Marketing attention is the scarce resource in 2026
Most small businesses aren’t under-marketing. They’re over-touching everything: a little SEO, a little social, a little email, a little “AI,” a little print, a little whatever their competitor posted this week. It looks like activity. It’s mostly noise.
Here’s a useful filter for 2026: if a tactic creates work but doesn’t create decisions, you can probably ignore it. Not forever. Just until you’ve earned the right to care.
Generic SEO and content bloat
If your “SEO strategy” is publishing thin, generic posts because a tool told you to, stop. That’s not a strategy. It’s a content landfill.
Search has been pushing toward depth, expertise, and usefulness for a while. The sloppy version of SEO—repeat keywords, write 800 words, ship it—doesn’t just fail to help. It can actively make your site feel untrustworthy.
The real cost isn’t ranking. It’s that you train your own team to treat writing like a chore instead of an asset. You end up with a blog full of posts nobody would miss if they disappeared. That’s a bad sign.
Publish less, but make it count. Pick 5–10 pages that actually matter: your core services, core industries, and best offers. Build those pages like you’re trying to prevent a sales call, not feed Google. Add specifics—pricing ranges, timelines, tradeoffs, failure modes, who it’s not for, photos of real work, and language customers actually use.
Then maintain those pages. Update them when reality changes. Set-and-forget SEO is basically wishful thinking now.
Chasing every new platform or trend
The fastest way to waste a year is to keep “testing” platforms with no plan to stick.
Every platform has its own grammar. Posts that work on LinkedIn rarely work on TikTok. Instagram cadence doesn’t map cleanly to YouTube. When someone says “Just repurpose everywhere,” what they usually mean is “Be mediocre everywhere.”
Sometimes a new channel really does matter. But most trend-chasing is avoidance dressed up as ambition. It feels productive because it’s unfamiliar.
Pick one primary platform where your buyers already pay attention, and one supporting channel you control—email, SMS, community, whatever fits. Then go deep. Depth means you can answer the same customer question a dozen different ways without sounding rehearsed, because you’ve learned what people actually mean when they ask it.
A practical rule: don’t add a new platform unless you can keep it alive for 90 days without resenting it.
Over-automation without human strategy
Automation isn’t the problem. Unsupervised automation is. It’s now common to automate outreach, sequences, DMs, follow-ups, chat widgets, lead scoring, reminders, and review requests—often all at once.
You’ve felt the failure mode. You reply to a “personal” email and immediately get a totally unrelated automated follow-up. That hesitation—did anyone read what I wrote?—is where trust leaks out. People don’t complain. They disengage.
Automation without a human brain behind it turns your marketing into a series of misunderstandings.
Use automation for logistics, not relationships. Route leads, capture context, schedule, remind, and track. Keep a human checkpoint anywhere tone matters: first responses, objections, pricing conversations, and anything that looks like it was written just for one person.
And if you’re using AI to draft, fine. Just don’t publish the first draft. That’s where the shiny, empty language lives.
Print-only or disconnected traditional ads
Print can work, but only when it connects to something measurable.
A postcard with a phone number and a vague promise is basically a donation. Same with a newspaper ad that sends people to your homepage with no next step. Traditional media isn’t dead. It’s just unforgiving when your offer is fuzzy.
If someone sees your ad while half-distracted, they need a simple path: a reason to act, a place to go, and a way for you to know it worked.
If you run print, attach a digital spine to it. Use a dedicated landing page, a clear offer, and a QR code that goes somewhere specific. One call to action that matches the ad—“get the checklist,” “book the estimate,” “see pricing,” “claim the intro.”
Then follow through with retargeting and email so print becomes the first touch, not the entire campaign.
Vanity metrics and “busy work”
This is the part that makes people defensive, so here it is plainly: impressions aren’t revenue. Likes aren’t pipeline. Engagement isn’t a plan.
If your marketing report makes you feel productive but doesn’t change what you do next week, it’s theater.
Stop confusing consistency with volume. Posting three times a day doesn’t help if you can’t clearly state the problem you’re known for solving.
Track the numbers that force decisions. How many qualified inquiries you get by channel, how many turn into real conversations, and how many become proposals.
Then look at what closes: deal count, average value, and what it actually cost—time and money—to get there. It’s less fun than follower counts. It’s also the difference between marketing and content cosplay.
Smarter replacements that compound
If you ignore the time-wasters above, you don’t get to do nothing. You reinvest that attention into work that stacks.
Evergreen buying content. The questions customers ask right before they buy: pricing, timelines, comparisons, tradeoffs, common failure modes, and what you won’t do. This content pulls double duty as sales enablement, support, and training.
One platform, done with intent. Use it to earn trust, not just attention. Show your point of view. Explain tradeoffs. Say when something isn’t for everyone. The goal isn’t volume. It’s being recognizable.
Measurement that leads to action. If a channel doesn’t produce qualified conversations, fix the offer or stop feeding it. If you can’t track it at all, treat it like a branding expense and cap the spend. Don’t call it ROI-positive just because it feels professional.