2026 Marketing Predictions: What’s Actually Working

Single blade shaving and talking does not work. I'm going to cut throat shave. Okay. What is the actual purpose of this video? Talk about marketing. Talk about 2026 predictions whilst also maximizing your attention. So, if you're here for the shaving mute. If you're here for the marketing, yeah, keep writing it in the background. And apologies for any uh random hopefully I don't cut myself. And yeah, so this is the shaver that I got. This is a Chevet from I think Japan. No, it's actually made in Germany. Comes out and then you get one of these blades. Now, I have actually tried this a couple times before. This isn't my very very first time doing this. Uh I've done it a couple times. So that's how I know that you half the razor blade to be able to fit it in. for kids, right? So, this goes here like that. Oh, no. There's like a little stopper thing at the bottom here. Here we go. This is a If you're here to learn how to shave cutthroat, you've come to the wrong place. This is how you don't do it. So, that's how you put the blade on. See that half of that? and it fits into the groove. And then you fold it in like [snorts] so. And then you let it clip. And then pinch that, put it in there, and you're away. Now, traditionally, you would uh get the sink and warm yourself up, but I'm just going to do it really kind of lazy speed runway. So definitely don't do it like me. But ever since I've been shaving the uh I feel like the hair follicles have gotten thicker. So and the reason why I started shaving with uh one blade is not because I want to feel like I'm back in the old days but because I get I get ingrown hairs and I don't like ingrown hairs cuz pimples and [ __ ] on my face. But anyway, um, so yeah, uh, someone will probably hopefully have commented by now where you would skip to to get to the marketing part for this year. But, um, right now I'm just getting this badger hair. Apparently, it's badger hair from Japan, maybe. And just apply that like so. I'll probably do this a few times. And, uh, yeah, someone will comment to when to skip ahead. actually talk about marketing but for now I'm just applying this maybe this will end up no just kidding I will talk about it okay here we go marketing what is the prediction for this year now I'm specifically going to talk about digital marketing so anything to do with content anything to do with bringing more business into your business uh via online attention now if you're new to this channel or this you found me from this video. Uh my backstory is I was a school teacher math and science and then I had a little side hustle wedding photography business but I also started a Tik Tok channel. This was like 2019 and I did it for fun because that's what the kids were into and I wanted to make sure I understood what their all their lingo was. So I needed to download Tik Tok. made some videos because I thought it was funny. Anyway, fast forward a few months, 30 40,000 followers later, I yeah, did reasonably well with it. And uh at that same time, someone messaged me or someone commented on one of the videos going, "Shat what do you do outside of school teaching?" And I'm like, "I'm a wedding photographer." And with that video, because I made that, I answered the question with a video. You can hear the baby crying. My wife has uh taken care of her. I'm not a bad parent. Um so yeah, that video that I posted answering the question and showcasing my weekend job got two customers on Tik Tok. And back then, I didn't even think that I would be getting any clients or leads from Tik Tok because I thought it was just mainly for kids. They're not really at that age that get married. Not in this country anyway. And so, yeah, I thought I'd double down and do more videos about my business. And yeah, it snowballed from there. Now, I didn't make my whole brand wedding photography. My personal brand was still my personal brand, but I made a side channel called Sev's Weddings. It's got about I think it's got like 5,000 followers on Tik Tok and about 3,000 on Instagram. But yeah, I booked out. I booked out for two years like six months later. It was crazy. So, I leveraged Tik Tok following and then I um and then I built the the business page as well cuz you know I didn't want to just do wedding content forever because I think that's you know I want to share some other stuff like me shaving. So, this part's going to be a bit tricky. I might have to be quiet for a little bit, but it's it's drying up really quickly, so I have to go do this faster. But anyway, I was um yeah, I quit my teaching job after 2020 and just did wedding photography and I was making double my salary as a school teacher, working just the weekends as a wedding photographer. It was great. And then yeah, that's when people started bothering me saying, "Hey, Seb, uh do you reckon you can uh teach me how to do that? How do I how do I start my own Tik Tok?" And so I did that. I started teaching people because, you know, I have a teaching degree and I had all the spare time during the week to teach people. And that's when I started dealing with clients like like I had a residential builder called Scott Park Group that had three different building uh companies inside that group and every week I would go to their boardroom, their HQ and teach their internal marketing team how to pretty much be better at social media. And after a year they became one of the one of the companies specifically Red Inc. homes became the most followed builder on Tik Tok in