I’ve been in business for more than 20 years, and I’ve been creating long, generous, educational content since around 2011. This week I sat in a room in Dallas and heard Ryan Deiss make the case for doing more of exactly that. Here’s everything he taught, and what to do about it in your business.

Ryan Deiss stood on stage this week and said something every business owner needs to hear: most of what used to work in marketing just doesn’t work all that well anymore. Even things that worked a year or two ago.

If you don’t know Ryan, he’s the founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer, and he says he was the first to introduce the idea of the marketing funnel, back in 2006. So when the man who says he gave us the funnel stands up and says “the funnel ain’t really a funnel no more”, it’s worth paying attention.

I’m in Dallas for LevelUp 2026, where I was also a speaker this year, talking about running a 7-figure SaaS company with AI operations. I recorded Ryan’s whole talk so I could share it with you properly. Not a quick summary. All of it.

And honestly? I was absolutely delighted by what I heard.

I’ve been in business for more than 20 years, and since I started creating educational content around 2011 (blogging, LinkedIn, then YouTube), it has become the number one marketing method behind my business: long-form videos, webinars, blogs and longer “how to” emails. I’ve always been told brevity isn’t my strong point. (You may have noticed. This post is long. Get a cuppa.) But as an educator, giving people deep, genuinely useful information has always been how I work, and it has worked for me for well over a decade.

So hearing Ryan say that long form is trending back up again, and that trust is now built with time, felt a lot like being told the thing I’ve been doing all along is the thing that works best right now.

Prefer to watch? Here’s the quick video I filmed at the conference the day I heard him speak.

Full transparency: I used AI to help me shape this article, working from my own recording and transcript of Ryan’s talk, my own notes and my past posts. Everything I’ve attributed to Ryan comes from that recording. Any figures are his, as he gave them on stage.

TL;DR: the 12 things

1. We’re in a trust recession. Their time comes before their money.
2. Speed beats the slow drip. Get people to binge you, fast.
3. Put long-form content where it “isn’t supposed to go”. Long form gets stares, not glances.
4. Turn one great idea into a native multi-part series.
5. Build a YouTube binge factory around one “wingman” video.
6. It really does hurt to ask. Marketing is a popcorn popper, not a funnel.
7. Add a “when you’re ready” P.S. to everything.
8. Make people register again. It’s date night.
9. Make email social again with short hand-raiser emails.
10. Faceless brands are fading. Become your company’s embedded influencer.
11. Choose your character: a point of view, hooks and flaws.
12. Pick one stage, master it, then bring people home to your email list.

Ryan grouped everything into three trends that he thinks will shape the next 12 months and that he isn’t seeing enough people talk about: content binging, selling in private and embedded influencers. He also mentioned, almost in passing, that his companies have spent (and keep spending) over $8 million on marketing tests across 17 companies in different industries. He said he shared that not to impress anyone, but so we’d know what he was teaching is real.

For each lesson below you’ll get Ryan’s point in plain English, what it means for you, where I’ve been doing it for years (and the one place he made me rethink my own advice), and one practical thing to do.

1. We’re in a trust recession, so build trust before you chase traffic

Ryan’s point

Ryan said he’ll let the economists argue about whether we’re in a recession. What he’s sure of is that we’re in a trust recession.

He reminded the room of the days when you could buy ads, send people to a video sales letter with an order button underneath, and they’d watch it beginning to end and buy. He said a lot of people built careers in that high-trust cycle and aren’t around anymore, because selling in a high-trust cycle was all they knew how to do.

He’s been doing this long enough to remember the low-trust cycles too: the dot-com boom and the 2008 to 2009 financial crisis. His point: we have to shift from chasing virality, traffic and list size to building trust, because “if they don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you.”

“People won’t give you their money until they have first given you some of their time.”

Ryan Deiss

He said we show commitment in two ways: with our wallets and with our calendars. Show him what you spend your time on, and he’ll show you what you’re probably going to spend your money on.

What it means for you

Your first job isn’t to get the sale. It’s to get people to spend time with you: watching, reading, listening and getting to know how you think. If you’re an expert, that’s good news. You already have the knowledge. You just need people to spend enough time with it.

