Chatterkick Predicts 2026

 Well, hello everyone and thank you for joining us today for our Chatterkick 2026 predictions. I am joined today by CEO and founder of Chatterkick, Beth Trejo. And Beth, I'm super excited about this conversation because we hear so much about like the tactics around the platforms and what they're doing, but I really think that.

This discussion that we're going to have today is a little bit more strategic and actually bringing us back to a lot of the basics that a lot of people have kind of forgotten about. So welcome and, uh, thanks for joining us today. Yeah, I'm excited to have this conversation today. It's crazy because, you know.

I started Chatterkick 14 years ago now, and there's so much that has changed, but there's also so much that has not changed. And so I think that that's really what I wanna kind of look at today is like, what is changing? How is marketing evolving? Because it is, and then. Also what needs to remain the same because it's important and it's important to tell stories within our businesses.

So let's, let's kick it off. All right, let's do it. And since this is the time of year where we are generally. Reflecting on what has happened in the past while also looking forward. Let's start with 2025. And um, also for anybody that doesn't know about Chatterkick and who we are, uh, we are social media strategists, uh, that support, uh, social media execution, measurement, and strategy, um, really have narrowed down kind of I think who we're servicing these days.

And, um. A, again, if you're unfamiliar with Chatterkick, I invite you to go to chatterkick.com, check us out or check out Beth's uh, profile as well. But as I kind of mentioned before, let's look at 2025 because last year we made some predictions and I think that some of them were on points, and I think that other ones maybe we didn't see come to fruition all of the way.

And so I'm curious, Beth, these were our 2025 predictions that we had. And is there one that really stands out to you that like, oh yes, we a hundred percent got this right last year. Um, I think the biggest thing, let me look at these. So, um, the social SEO has become a big part of conversations. I know that in a couple of years past, we've, we've definitely seen more businesses get curious about this, try to understand, you know, how people were using TikTok for search, for example.

That's been on our radar for several years, but. The integration of how these large language models specifically are integrating and scraping and pulling from social sites, I think is something that is for sure on many business owners lists. Because they're nervous. They're nervous that Google is changing the way that.

They're serving up their business. Um, they're hesitant to invest in traditional SEO strategies. Um, and they're trying to quickly get a plan in a space that oftentimes is. You know, hard to understand for many businesses, for many business owners, for many people that don't have a marketing background. And so social, SEO, in multiple forms has been a big part of our conversations with customers and with prospects.

Um, I also think that just the concept of a taste maker, uh, just so everybody knows kind of what we were, uh, trying to communicate on this. So because these AI tools can generate. Copy and information so fast, you could get, you know, a hundred social media captions in an instant. And our prediction was that those people that can pick out the best ones, the ones that will actually connect to audience, the ones that don't feel gross, or just like a robot.

That was going to be a huge differentiator for businesses, and I think we saw that very, very clearly. Um, you can tell on LinkedIn who uses either a bad version of the AI tool or who can leverage the AI tools and still make it sound like them. Um, and you can see it across all different social accounts.

Um, and now we're seeing more on the visual side as well. But I do think that that. Particular skill set of marketers has been brought to light in the last year. I definitely agree with you on on both of those. I mean, the amount of conversations that we've had regarding SEO and social tying into search visibility now just even over the last six months has exploded with most of our clients.

And I think the other thing that maybe we, we knew the transparency would be really big, and I really think that that came to a head with. The release of SOA and, um, the updates of the, the video AI in particular and some of the backlash that came as a result of that. And I do feel as though we have consumers now that are kind of voicing their concerns around AI generated content and actually starting to push back on it a little bit, which is something that we'll get into here that I think is a prediction that carries over into 2026.

So I don't wanna give anything away, but. I do think that the transparency kind of played a role, but maybe like more so in the last quarter than what it did initially in, in 2025. Yeah, it's really interesting, especially like I, I have two teenagers, so I have a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old, and it's interesting.

For me to watch them try to navigate what's real content and what's not real content, and they will call out images that are just beautiful photographer photographs as that's ai. And it's funny because some of them I genuinely know are not because like either I've taken them or maybe they were. Edited to a higher vibrancy or you know, a little bit higher saturation.

And I do think that that is going to be something that the next generation of young people are going, like, they're gonna grow up with it. They're gonna grow up being hesitant of, you know, different photos and videos and messaging and. Um, I see the same thing with my parents, um, where they are a little bit more likely to call things out as ai.

