As in most areas, efficiency is key in marketing and promotions: you have precious little time to grab the attention of your target market and only a few opportunities to do so before your efforts fade into the background noise, so choose your strategy carefully.

Simply acknowledging the importance of promoting your business is enough to give you a head start on your competition. Partly because the term "marketing" is so wildly overused nowadays that no one seems to know exactly what it means, most small business owners dismiss marketing as a cost-prohibitive add-on for creative types - an error that has killed countless otherwise promising young businesses.

So we agree, you need to market your business, regularly and aggressively. (Just how best to go about it is the subject of another thousand or so hubs - and of the excellent resources listed below.)

But is there such a thing as too much marketing, too much promotion? Yes...and in today's hypercrowded marketplace, the line between loyalty and loathing is thinner than ever.

Irritating Your Prospective Customers

The most obvious consequence of overpromoting your business is straightforward and obvious, but it's nonetheless damaging to your operation: stick your "Here I am! Pay attention to me!" message in your potential customers' faces often enough and, yes, they'll notice it. They'll notice it because it will annoy them. And after being exposed to it over time, they'll come to hate your message, your product, your company. (Close your eyes for a moment and picture a caveman or a gecko or a guy with a headache, and you'll likely have a firsthand feel for this phenomenon.)

Think of yourself as a consumer: do you want to do business with people and companies that drive you crazy? Most people don't if they have a choice - and nowadays, there's always a raft of alternatives in any purchasing decision. The 1950s, the era of "Any publicity is good publicity," are long gone.

Will a relentless, in-their-face campaign still bring you business? Sure. But it's extremely costly, and it's bound to be a short-run victory anyway: how long can you prosper in a market that keeps shrinking because your message alienates more and more of your potential customers?

Getting Lost in the Herd

You've heard it over and over: consumers are hit with thousands of marketing messages every day - so many for so long that we've become very good at tuning them out (or TiVoing them away). Advertising has become nothing more than the background noise of our daily lives.

A promotional campaign that's overly aggressive will probably be based on one or more traditional advertising methods - radio/TV, newspaper, flyers, direct mail, e-mail (after all, it's a little hard to imagine blogging or podcasting your customers over the head). And that means wasting a sizeable part of your marketing budget on messages that blend in, that are doomed to fade into the sea of static.

To break through to your target market, your message, even your medium if at all possible, has to be original. What everyone else is doing - or even something a little bit different from what everyone else is doing - won't cut it. Louder doesn't get you noticed. Brighter, faster, edgier don't get you noticed. In fact, no marketing message that your target customers don't invite into their consciousness will get you noticed.

Opportunity Cost

And therein lies the most pervasive, if least apparent, danger in over-promoting your business. If you're spending money and energy clobbering your customers over the head with traditional "Ooh! Ooh! Pick me!" messages, you're by necessity devoting less time and energy to truly effective strategies for growing your business: to name just a few, boosting your customer service to a level where your customers become your evangelists; blogging, podcasting, cultivating an online presence over time that positions you, and by extension your business, as the resource for your customers; and getting your business's name on others' relevant blogs by submitting comments and becoming part of the ongoing dialog. Such strategies work. They're effective at lending your business an aura of authenticity, appeal and legitimacy with your target market - and they won't put a strain on your promotional budget.