2026 Small Business Marketing & Advertising Trends

With the new year coming in, you’re probably looking at how your company is spending marketing dollars, where you can be more efficient, and what new platforms you need to be focusing on to stay relevant to your customers. We’ve put together a list of marketing and advertising trends coming into the new year that you can use to stay ahead of your competition, keep in front of your existing customers, and show up more frequently to people that are likely to buy your products or services. Let’s dive in!

TikTok & Meta Advertising

Wasn’t TikTok supposed to be banned in the US earlier this year? Well here we are and TikTok isn’t going anywhere, at least for the time being. While you want to make sure that you’re differentiating what marketing tactics and advertising platforms you’re using, you never want to make decisions solely based on news headlines that may or may not ever come true…lesson learned. So how can you leverage TikTok advertising in a way to help your business? We could get fancy talking about conversion metrics, coding and stats. But setting up this one campaign type will help you flood your local market(s) with your messaging.

Awareness Campaigns (That Work)

Hyper local is the focus for 2026. Most companies make the mistake of trying to do too much and they end up not accomplishing much of anything. “Let’s do a nationwide campaign!” “Let’s blanket the entire state!” “Let’s try to hit everyone in the industry with our messages and marketing!” All of these statements are great ways for you to spend lots of money and end up with not a lot of return or meaningful visibility for your company. Here’s the approach we recommend instead: City-specific campaigns.

Don’t use large radius targets or open it up to general locations like your entire state or anyone who might be interested in your product in the entire country. This is a sure way to end up reaching lots of people that either (a) don’t even know who you are yet and will likely never see your ads again, or (b) target people that are outside of your target audience, the ones that are even capable of doing business with you in the first place. So how do you create these city-specific campaigns to make sure that you’re reaching the right people?

First, don’t use radius targets, use zip code or city targets. You can set your targeting options to make sure that you’re only reaching people that live in the city around your location(s) or area(s) of service. This does 2 things. It makes sure that you’re only spending money targeting the people that are most likely (locationally) to do business with you. And secondly you can dial in the targeting to reach people that are already likely to purchase products from your competitors. If you own a pool company you can select an interest target for people that like pools. If you have a local sporting goods store you can target people that are interested in youth sports. If you have a home services business you can target specific zip codes where you know a lot of single-family homes are. The sky is the limit for how effective and impactful you can make these targeting options. A lot of businesses just want to click “Publish” and watch the marketing dollars get spent. You can outcompete a lot of businesses in your industry just by choosing a couple extra options that will help you increase business and get people noticing what you’re doing almost immediately.

Email

We’re still talking about email marketing in 2026? You bet! With everyone focusing on AI, social media, and new platforms, a lot of businesses have decided to stop spending time on one of the most tried and tested methods for keeping people engaged with their business. If you look at any big brand that you follow and you’re on their email list, they send emails out regularly. Are they optimizing with AI and putting out a lot of social media content? Yes. But if you pay close attention, they spend just as much time pushing out emails as they do content on other marketing channels because it works.

Think of it this way…the people in your email list are the people that you have already captured. They’ve already visited your website and filled out a form, they’ve purchased something from your business, or maybe they’ve entered a content. Regardless of how they came to you, they’re far more interested in what your business is doing than the average person. You should be spending just as much time (if not more) on crafting your email marketing as you are on social, because at the end of the day, these people are more likely to purchase from you than the majority of other people you’re reaching with your marketing.

Talk about what new products you have and how they’re solving problems for your customers. Show what you’re doing in the community. Highlight a raving review from a customer. Don’t overcomplicate it. We know people that are getting average open rates of 50%+ on their emails, so it’s more about the quality of the content that you’re pushing out rather than the quantity.

Retargeting

We talk about this in a couple of our other articles, but it’s worth revisiting because of how important it is! If you have not already installed your Meta Pixel, your LinkedIn Insight Tag, and your Google Remarketing Tag on your website, you need to work with your marketing team and/or developer to make sure that this is installed ASAP! The longer you wait to do this, the more data on your website visitors you’re missing out on that can help you stay in front of the people that are checking out your business and likely to purchase from you if you just keep staying in front of them.

Conclusion

In 2026 you’ve got a lot to keep track of as a business owner and marketing can sometimes be one of the most challenging areas to understand. Make sure you have the talent on staff (or outsourced) to implement these tactics, or maybe you already know how to do some of these things yourself and you just need to set aside time to do them! Whatever the case may be, we wish you luck as you implement these strategies and let us know which of them have been most impactful for you! For more information regarding growing your business read more here.