What to do

• Look at everything you put out last month. Count how much of it asked for money, and how much gave people a genuinely good reason to spend time with you.
• Pick one piece this week that earns time: a long video, a full how-to post, a workshop or a properly useful email.

2. Speed beats the slow drip: get people to binge your content

Ryan’s point

Ryan’s first trend is content binging, and specifically how it speeds up sales cycles.

He credited Google and his friend Daniel Priestley with this idea: if you can get someone to consume seven hours of your content over 11 different interactions in four different places (reading you here, watching a YouTube video there, seeing you on Instagram or TikTok), you can get them to buy. And the key, he said, is doing it as quickly as possible.

Then he took aim at something a lot of us were taught. Remember the 30-day email drip series that people actually opened and read, one a day? His words: “If you’ve got 30, 50, 100 day drip cycles, rip them out. It doesn’t work anymore. The key is speed.” Later in the talk he said his own automated sequences now mostly run for just three to five days.

What it means for you

You can’t rely on a slow trickle of emails over months to build trust anymore. You need moments where people can consume a lot of you in one go, and you need to make that easy as soon as they find you.

What to do

• List every automated email sequence you run and how long each one lasts.
• For anything longer than about five days, ask: would this work better as one binge-worthy piece (a workshop, a long video, a full guide) sent in the first few days?
• Don’t cut onboarding emails that help people actually use what they bought. Those do a different job.

3. Put your long-form content where it “isn’t supposed to go”

Ryan’s point

Ryan told us he got serious about social media about a year to 18 months ago. He posted good content consistently, did everything everyone tells you to do, and got flat results. No growth, no real engagement.

He also admitted he’s verbose (he said his wife says he monologues like a Bond villain), and chopping his ideas into tiny clips never worked for him. So he said “screw it” and did the opposite: he downloaded a 30-minute video people liked and posted the whole thing natively to X. He took his long newsletter articles and posted as much of them as he could straight onto LinkedIn and X.

It worked. He said his long-form posts on short-form channels were getting five to seven times the engagement of his short-form posts.

Why? Partly because the content is good. But also because the algorithms notice time. When someone sees a long video and thinks “I’ll watch that later”, they open it in another tab and it just sits there. Do they come back to it? Mostly not, because, as he put it, “later equals never”. But it’s enough of a signal that the platform decides people must like spending time with you.

“Short form gets you a glance; long form gets you stares. We all need to be in the business of generating stares, not glances.”

Ryan Deiss

He also pointed to his friend Caleb Ralston, who posted a six and a half hour video to YouTube: essentially a whole course in one video. Everyone says nobody will watch that. Ryan’s point: even if they only watch a quarter of it, that’s a lot of time with you.

What it means for you

Stop assuming every channel needs bite-sized content. If you have a great long workshop, webinar or article, try putting it, uncut, somewhere people don’t expect it.

What to do

• Take one long piece you already have: a workshop recording, a webinar or a long blog post.
• Post it in full, natively, on one short-form channel: LinkedIn, Facebook or X.
• Compare it with your usual short posts after a week.

4. Turn one great idea into a native multi-part series

Ryan’s point

Ryan said one of the most popular videos on his channel is about how to create a CEO scorecard and metrics dashboard. (“Really riveting stuff,” he joked. But people liked it.)

So he took that exact same content and broke it into five videos. Not clips cut out of the long video. Five videos recorded natively for the short-form platform. He said of everything he’s done, that series brought in the most traffic, the most engagement and the most leads.

The reason: when you label them “Part 1 of this series”, “Part 2 of this series” and so on, anyone who sees Part 2 or 3 goes to your profile to find the others. That’s another signal to the algorithm that you’re doing something right. He suggested testing multi-part value series on Reels and TikTok.

What it means for you

You don’t need a new idea for every post. You need your best idea, told well, in parts that make people want the next one.

What to do

• Choose your most popular topic or most-asked question.
• Outline it as five short parts, each with one clear point.
• Record each part natively for Reels or TikTok, and say “Part 1 of 5” (and so on) at the start.

5. Build a YouTube binge factory around one “wingman” video

Ryan’s point

This was the part Ryan called “the biggie”. He said that right now, YouTube is the place.