Um, and it's a very different way that they do it compared to my teenagers. So, um, yeah, I think, and if anybody doesn't know, SOA is a app from OpenAI and it's a video app that you put your face in. Um, and it's kind of like a social media platform that you can interact with. That you can create videos with as well, but you don't have to actually be in a video.

It will make a video of your likeness, of your audio voice. And, um, I think that it's fun in some regards, but I also think that there's a lot of backlash that happened within that release, like Liv was saying. And so, uh, it's for sure on our radar to watch and to understand. I am curious, Beth, out of this list, what is one thing that you feel like we definitely didn't get wrong or maybe see it come to full fruition?

Like we had maybe thought, two things I see on this list that I'm like, oh, we thought that was gonna happen and like it did not. The first is, I know that businesses want more video. Like I genuinely hear it all the time. Um, there's tools to make video development easier. Uh, there's, you know, from small businesses to large businesses and anywhere in between.

I just don't think people are still pushing video at the rate that consumers and viewers, audiences are consuming it. So there's a big gap in video content too, and I thought that that would be faster. I thought though, with the rise of these tools, it would allow people who are not comfortable with video production or content generation, um, to do it better and faster and easier, and that really hasn't.

Been the case in our, um, experience. I still think video is a big barrier for especially mid-market businesses that have multiple layers, like a local market and a big brand or multi-site location. Um. And I think genuinely it's a fear of people to actually show up in video. I think that if you go to the psychology of it all, it's not the time that it takes to create video.

It's the, what do I make? How do I say it? I don't wanna look bad on camera, and then I don't know what to do with it once I get it created, so it lives in my phone. I always tell people it is a hard realization to come to, but um, at some point you need to just accept that you look the way that you look and post the video.

Yeah, and I also, the other one I see glaringly, and I don't think we missed this, but I. I have not found great results from any of these AI ad generating tools. Um, we tried one for one of our clients, specifically within Meta, and it was not a, it was a, a service brand and the actual output all of a sudden created fruit.

Because of the coloring of the brand. And it was just so bad. And I've seen it from other agency owners. I just, maybe they, they have some potential going forward, but I, I don't know. I would rather have good quality messaging. Um, it doesn't have to be perfect quality, but at least something that you feel like you would click on or your audience might actually stop the scroll instead of something that is just massive.

Uh, variations, varieties. I do think personalization and ad development is going to be enabled by these AI tools, but I haven't found the spot right now where it's a turnkey product. I. And I should add that the fruit that it chose was also a peach, which anybody that is familiar with the peach emoji right, knows the connotation of that and some of the risk associated with that.

So I agree with you. You, you know, we did see. Facebook released the Andromeda, uh, update where they were really pushing for more ad creative and they're pushing people and marketers to try to utilize those tools, but the actual output of it, I don't think is there yet. So something that we will keep an eye on in 2026 though, moving forward for certain.

For sure, which brings us into 2026. So we've talked a little bit about 2025, what we missed, what we got. Right. I do think there are so many things that we talked about in 2025 that are a little bit of a continuation. Totally. And so one of those, kind of, that we had discussed was the transparency and so.

We have talked kind of extensively the last several months with our clients, with internally as a team about the importance of trust and how that is something that you just cannot fake with ai. And so I'm curious, Beth, if you can kind of give a rundown of how you're seeing trust as the new differentiator for brands and how they can utilize it Really in 2026.

Yeah, so I think in the beginning when like tools like Chat, BT and Gemini and all of these tools were, were released businesses and brands thought of them as another channel to manage, right? So for any of you that are not, you know, marketing people out there, channel strategies are like, Google is a channel and Facebook is a channel.

And I think people thought LLMs are a channel. And I think what we're seeing here is. That a lot of these tools are the new front door. They are how people are getting into. The exploration stage of understanding what type of business solutions they're looking for and how they can purchase something.

And so I think we have to think differently about AI and where these tools sit within the customer experience. And so with that being said, a lot of the output of these tools is very hard to control and. It is what it is. So you can't always just turn the knob and change the output because people are using a lot of different variations.

Um, there's definitely, um. You know, some strategies behind it, but one of the KPIs I've heard some companies monitoring is their reputation status within the tools. So your reputation is only as good as the LLM is going to say it is. Um, and so I think that that's an interesting just metric and marker that really wasn't always in that same way, communicated.

