Marketing money in the US has effectively hit a ceiling: Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey shows average marketing budgets holding at 7.7% of company revenue for a second year in a row, with most CMOs saying that still isn’t enough to execute their plans. That pressure is exactly why 2026 can be a sorting year, where brands that spend with intent pull ahead of those that keep pouring dollars into channels that no longer deliver.
The good news is you don’t need a bigger budget to compete. You need a clearer job description for every dollar you spend.
This article walks through three practical moves any brand can make for 2026: treating brand as a multiplier, building an “always‑on” attention engine, and giving AI a defined role that pays for itself. All of it rests on current data from Gartner, The CMO Survey, Insider Intelligence, Statista and leading content marketing studies, so you can feel confident about the direction, not just the theory.
Make your brand the multiplier, not a line item
Right now many marketing teams are stuck in short‑term mode. Analysis of The CMO Survey reported by WARC found that nearly 69% of budgets in 2024 went to performance activity, up from about 60% the year before. That tilt puts pressure on every ad to convert immediately, while long‑term elements like brand story, visual identity and customer trust get squeezed.
Decades of effectiveness work by Les Binet and Peter Field, based on hundreds of campaigns, point in a different direction: brands grow more reliably when a meaningful share of spend is reserved for long‑term brand building, with performance activity layered on top rather than dominating the mix. In simple terms, brand is the multiplier that makes every future click, view or store visit cheaper and more effective, because people already know and recognise you.
For 2026, it helps to treat branding services as a concrete budget line, not a fuzzy aspiration. That can include strategy, visual identity, packaging and web experience, the kind of integrated work delivered by specialist studios such as Helms Workshop in Austin, which focuses on consumer, hospitality and lifestyle brands and handles everything from brand foundations to design systems and digital touchpoints. When you see that level of consistency across a logo, label, site and social feed, it’s easier to understand what a serious brand investment actually buys.
If you’ve ever struggled to brief a designer, found that your social content looks different every month or watched an ad underperform because it “didn’t feel like you,” you’ve already felt what happens when that brand multiplier is missing. Giving it a protected share of your 2026 budget is less about aesthetics and more about making the rest of your spending feel lighter, faster and easier to execute.
Always‑on is the new big bet
Once the brand is doing its job, the next step is staying visible in a way that doesn’t rely on one‑off bursts. US digital ad spend is forecast to exceed 309 billion dollars in 2024, with steady double‑digit growth and a rising share going to digital video. That tells you where your customers’ attention is actually going in the next few years.
Content and creators are how you show up there consistently. A 2025 content marketing study from Reboot Online found that 54% of businesses planned to increase content marketing spend, and almost half expected to invest between 5,000 and 25,000 dollars per month in content alone. Forbes Advisor’s review of similar research shows that many smaller firms still work at lower levels, with roughly a quarter spending under 1,000 dollars a month and others clustering in the 1,000 to 5,000 dollar range. That spread is useful because it proves you don’t need enterprise money to build an always‑on presence; you need a number you’ll actually stick to.
Influencer and creator partnerships are moving in the same direction. Statista’s series on US influencer marketing spend estimates the market at around 9 billion dollars in 2024, up from 7 billion in 2023, with further growth expected into 2025 and beyond. Forecasts summarised by Oberlo show a similar upward curve, reinforcing that creators are now a standard line in many plans, not a quirky experiment.
A simple way to make this manageable in 2026 is to combine content and creators in your mind as a single “attention” bucket. Instead of treating blog posts, video series, social clips and influencer fees as separate worlds, you give yourself one monthly number and let it flex. One month that might favour short videos for your own channels. Another month it might mean shifting a slice into a creator partnership that introduces you to a specific niche. The important part is the rhythm, not the exact mix.
To make that feel practical, you might define your “attention” line in one of these ways:
- A fixed monthly content budget you treat like a subscription to your future growth, even if it’s three figures rather than four, adjusted once a year instead of every time cash feels tight
- A simple rule that at least a small percentage of that line goes to creator trials each quarter, so you’re steadily learning which partnerships fit your brand
- A cap on one‑off campaigns so they don’t cannibalise the money your audience relies on you to spend showing up consistently
Because many brands are still handling influencer deals and content bursts ad hoc, there’s space in 2026 for smaller, more organised teams to secure good creator relationships and build dependable content habits before prices climb further.
Let AI pay its own way
The third pillar for 2026 is deciding how AI and martech fit into your budget, and being honest about what you expect them to do. The Fall 2024 edition of The CMO Survey reports that marketing technology already accounts for roughly 19% of the average marketing budget, with leaders expecting that share to rise over the next few years and more than half of marketing activities already relying on martech tools.
At the same time, a Statista‑reported survey of US marketers in 2023 found that about 73% were already using generative AI in their marketing work, whether for copy, chatbots or creative support, and separate research from the Marketing AI Institute shows that a majority of marketers see AI as very or critically important to success in the near term. In other words, AI and automation are no longer side projects; they’re part of how modern marketing happens.
For your 2026 plan, it helps to think of AI and martech as a small unit that must earn its keep. That could mean setting a modest percentage of your budget aside for tools that clearly reduce reporting time, help resize assets for multiple platforms, support content drafting or speed up influencer research. If a tool can save you, say, a few hours of manual work a week or replace a freelance task you used to outsource, it deserves a place. If it doesn’t, you drop it and reclaim those dollars.
A useful question here is simple: which repetitive marketing jobs would you happily hand to a machine if it meant getting that time, or that cash, back to invest in your brand and your always‑on presence? Your answer to that question is what should guide your AI line in the 2026 budget, not fear of missing out.
Turn 2026 into your no‑waste year
Content and influencer spending are expected to keep rising, and martech’s share of the budget is likely to grow as more work shifts into software and automation. That’s exactly why deciding how you’ll use those trends now can set you up for calmer, more predictable marketing in the late 2020s, instead of scrambling from one channel panic to the next.
If you boiled all of this down into a one‑line guide for your 2026 plan, it might read something like: brand first, attention always‑on, AI that pays its way. The details are yours to tailor, but the order matters. With that in mind, the real question becomes straightforward: if every dollar in your 2026 budget had a specific job and a result you could describe in one sentence, how different might your year look
