Top Content Marketing Trends for 2026

Content marketing trends are valuable in answering questions ranging from “Should we jump on X now that it’s taking off?” to “Should we start laying the foundation for Y in our five-year plan?” In a discipline where certainty is rare, trends are the marketer’s friend in helping navigate the future. On this basis, we once again bring you the top content marketing trends for the year.  

Each of these content marketing trends for 2026 is backed by data and expert opinions.  

Take a look.  

AI will become a workflow play 

AI-generated content draws mixed reactions, but the more important question is where it delivers the most value (Hint: It’s not in generating your holiday commercial).  

Increasingly, brands are discovering that AI delivers the most value when it’s integrated across the entire content creation workflow. Rather than juggling two or three separate AI tools, they use an AI marketing platform like Typeface that embeds AI across ideation, creation, analysis, and publishing. Teams decide what they want to use AI for and what they’d like to keep with themselves.  

Example 

You create a banner ad for your latest campaign and Typeface’s Ad Agent generates audience-specific variations of this parent ad using your audience data, ad templates, and images. You review once, notify the next editor, and publish to Google Ads — all from a single platform.  

(The time saved can go toward higher-value strategic and creative work, such as developing a standout holiday ad concept or expanding campaign efforts — with the same AI platform at hand to suggest concept ideas or campaign briefs.) 

Why this works 

• You control creative quality: Define tone, voice, and visual guidelines to shape how AI creates. Add checkpoints for human review.  

• You lock in brand compliance: AI agents work with your approved templates, images, video, and messaging rules to keep content compliant and on-brand.  

• You personalize all elements: AI agents tailor copy, visuals, and CTAs for each audience. They adapt social posts and ads to each platform’s specifications.  

• You create at scale: AI marketing platforms are ideal for enterprise marketing teams creating content at the scale of hundreds or thousands of assets and requiring strict brand compliance. 

AI in content workflows – What brands and experts say  

• More marketers are actively testing AI tools or embedding AI into their workflows. Only a small minority remains in the early curiosity or understanding stages.

• Agentic workflows and automation are becoming everyday marketing tools. Experts advise teams to use AI strategically. 

Brands will deepen influencer partnerships to engage communities 

While celebrity endorsements remain powerful, a new kind of influencer has emerged: the niche expert armed with a smartphone, deep subject knowledge, and high follower trust. Understanding the value of partnering with such influencers on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, brands are boosting their creator marketing spend while taking a strategic, long-term view of creator partnerships.  

Influencer partnerships also give brands a way to reach beyond algorithm-driven social media feeds and into community-focused platforms like Substack and Discord. This approach balances top-of-funnel awareness from short-form video with the repeat engagement and deeper narratives that subscription channels deliver. But there’s a trade-off: measurement complexity. Since creator content is spread across many platforms, ROI isn’t as straightforward as paid clicks. Brands need multi-touch attribution to understand how these platforms influence the customer journey. 

A few statistics: 

• The global influencer marketing market has tripled since 2020.

• In 2026, investment in creator content will grow by 61%.

• Four to five years from now, 85% of enterprise marketers plan to increase investment in creator marketing.

• 90% of CMOs believe that social and influencer content drives more engagement than traditional advertising.

What leaders opine: 

• Nano and micro creators outperform larger creators on engagement and trust. A graphic designer demonstrating an AI design tool or a styling expert comparing viral beauty products carries the credibility that drives conversions and loyalty.  

• Long-term creator partnerships deliver stronger results. Integrating creators across organic, paid, website, email, and retail, and choosing them based on where they can drive the most value — from awareness to engagement to sales — outperforms one-off activations.

• CMOs should set clear rules for creator content, define what success looks like, and then give creators freedom to express what makes the brand different in their own distinctive style.

Marketers will continue optimizing for AI search  

Some SEOs argue that AI discovery requires new rules, while others believe AI search optimization is simply SEO done right. The wisdom is in staying open to different perspectives and validating strategies with your own content. 

You’re not doing anything radically different — SEO and AI search optimization (now commonly referred to as answer engine optimization or AEO and generative engine optimization or GEO) — share many core tactics. At the same time, you’ll need to consider the differences in how answer engines retrieve content as they’re meaningful enough to affect what gets retrieved and who gets cited. 

• AI Overviews have widened the gap between impressions and clicks, particularly for informational queries.

• Click volumes from Google Search remain stable.

• AI makes up 0.1% of traffic.

• Retail is likely to be the first major vertical to become a battleground for LLMs, directly challenging Google Search. 