And I also think that businesses are going to go a little bit more old fashioned at times. I think in the B2B category, um, relationships, phone calls, old fashioned networking in-person meetings will start to trend up slightly. I don't think it's gonna go back to what it was before COVID, but I do think when you see some pinch or squeeze in the economy.

And your business maybe can't take a risk on making the wrong decision. They, those businesses tend to go to first to second degree referral networks, partnerships that they know of and or looking at, you know, someone they may have done business before. So I really think that trust is going to be that layer between the front door and.

The buying purchased who is in the middle is who do they trust the most? What is the risk that they can't, you know, that is going to be the top choice for them because it's going to be easier. They've heard of the name, it's a, you know, more reputable company, quote unquote. And so I think that that's something that all businesses are gonna have to, um, figure out.

Especially whenever it does come to content, I've spoken to several clients about this that are like, oh, I'll just use AI to make content, or I'll use SOA to make, you know, videos of myself or just random videos. And for the, the B2B clients in particular, or even a lot of B2C clients, where your differentiator on how you provide a service is your customer service.

You do not wanna destroy that trust with one AI video that is not a real person that's on your team. Or, you know, there's something weird about it because all it takes is one tiny little seed to get into somebody's mind to be like, well, that wasn't real. Like, what else about them is not real, right? Like it's slowly erodes and chips away.

So while you could have spent decades building trust within your community, all it takes is one or two really bad social posts. AI generated or not to destroy that trust, and I just think that the tools are amazing, but we have to still, you know, utilize them in a way that is ethical and safe for the brand.

Yeah, and you know, I think a lot of people think that the disclosures on AI generated content are tomorrow's problem, but there's actually some regulations within the state category. Um, I think some of the platforms are already starting to label stuff as AI generated, and so. It is something that, you know, everyone needs to take a pulse on.

What type of content do you need to have a disclosure on? What platform are you posting it on? Um, I think there's, you know, a different use case if you have a product and you do something fun in the background as opposed to if you generate the product from AI specifically. Um, those are two different levels of trust that I think you're gonna have to deal with with your customers.

All right, moving on. The messy middle is the real opportunity. So Beth, this is definitely right up your alley and something that you have been preaching for a while now. So can you talk a little bit about what this means and the implications for businesses? Yes. So personally we have found this, but I would also say the businesses that are able to scale AI the fastest are those that have already a very tight and diligent operational system that can easily handle change.

So I really think that change management is the antithesis of. AI enablement, you can only enable AI if you have people willing to accept the way that that is changing their workday, their workflows, their jobs. Even if you have it built into the software, it still is a change. And so it really requires operational support.

And that's, when I say the messy middle, it's a lot harder to. Improve your use of ai. Let's just say in social media, if you have your stuff all over the place, you have spreadsheet content, calendars, you have another tool for tracking. You are, um, you know, pulling metrics natively from this platform and that platform.

You're not like outgoing, tagging them to understand the type of content. All of that creates a lot of different data points, and yes, AI can help synthesize those. But you're still gonna have that like fragmentation until you figure out the operations, the workflows, the change management of your social media programs.

And I think that is something that a lot of leaders have been able to close their eyes and say, it doesn't really matter. But as this stuff continues to come to a higher, whether it's a. Conversation within your leadership team, or even if you need to hire and, um, restructure. That's where this stuff needs to be defined.

It needs to have clear ownership and you need to be able to evaluate and shift if things are working. And I think that where we see people may be taking the wrong approach with this is being like, oh yeah, Chad, GBT can do this thing for me. Like just throw it in and make it work. Right? Like there's no actual clear review of the processes.

Yeah. And. To us in particular, you know, AI is a tool very much, and is, is not necessarily like the tool, the end all be all right. And so, you know, to your point, I think that it, it is about looking at the processes that you have in place and how the tools can assist you and not necessarily replace, I mean, in some instances maybe replace, but it's, it's an assistance versus an actual replacement.

Wouldn't you agree? Yes, and I think that the differentiators when it comes to using and leveraging AI are going to be where they decide to put the human in the process. Because if you put the human in the wrong spot and you put the AI in the, you know, in the wrong spot. You are going to have a mess and you're gonna have bad output.