He told a great story about calling his friend Dan Martell (he’s also friends with Alex Hormozi) and asking how to win on YouTube. The advice: “You gotta go pro.” A videographer, a producer, a crew following you around filming everything. Ryan’s reaction was that there was a 0% chance of him doing that. So he did nothing for six months.

Then he decided to do it on his own terms. His rule: post a video on a topic he finds interesting every single week. “Every single week, except when I don’t.”

Here’s his strategy, and it’s simple:

1. Make one pillar video. Ask yourself: what is the one piece of content I wish every prospect saw before they talked to my sales team or bought from me? Ryan calls it your wingman, because it goes out first and tells people how great you are. It could be your webinar, your keynote, a demo, your origin story or you doing something impressive. His was a keynote he’d also run as a webinar, about 1 hour 20 minutes long. People said that was way too long for YouTube. He didn’t care. He also said it’s basically a Loom-style video, not a slick production.
2. Make five shorter videos from it. Pull out the separate ideas inside the pillar and give each one its own 15 to 20 minute video.
3. Put them in one playlist. When someone watches one, YouTube is very likely to serve up the others.
4. Link everything back. In every description, link to the pillar video and to a relevant lead magnet, and mention it in the video: “check out the link in the description”.

One detail I loved: Ryan doesn’t want the pillar video to be the first thing someone watches. He doesn’t even need it to be the second. He wouldn’t mind it being the third. The smaller videos do the warming up.

What it means for you

You don’t need a film crew. You need one great video you’re proud of, and a handful of focused videos that lead people to it.

What to do

• Write down the answer to Ryan’s question: what is the one piece of content I wish every prospect saw before they bought?
• If it already exists (a webinar, keynote or workshop recording), upload it to YouTube as your pillar.
• Plan five 15 to 20 minute videos on single ideas from it, put them in one playlist, and link each description back to the pillar and your lead magnet.

6. It really does hurt to ask: marketing is a popcorn popper, not a funnel

Ryan’s point

Trend number two is selling in private. Ryan is a self-confessed direct response, ask-for-the-order guy. But he said what’s working right now is being much more intentional about when you ask for the sale.

He took apart the saying “it doesn’t hurt to ask”. Of course it hurts to ask, he said. When someone says no to an offer, the chance they’ll change their mind and say yes later is actually quite low, because changing a no to a yes means admitting “I was wrong”. And we humans really don’t love doing that.

Then came the line that got the room buzzing. Ryan says the funnel isn’t how people buy anymore. Instead:

“Marketing today is not a funnel, friends. Marketing today is a popcorn popper.”

Ryan Deiss

Some kernels pop almost straight away. Most need time to heat up. A few never pop at all. And if you don’t put a lid on it, they pop all over the place.

He shared a model he learned from Dean Jackson: you have now leads, later leads and never leads. At any given time, he said, about 3 to 6% are ready to buy right now (from someone, if not from you). Some will never buy. Most are “later”. The problem is they don’t come with labels.

So most of us make one of two mistakes:

• Too much heat. We treat everyone like a “now” lead, pitch constantly and burn out our list. Ryan said that actually worked from about 2018 into 2022 or 2023, because we were in a high-trust cycle. It doesn’t now.
• Heat off. We’re so scared of unsubscribes that we stop emailing. Ryan called this the marketing equivalent of getting friend-zoned: first you get friend-zoned, then you get forgotten. Then one day you email out of the blue because you need sales, and people call you a spammer because they don’t remember you.

The lid, he said, is segmentation campaigns. They let you sell every day, because you’re not selling to everyone in the same way. For example: send helpful content on Monday, then on Tuesday send a segmentation email that says “if you’re interested in this, let us know”. The people who put their hand up go into a sales process. Everyone else? No harm, no foul. See you next week.

What it means for you

Stop pitching your whole list at once. Give people easy ways to tell you they’re interested, then sell privately to the ones who do.

What to do

• Look at your last ten emails. How many were pitches to everyone?
• Replace your next full-list pitch with a segmentation email: one short paragraph that says “if you’re interested in X, click here or reply”.
• Send your sales emails only to the people who put their hand up.

7. Add a “when you’re ready” P.S. to everything

Ryan’s point

The first way Ryan sells in private is passive segmentation. He called it the simplest thing in the world: “If you’re not doing this, just do it. All you’ll do is make money, and it will cost you nothing.”