the country. So that was a pretty cool thing. Shout out to the girls that listened to me and did what I told them to do. And then and then I got picked up by another brand called Red Rooster. Um, this is like within the same two weeks where I picked up that first client and it was a like a 200 odd restaurant chain in Australia that's like a Australian version of KFC, a much better version of KFC called Red Rooster. They hit me up to do a collaboration and it did really well and they only had 180 followers and I said, "Who's doing your TikTok?" and they said, "No one. Do you want to give it a go?" And I'm like, "Yeah, let's give it a go." Anyway, 12 months of that and they still have one of the best performing organic videos of all time in Australia for any hospitality business. Engagement, views, and the amount of people that, you know, said that they were going to Red Rooster that night because of this video, it was crazy. So, yeah, I was doing that. And then yeah, I in amongst all that chaos, I thought it would be cool to start a podcast um of myself like talking about all this stuff, entrepreneurial stuff and business advice on marketing. And Red Rooster had paid me uh a nice amount of money that I was able to put 12 months into a a a commercial space to rent out in my city, 36 square meters and it was my first studio. I bought all the equipment, my wife designed the background of my podcast and then started doing that and lo and behold, people started going Sev, can we use this space to record our own podcast? So now in 2026 I have a business partner. We are 50/50 into this production studio where we do podcasting, where we do done for you stuff, um like talking head stuff and um I specifically won workshops for businesses just like I did back in the um the Scott Park residential builder days and all of the stuff that I did for Red Rooster. I've compiled [snorts] it all into a workshop to teach businesses in Australia and around the country and the globe. So, welcome. That's my that's my last five years for you. Far out the last six years now. It's like 2026. So now, now that I've told you all of that and I'm not just some random content guru coach, I've done it all myself many times over. Actually, I started a jujitsu page literally four days ago on the 6th of um January. It is now the 10th of January and I'm 10 followers away from a,000 followers. And my first post got 130,000 views, you know, and I'm not even selling anything on that page. I just want to share my journey and I'm 35. I don't care. So, I'm going to workshop. Oh, man. I really cannot talk during this part here. This is the this is the business end here. Stop the yap and then do like a a fast fastpaced thing. If you came here specifically to watch me shave, single blade shaving and talking does not work. It definitely takes a little bit longer than the four or five blade shavers and in a couple of cuts here. I need to put some after shave on. I'm going to find that after shave. Definitely don't shave where one side of the face is more light. Might have to try this way with the mirror. Now that's all done. Predictions for this year and what's going to happen with uh marketing. It's already starting and it's cool to actually be a proof of concept. You don't have to go viral. You just have to do you just have to talk about the things that other people in your target market are looking for, searching for. It's not about social media. It's about uh interest media or search media or relatable media. And if your business is putting out content that is relatable to your customers, whether it's their frustrations, their problems, their pain points, their experiences, um, good or bad, um, in relation to what your product or service has to solve, you just do that at scale. like put content out at scale about anything and everything around those things that you provide and why and how and how it works and what it looks like and what the results are, all of that. You will be able to dominate your market significantly sooner than you think. And I did this organically, figured this out organically when I was doing it with my wedding photography business um on Facebook. There was there are groups and there are still so many different groups out there, but I'll use mine as an example. People are out there looking literally for you and they're asking in their posts. Guys, can anyone recommend a wedding photographer and you finding those places where they're they're look asking for that and it's free. It's free. You just need an account and just go in there and just say hello. But specifically and and strategically do it though, you know, you can't just go, "Hey, yes, I'm a photographer. Choose me." Because that's what everybody else is doing. So, you have to be strategic tactic. Use tactics to win the trust over everybody else that is no doubt doing the same thing. And how do you do that? Well, you got to build your unique selling personality first and foremost. If you're coming into this space with a business because you think it's cool, you want to give it a try, great, do that. But also, you need to really figure out what sets you apart from everybody else in that industry. And the main thing usually is why you started in the first place. I never wanted to do wedding photography. I started doing it because I was given an opportunity and I thought, "Wow, I'm getting some seriously good angles here and that nobody else can get because of my height. I'm 6' 10. Doesn't look like it now cuz I'm sitting down, but this is literally