You're gonna have, um, the wrong facts in many cases. So it is really important to plug the humans and the reviews in, in the right stage, and that I think is what's gonna make a huge difference on those businesses that make it work well. All right. Moving on since we have several of these to get through.

All right. Strategy is the new social currency. So I think that a lot of businesses over the years have kind of just been like, yeah, that social media thing, right? Yes. Um, what we, you talked previously about. Social, SEO and the importance of that. But even beyond that, can you talk about how we're seeing social change, business strategy and marketing strategy now?

You know, 20 years after it's been, almost 20 years after it's been introduced? Yeah, I think this has always blown my mind because as a business owner and as a leader, I want to be customer obsessed. I wanna be obsessed with our customers, and I think that those businesses. That have put social media at the furthest part of their office with the most junior team, miss where their customers are living and breathing.

We know that people spend a ton of time on their phones, on social media, um, on websites. They're, their customers are interacting, and so many leaders close their eyes and say, that's a marketing problem. But the reality is. You can find the problems, you can find the press, the things that are bubbling up within different communities directly online.

And so I think when we say strategy is the new social currency, I think it's a discovery scenario. I think it's a testing, um, opportunity. And I think that. It gives us an insight to what's happening even in B2B before it actually comes to the market. So I just think it's just a playground that business owners need to get curious about and business leaders.

And if you are in marketing and specifically in a senior level marketing, I, I would go all in on testing, like a fast testing, not just an ab testing of creative, but messaging. What messaging are you going to put in your new campaign? Do a quick test, send it to your audience. Decide what works best. Ship that, launch that to your next stage and just constantly do this so that you're getting data points with how you show up before you have to do all of this.

You know, oh, our campaign worked or it didn't work. Um, use social detest. One of my favorite use cases of this, like you said, is testing messaging, but just getting community feedback as well. And a great example of this is for one of our clients. Recently we developed a post, uh, the client that we serve is in human resources and actually manages recruitment for a rather large.

Uh, food processing factory. And so continually hiring people, but we wanted to understand, you know, what benefits do their employees actually value? And so we asked, what, what benefits do you like the best at this company? And their answers, well, we didn't get a ton of them, so I mean, there's not maybe enough data to officially infer a lot, but what we heard was, well, the people that I work with.

Are really important to me or the 401k match or even like the weekly pay that I receive. But it wasn't the things like healthcare, right, or some of these other things that they were touting pretty heavily that they offered as a benefit. It. It was really eye opening, I think, to our client to be able to see that.

And even beyond that, you know, I think to some of the other posts that we have on the, the B2B side where maybe people aren't commenting as much, right? But there are other metrics that we can look at to determine if people are actually, uh. Finding the information valuable. Right. LinkedIn in particular, has a new metric on their PDF carousels that they have, uh, called dwell time.

So we can see how long people are actually spending reading those. And, you know, if you have one post that has a really long dwell time, you should probably make more content around that. Yeah. Versus the other post. So I, I agree with you that, you know, this is where your communities live and. Treat it like a community building tool rather than just a traditional marketing.

I'm gonna spew my mess message out to people and hope that they listen to me. Right. All right, next one. We kind of discussed this, but as we mentioned, like a EO just really, I think, took off this year. And so if you wanna talk a little bit about that and what we're seeing on the language models and just how social is influencing those.

Yeah, so it's really interesting because all of the different language models pull from different platforms as like their primary sources. And while social media isn't necessarily on, well, Reddit, let's keep Reddit to the side. 'cause Reddit is a big, it is a social media platform and it is a big factor in search, um, as is or in a e, as is YouTube in many of the platforms.

But that being said, even if your website gets pulled up. You're, you know, it's pulling from another source, they're still gonna wanna know more. And you need to have your social linked on your website. You need to have, you know, the keywords of locations that you're serving. If you're geographically bound, um, you need to have everything interconnected because that's what's going to be harder for.

Um, you know, brands, if they're fragmented all over the place, if they have different naming conventions, if they have lots of brands that nobody knows that are associated, but they need them to be associated, um, if you have franchise locations and they're not all named in the same way, it's hard for people to understand and it's hard for the models to understand.

So there's a lot of basic foundations from SEO that these. Tools are, are supporting, but it's a little bit different. And I think that reviews, trusted sites that have listicles or links make a big difference. And, uh, Reddit is a, and YouTube are both big players in this. So you need to have a strategy that will support you so that if you wanna get found for something, you're in the opportunity, uh, window to do that.