Popular AI search optimization (AEO/GEO) tactics that are also SEO tactics 

• Chunking content  

• Q&A style: Question-based headers and direct, concise, factual answers (also an SEO tactic for Featured Snippets) 

• Entity building 

• Schema  

• Content freshness 

• Authority  

What changes in AEO? 

You’re not just ranking for keywords but creating pieces of content that AI retrieves when users ask questions. Hence the emphasis on creating and structuring content meaningfully for AI systems (and users).  

Google’s AI Mode uses the fan-out technique of breaking down a query into subtopics and running multiple queries across diverse sources. This deeper dive into the web than traditional search is intended to find highly relevant and superior content matching user queries. Hence the AEO tactic of identifying sub-queries covering different intents and perspectives.  

Someone discovers you on ChatGPT, searches your brand on Google, and visits your site. Brand mentions are visibility boosters and worth pursuing. For that, you must be seen as a reputed site in your niche. Unlinked mentions of your brand on third-party sites are more influential for AEO than high-authority backlinks.  

Hence, the common AEO suggestion to invest in digital PR, building an expert reputation across popular media sites (CNET, Forbes), niche media outlets (Demand Gen Report and MarTech for B2B companies), and social and UGC platforms (LinkedIn, YouTube).  

Video marketing trends: Snackable video, vertical video and, AI-powered video creation 

89% of businesses use video as a marketing tool to cater to consumer preferences for this format. As you may guess, video marketing isn’t going anywhere in 2026. But experts are betting on certain video formats to dominate and AI to ease and scale video creation. 

Where is video headed?  

• In 2025, 69% of marketers reported creating video specifically for social platforms. Social media videos is likely to remain the most popular use case for video marketing.  

• With short-form video proving powerful for reach and engagement, consumers have shown that they’re ready for vertical videos on news and media sites. Taking the cue, publishers are expected to go less text-heavy and instead, add swipeable video feeds in their home pages and articles. 

• AI has enabled more brands to bring video creation in-house. But mere access to AI doesn’t guarantee engagement and clicks. As AI video proliferates, brands must balance creating at scale with quality and authenticity.

• B2B video ad spend is expected to continue climbing.  

Pro tips 

• Use Video Agent to repurpose long videos into TikTok/Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.  

• Mix and match clips to create sizzle reels tailored to a specific product line or audience segment.  

Graphic design trends: Anti-AI, sensory textures, local influences, expressive typography, and more 

Going by expert predictions, visual design in 2026 will lean toward raw, bold, and human-centered expression. This comes as AI continues to relieve designers of the more mundane aspects of creative work. 

Showcasing human craft 

As AI-generated visuals become more common, designers are intentionally creating visibly human work to stand out. They’re using hand-made elements, analogue techniques, and deliberate imperfections to make brands feel more authentic and distinctive. 

Inviting people to feel, not just see  

How do you create immersive experiences for a population that’s spending more time with digital media? By simulating the physical world. Designers are increasingly using tactile elements mimicking touch, movement, and physical materials to enhance sensory engagement.  

Typography turns rebellious 

Playful colors, varied sizing, loosening rules, and reworking classic letterforms with a modern flair. 2026 could be the year typography moves beyond rigid minimalism and becomes more expressive and character-driven. 

Returning to the roots 

Designers in markets like India, Mexico, and Spain are blending heritage aesthetics with contemporary styles to assert a unique visual identity in an increasingly homogenized global visual landscape. Loud, layered visuals, handloom patterns, festival-inspired color palettes, and regional typography reflect this unique expression.  

AI reviving traditional styles 

Generative tools are reintroducing techniques like woodcut illustration, stone carving, gothic typography, and ornamental patterns within creative workflows. This creates an interesting contrast — machine helping revive traditional craft as designers showcase human skill. 

Balancing efficiency with craft 

As visual creatures, we instinctively assign more credibility to brands with strong design aesthetics. Maintaining that quality, however, places intense pressure on creative teams.  

Creatives enter the field for their passion for the craft, but the day-to-day reality is different. Designing dozens of similar assets week after week can be exhausting and monotonous. 

That’s a major reason AI tools like Image Agent have found a place in creative workflows. By offloading repetitive visuals and cross-platform ad adaptations to AI, teams reduce busywork and free up time to demonstrate human craft for key visuals.  

Try Typeface 

That’s a wrap of the content marketing trends for 2026! 

Typeface gives you the AI workflows to execute on these trends at enterprise scale while protecting creative quality and avoiding burnout. Get a demo or talk to sales to learn more about how Typeface can help your team achieve more this year.