Every email you send should have a P.S. And his formula is simple:

“When you’re ready, here are three ways that we can work together.”

Ryan Deiss

1. Something free, like a lead magnet, video or workshop.
2. Something inexpensive, which he said we used to call a tripwire, or an entry-point offer.
3. Your core offer.

He made a point that stung a little: many of the people on your list have absolutely no clue what you sell. They don’t know how to do business with you because you never tell them.

And it’s not just email. He does it at the bottom of relevant social posts, at the end of long posts on X, and in every YouTube description. He even said that if someone has watched his 1 hour 20 minute video, that’s like an entry-point purchase, because they’ve given him their time.

Here’s the freeing bit: the content above the P.S. doesn’t have to have anything to do with the offer below it. People don’t need to think “how do I implement this?” They just need to think “this person’s smart, I trust them”. When they’re ready, the options are right there.

What it means for you

You can stop trying to make every piece of content lead neatly into a sales pitch. Just be helpful, and make it obvious how to take the next step when they want to.

What to do

• Write your three: one free thing, one low-cost first step and your core offer, each with a link.
• Add the P.S. block to your master email template and your blog footer.
• Add a short version to your YouTube descriptions and the end of your long social posts.

8. Make people register again. It’s date night.

Ryan’s point

The second way to sell in private is re-registration. Ryan admitted it sounds weird: if people are already on your list, ask them to sign up again.

So if you create a new lead magnet, don’t just put it on a resources page and email everyone the download link. Have them opt in again. If you’re running a training, don’t automatically RSVP your list. Have them register.

When clients ask him why, he asks if they’re married. “Honey, why do you need me to take you out on a date? We’re already married.”

“Re-registration is date night.”

Ryan Deiss

Every time someone opts in again, you’re repeating the process that got them on your list in the first place. And if you think “but they already hear from me”? Ryan’s answer: they don’t think about you at all. Re-registering is one of the clearest signs of engagement, and one of the clearest signs that someone is ready.

What it means for you

Every new training, workshop or freebie is a chance to find out exactly who is interested right now. Don’t waste that by sending it to everyone automatically.

What to do

• For your next training or freebie, send your list to a registration page instead of a download link or an automatic RSVP.
• Tag everyone who registers with the name of that training or freebie.
• Follow up the people who registered with a short, relevant offer.

9. Make email social again with short hand-raiser emails

Ryan’s point

The third way to sell in private is the hand-raiser: short, conversational emails designed to get a reply, not a click.

Ryan said email is the oldest social media channel on the internet. Remember when getting an email actually made you happy? “You’ve got mail!” Now it’s mostly “you’ve got spam”. So he’s started a campaign he calls make email social again.

His point: with AI reading and sorting more of our inboxes, the people who get opened will be the ones we open because of the from line, not the subject line. And the way to become one of those people is to send stuff people actually want, from a name they feel warmly about.

He shared three hand-raiser examples:

• “Hey, I’m looking for [number] [ideal clients] who want [result] in [time frame] without [the thing they don’t want]. Just reply to this email and I’ll send you the details.”
• “Hey, last time we talked you wanted [specific outcome]. Are you still working on that? Is it still a priority?”
• “Hey [first name], anything I can do to help you or your company move faster?”

That last one, he said, came from his friend Neil Patel. Neil sent it to him out of the blue, and Ryan immediately pictured what “moving faster” would look like for him. Everyone wants to move faster, so it makes people imagine their own answer, and reply.

When clients worry about being flooded with replies, Ryan’s response is brilliant: “That’s adorable. You should be so lucky.” You won’t get that many. The ones who reply are ready. The ones who don’t won’t feel spammed, because it was so short. He added that life and business are really about improving the quality of your problems, and too many replies is a good problem.

He also shared the rough monthly rhythm his team runs (and mixes up depending on goals):

• Week 1: a hand-raiser email.
• Week 2: a re-registration.
• Week 3: one direct offer.
• Week 4: another re-registration.

What it means for you

Your emails don’t have to be newsletters. Some of your best-performing emails might be three lines long and sound like a message from a friend.

What to do

• Send one hand-raiser email this week. Use one of Ryan’s three, in your own words.
• Decide who will answer the replies, and how fast.
• Try Ryan’s four-week rhythm for one month and see what happens to your replies and sales.