what happened." And and then I like locked into that and went down that path. How did I dominate the same strategy for someone like Red Rooster? I posted content and waited until something came up that the target audience was talking about in relation to the brand. And that was the fact that everyone thought that Red Rooster is a money laundering business. They nobody's ever seen them inside the at lunchtime. No one's ever seen someone inside the restaurant. And I thought, okay, well, let's go there during lunch hour and see if there's anyone there. And there actually is. And the reason why people haven't actually seen anyone in there during lunch hour is because they don't drive past during lunch hour. They're somewhere else eating lunch already. And when I went there, I recorded it and made fun of it and and really honed in on it. The Red Rooster people didn't initially say yes to this idea. They pushed back on it and then eventually they said, "You know what? Stuff it. Let's give it a go." >> [snorts] >> became the most viral uh most engaging video ever in in in out of all the posts. And this was four years ago now. To this day, they have still not touched it. No one else has touched it. Actually, last year, someone on the channel, cuz I don't work with them anymore, someone on the channel repurposed the the money laundering theme and put it out as a 7-second meme and got millions of views again organically and comments as well. You see those videos that have um lots of views, but there's no engagement. It's probably because it's an ad. This was not an ad. This was organic marketing. And that's what I figured out with my wedding photography. And that's what I figured out with these other brands. It's just just create what the customers are looking for, asking for, or talking about in relation to your industry, your product, your service, your brand, whatever. Right? If you're a new person coming into the field, create content that's relatable to the people who want to purchase from. That's it. You do that a lot. So, predictions in this space. Now, this isn't new [ __ ] This is just kind of revision over the last four or five years that um a lot of the top marketers that I've seen actually talk about this. They say create content at scale or this or this or that. They don't exactly go deep down into the how. And the how is simply whatever they're asking or whatever they're talking about, whatever there are in the forums, whatever the questions are that they have in relation to your expertise in your field, that's the content that you should put out at scale. So what you need to do lots of content what is that content answering the questions that the public is asking and you can find that out using AI now. It's so easy. Uh again I'm running workshops link in description if you want to do that. But I'm not here to sell you that. I'm just going to mention that every now and then because why not? I do [sighs] uh I do one-on-one workshops but I mostly do in-person workshops in my city of Perth in Australia. Um, they're two-day workshops. It's a six month worth of support as well, but you literally learn how to do all this properly for your business. What to say, how to say it, how to know what to say, how to know and identify what your customers actually want, how do you leverage AI to make it easier for you because I know you didn't get into this for uh the marketing part. Nobody, mostly nobody got into business um to be really excited about the marketing part. They got into the business because they got really excited about probably one making money or two doing the work that they love and they figured out how to monetize it. You know, you never work a day in your life if you love what you do, right? But they never got into it to make videos about that to get more clients. Mostly nobody did. So now they have a problem. They're trying to get more clients. They're trying to get more customers and they don't know how to do it. So they hire agencies and these agencies also don't know how to do it properly from my data and my observation. Most agencies struggle to do it properly because they don't care or they have a cookie cutter system that they just duplicate over and over again. No matter who you are in whatever industry and they give you to a junior account manager who's just finished uni because they're on the bottom tier salary and you're paying the top monthly package and getting bugger all results. Try not to swear here. And it's a shame because most of these businesses, it's your life savings, man. Like, you shouldn't be you shouldn't be spending your life savings. You should be investing your life savings. But how do you know you're going to get a return on investment? Well, you got to measure it, right? And so, I think the prediction for 2026 in terms of marketing, not just what to post, is how to measure it. how to measure it yourself, but also how to measure it with the people that you hire to do it for you. And that's called accountability, right? You can't keep yourself accountable. You're responsible for your business. You're responsible for your business to succeed. But you can hire other people and keep them accountable and that's what we teach you. But accountability is going to be real real big time thing. And this isn't just marketing. This is across probably any business, any field. like accountability. Are you going to do what you say you're going to do? Cool. How do I know um you're going to do it? And when will it be done? These are all the questions