Marketing has never been more accessible. You can build a website without knowing how to code, create an advert in a few minutes, send thousands of emails for very little money and produce a month's worth of content before lunch. AI has accelerated that again, putting capabilities that would once have required a team of specialists within reach of almost any independent business.
That's largely a good thing.
Independent businesses can now do things that would have required significant budgets, specialist agencies and technical expertise not very long ago. The barriers have come down, the tools have got better and businesses have far more control over how they reach their customers.
But there's a slightly awkward consequence.
Making marketing easier to do hasn't necessarily made businesses better at marketing.
In some cases, it's done the opposite.
We've confused access with expertise
The problem isn't the tools themselves. We use many of them every day, and wouldn't particularly fancy returning to a world where changing a website meant sending a request to a developer and waiting three weeks.
The problem starts when being able to execute something gets confused with knowing whether it's the right thing to do.
Shopify makes it relatively easy to launch an online shop. Canva makes it easy to create graphics. Meta and Google make it easy to spend money on advertising. Klaviyo makes it easy to send an email to thousands of people. AI can generate copy, images, ideas, strategies and enough social content to keep a business posting until approximately the end of time.
None of those tools can decide whether the activity makes commercial sense for your business.
That's the bit that's become more important.
More marketing isn't necessarily better marketing
One of the things we see regularly with independent businesses is an extraordinary amount of activity.
There's a website being updated, Instagram to feed, LinkedIn to think about, emails to send, Google Ads running somewhere in the background, SEO recommendations waiting to be implemented and a growing list of things somebody has heard they "should" be doing.
Then AI arrives and offers the tantalising prospect of doing even more of it.
It's easy to end up with a business that's incredibly busy marketing itself without being entirely sure what all that activity is supposed to achieve.
The question we find ourselves asking isn't usually, "What else could we do?"
It's, "What are we actually trying to change?"
Do we need more people to discover the business? Are enough people finding us but too few buying? Are we attracting the wrong customers? Are customers buying once and disappearing? Has the business changed but the positioning hasn't? Are we trying to solve a commercial problem with a marketing channel?
Those questions are less exciting than discovering a shiny new tool, but they're much more likely to lead somewhere useful.
A website is still just a website
The same principle applies to individual channels.
A business can have a beautiful new website and still have a positioning problem. It can rank brilliantly on Google and attract people who aren't particularly likely to buy. It can have thousands of Instagram followers who contribute remarkably little to the business.
Equally, a fairly ordinary-looking website can work extremely hard if it clearly explains why somebody should choose the business, answers the questions customers actually have and makes the next step easy.
The technology matters. Design matters. SEO matters. Content matters.
But none of them exists independently of the business.
A website works because the proposition is strong, the customer understands it and the experience helps them move towards a decision. Email works because there's a useful reason to stay in touch. Social media works when there's something worth saying to people worth reaching.
The tool is rarely the strategy.
The platforms have an incentive too
There's another part of this that's worth remembering.
Most marketing platforms benefit when businesses use more of them.
Advertising platforms want you to spend more money. Social platforms want more content. Software companies want more features adopted. AI companies want more prompts. Marketing technology has become exceptionally good at removing friction between thinking about doing something and actually doing it.
That's useful, but the interests of the platform and the interests of your business aren't always the same.
The fact that Meta makes it incredibly easy to boost a post doesn't mean boosting it is a good use of £100. The fact that your email platform lets you send four campaigns a week doesn't mean your customers want four emails a week. The fact that AI can create thirty blog posts doesn't mean the internet needs thirty more blog posts from you.
Sometimes a little friction is useful.
It forces you to ask why.
AI makes judgement more important, not less
AI takes this argument somewhere particularly interesting.
For independent businesses, we're enormously positive about its potential. Used well, it can give a small team access to research, analysis, creative capability and productivity that would previously have been difficult or expensive to obtain.
That should help level the playing field.
But AI also makes average marketing extraordinarily cheap to produce.
When every business can generate competent copy, reasonable images, endless ideas and respectable-looking campaigns almost instantly, simply producing marketing stops being much of an advantage.
The scarce resource becomes judgement.
Knowing your customers. Understanding the business. Recognising what's distinctive. Asking better questions. Deciding where to invest. Knowing when the output is generic nonsense. Connecting information from different parts of the business and deciding what it actually means.
The technology can make those people considerably more capable. It doesn't remove the need for them.
Perhaps the advantage is knowing what not to do
For years, marketing capability was constrained by resources. Smaller businesses couldn't necessarily afford the technology, people or agencies available to larger organisations.
That's changing quickly, and we think that's genuinely exciting for independent businesses.
But removing the constraint on doing things creates another problem: there are now almost infinite things you could do.
Which makes focus considerably more valuable.
Good marketing isn't about being everywhere, using every tool or producing more content than the business next door. It's about understanding the people you're trying to reach, knowing what you want them to do and choosing the activities most likely to make that happen.
Sometimes that's a new website, an advertising campaign or a better email programme. Sometimes it's improving the offer, talking to existing customers or fixing what happens after somebody enquires.
And sometimes the smartest marketing decision you can make is deciding that something isn't worth doing at all.
The tools have never been better.
The difficult bit is still deciding what to do with them.