10. Faceless brands are fading: become your company’s embedded influencer

Ryan’s point

Ryan’s third trend is the one he called “the meat”: embedded influencers. If you own a company, he said, it’s probably the most important line you can add to your job description.

He believes faceless brands are dying, and that the ones still working will eventually be overtaken by brands with a trusted person at the front. He quoted a PwC study that asked executives at major brands whether their customers trust their brand. 90% said yes. When the same brands’ customers were asked, only 30% said they trusted them. A 60-point trust gap.

And no, you can’t fix that by borrowing a famous face. Ryan ran through some memorable celebrity endorsement deals and made the point that consumers can tell when someone is hawking a product they’re not really into. He even told the story of a brand that got an unpaid mention from one of the most famous celebrities in the world, rushed to build up stock, and saw no impact on sales at all. You can’t rent trust.

What does build trust? He quoted another study: 82% of consumers said they’re more likely to trust a company whose leaders are active on social media. Leaders, not celebrities.

An embedded influencer, in Ryan’s words, is a trusted internal voice, ideally the founder or CEO (though it can be a team member), who embodies the values of the brand. Not a paid endorser. He called Gary Vaynerchuk the original: Gary started out as the face of his family’s local wine shop. He spoke at LevelUp 2026 too, and I wrote up what Gary Vee warned every business owner about business after 2026.

And if you’re thinking “but my business is boring”, Ryan had examples for that too: a home inspector in Arizona who’s booked out for ages, a home cleaning company that grew a following filming dirty benchtops getting clean, a woman who hangs drywall, a man selling CNC machines, and one of his own clients whose company digs giant holes for fuel tanks and posts a walk-around video on LinkedIn about once a week. Boring to most people. Riveting to the people in that industry.

“If not you, then who?”

Ryan Deiss

He added that eventually you can go “from Iron Man to the Avengers”, with several embedded influencers in your team who share the same mission and point of view, so the business isn’t wholly dependent on you.

What it means for you

The most trusted marketing asset in your business might be you. Not a logo. Not a brand account. A real person people can get to know.

What to do

• Decide who the face of your business is. If it’s not you, who?
• Commit to one piece of face-to-camera content a week for the next month.
• Make it about your work, your opinions and your customers, not just your products.

11. Choose your character: a point of view, hooks and flaws

Ryan’s point

Ryan said choosing your character is the most important part of becoming an embedded influencer. He said remarkable characters have three things:

• A unique point of view. This creates authority and separates you from the noise.
• Brandable hooks. Visual and verbal signals that make you stand out and easy to recognise.
• Flaws and quirks. These are what make people trust you. As he put it, we don’t like people who are a little too perfect.

For point of view, he asked: what are your core contrarian beliefs? What hills are you prepared to die on? He shared some of his own, including “the more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is”, “good people don’t fix broken systems, broken systems break good people”, “annual planning is dumb” and “most company mission and vision statements are entrepreneurial arts and crafts”.

His tactic: find the beliefs everyone in your industry repeats, and flip them. Not to say something you don’t believe, but because very often you’ll find you believe the flipped version more. And he gave us a prompt to do it with AI (my wording of it is below).

He said you’ll know it’s working when you get haters. If nobody disagrees with you, you’re not really saying anything interesting.

For hooks, he used Alex Hormozi’s famous handlebar moustache as an example, and pointed out that when Alex grew a beard, he kept a recognisable hook. Hooks can evolve.

For flaws, he was clear: don’t overshare. Start with your surface quirks and visible flaws, and keep your deepest shadows for the people you love most. His own quirk? Dad jokes. He said he used to play Forrest Gump as a character online, and now he’s Ted Lasso: a walking dad joke who also nearly ruined his marriage by being a workaholic, which he said is his story too.

He finished with a lovely story about a building where everyone complained the lifts were too slow. Nothing fixed it, until someone put in mirrors. Because we love looking at ourselves. We love characters who remind us of ourselves.

What it means for you

People don’t remember information. They remember people with opinions, signatures and a bit of honest mess. Decide what yours are, and repeat them.

What to do

• Run the prompt above in your AI.
• Choose your three hills to die on.
• Post one of them this week, with a real story from your business behind it.

