Are you inundated with marketing? I woke up this morning and my Amazon Echo was waiting with an ad for me to buy something. When I picked up my phone, there were ads on my weather app, my newsfeed, my stock app and my sports app. I had dozens of ads waiting in my email. Even the security app I put on my devices to help keep out the spammers had an ad asking me to upgrade to a new service. I get ads pushing products and services everywhere I turn all day long.

Is there such a thing as too much marketing? We just came through the gift-giving season with the Christmas and year-end holidays (which also came with too much to eat!) We all have seen our fair share of ads trying to entice us to buy gifts, holiday meals, lights, decorations, holiday clothing and stuff that only comes around this time of year, like chia pets. That season is over now. We are currently in the post-New Year’s phase of marketing. What is that? It is the self-help cycle that follows New Year’s Day. Now weight-loss pharmaceutical companies and gyms are trying to get us all to sign up to try to cut some weight, figuring we all ate too much between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Playing off the lack of discipline in one season, marketing crosses over to the next in trying to help us gain some sort of control of our lives back again. But just when you have given up on your New Year’s resolution, another season of marketing will be coming our way. The fat-burners will give way to Valentine’s Day and lots of candy! One season’s excesses become the next season’s marketing opportunities.

So, is there too much marketing? If you ask the average consumer, they would say yes. However, the reality is that nothing sells without marketing. Let me say that as a marketing professional, my job is not to be your conscience. My job is to help my customers sell their products and services to consumers… and the reality is, consumers want to buy stuff. How does that happen? You know the answer: through marketing.

If marketing is essential to doing business, asking if there is too much marketing is the wrong question. The real question is what kind of marketing gets results? Let me break that down a bit. First, what gains the interest of the people who are likely to need what you are selling? Effective marketing happens when you get the attention of your target market. That comes by understanding what their needs are and what features of your brand meets those needs. Here is a second component to effective marketing: you have to compete in a way that elevates your brand above your competition’s brand. Consumers have choices. Great marketing gives them a reason to buy from you instead of a competing brand. That means you have to know where your brand stacks up against all others. Where are you beating them? Emphasize this in your marketing. Here is a third component that leans back to the first two: you have to market in a way that is tactically unique and to the point in its messaging. The problem with so much marketing is that it looks and sounds like everything else. There is no originality to it. If your marketing could take your competitor’s logo to replace your own and the marketplace would not know the difference, you need to change your marketing tactics. Your marketing has to get the attention of consumers with a brand that meets their needs, but it needs to do so in a way that makes them want to become a customer. That means it has to do more than gain their attention, it has to sell them and do so in a word or two. Really great marketing sets brands apart by driving home a point that consumers come to know and understand. Many times, that is done with a very short tagline that becomes part of the brand. It is the line that consumers remember because it comes to define the best features of the brand. Be effective in all phases of your marketing.

Is there too much marketing? There is too much bad marketing. Be smart and build your marketing to connect with consumers to make them your customers.