I think it reminds me so much of the late two thousands and early 2000 tens and just the, the Buzzfeed style listicles over and over again and, you know, thinking about FAQs. But what we're really seeing with these AI models is that they are pulling websites, social content that. Speak conversationally in a lot of instances, right?

And as opposed to just, okay, does this keyword exist? Do you actually answer the question that people are asking and answer it efficiently so they can pull you in? And so I'm curious, Beth, because one of the things that came out I think in early 2025 was keywords are important. Instagram's doing away with hashtags, which we've been saying for several years, honestly, that that was going to happen, but.

Are you seeing, or do you feel like people are going to try to just like stuff keywords into their social content? And if they are, you know, what's your advice for that? Like, is that a good strategy or not? I think in some regards it's important to keep it in the forefront because it is important for businesses to be able to get found for what they do, um, in, in multiple ways.

But do I still think that you need to do it in a way that is. Feels connected to your brand, gives good vibes, is aligned with your tone and voice. Yes. And that's again where the humans need to come in. How do I do this plus this with a human in the middle or a human overseeing it. And as these agentic tools, meaning they can do multiple steps, continue to evolve and they're doing a lot of different things within marketing.

That's what I mean by like you need to make sure that the humans are in the right spot so you don't have steps one through seven. And then you review eight if you really needed to do a check-in, you know, right in the middle of that workflow. And I think you'll see this a lot in sales. Um, right now we see a lot of cold emails being AI generated.

There's a lot of outreach happening on cold emails. Salesforce is building some of this in. HubSpot has a a, a plan and platform for it too. But if you just let it run, you may reach out to somebody that could have been a prospect, or maybe you just said something slightly off and now you're reverse marketing to them.

Right? You're turning them off. And I wish that sales enablement and, and new that feeling a little bit more, because sometimes that's a sticky feeling. If somebody reaches out and they're like, they try to localize something, and you're like, that isn't, that feels so gross. You know, not only am I just not responding to this email, but like I'm blocking this company from my list.

Um, and you just don't want that to happen at scale. It is funny that you say that because two times now I've been reached out by, I think the same company and they have said, you know, I'll be in the area. We're opening a new office near Mayo, Michigan. And I, I have replied back both times, like, sir, you need to review this because you are most definitely not right.

A new office in a town of 2000 people. Um, it, it is just those, it's those little things like that. That you have to watch out for. Totally. All right. Last prediction that we have for 2026, and that is thinking like CEOs and just again, trying to weave it into the broader business strategy. So can you talk a little bit about this and, and what you wish the CEOs and CMOs in particular would, uh, take away from this?

I think the biggest opportunity for marketers that maybe have not had other business, uh, exposure. So maybe they came up through the marketing pathway, but they didn't really dig into analytics or they don't know about, you know. Different lever levers that you can pull for growth, cost savings, um, go to market, all of that stuff that used to be reserved for people that were senior in their careers or that had lots and lots of experience doing that is that these tools allow you to think differently.

They allow you to pull the metrics that maybe matter a little bit more to one person than the other, and they allow you to learn so fast. Um, I mean. You could check your social media content against a go to market strategy. Like that used to be really hard to do if you didn't have a lot of experience and now you could have just enough experience that you're like, okay, this actually makes sense.

I understand this. It's the language is different if I just like shift it like this, or I actually knew what this meant. So I do think that these tools allow marketers to level up in a way that maybe. Felt difficult for them in the past and, um. I think that it also helps CEOs understand marketing when things are presented in the way that they can consume.

'cause there's been a lot of research out there that many, many, many top leadership positions are not marketing minded. They don't have a background in marketing. And so when the CMO or the VP of Marketing brings the board report, it's a constant battle. And I would hope that these tools. Could help break that barrier down because it helps change language, it helps change positioning.

Um, there's a lot that you can do in order to connect the dots a little bit more. And we've seen it. I mean, we've seen the ability to expand, um, you know, within our business partners in, in categories that maybe we hadn't been in before, right? Like, we're evaluating pieces of their business based on what we knew from marketing.

Over into sales enablement or over into recruitment. Um, and I think it's really important that everything is integrated. So your brand really stands with personality and preciseness, and people know what you're selling and who you're selling it to. One of my favorite things to do each month as a customer success manager is to analyze our reports and actually try to look at them from the C-E-O-C-M-O, whoever it is that we're presenting the reports to, right?

