Marketing in 2026: Get These Numbers Down First

A few days ago, a friend of mine who works in consumer goods came to me looking absolutely defeated.

"Be honest with me," he said. "Can anyone actually make it in marketing these days?"

His exact words were: my backend traffic is dropping, my costs are climbing, and the strategy keeps getting redone, while my boss has exactly one answer — "You need to read the market." But what even is the market? Nobody has ever handed me a straight answer.

I laughed.

You do not lack a plan. You lack the numbers.

The market never shifts in the way it feels. It shifts in the numbers. Those numbers are the market's regular health check.

So in this piece I am not going to talk big ideas. I went out and pulled the sharpest figures from the major 2026 reports, and I am going to walk you through them one by one. The centerpiece is HubSpot's annual report covering more than 3,400 marketers worldwide, with Statista, Wyzowl, and DataReportal data thrown in to round out the table.

Grab a chair. Dinner is being served.

The First Line of the Ledger: Where Customers Actually Find You

What do I mean by "find"?

You open a store, and since customers have never heard of you, they have to search first. Only when they find you through a search does your store count as open. So the first line of the ledger is all about search.

But the way search gets counted has changed.

Globally, 32.9% of internet users aged 16 and up discover new brands and products through search engines. In mobile search alone, Google holds more than 93% of the share.

But do you think guarding a single front is enough? It is not.

The first front: your phone.

63% of customers reach for their phones first when looking for a brand, and 78% of global retail website traffic comes from mobile. The average American household owns 21 connected devices.

One quick note on e-commerce while we are here: online sales now make up 23% of global retail, and the seller ranking is remarkably steady — Amazon at number one, then JD, then Walmart.com. Do not get distracted as platform names keep shuffling; what everyone is really fighting over is still your phone.

The pages you have painstakingly optimized — most of them get opened on a phone. If the phone will not open your front door, the store stays closed.

The second front: AI search.

This is the hottest line of the whole ledger this year. Roughly three in ten marketers now admit their search traffic is falling, because customers have gone off to ask AI. Meanwhile, more than 92% of marketers are already optimizing for both traditional search and AI search at the same time.

Wherever your customers are, that is where your sign needs to hang. That used to be a message for the search engines. Now it is a message for the large language models — for your content to stay alive in search, the AI has to be willing to recommend it.

The third front: voice.

This contrast is the most interesting. More than one in five internet users globally already looks things up with a voice assistant. On the marketer side, though — 73.7% say they will pour more into voice search this year, while fewer than one in ten has actually done anything.

Seven promise to do it. One actually did.

Opportunity always sits in the wilderness, never in the crowded square.

By the end of 2026, voice assistant users in the United States alone will be heading toward 157 million. By 2029, voice search on mobile will reach nearly half of all internet users. Nobody is racing you for that parcel of land yet.

The Second Line of the Ledger: What Keeps People Here

Customers have walked in the door. What they look at, how long they stay, and whether they buy — that is the content line of this ledger.

Content is not dying. Take the blog: in 2025 it ranked third among the content formats marketers use most, up a spot from 2024, and it held a place in the top five for the highest ROI. Small and mid-sized companies that blog are 23% more likely than average to get a return.

Content is not dead. What is dead is content that all reads the same.

Now add up the video line. The top three formats marketers self-report as highest-ROI are all video: short-form at 49%, long-form at 29%, and live-streaming at 25%. In 2026, 91% of companies still use video in marketing, and 93% call video a major part of their strategy.

What makes video work? Of the marketers playing with video, 67% watch the play count first. Length? 51% say 30 to 60 seconds works best. Wistia serves an even sharper number: under a minute, average engagement is 50%; beyond that point, it drops to 17%.

One minute is the only window you get with a customer. So no filler.

Oh, and you have a helper sitting next to you — it is called AI. In 2026, 94% of marketers will bring AI into their content production, including writing blog posts, and over 80% already use AI for marketing copy. Everyone is running the same assembly line, so how are you going to win? AI can bring your writing up to a passing grade. But if you camp on the pass line with everyone else, that is a shame. This battle comes down to the extra bit you understand that AI does not — you understand what your customer is thinking.

The Third Line of the Ledger: Where the World's People and Time Went

The first two lines handled finding and keeping. This one is about which platform they are spending their time on.

There are 5.66 billion social media users in the world — more than half of the population — and they spend an average of 2 hours 21 minutes a day there. And 73% of internet users aged 16 and up research brands and products on social.

First check, then buy has become the default action.

Let us go platform by platform.

TikTok — the strongest momentum. 57% of marketers already use it, and more than three in ten swear it has "always been among the highest-ROI batch for me." It is the platform marketers most want to invest in this year, and it was last year's most downloaded social app in the world — second only to ChatGPT across all apps. In the short-video world, it sits at number one.

