What 10 Years of Digital Marketing Trends Taught Me About What Actually Lasts

Ten years ago, I wrote an article about my favorite digital marketing trends for 2016.

Recently, I came across it again.

Some of the language immediately transported me back. Periscope. AWeber's new campaign builder. The excitement around increasingly sophisticated marketing automation.

The internet moves quickly.

But what surprised me wasn't how much of the article had become outdated.

It was how much hadn't.

Underneath the technologies and platforms were three shifts I believed were coming: more real-time and human communication, more opportunities built around specialized expertise, and greater emphasis on smaller groups of deeply engaged people.

Ten years later, I wouldn't describe those trends in quite the same way.

But I believe the underlying ideas even more strongly.

That's one reason The Presence Economy feels particularly relevant now. Technology keeps changing how we appear in front of people. The deeper question is what makes someone worth returning to once appearing becomes easy.

So rather than predicting the next ten years, I want to revisit three old predictions and ask a better question:

What actually lasted?

Prediction #1: Ephemeral Marketing Would Become Important

In 2016, livestreaming felt new.

Periscope had arrived. Marketers were experimenting with sharing experiences as they happened rather than carefully producing everything in advance.

I called this "ephemeral marketing."

The platform didn't last.

The behavior certainly did.

Stories, livestreams, disappearing content, behind-the-scenes videos, short-form video, informal updates, and real-time commentary all became ordinary parts of online communication.

But I think I got something else more important right.

People were becoming interested not only in polished expertise, but in greater access to the human being behind it.

Today, that instinct exists alongside something we couldn't have fully anticipated in 2016: generative AI can produce enormous amounts of competent information almost instantly.

That makes information itself less differentiating.

Perspective matters more.

Judgment matters more.

Experience matters more.

The interesting question is no longer simply, "What do you know?"

It is:

What does the way you see this help me understand?

That's a much higher bar than simply sharing more of yourself online.

Prediction #2: Specific Expertise Would Create New Opportunities

My second prediction was what I called "piggyback monetization."

The phrase makes me smile now, but the underlying observation was useful.

I noticed that every successful technology, platform, or product created secondary opportunities for people who became exceptionally good at helping others use it.

My example was learning a particular AWeber campaign builder and offering specialized consulting around it.

Today, I'd describe the opportunity differently.

Specificity creates findability.

Someone searching broadly for "marketing help" has thousands of possible directions.

Someone trying to solve a specific problem with a particular tool, audience, business model, or situation has much clearer intent.

That creates an opportunity for the expert who has developed unusually precise knowledge around that problem.

AI makes this even more interesting.

People can now ask extraordinarily specific questions rather than reducing their problem to a few search keywords.

That means expertise doesn't necessarily need to become broader to become more valuable.

It may need to become more precise.

The opportunity isn't simply to know a tool.

It's to occupy useful intellectual territory around problems people genuinely need help solving.

Prediction #3: Smaller Groups of Loyal Followers Would Matter More

This was my favorite prediction in 2016.

I wrote:

"The shift continues from thousands reached to hundreds influenced."

I still like that line.

At the time, I thought increasingly sophisticated targeting would allow businesses to build deeper relationships with smaller groups.

That happened.

But today I'd take the idea further.

I don't think audience size is the most interesting question anymore.

Recognition density is.

By recognition density, I mean the proportion of people encountering your work who understand what you stand for, remember your ideas, and have a reason to return.

Imagine one expert with 100,000 followers who are only vaguely familiar with her work.

Imagine another with 3,000 people who regularly read her ideas, recognize her frameworks, recommend her work, search for her by name, and associate her with a particular area of expertise.

Who has built the stronger position?

Reach still matters.

But reach without recognition can be surprisingly fragile.

What I Would Change About My 2016 Advice

Looking back, I placed more emphasis on "sharing who you are" than I would today.

I still believe personality matters.

I still believe our hobbies, experiments, failures, curiosity, and lived experiences give our work texture.

But simply revealing more of yourself doesn't necessarily create meaningful connection.

There is already an extraordinary amount of personal sharing online.

What matters is whether what you share contributes to a recognizable body of work.

Your personality can create texture.

Your perspective creates territory.

That's an important distinction.

Platforms Change. Human Patterns Move More Slowly.

This may be the biggest lesson I've learned from revisiting old digital marketing predictions.

We tend to talk about marketing trends at the level where change is most visible.

Platforms.

Algorithms.

Tools.

Formats.

Technology.

Those things change constantly.

Underneath them, however, human beings continue doing remarkably familiar things.

We look for people we trust.

We remember ideas that help us understand something.

We return to sources that have been useful before.

We pay attention when something feels relevant to a problem we're trying to solve.

We recommend people whose work we can clearly describe to someone else.

And we gradually develop recognition through repeated encounters.

That suggests a useful distinction between trend and trajectory.

A trend is a visible expression of change.

A trajectory is the deeper direction underneath it.

Periscope was a trend.

More immediate, human communication was the trajectory.

A particular email automation tool was a trend.

Increasingly specific, technology-enabled customer journeys were the trajectory.

Follower growth was a metric.

Recognition and relationship were the deeper trajectory.

The Digital Marketing Trend I'd Bet On Now

I am considerably less interested in predicting which platform, format, or marketing tactic will dominate next.

I'm more interested in something quieter.

Experts will need to become increasingly recognizable, not merely increasingly visible.

AI has made producing information easier.

Discovery is becoming more distributed.

People can encounter your expertise through search, AI systems, social platforms, newsletters, podcasts, recommendations, websites, and channels that may not even exist yet.

That means the durable advantage isn't mastering every new platform.

It's building a coherent body of work that can travel across them.

Clear ideas.

Recognizable language.

Useful intellectual territory.

Owned assets.

Multiple pathways into your thinking.

Enough consistency that someone encountering you in three different places realizes they have encountered the same mind.

That is very different from chasing attention.

It is building infrastructure for recognition.

Ten years from now, many of today's favorite tools will probably look as quaint as some of my 2016 examples do now.

I'm comfortable with that.

Because if the last decade taught me anything about digital marketing trends, it's this:

The tools change much faster than the reasons people pay attention, remember, trust, and return.

Build around those, and you won't have to reinvent your business every time the internet reinvents itself.