From their perspective of what I actually care about this and. Most of the time I would say that like the information that our ad strats pull, I'm like, yes, absolutely. That is spot on. Sometimes they get a little into the numbers and then I have to go, okay, what does this mean exactly? But one of, I think the amazing things that they have managed to do is look beyond just the social platforms themselves.

Yes. Right. It there is a through line and we have talked with multiple clients and internally about. It's how social is not just the standalone island like we kind of mentioned before, but it's part of the broader ecosystem. And what we find is that the clients that give us access to their website, a lot of times we can find that through line a little bit easier.

Yes. For them and it, it can be a little challenging. You know, obviously we don't have every single person that came to their website and able to cross-reference it with the CRM, although there are some tools out there that can be ized data, but not all of it. But just being able to find that. Story to be able to tell I think is really helpful.

And I think that for marketing teams in particular, having somebody that knows how to do that and can guide you through that, again, to bring the important, valuable insight to the CEO to the board about this is why we need to spend this money on a new website, or this is what we're seeing over here, this is the messaging that's working.

Your click through rate is strong, but the bounce rate's really low. You know, what does all of that mean? And being able to, to wrap that up in a. A story, I think for those people can be really, really valuable. And I think one of the examples that sticks in my mind is for one of our clients in the financial services industry, we put Microsoft Clarity on their website and actually analyzed, okay, whenever we drive people from social, from a social ed, and then they land on your website.

What are they doing? And actually using clarity to see, you know, live sessions where people are clicking what they're doing. And there was a pretty significant. Like finding that we got from that, that we were able to tell the client, people are getting stuck right here. They don't know where to go. We need to adjust this button.

And then their marketing team took it and they're working on it and trying to fix it. I mean, that is a massive business implication Yes. That anybody at any level can understand for them. That again, came from the social team and identifying, you know, where people were getting stuck. Yeah, I do think that like sometimes it's the simple things that make a big difference in businesses, right?

Like your button is covered by your cookie, banner, or people don't. Your link on your phone. Number can't be clicked. Um, or like, it's, it's, it's sometimes super, super basic. And I do think, like from a reporting and tracking perspective, I think it's gonna even get more difficult because people are going in Discord channels and Slack groups and mastermind communities, and they're swapping and exchanging information about service providers.

You're not gonna be able to track that very well. It's going to be really hard. You can ask questions, you can get some information, but you're not gonna be able to see a linear attribution path. And sometimes we just have to accept that. And I think in the leadership room, people have to accept it. I think CMOs have to accept it.

I think marketers have to understand where the barriers, like where things can stop and where they don't stop. Um, because it's. It's very scattered these days, and with that trust that we were talking about in the beginning, it will tend to do that. If you have, you know, a lot of different sources, they're gonna go to the ones that they trust, which sometimes are in communities that you don't have access to.

Is there anything else that you think, just thinking about looking at like analytics or, or even as you're developing a strategy that marketers should be aware of in, in 2026 in particular of thinking like a CEO, things that they should be bringing up to their board in particular for them to be aware of?

I think that we need to a, answer the hard questions of. What will this do for my business? And sometimes the answers are easy, like people will not be able to buy from you if they don't know you exist. Like that is a easy answer for a difficult question. But I do think that every business. Person, whether it's you're in marketing, you're in your leadership, you should go through your customer journey.

Like pretend you're a client, click on the buttons. How would you interact? Have your 15-year-old try it, right? Like just go through the steps, because sometimes those steps are. Confusing. Sometimes your assumptions are not the same, and it doesn't take that long. It's not that big of a project. But I do think that there's a lot of that, um, clarity that you'll find if you just start by putting yourself in your customer's shoes, whether it's B2B or B2C.

You have your children go through the try to kick website pretty regularly it seems. Yeah. They tend to both like to like give me feedback, let's be honest. Um, and again, they're not our target demographic, but I think what's interesting about anybody that's like a young adult or young person, even like as young as like 10 or 11, they know how to navigate websites very easily.

They're on 'em a lot. But what's crazy to me is, is the expectations of things just working right? Like if a button is a little slow to load or if they can't find something, they're just like, this is broken. This website's trash. I'll be like, agreed. But like, give it a chance, right? Give it a second. And just the responsiveness, like the quickness of things that that generation expects is what we should be striving for, because.

