What is marketing's role in 2026?

TLDR:

• Make sure all your marketing efforts are squarely aimed at hitting your business goals.

• Marketing is changing really fast - so help your marketing team help you keep up.

• Make sure marketing and sales are best friends, but don’t confuse the two.

• Understand the limitations of marketing.

• If you’re not in marketing, don’t presume you know better.

I often find that marketing can hold an odd position in businesses. At the same time, it’s the fall guy when things don’t work across the board, and it’s seen as “fluff”. So what is marketing's role?

Where marketing sits in a business

I did a little exercise for myself, mapping out what “marketing” as a whole is responsible for in business, in terms of where it sits, and how it interacts with the other critical business functions. It’s not a complete map, but it gives the gist, and for me, the most critical thing is how closely it needs to link into business strategy. If that link isn’t there, it all falls apart, and it really is “fluff”.

Because at the end of the day, marketing is an investment businesses make to drive revenue. The markers along the way (like leads, like web traffic used to be) are indicators, rather than the goal.

The other point of this diagram is that marketing does A LOT. With the proliferation of marketing channels, marketing’s to-do-list is just getting longer. And it all has to work together cohesively, seamlessly, and effectively. If you wonder why your single-person marketing team is exhausted and overwhelmed, this is why. They have so many hats to wear, get blamed for everything, and never get the credit for new business, because sales closed the deal.

And when something goes wrong in the business, marketing has to fight that fire. Crisis communications is a discipline in its own right, and it’s just yet another part of marketing - one that is always undervalued until the crap hits the fan.

Marketing is changing really fast.

I sat on a webinar recently, and three messages from it stood out to me:

• Over half of website traffic is bot traffic, and that’s only going up.

• We need to structure our online presence so that the good bots (Google, ChatGPT, etc.) can find us.

• The good bots don’t trust or value AI content, so people-written content is critical.

It is a crazy world right now, and we’d better get used to it. Here are my thoughts on how to approach this dichotomy.

• Be prepared to shift your strategies and tactics as everything continues to evolve; run experiments with your marketing team so you can see what’s working right now.

• Expect your marketing team to know what’s going on out there and give them the time and space to upskill themselves. No one can learn new things when they’re burnt out.

• Don’t expect your marketing team to be soothsayers - no one knows where this is going, we’re all just reacting to what we’re given.

• Don’t get me started on assuming you can fire marketing people because AI can do it. Just don’t do that.

  
  

Marketing's role isn’t sales, but they should be best friends.

Marketing should be in tune with what’s going on in sales. That’s because whoever is doing the selling has direct contact with the client and knows them really well, and all the objections. Marketing can help answer some of those objections before they make contact with the company.

And that can look like different things:

• In law firms, the first step in the sales process is the intake professional. So they should become your best friend. Because they know what the good leads look like, and they know what questions people are asking during intake, which is great marketing fodder

• In small finance teams, that initial consultation is often done by the financial advisors themselves, and they really are at the coalface.

What marketing can do for sales:

• Help identify the right audience to target

• Target that audience so they’re interested in your company

• Help them discover your company.

• Warm them up for sales so that they know what they’re getting, and the sales conversation is easier.

  
  

What marketing can’t do for sales:

• Make them sign a contract.

  
  

Marketing isn’t going to save your business.

Marketing puts the shine on the apple, but if the apple is rotten, there’s no saving it. Marketing can’t save a bad product, bad client service, or a market that just isn’t ready. Marketing can help identify where the market segments are that are less competitive, or help you run experiments to test out theories. But if your audience doesn’t want what you have to sell, it’s going to be hard.

As someone who spent three years trying to educate the market about ordering food from your phone (pre-COVID), I know the limitations of marketing. As soon as I left the company, the world shut down, and suddenly everyone was ordering food from their phones! It would have been a completely different marketing job.

Don’t think you could do better.

Marketing is often like a swan, elegant and smooth above the water, but below the water, those little legs are peddling like crazy. And it requires a lot of work for everything to go smoothly. If marketing looks easy, that’s because the person/team doing it is great at their job(s).

So please, have high expectations of marketing - it’s a business function after all, but don’t think it’s easy, and don’t tell us about a magical new channel that we need to “go viral” on because your cousin told you about it over drinks.