you got to ask your your agency, your suppliers, your vendors, who whoever you're hiring to do stuff for you. What's going to be the result? When will I find out this result? And how will I know the result has been achieved? That's it. That's you got to just repeat that over and over and over again to the people that you hire. That's it. Keep them accountable and if they don't like it and they've got excuses, get rid of them. New person. Again, this is what we teach in these workshops because I am sick of my mates, colleagues, or hearing stories of of my students coming to me saying, "Sep, we hired an agency, we paid them 15 grand, and now we're in debt because they didn't achieve what they said that they were uh going to achieve." social media managers, freelancer social media managers as well. I've gone into meetings with businesses who have given me their email of the account manager, some early 30s, late 20s blonde girl. No disrespect to blonde girls. My wife's a blonde. And the emails is just fluff. Hey, look. We've got a million views this month. Cool. But how many sales did you get? Oh, it doesn't matter about how many sales we're getting attention. We're getting we're building the attention. It's like, okay, but there are ways to get more sales through organic. There are, you know, and you have to measure it. How many views? How many people engaged? Are they talking about your brand? Are they commenting? Are they DMing? Are they liking? Are they sharing? Are they saving? What are whatever? Are they doing any of that? There's a metric there. What does that look like? Some social media managers do measure this. But then the next stage after that is how many of those people that are talking about your brand come back do it again because you're consistent with your content, right? Or your social media manager is, right? And then those touch points, which is what they would argue, oh, it's more the more touch points, the more business you get. It's not now, it's eventually. That's not entirely false. But at the same time, you still need to measure it. So when it happens, you know why it happens and what content worked the best. That's what I did. As soon as I got two bookings from that one organic video, I was like, "Wow." Yes, they've been following me for a while. Yes, it didn't happen overnight, but I measured it and then I got obsessed with the stats. If there's no measurement, especially after three plus months, you're you're losing. You're losing. Um, so now what you do? You got your views. You've got your engagement, then you've got your inquiries. How many people are inquiring directly from social media? And no, you you you can't just do it with ads. You can do it organically. I am living proof. You need to create a funnel or a pipeline where you nurture people from your direct messages, from your comments. This is the social media manager job if they're good enough. But because they've got 10 other businesses they have to cater for per week, there's no way they're going to check your accounts direct messages on a Tuesday night when someone's feeling like they want to spend money. Because once you get a DM, an inquiry, a lead, and you don't respond to them fast enough, there goes that revenue, there goes that profit. Oh yeah, you can automate it and put it into many chat and stuff. Cool. Do you have that? Do you have that measured? Do you have the results of that? If you don't, there's a start. But I specifically for service based businesses, I suggest having someone man the direct message lines manually respond to them because me and I think this is another prediction for this year and beyond is people are going to start getting fatigued with these automated messages. Instagram last year just announced the thing or many chat um the automation plugin that you put in. When you follow an account, that account can have it set up so that they instantly send you a direct message, right? Cool. It's kind of like when someone when you walk into a store in real life, someone comes up to you immediately going, "Hey, how you going? Welcome to my store. How can I help you?" Just like looking at you like this. And then if you don't respond, they just look for the next person that comes in. Hey, welcome to my store. How can I help you? Hey, welcome to my store. How can I help you? That is robotic. Now, that's being done online. Now, there are tactics and ways to do this properly on Many Chat. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but for what I've seen, it gets annoying. I'm getting annoyed at it. If I'm getting annoyed at it, many people are getting annoyed at it. and the the accounts that I follow which are not many accounts that I follow these days that when I do follow a new one I don't want to be bombarded with messages and it's early days but more importantly if you do have an automated message thing on on many chat on Instagram or whatever and there's no followup there's no direct trying to build rapport because if someone messages me looking for work or interested in doing one of my workshops I want to know if they're the right fit, if I actually can help them because one, if they're not the right fit, I don't want to take their money. And two, it's not going to work. So, I just feel bad. But that's where the real conversation comes in. And, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I haven't learned yet. And this is just me documenting and sharing my experience so far. But, you as a business need to create that third line. Again, let's review. You've