We need people to find information easily. We can't bury it anymore. We need to put things in FAQs. Um, all of that stuff is what these young people want, and that's what businesses really need to do anyway, so it's a, it is an interesting experiment. That is, it is definitely relevant now. Like that is not something that you should wait on until next generation becomes in a purchasing phase.

Right. And but it, it is, I think to your point that it, the expectation as they step in to and ha sort of have more buying power for everything to be perfect, for everything to feel fresh and updated and not like it was built in 2007. I think will only increase and, uh, put more impetus on businesses to keep their website, their social channels updated as they go along.

What will be really interesting is the design expectations that that generation will have. I don't know the answer to this, but I think. It's curious to me that like Google Slides now has like templates that you can just beautify this slide. And you know, some of these other tools are like creating with visual standards in tact, right?

So they have different like typography hierarchy and they have consistency in formatting and all of that, which are general design standards. Um, and so if you don't do something like that. I'm curious to know how bad it will look or maybe it will build, you know, trust. But there's a lot of websites that are really bad.

I mean, they are just hard to navigate. There's like 400 different fonts and colors and type type treatments, and it's like real loud and with our eyes getting used to everything in a balanced way. If these tools make it prettier, um, will that make your. Really gaudy website. You look even worse. I don't know, right?

Could be. Oh, yes. Uh, we could probably go off on the importance of creative and everything. Right. A whole other webinar. In all honesty, I do think though, speaking of creative, I think that there is going to be a, uh, place for real. Raw content that is going to just show up and people are going to scrutinize it.

They're gonna look for signals that you say, um, or, and, and they don't want you to be perfect. And I continuously see that type of content performing well. And I think on social specifically. There should be a plan for it. Mm-hmm. Because it's, it's still working and I see this stuff working in the future.

There is nothing more frustrating to our creative team than a frustrating and exciting than for our clients to post alongside of us and just whip out their phone, take it a mi like a quick photo on their phone and upload it. It's super authentic. You know, they're at an event, they're sharing it. It's maybe a little blurry.

The lighting's not very good. There's shadows everywhere and our creative team is. Spend all of this time making these perfect images and those posts will always blow our team's posts outta the water any day of the week. We love to see it though, because you really need that balance. Yes. Um, you know, the brand story also combined with the authentic authenticity to build the trust and that there are real people behind this business that you'll be speaking to and not just a random, you know, uh, randomly generated AI bot that's doing things now.

I do have one question that came in, Beth, before we kind of Yeah. Wrap up on the key takeaways. So can brands show authentic moments without sacrificing polish or credibility? I think that is totally doable, and I think a lot of this has to do with the channel that you're on, right? Like I think people expect a little bit.

More polish on maybe like a YouTube at times than a TikTok. Um, but I think the reality is, is like show up in the way that makes the most sense with your brand, right? Like, let's say you're a, a architecture company, or you're building beautiful buildings, you have construction and you have, um, your. Output or your credibility is based on how pretty your buildings are, how functional they are, um, all of that.

You want to put some polish in that because if you are the artist, you need to make sure that there is a representation of what that artwork is, so that design standard. Is important to have across your channels. Now, does that mean you can't show up on video and showcase your pretty pictures with the green screen and say, Hey, I wanna show you a couple of our projects.

Beautiful picture, beautiful picture behind your head, and you're still in a very like casual style video. I think we do that naturally as humans, right? Like sometimes we're at a basketball game and we're talking to a business partner that just happened to sit down by us and we have a sweatshirt, hoodie, and a cap on.

Other times we're with that same person and we show up in a way that's dressed up fancier, um, a little bit more polished. And I think that. The best brands are gonna mimic that. They're gonna mimic the duality of humans, of brands, of data and vibes. And if they can do that, I think those are the ones that are really gonna stand out and win.

It is something that we discuss with clients a lot, is that when your content appears on your prospect's feed. They're probably sitting at home on the couch most of the time. You know, if they're on LinkedIn during work hours, that might be different. Or if they're scrolling on Facebook during work hours, that might be different too.

But most of the time we are interrupting people whenever they are in a mode of relaxation, or not necessarily in like a searching mode. And so being able to show up in a very authentic way. Whenever they're in that mindset already of, you know, the professional mask might be off and they just happen to see your content and go, oh, that's kind of interesting.

