St. Louis marketing strategist Valerie Mills on why small, local brands are the wrong customer for nearly all of the marketing technology industry.
Every year, the marketing technology industry gets mapped onto a single, famously unreadable chart. The 2025 edition, produced by the chiefmartec team that has tracked the field since 2011, counted 15,384 separate tools, up nine percent from the year before. The chart has become a running joke in the industry, because no one could ever use, or even name, a meaningful fraction of what’s on it.
Valerie Mills thinks most small businesses should ignore nearly all of it. She runs Mills Marketing, a consultancy in St. Louis, and most of her clients are the kind of business that chart was never drawn for. Independent retailers. Boutiques. Makers. A florist, a record shop, a woman who sews her own label out of a studio behind her house. When one of them sees a number like fifteen thousand, Mills says, the reaction is always the same. A quiet panic that they are hopelessly, permanently behind.
“They’re not behind. They’re being marketed to,” she says.
A market built for somebody else’s problem
Almost all of that software exists to solve a problem of scale, Mills argues. How do you talk to a million people you will never meet. How do you segment them, score them, retarget them, and automate a relationship that was never going to be personal in the first place. That is a genuine problem if you are a national brand with a national budget. It is simply not the problem a neighborhood shop has.
A small, local brand has the opposite problem, and a much nicer one. “You don’t need to reach more strangers,” Mills says. “You need a few hundred people who live nearby to know who you are, trust you, and come back.” No platform on that chart, she points out, does that better than an owner who remembers a customer’s name and what they bought last time. The most powerful piece of marketing technology a small shop owns is usually the person standing behind the counter.
Where the tools actually earn their place
None of which means technology is useless to a small business. Mills uses it every day. AI in particular, she says, is genuinely good at the grind: the scheduling, the resizing, the rough first draft of a caption, the twenty ideas you need when your brain has gone flat at nine at night. Used that way, it hands an owner back hours they can spend on the floor.
The mistake, in her telling, is reaching for it to replace the part that actually makes a small brand work. “A national chain can’t tell you which regular just adopted a dog, or which one always asks about the navy one,” she says. “You can. Don’t automate that away to feel modern.” As St. Louis marketing strategist Valerie Mills frames it for clients, the local, human knowledge a small business holds is the one advantage no tool can copy and no competitor can buy.
So when a shop owner asks which of the fifteen thousand tools they are supposed to be using, Mills doesn’t hand them a list. She hands them a filter with two questions. Does this tool give me back time on something boring and repetitive? Then it’s worth a look. Does it mostly promise reach, scale, virality, a bigger funnel, exponential growth? Close the tab. “For a business that wins on relationships,” she says, “most of that chart is a very expensive answer to a question you never asked.”
The independent retailers and small fashion brands Mills works with, she says, don’t need to keep pace with an industry built for companies a thousand times their size. They need to be clear about what they stand for, consistent in how they show up, and genuinely known in their own neighborhood. The right amount of technology is whatever protects their time so they can spend more of it on the people in front of them. Usually that’s three or four tools, not three hundred.
It is a point Mills makes often in Valerie Mills’ blog for small-business owners, and she admits it is the least fashionable advice in marketing right now. “You are not behind,” she says. “You were just never the customer that chart was drawn for.”
