and you can get some highlights on updates. If you're listening today and you're thinking, I have no idea where to start with everything that Lindsay just told me about. The one place I start, website is always the foundation of everything when it comes to marketing. If you are wondering if your your website is ready to go, is it if it's optimized for AI, we'd be happy to audit it for you. You can also audit yourself for free. You can just go on search on Google, search on AI, and look for a place to have your website audited and see how well it's showing up with optimization. But if that's something that you would like to have an expert do, we'd be happy to do that and just give you a quick AI overview. We can send that to you for free. So you can send us a message and we'd be happy to send that your way. Thanks for tuning in to Torch Talk. If today's story sparked something for you, share it with a colleague, community leader, or future change maker. Until next time, stay inspired, stay intentional, and keep your fire burning.