How do 10-year-old marketing trends stack up today?

Towards the end and beginning of each year, we see a flurry of think pieces reviewing the most impactful trends of the past year, as well as predictions for the trends we can expect to see next.

Whether we’re in B2B or B2C, marketers spend precious time exchanging and debating trend predictions, hoping to stay ahead of the curve. Were those predictions correct? Did they serve us well, or did they fall flat?

To answer that question, we dredged up some marketing trends from 10 years ago to see how they stack up against the B2B landscape of 2025. We also rated their present-day relevance on a scale of 2015 pop culture trends, because we can.

Emojis rose to prominence 😊

The first emoji can be traced back to 1999, but it took a while for marketers to start incorporating them in campaigns. In 2015, big brands like McDonald’s, Domino’s Pizza, and Pepsi adopted the trend, starting the bandwagon that many marketers would end up riding well into 2025.

As an immediate and near-universal way of communicating ideas, the use of emojis today has been normalized among B2C brands. Emojis are less common in B2B, but they have their time and place. We only recommend them when it fits the voice of your brand, the tone of the marketing piece, and the channel you’re using.

For example, they can help attract attention to an email subject line or a social media post, but they’re best avoided if your brand identity is on the more serious side.

Relevance score: 7/10 selfie sticks

Mobile marketing was the next big thing

Marketing campaigns need to meet users where they are. In 2015, 50 percent of B2B customers were using mobile devices to search for products, prompting marketers to create websites and apps that ran seamlessly on mobile.

In 2025, when closer to 80 percent use mobiles to search for products, we can all agree that frictionless integration across all types of devices is a must. Users who can’t access your website, navigate it, or find what they need on their preferred device will simply leave.

Relevance score: 10/10 iconic Vines

Microtargeting seemed like a totally innocent idea

Microtargeting came up in several 2015 trend posts as a way to serve more relevant, individualized content to B2B audiences.

Calls for more market research, clear segmentation, and tailored content were all borne from the apparent frustration that users feel when they see content that has nothing to do with them. Microtargeting seemed like the ultimate extension of that theory by targeting single customers with hyper-personalized content.

Since then, microtargeting has raised serious concerns around manipulation, transparency, and data privacy, especially due to its use in political advertising. Through stories like these, users are more aware than ever of how their data is being collected and used to target them. Using their data responsibly is a critical part of earning their trust.

It’s worth noting that while microtargeting has fallen out of favour, its broader counterpart, personalization, can still be used in ethical ways. Besides, in B2B, it’s often more useful to target based on categories like application, region, or job function rather than hyper-specific factors like age or voting preferences.

Relevance score: 3/10 man buns

Content was king (and still is, and always will be)

Coined by Bill Gates in 1996, the phrase “content is king” has surpassed trend status. We see it in trend roundups and predictions almost every year, and it always seems to be undergoing some kind of fundamental transformation.

In 2015, brands were focused on writing quality content, rather than cranking out articles that pass the spell-check but otherwise only serve to feed the SEO machine. This old article encourages B2B businesses to hire actual writers with actual writing experience (you don’t say!), who know how to use the skills, tools, and documentation needed to implement a successful content marketing strategy.

In 2025, that advice holds for a reason that was seldom predicted back then: the advent of AI. The need for relevant, human-driven content is greater than ever, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see content wearing its crown another decade into the future.

Relevance score: 11/10 avocado toasts

Marketing automation was taking off

These days, it might be hard for some of us to imagine marketing without automation. The stories of 2015 urged B2B businesses — those not already in the tech sector or ahead of the curve — to automate marketing activities like social media, email, SEO, and lead nurturing to save themselves time and resources. It also allowed them to move past a reliance on historical data to enable real-time reactions to the intel they collected.

The marketing automation tools of 2025 take that a step further with predictive analytics, allowing us to react even faster and create more relevant personalization. There’s not much to critique about this trend — it has simply evolved to encompass even more robust tools that are useful in more ways than we had imagined in 2015.

Relevance score: 9/10 Snapchat filters

Today’s takeaways

We saw plenty more trends in our research that still resonate today, like humanized marketing, improved web security, and prioritizing educational content for B2B buyers. The main difference is the reasoning and context behind them. Overall, it seems marketers are pretty good at predicting trends — if you’re curious, we also took a crack at it this year.