LionShark Digital Marketing Blog

The Neuroscience behind Gain and Loss Perceptions & Why It Matters in Your Marketing

2/26/2015

Gains and losses are not created equally in the human brain. When we gain something, we feel happy and when we lose something, we feel unhappy. But the unhappiness we feel from loss is a much stronger emotion than the happiness we feel from gain. This is a powerful cognitive bias that can influence our thinking and behavior.

Scientists have studied and quantified this phenomenon to such lengths that it has become a well established truth in the field of psychology.

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How to Tell Someone Their Baby (i.e. Website) is Ugly

2/24/2015

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Websites are, oddly, a bit like babies. Business owners work hard to get ready for their arrival, spend sleepless nights worrying about their future, often feel ill-equipped or prepared to deal with issues that they may encounter, take incredible pride in their progress and are closely tied emotionally to their success. These parallels may explain why every parent thinks their baby is beautiful and every website owner thinks their website is amazing.

The reality of the matter, though, is that many websites lack important information/key functionality/user-friendly elements and fall short on overall aesthetics. These shortcomings can hinder business goals and future growth. This is why I feel like I owe it to clients and colleagues to be honest with them regarding their websites if I notice that there are areas where the sites may be falling short. As the owner of an internet marketing company, I sometimes come across situations where all of the best marketing efforts in the world are not going to make a difference because the website we’re being asked to optimize just will not convert traffic into leads or buyers. It is in these situations where I basically have to tell a business owner that his/her baby is ugly.

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How to Get 100% on the AdWords Certification Exams Without Ever Studying

2/19/2015

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I’ve been AdWords Certified since 2007, I believe, and in that time, the AdWords certification program has changed a lot. I won’t bore you with a recap of all of the technical program-related changes over the years, because the more interesting thing is what hasn’t changed in all this time – the questions.

The first time I took the AdWords exam, I was really nervous. I was fresh out of college and new to my position and I didn’t want my boss to be disappointed in me. At that time, you had to pay each time you took the test, so if I failed it would have been glaringly obvious because I would have had to expense the exam again. I read every AdWords resource and study document that Google put out and took extensive notes. After a weeks of prepping, I finally felt ready to take the exam. I slowly worked my way through the exam. Back then the time limit was 3 hours, you could mark questions to come back to and review before submitting it for grading, and the exam module took over your computer so you couldn’t cheat… not from your workstation anyway. I passed with flying colors. The next time my certification came up for renewal, I dusted off the old study guide to review for a couple hours and took the exam again. Again, I passed easily. But I noticed something that second time that would help me with every subsequent AdWords exam. There was a certain irrefutable logic to the questions that acted almost as an answer key to the questions.

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Starting Your First Ecommerce Store

2/17/2015

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If you’re like many Americans that decided to start an online business this year (or have been strongly considering it), you may be wondering where to start. What kind of information do you need to include? What should your design look like? Where should you invest your money? How can you convince people to buy from you instead of your competitors?

We’ll answer all of these common questions and give you some actionable ecommerce tips:

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Generating 104 Blog Post Titles During Lunch – It Can Be Done

2/12/2015

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Last year I read Ginny Soskey’s post “How to Think Up A Year’s Worth of Blog Posts in an Hour” on Hubspot. She explained how she got her team of 8 people together to brainstorm enough blog ideas to fill a one-year editorial calendar in just 45 minutes. When I read this article, I assumed she must have a team of geniuses or super writers or something. I was in disbelief that this was even possible at all. One year in one hour?

I publish on the LionShark online marketing blog every Tuesday/Thursday, so I need 104 posts to get me through the year. That meant I had to come up with one idea every 30 seconds or so. It was a tall order, but I sat down and decided to try it myself. I figured that the worst that could happen was that I would waste an hour doodling and the best that could happen was that I could get some great ideas for content. I’m just a writing team of one, so I wasn’t expecting much. In fact, I think I may have decided to try it just to prove that it couldn’t work. And then something unexpected happened… It worked.

But the story doesn’t end there! The most surprising part was yet to come.

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4 Alternatives to Sleeping

2/10/2015

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Sleep is lovely. Many people (myself included) love sleeping. However, few people get as much sleep as they should. Whether it’s work or family, there are countless sleep-stealing distractions that can pop up at any time. So, what do you do? Obviously, you could try minimizing these distractions but that’s often easier said than done. Why not try these 4 alternatives to sleep instead:

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Remarketing Text Ads for Dummies

2/4/2015

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If you’re trying to setup PPC remarketing for the first time, you may have noticed that there are virtually no resources on how to write text remarketing ads. One of our readers pointed this out to us and suggested that we explore the subject for anyone else out there that needs a little bit of advice to get them started. (Thanks for the suggestion Greg!)

First, let’s briefly explore why there are so many PPC resources and, yet, so few resources around the topic of text ads for remarketing. When advertisers start doing remarketing ads, the emphasis is usually on creating compelling image ads rather than text ads because advertisers tend to be much less familiar with image ads than text ads. Additionally, the requirements and restrictions on remarketing image ads are so numerous that it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the details and struggle with getting them created and approved. The result is that image ads steal the spotlight and text ads for remarketing are often overlooked.

So why should you even care? Text ads are an incredibly important component of an AdWords remarketing strategy because Google will take all of your remarketing ads and fit them into ad spaces on the web where they are allowed, and some ad spaces are only eligible for text ads. So if your remarketing campaigns don’t have text ads, you’re missing out on ad placements. Additionally, if your remarketing ads are just copied from your regular campaigns, you’re missing out on a second opportunity to pitch your company and your products/services to visitors in a way that will bring them back to your site after their initial visit.

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The Neuroscience behind Gain and Loss Perceptions & Why It Matters in Your Marketing

How to Tell Someone Their Baby (i.e. Website) is Ugly

How to Get 100% on the AdWords Certification Exams Without Ever Studying

Starting Your First Ecommerce Store

Generating 104 Blog Post Titles During Lunch – It Can Be Done

4 Alternatives to Sleeping

Remarketing Text Ads for Dummies

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