12. Pick one stage, master it, then bring people home to your list

Ryan’s point

Ryan’s next step is to choose your stage: the channel where you’ll show up. His advice was to start where your audience hangs out, not where you’d most like to be. “I’m most passionate about the channels that my customers are most passionate about.”

He said that if you run a local home services business, you should really be doubling down on Facebook. People hate on it because that’s “where the old people are”. His answer: “You know what old people have? Money.” He also said Facebook is becoming more locally minded.

Then the important bit: just pick one. He started on YouTube. His client with the giant holes only does LinkedIn. Master one, then go to two, then three.

“There are two models in content marketing: being everywhere all at once, and being missed when you’re gone.”

Ryan Deiss

Start with being missed when you’re gone, he said. Work on being everywhere later.

Finally, integrate the business, which he called deplatforming: getting people off social channels and onto your email list. At a minimum, put links in your bio. Don’t make your featured or pinned posts just posts; make them point to lead magnets. And add calls to action where they’re relevant.

“You don’t need a million followers. You need to be a voice that people trust, and that voice should be inside your company.”

Ryan Deiss

What it means for you

Spreading yourself thin across every platform is a fast way to be forgettable everywhere. Go deep in one place, and make sure that place leads to something you own.

What to do

• Choose your one stage for the next 90 days, based on where your buyers already spend time.
• Update your bio link and your pinned or featured posts so they point to a lead magnet.
• Add a short call to action to your most relevant posts.

The big idea: AI makes content endless, so your humanity is the scarce thing

Ryan wrapped up by tying all three trends together. He said AI is flooding the world with infinite great content. The scarce resource is going to be humanity: your humanity, and your brand’s humanity. Content binging, selling in private and embedded influencers are all ways to sell that.

He said that if you focus on these for the rest of this year and into next year, you’ll win, while your competitors are still chasing tactics that, even if they work, will be gone tomorrow.

And he gave us three things to do this week:

1. Cross-post one long-form piece somewhere it “isn’t supposed to go”.
2. Send one hand-raiser message.
3. Brainstorm your three unique points of view, and start putting them out into the world.

Your 7-day action plan

FAQs

What are the biggest marketing trends for 2026, according to Ryan Deiss?

Ryan Deiss named three trends for the next 12 months: content binging (getting people to consume a lot of your content quickly, to build trust faster), selling in private (using segmentation, re-registration and hand-raiser emails so only interested people get sales messages), and embedded influencers (the founder or a trusted team member becomes the visible face of the business).

What is a trust recession?

It’s Ryan Deiss’s term for the current low-trust environment, where people are much more careful about who they buy from. His rule is that people won’t give you their money until they’ve first given you some of their time, so marketing has to focus on building trust, not just traffic or list size.

Do long email drip sequences still work?

Ryan Deiss says long 30, 50 or 100 day drip sequences don’t work anymore and should be ripped out, because speed matters now. He said his own automated sequences mostly run for three to five days. Onboarding emails that help customers use what they bought do a different job, so review those separately.

What is a hand-raiser email?

A short, conversational email designed to get a reply rather than a click, for example: “Hey [first name], anything I can do to help you or your business move faster?” The people who reply are telling you they’re ready, and the people who don’t aren’t put off because the email was so short.

What should go in the P.S. of a marketing email?

Ryan Deiss recommends a “when you’re ready” P.S. in every email, with three options: something free, a low-cost entry-point offer and your core offer. He calls it passive segmentation, because people who are ready to buy can take the next step without every email needing to pitch.

What is an embedded influencer?

A trusted internal voice, ideally the founder or CEO, who becomes the visible face of a business and embodies its values, rather than a paid celebrity endorser. Ryan Deiss quoted a study saying 82% of consumers are more likely to trust a company whose leaders are active on social media.

Who is Sarah Cordiner?

Sarah Cordiner is a business and AI educator with more than 20 years in business, and the founder of the Legends Lab business education program and of Tekmatix. She teaches business owners how to turn their expertise into courses, content and AI-powered systems.

One last thing

If you take one thing from Ryan’s talk, make it this: people buy from people they trust, and trust is built with time. Give people more of you, more generously, and make it easy for the ready ones to put their hand up.

I’ve been creating content this way for well over a decade, and I’m more convinced than ever that it works.

Sarah x