got your uh views from the content you make consistently online. You got the engagement of the people that like, share, comment, whatever on your videos. The ones that do do that, the algorithm pushes more of your videos to them because by them engaging with your videos, it's telling the algorithm that they like your content and they're staying in the app. So why wouldn't the app give them more of your content to do more of that so that when they scroll more more ads come up and more revenue for the app? That's the whole business model of social media. So now we're at the inquiry stage. So that's level three. How many inquiries are you getting per week or per month? Do you know? If you don't, that's a red flag, especially if you have someone hired to help you increase your sales through marketing. But if you are getting DMs, direct messages or whatever inquiries, cool. The fourth line is sales. How many are you converting into a customer? Now, that's technically not marketing. That is your side of the fence of sales. However, if those inquiries are coming in and you're not making a close on any of them, you're not selling any of them, whose fault is it? Is it the marketing team's fault because they got you dud leads? Who's pointing fingers where? It happens all the time. The sales team is upset with the marketing team because the marketing team is getting them trash or the marketing team's upset because the sales team's not getting the close rate to make the marketing team look good. The correct answer is marketing team and sales team need to get to in bed with each other and absolutely just collaborate and just you know what guys, here are the pain points that uh our customers are asking us in these sales calls. Can you make content about that? So, they're not asking us about it. They're already informed through the content. And because they're informed through the content, they trust us. Therefore, when they get on the call, they get the sale easier. It's not rocket science. That's what you need to do. So, let's recap. Finally, you've got your views. How do you get more views? You put out more content. How do you get more views and less content? You can't do it straight away. You got to test. my first video in my jiu-jitsu page that got me over 500 followers initially in the last two three days 130,000 views but I I mentioned the key words I was vulnerable and all that stuff we can theor theorize about that for days but for you it's get started or put put out more again if you want to know exactly what to put out uh I do the workshops on teaching you exactly how to do that but it's again not hard you can find the information for free online. I will make another video one day if I get enough comments saying, "Yes, teach us. Teach us for free on YouTube." I will. Then you see how many of those views turn into people talking to you via comments, via sharing. If they're sharing your content to someone else, that means they've identified that you are valuable to their friend group or their network to then see your stuff, too. That's super valuable. That's like my favorite metric to measure. how many people are sharing the content, right? But if they're commenting, are you commenting back? You have to comment on you have to comment back on every comment. Non-negotiable. Like, comment. I don't even care if it's a hate comment. Just reply. I don't care because then they'll come back, respond again, and that'll create more of a rush for the algorithm to go, hm, there's people in here talking, talking, talking. This is a discussion that's getting people back into this video. Let's push it out to more people. That's what happens. That's why you need to reply to everyone, right? Engagement second. Third is inquiries. Does the video tell people to go somewhere and book something? Yes, this one does. I've told you many times already in the description if you want to check out the workshop, click the link and go from there. But I also said comment below if you want me to make a video about something else. Right? And this is a deep now into this video. We're like half an hour in. If you got this far and you're commenting, that means cool. I've got good retention. People want to hear what I want to hear. This is data that I'm collecting, right? So, once you have the inquiries, all you need to do is just make sure you have a decent close rate, your sales. And if your close rate sucks, then hey, let's make another video about it. Because I'm not the best salesman. I am just here to go, here it is. Here's what you need to do. Do it. If you don't know how to do it, come to my workshops or hit me up and I will see if we can do a one-on-one. Otherwise, good luck. If you want to build more customers this year and next year and into the future, you need to answer the questions that your customers are asking you as content. It saves you so much time in the future anyway because they're not asking you again and again. You're not repeating yourself again and again. They're just finding the video that you have and you answer the question directly clearly in a way that they believe and then they go, "You know what? Now I know what to do, but I'm still going to hire this person anyway to do it for me because they've got years on this [ __ ] I'm going to still be a newbie to this. Right, cool. Awesome. If you like this video, let me know. Comment all that stuff. And uh I'll see you on the next one. Have a good year and hope that you're bringing in more revenue and more profit into your business in 2026.