Right, and click into it and then I'll follow up with this tomorrow. That tends to be how we find people most of the time, especially in the B2B space. Um, right. The B2C, definitely, we are generally reaching people whenever, again, they're just, they're in a different mindset most of the time from just purchasing straight up.

Yep. Totally. All right. Another question. When it comes to trust within creative elements, could transparency around AI usage help audience perception and loyalty? Yes, and I actually think that this is what the, the good marketers will do in the future. It will be labeled as such. So, um, and I think that there's a lot of fun and playfulness and humor that AI visuals specifically can be leveraged for.

Um, because you can imagine anything, right? You can make anything. And so I think that there is a, a definite use case for some of this stuff. And I also think that where stock photos and videos lived is probably where AI generated content is going to live. So you may. W when used to go on those doctor hospital websites and you see the pictures of the not real doctors and not real nurses.

Um, and you knew it, right? As a consumer, you knew it, it still looked nice, but you knew it. I think that's where a lot of these AI generated images are going to fill the place of. Um, and I think that in some regards, that's perfectly normal. It's perfectly fine. But I think the scary part is, is when you try to make it feel like you didn't use.

Those tools or it was supposed to be real. Um, and that's where I think you lose trust with audiences is when you get them in a gotcha moment and that's not what they want. My favorite AI videos are the ones that are overtly ai. Yeah. And that is, you know, very obvious. You know, I've seen the, is this AI or is it not ai?

And then it starts off with one video that is, is you're kind of like, oh, I don't know. It could be. And then it just transforms into something that you're like, wow, that is, yeah, a hundred percent. You know, a baby that just gives up newborn baby that gets up and starts running across the floor, whatever it might be.

Right. Um, those ones always make me laugh a little bit and, and I think. But the ones that can elicit emotion, I mean, we've always talked about emotion being a strong driver, but I, those are my personal favorite ones to see is whenever a brand can be creative in that way. And the other spot that I think it could be really valuable is, um.

Like storytelling without big budgets, right? Like animated cartoons. Cartoons, um, anything that, you know, we used to watch on, on tv, like, uh, Disney movies, all that. You could never just create that sort of video without having huge budgets, um, or animators or like, there's so many things that go into that, but we knew cartoons were not real, right?

Like we knew that there was not really. Um, bugs Bunny on Space Jam, like it was a thing. And so I think as long as you kind of think of it in that way, like, okay, I just wanna make sure that it's obvious to the end user that like, this isn't a real bunny, it's a cartoon bunny. Um, and I'm still gonna tell a powerful story, but we never thought that that was real life.

The scary part, like I said, is when you start inter intertwining and, and lacing that stuff together in a way that like isn't for the good of the end user. And I think, I think with that too is also on social monitoring to make sure that nobody else is using your likeness or your brand. Right, right. To, to make these things.

Yeah. We could do a whole other one about the, the dangers of ai, but I think, I like to stay on the, the light side, the positive side. Um, and I think, again, as it relates to businesses and brands, the. Best use case is just be transparent, see if it feels right or wrong, and evaluate and try something else.

All right. Key takeaways, three things that you want people to take away in 2026. If you could summarize our whole conversation, what would you say? Yeah, trust is going to be a huge factor. Build it into your marketing, build it into your sales. Make sure you're not doing the reverse of marketing and turning people away, and you're actually reaching people with emotional connection.

The second strategy, this is where you have to think big. Don't just say, Chad, GBT, make me a marketing plan. Start with research. Start with understanding psychology of your buyers. Start with understanding the firmographics and the technographics of your, uh, key audiences and businesses. Get deep first.

Understand the business strategy. Then go to marketing. It makes all the marketing a lot easier. And then third is be consistent. Some of the best marketing fails because it's not consistent. It's not consistent to your end users, it's not consistent in your operations, and it really, um, kind of can, can tank everything if you don't do things on a regular repeat and, um, evaluate basis.

That is a wrap on 2025 and 2020. Well, 2020 review. 2026 predictions. So we will reconvene next year and see how we did on all of these and you know, see what we hit on and what we missed. If you have any questions for us or. If you say, Hey, I think that you completely forgot about this. Yeah, totally. This email us, uh, you can find us@chatterkick.com.

You can email Beth directly at beth@chatterkick.com, and we would love to hear what you are seeing and what your predictions are. So thank you Beth, for taking the time to Yeah, yeah. Thanks and really appreciate it. Bye everybody.