Instagram — the most stable. It has the highest marketer usage, at 70%; 3 billion monthly users worldwide, with more than 90% of them under 45. And another 26% of marketers are getting ready to open stores right inside social apps this year. Where the young people pour, that is where you set up shop — go figure it out.

Facebook — it is old, but still a legend. 69.6% of marketers are still on it, and 43% place it on the list of the highest-ROI social platforms. Do not kick it off the table just because it looks dated.

LinkedIn — the hard currency of B2B. It has 1.2 billion members around the world, three-quarters of whom take part in company decisions; 89% of B2B marketers rely on it to hunt leads, and 62% say it actually brings leads in. The higher the average order value and the longer the decision cycle, the more the effort is not wasted. If you want to play B2B, choosing it is not a mistake.

Pinterest — the counterintuitive one. In its search, 96% of queries carry no brand name — the user has not come to search for you, but to find inspiration. Yet its priciest segment, "luxury," rose 31% in a year — three times the platform's overall growth — and half of it is Gen Z. Every next growth opportunity is often hiding inside a counterintuitive insight like this.

The Fourth Line of the Ledger: Email, Leads, Sales

The first three lines took the work outside the door. This one brings the books home.

First, email. Global email users reach 4.6 billion in 2025 and are set to hit 4.9 billion by 2028. But what wins for the people turning email into money? Segmentation. Segmented email gets a 30% higher open rate and a 50% higher click rate, and 78% of marketers rate segmentation as their single most effective tactic. Sending the same one message to a thousand people versus a hundred different messages to a hundred thousand — those are two different worlds.

And one more discouraging figure: the average conversion rate across all e-commerce is under 2%. Skincare climbs to 2.7% online, while luxury apparel manages only 0.4%. On the very same phone, the gap between these categories is night and day.

Now, leads. Marketers' own report? 77% feel their lead quality is decent. But here is another number to remember: nearly seven in ten say the customer only shows up at a deeper stage of the buying process — because the AI has already finished their homework before they arrive.

Before, you were waiting for them to flip the book open in front of you. Now they study everything first and then come. The very first time you meet the customer may be the final exam.

That is why marketers these days watch lead quality first (39%) and, second, the conversion from lead to closed deal (34%). Quantity does not matter — quality does. A purified lead beats a scattered spray of volume.

Last, the foundation of sales — CRM. Among companies with 10 or more employees, 91% use a CRM to manage customers. Of the marketers who use CRM, 87% call their marketing effective; of those who do not, only 52% say the same. That gap of more than thirty points is not the cherry on top — it is the foundation. Where your customers come from, who you should reach out to next — do not keep those in your head. Put them into a system.

The Fifth Line of the Ledger: Ad Money Changed Lanes

Let me start with a number that will startle you.

In 2024, ad-blocking software alone siphoned off $54 billion in revenue from content publishers in a single year. The 2025 figures add one more jab: a quarter of American internet users run an ad-blocker, and 41% say they are sick and tired of the pop-up ads.

But the money did not disappear — it changed lanes.

More than 60% of the world's web traffic runs on mobile. Mobile ads: $233 billion a year in the US, with China in second at $163 billion. The delivery plan you built around the desktop? That lane is due for a change.

Keep an eye on two fast lanes. Video ads: an estimated $236 billion globally in 2026, growing toward $268 billion by 2029. And on just one platform, TikTok alone is set to bring in $44 billion in ad revenue in 2026. The highway is open — are you going to run on it, or just stare at the taillights?

Put it down on the abacus and it comes to one line: a well-optimized PPC campaign brings back $2 for every $1 spent — a 200% ROI. The channels keep changing, but "was every dollar of mine worth it" is the bill you will always have to settle for yourself.

Closing the Book

Let us return to that desperate friend.

And I told him: do not be afraid.

Over these years marketing has not disappeared — it has changed. Your customers use their phones to find you, AI to search, and voice to ask; you hold people with short video, mop up the leftovers with a blog, and run AI as your assembly line. They are still spending their hours on the same screens, only it has moved from "you post, I scroll" to "I research first, then buy." Email did not die; segmentation carries on. It is not that leads have gotten fewer — it is that they come later. CRM is not a decorative touch; it is the foundation. And ads did not retreat — they simply took a different road.

So hold on to the line I keep repeating: Look at the numbers first, then make your move.

In any period of change, the most dangerous thing is not failing to place a bet — it is driving this year's car with a map from five years ago.

Once you understand the numbers, the next step is to find the right road and put your energy where it genuinely counts.

Wishing you a 2026 where every account is settled clearly and every step lands precisely.