AI in marketing has changed absolutely everything but also nothing at all

If you’ve been looking for marketing advice recently, you may be feeling a bit lost. Between the thought leadership blogs, media articles, and hot takes on LinkedIn, you could be forgiven for thinking that marketing in 2026 is something completely new and unknown. Tropes such as “SEO is dead”, “the sales funnel is now a flywheel” and “AI has replaced XXX” are peddled by anyone with an angle and nothing to lose.

Businesses right now are facing a very tough landscape. Sentiment isn’t great, and spending in many categories is down. Social media has become so crowded that it’s hard to get any attention. Meanwhile, competition elsewhere online grows and grows. Global corps like Amazon dominate so heavily that sometimes it’s hard to believe anyone will ever find your small local biz. The struggle is real; we’ve seen it many times, and we understand how tough it can be.

The nonsense of ‘AI marketing’

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, its most visible capability was that it produced (somewhat) fluent text on demand. The venture capital firms that had staked billions on AI companies needed a compelling story to justify those bets, while the LLM companies had obvious commercial reasons to make their tech sound as transformative as possible. In the rush to find use cases for generative AI, the connection with marketing was superficially obvious – marketing needs words, genAI can make words.

The LinkedIn gurus came next, laundering these claims for a business audience and attaching marketing use cases because that was the audience they had. These opportunists retailed the ‘AI marketing’ myth, repeating the claim so many times it was treated as established fact. Social algorithms took over, amplifying the premise that marketing was a primary home for the technology instead of a poor retrofit.

The actual strategic and analytical work of marketing – understanding customers, identifying opportunities, making positioning decisions – was quietly dropped from these conversations because the tools couldn’t do any of it. What remained was the basic text generation layer dressed up as a whole discipline.

But don’t just take our word for it. Three years into this ‘marketing revolution’, the companies selling AI as a replacement for creative and marketing work are searching for real, experienced humans to do precisely that work. Both Claude and OpenAI, for example, have recently been hiring for extremely well-compensated content strategy and storytelling roles as well as a raft of content and writing positions.

Marketing has always been human

So, let’s get back to real small businesses and their day-to-day in Ireland. Plenty heard the “ChatGPT is your marketing strategy” euphoria and abandoned whatever they had been doing in favour of various tools that promised to do the heavy lifting for them. They summarised, automated, delegated, and generated, then walked away assuming everything would be fine. But marketing tactics on autopilot are not a marketing strategy!

We all wade through streams of generated slop daily in the search for real connections with real humans. Big brands have faced big backlash after using AI in their advertising, while survey after survey shows that consumers prefer brands that avoid using generative AI in content and that their trust of brands is now more fragile.

Cash-strapped small businesses have a choice to make. Pump out volumes of AI-generated content (which begs the question: why should I engage with something you couldn’t be bothered to create?) or swap spray-and-pray for a simpler and more focused approach that works through quality, not quantity.

LLMs can help to make some workflows easier and faster. But the need for judgement, insight, strategy, relationships, and decision-making is a human one. The net effect of AI for most small business owners is a modest productivity gain on low-value tasks, not a transformation of how they compete or grow.

The marketing that still works in 2026

The fundamentals of marketing still hold true. Here are the top six we feel are worth revisiting if you are assessing your marketing strategy in the current context.

1. Search still matters

People are still searching when they are online. LinkedIn gurus chanting “SEO is dead” conveniently ignore that a question typed into ChatGPT is merely a variation of typing a search into Google. The behaviour hasn’t changed; it’s just that the number of channels we have to search on has evolved. Search may no longer be a place called Google, but people still want answers! So good marketing learns what questions people are asking and finds great ways to answer them as well as ensuring that those answers will get found. GEO (AI visibility) hasn’t replaced SEO; it is simply something you must consider in addition to the SEO tactics you already have in place.

Takeaway: The fundamentals of being findable – being credible, being specific, and being relevant – matter even more now that there are many places to search from.

2. Trust is even more valuable

In the last few years, the volume of undifferentiated content online has exploded thanks to genAI. The result is that almost everything looks roughly the same; but when everything feels equally credible, nothing is. Authenticity and transparency are important factors here, as buyers are looking for reliable evidence to answer the questions: Who is this person? Has someone I trust recommended them? Does this feel like a real human being with actual skin in the game? Consumers are increasingly sceptical about what they see and hear, so marketing needs to help back up claims and provide clear proof points.

Takeaway: Be visibly, verifiably human. Stop trying to convince people and start making it feel safe to say yes.

3. Understand your market fit

Market fit isn’t a branding exercise; it’s an honest appraisal of whether what you offer actually solves a problem people have and are willing to pay to fix. Most small businesses skip this entirely. They build something they’re good at or passionate about, assume there’s a market for it, and then spend years struggling to grow. When fit is genuine, marketing becomes easier because you’re articulating something real. Once you know a real market exists, differentiation asks why someone should choose you over the alternatives (where you’re genuinely better and where you’re not). Positioning is then what you do with that clarity – saying the same true thing to the right people consistently enough that, when the need arises, you’re the obvious answer. When fit, differentiation, and positioning align, you stop chasing customers and start attracting them.

Takeaway: Know what you’re genuinely better at, for whom, and say it clearly and repeatedly until the right people believe it.

4. Consistency is everything

Most small business owners chase tactics because tactics feel like action. A new platform, a new format, a new campaign… this must be PROGRESS! But the businesses that actually accumulate customers over time are the ones that kept showing up in the same place, saying roughly the same things, long after it stopped feeling exciting. That’s because buying decisions rarely happen the first time someone encounters you. Research consistently suggests multiple touchpoints before a decision is made, and those touchpoints need to add up to a coherent picture. If you’re on LinkedIn one month, podcasts the next, then silent for two months, then back with a completely different thing, people will struggle to recognise you.

Takeaway: When you keep showing up, you don’t just increase the chance of being found. You’ve also been building retrospective evidence of your trustworthiness (see the point above).

5. Keep your existing customers

An existing customer already knows you, already trusts you, and has already made the psychological leap of buying from you once. Selling to them again is categorically easier, faster, and cheaper than starting that process from scratch with a stranger. As an added bonus, a genuinely happy customer will refer other customers, who arrive pre-loaded with trust borrowed from the person who sent them, meaning they convert faster, haggle less, and tend to become good customers themselves. Most small businesses front-load their effort into winning the customer and then go quiet. The ones that grow steadily treat the moment someone becomes a customer as the beginning of the relationship, with thoughtful marketing and great customer experience strategies.

Takeaway: The cheapest and most effective marketing you will ever do is taking exceptional care of the people who already pay you.

6. Experience and opinions are key

The more AI floods the internet with confident yet hollow content, the more genuine experience and hard-won opinion become scarce and therefore valuable. If you let genAI create your marketing materials, you will get a decent consensus on any topic. But the perspective that comes from having done something in the real world is exactly what people are hungry for and struggling to find. So start saying what you actually think, based on what you actually know, to people who have the problem you actually solve. An opinion that comes from real experience is differentiated by definition, because nobody else has had exactly your experience. People will recognise the truth in what you’re saying and know that you are the person they’ve been looking for.

Takeaway: Your experience and opinions are the one thing about your business that cannot be commoditised or replicated.

If you’re feeling stuck and would like to talk through your options with someone impartial, we can help! We’ve helped hundreds of businesses with roadmaps, brainstorming, and strategy development – whether the day-to-day is handled by you or needs to be outsourced. Give me a call on 085 214 7924 to start that conversation.

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