Cutting through the buzzwords to find the one strategy every small business already knows.
Kurt kicked off this week’s Marketing Minute with an experiment: searching “2026 marketing strategies” and, for once, actually reading the AI-generated summary instead of scrolling past it. What came back was a wall of trend-forward language: trust-building, first-party data collection and a new term, “agentic optimization”, the idea of designing your brand so AI shopping assistants and predictive algorithms recommend you directly. The pitch also pushed businesses to move away from siloed campaigns and vanity metrics in favor of interconnected systems, customer lifetime value and authentic storytelling.
His honest first reaction was that it sounded like AI trying to sell you on AI. But rather than dismiss it outright, he did the useful thing by translating the jargon into something a small business owner can actually use. Kurt’s takeaway is simple: track where your referrals are coming from throughout the year and put your marketing energy where the results already are. It’s not a new idea but the practical core hiding underneath all the “agentic” language.
Kurt’s broader point is that even if the terminology feels like hype, the underlying shift is real. AI shopping assistants and predictive algorithms are increasingly part of how customers find businesses and understanding how that works, even at a basic level, is becoming part of building a business in 2026. You don’t need to chase every buzzword, but knowing the landscape helps you recognize which parts are noise and which parts are worth paying attention to.
Today’s Marketing Minute is brought to you by Kurt Engebrecht of REMAX Plus.