How Average Marketing Kills Your Business - Interview with Larry Bailin

5 min read
Vlad Kovalskiy
February 18, 2015
Last updated: May 27, 2019
How Average Marketing Kills Your Business - Interview with Larry Bailin
Larry Bailin is one of the top rated Internet marketing and professional motivational business speakers, CEO of SingleThrow Internet Marketing, best-selling author, and entrepreneur.

1. What is the biggest online marketing mistake that companies make?

Accepting average. Average online marketing is the norm because it has become accepted. Online marketing is treated as something done once the tick mark is placed in the box. We check it off, and consider it complete. Average starts by fooling yourself into believing that the metrics of the platform or tool are more important than the reason you set out to market in the first place, to get customers.

Likes are not customers, tweets are not customers, clicks and impressions are not customers. They are not customers until they buy something. You need to break from the status quo and understand that showing up in Google is not success, likes are not the goal, and these things are the starting point, not the finish line.

We coined a term at my marketing company (Single Throw), “NOMAMNo More Average Marketing. NOMAM is more than a trademarked tagline, it’s a mantra that we live everyday across every project. Average won’t win, never has, never will.

2. What is the single most impactful thing companies can do to attract more clients?

Develop a TRUE sales mindset. Show customers, no, prove to customers that buying from you has more value than buying from the competition or not buying at all. Businesses tend to forget that the message is what matters in marketing, it’s what the clients connect with. Would you buy from you?

Read the messages, tweets, posts, pages on your website as if you were a customer and ask yourself, does this persuade me to take action? Am I influenced to make contact and learn more? Do I know what I’m supposed to do next? Customers search for the problem, not the solution, am I making it clear to my constituents that I am the one to solve their problem.

The reality is that for all the bells and whistles we label as online marketing, most just end up adding to the noise and not cutting through it.

3. You wrote a book six years ago (great name, by the way). Unlike other professional speakers, especially in the internet marketing arena, there has been no follow ups or a brand extension series or even update, as far as I know, and this looks like a conscious decision. Care to elaborate?

In 2007 I wrote Mommy, Where Do Customers Come From? In 2010 I wrote the second edition. You’re right, there has been a conscious decision not to write another online marketing book, the reason being, aside from a few dated references, the book holds true. Content contained between the covers is still relevant.

I chose to deal with the way in which fundamentals of customer attraction and conversion (sales) intertwines with marketing in a connected world. Those fundamentals still apply and always will. I have not written another book because I would just be writing it to write it, as you mentioned, to further my brand, not help businesses succeed. My brand is doing just fine. I’m hired frequently to speak and am still considered an authority in my space.

I am working on another book titled, “Sales Solves All”, as the title eludes too, it’s more about how the act of selling, the skill of persuasion can solve all the woes a company has. A business that can throw money at a problem, has no problem. I will touch on effective ways to interject sales methodologies into the marketing platforms of the day, however, I have been taking my time as I want this title to be as timeless as the last. I expect a release date sometime in 2016.

4. Marketers like to say that technology is just a tool. You did too, in several interviews. But technology (think AdWords or Facebook or even email before that) can significantly change marketing landscape. Are there any emerging disruptive technologies or tools that are on your radar?

One of my favorite right now is Re-Marketing / Re-Targeting. There are few things that give us a second chance at a first impression. Although re-marketing is not new, the way it engages with consumers is greatly improved from the past. Re-marketing in social is powerful, allowing for specific interest targeting and couple that with Google’s massive ad network and you’ve got a winner.

The problem with re-marketing is that the execution of the technology is usually poor, at best it’s average. Very little thought is being put into the sales aspects, the engagement nuances needed to properly benefit from this powerful tool and that’s a huge miss.

Here’s an example of a large brand doing average remarketing. I buy a lot of golf equipment from GolfSmith and the other day, I went on their website, found and purchased a Callaway wedge. Not 5 minutes later, I’m on a news site and an ad for the same wedge appears. Later that day, the same ad for the same wedge is displayed to me on Facebook and this goes on for about 2 weeks. I already purchased the item. Why pay to market to a closed deal? Even if I don’t click the ad (why would I), it’s annoying and makes me think the brand does not care about me.

There are a lot of great marketing tools out there but none of them will get the job done if you’re going to use them in an average fashion.

5. Social is no longer just for customers. Companies are starting to use social collaboration platforms, private social networks, work chat, social task management, etc. inside their organizations to make faster and better decisions. Which of those tools in your experience work best for marketing teams?

That question can really only have a purely subjective answer. Best is a funny word because it’s subjective and can be defined by many variables. What’s best for me may not be for someone else. I think more important than the tool used, is just using one in the first place. My company benefits from collaboration software, it allows us to share ideas that lead to innovation. We use multiple tools and have gone through a few that we’re not a fit or we just plain grew out of. What we used when we were 10 people no longer works now that we’re 40+.

More so than trying to determine the best internal social tool to use, take time to ensure everyone using it knows why they are using it in the first place. Innovation is the lifeblood, the fuel that grows an organization. Social tools can spark innovation. Create rules and measurements that give you the data that will lead to innovation. Just having the tool won’t be good enough to make the effort worthwhile.


Thank you for the interview.

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