5 Marketing Questions I'm Asking Myself in 2026

Say what you will about marketing: it never gets boring.

I recently wrote about what made marketing harder in 2025. I specifically called out broken attribution, AI content flooding the zone, and general economic chaos. All of these were very real problems that affected every marketer regardless of skill level.

But playful as my griping was, you and I both know complaining doesn’t help much. What matters now is what we do about it.

So as I'm planning for 2026, I'm wrestling with five questions that don't have easy answers. And those are the questions I’ll share with you here.

I don't have these figured out yet. But I'm convinced these are the right ones to ask.

And if you’re like me and you're doing year-end planning or mapping out Q1 strategy, these are worth considering for your business too.

Let's start with the elephant in the room.

Attribution in 2025 was an absolute mess. Privacy regulations have seriously hobbled tracking (and as a consumer myself, thank goodness). Meanwhile, third-party cookies are dead or dying. And even if you somehow found a legal and technically functional way to track people on one device, you’d still have customer journeys spread across devices and platforms in ways that are impossible to follow.

Even so, CFOs still want proof that marketing drives revenue. And they’re absolutely right to want that.

Here's the problem: the infrastructure we relied on for years is gone. Someone sees your Facebook ad, hears a podcast mention, remembers your brand while scrolling Reddit, then Googles you directly three days later. That shows up as "organic" or "direct/none." Your Facebook campaign gets zero credit even though it incepted the entire idea to buy from your brand in the first place.

Platform attribution isn’t very reliable either. If someone sees a Facebook ad, a Google ad, a TikTok video, and a LinkedIn ad, then makes a purchase, all four platforms may claim 100% of the credit. Not because they’re lying, but because they’re not talking to one another to compare notes.

Of course, budget scrutiny certainly won’t go away in 2026. If anything, it’s likely to be tighter since platform costs are up.

So what am I doing about this?

I'm exploring marketing lift testing and Marketing Mix Modeling—old-school measurement techniques that work when modern attribution fails. I'm setting up holdout groups for email campaigns to see if people who get the email convert more than people who don't. I'm tracking business-level metrics like revenue and customer lifetime value instead of just trusting what platforms tell me.

I'm also building in more qualitative feedback loops. Asking customers "how did you hear about us?" in conversations, not just on forms they may or may not respond to.

None of these are perfect answers. But they're directionally right.

And to be perfectly level with you, this is genuinely hard and I don't have it figured out. Most marketers don't either. But asking the question is better than pretending attribution dashboards are guardians of the one ultimate truth.

We track dozens of metrics. Impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, CPM, engagement rate, bounce rate, time on page, scroll depth. I could go on if you want—grab a chair.

Most of them are vanity metrics.

The question I'm asking myself: which numbers actually predict business success?

It's easy to drown in data. Platforms give you every incentive watching their preferred metrics. They want you obsessing over CTR and engagement because those numbers make their algorithms look good. But CTR means nothing if people don't buy. Engagement means nothing if it doesn't lead to revenue.

And as I said before, platforms grade their own homework. They have every incentive to show you metrics that make them look effective, whether or not those metrics matter to your bottom line.

For my part, I'm ruthlessly cutting dashboard bloat. For most folks, I’m focusing on three core metrics and they’re usually cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value, and revenue attributed to marketing efforts at the business level. Everything else is diagnostic, not outcome.

I'm asking one simple question about every metric: "If this number goes up, does revenue go up?" If the answer isn't a clear yes, I stop caring about it.

Basically, I’m looking for lift.

Better to have three numbers you trust than 30 you don't.

Platform costs went up significantly in 2025. So if you’ve been using social media or search engines to advertise, you’ve probably already noticed that everything got more expensive.

So here's the uncomfortable question: are you spending on channels because they work, or because you always have?

What would your channel mix look like if you started from zero today?

Budgets are tighter in 2026. And even if they weren’t, opportunity cost is still a very real force. Every dollar spent on an overpriced channel is a dollar you're not spending somewhere that might work better. What worked in 2023 might not work now.

I'm auditing my spend by channel against actual results. Not what the platform says the results are—what the business-level impact actually is. I'm looking for underpriced channels I've been ignoring because they're not part of my usual playbook. And I'm willing to eliminate channels where I feel comfortable if the data says they're not working.

I'm also testing small in new places before doubling down on old standbys. If a channel has gotten 40% more expensive but performance hasn't improved, that's a problem worth addressing.

The hardest part of this is mounting the momentum for change, of course. “We've always done Facebook" is a powerful force. There's sunk cost fallacy when it comes to “tools we've paid for, expertise we've built, creative we've developed.” There's risk aversion when budgets are tight and nobody wants to be the person who killed the one channel that was "working."

But staying put because it's comfortable is how you fall behind.

When's the last time you actually talked to a customer?

Not sent a survey. Not looked at analytics. I mean had a real in-depth conversation with someone who bought from you where you asked them why.

For marketers, it’s easy to build personas from demographics. We optimize messaging based on what we think sounds good. We run campaigns based on assumptions about what customers care about.

Then we wonder why messaging falls flat.

Market conditions changed dramatically in 2025. Tariff uncertainty, economic volatility, and a million other factors have all affected how people make decisions. Customer priorities shifted. What mattered to them in 2024 might not matter now.

You can't run 2024's playbook in 2026 and expect the same results.

This is why I’m bullish on doing more customer interviews. Not surveys with multiple choice questions—actual conversations with open-ended questions. I'm reading reviews and support tickets looking for patterns in what people say, not what I hope they'll say.

I'm asking "why did you buy?" and "what almost stopped you from buying?" instead of "do you like our product?" The first two questions tend to be far more incisive, where as that last one risks you hearing polite, but nevertheless empty words.

Late at night, when it’s 2 in the morning and I worry about work, I often fear that I’m building strategy on top of assumptions that may or may not work. Because a lot of well-meaning marketers do that.

We think we know what customers want because we've been doing this for years. But things change. And if you're not checking your assumptions against reality, you're probably wrong about something important.

Talk to ten customers this quarter. Ask open-ended questions and listen for pain points, not validation. Then adjust your strategy based on what you hear.

This one's personal, but I think there’s a real good chance you know what I'm talking about.

Yes, that thing that's been on your "I should really do this" list for months. The project that would make a real difference but feels too hard or too risky or too time-consuming. The thing you keep pushing to next quarter.

For me, it's really systematizing lead generation for the agency. That is, not always relying on referrals, upsells, word of mouth, and even content marketing. I know having a rock solid channel—one that can be scaled up or down with spending like PPC or cold email—would make it easier to forecast revenues, divide up work, and do all the little things that make an agency tick.

If you’re anything like me, then the things you're avoiding are probably important, and that's why they keep nagging at you. So for what it’s worth, I’m approaching my own avoidance by breaking the thing I'm avoiding into smaller pieces and setting deadlines for the smaller, more manageable pieces.

And when I feel like stopping, I remind myself that this is better tackled badly than avoided perfectly.

These aren't "5 things you must do in 2026."

They're questions worth sitting with. Your answers will be different than mine. Your business has different challenges, different constraints, different opportunities.

But I know this: asking good questions is half the battle. You don't need perfect answers. You need to be asking the right questions and taking directional action based on what you learn.

So here's what I'm curious about: What questions are you asking yourself in 2026? What are you avoiding that you know you should tackle?

The answers to those questions will shape your year more than any trend prediction or best practice checklist ever could.