LionShark Digital Marketing Blog

How to Allocate Your Marketing Budget

1/27/2026

Most small business owners understand that they need to spend money on marketing but knowing where to spend their marketing budget can trip up even the smartest business owners.

We’ve put together a marketing budget framework to help you allocate your marketing resources for maximum return.

As you use this guide, let us know if you have any questions. We would be happy to help!

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Email Marketing Best Practices Checklist

12/12/2025

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You asked, so we're delivering! Last month we published an article called Lessons Learned from Purging Over 30,000 Unread Emails. In it we offered a slew of email marketing best practices. We heard lots of feedback that the article was really helpful, but many of you wanted an email marketing checklist that you could use to prioritize new activities and refine your existing efforts. So, we're delivering! Check out our to-do list for email marketers:

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Email Marketing Best Practices: Lessons Learned from Purging Over 30,000 Unread Emails

11/17/2025

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Last month I had over 30,000 unread emails across my 5 email accounts. Every time I went into an inbox, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of messages vying for my attention. Every so often, I would try to work through them little by little, but no matter how hard I tried, they came in faster than I could clear them out. Like a sinking boat, I knew I needed to stop bailing water out and start plugging it from coming in. So, I began the arduous process of unsubscribing to anything I didn’t want to receive any longer.

Over and over, I saw different organizations making the same kinds of mistakes that had turned me off as a subscriber, making me want to opt out of future communications.

Unfortunately, your emails may be meeting the same fate – at best being ignored and at worst driving up unsubscribe rates (and worst-est, damaging your email sender reputation with today’s biggest email service providers). To help you avoid this fate, I’ve put together some key email marketing best practices that really stood out to me as I went through tens of thousands of emails.

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How AI Failures Prove People are Still Better at Offering Helpful Advice

10/20/2025

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How AI Failures Prove People are Still Better at Offering Helpful Advice

Brands publish content to inform, educate, inspire, connect, and ultimately persuade their audience to take desired actions (like buying or subscribing). But to do that, they must first demonstrate themselves as trustworthy and knowledgeable. After all, who’s going to trust a brand that provides bad information or unwise advice?

So, when a company or organization is trying to decide where their content will come from, they need to prioritize establishing trust first and foremost, or their content marketing efforts will fall short. This is an important consideration when evaluating whether you will use an LLM (like ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, or others) to write your content for you, or whether you will hire a real human to do the work.

Much has been debated over the last year about what AI is capable of versus what skilled human writers are capable of, so we’re not going to rehash that discussion all again. (If you want to know what we have to say on the topic, we covered it in great depth here.) But what technology proponents still seem to be ignoring is the way AI is failing to progress in ways that are truly meaningful for businesses that need quality content to reach their target audiences.
Organizations that want to be able to offer their audience helpful, trustworthy, actionable advice (which should be all organizations!) need to pay attention to the ways in which AI-generated content continues to fall short to understand why relying on humans to generate their content is still so important.

I’m going to detail some AI failures that I’ve personally witnessed recently to offer some clarity around where AI is still severely limited. What I want you to understand is that these types of AI failures are not one-offs and they’re not meaningless. Bad AI outcomes occur routinely and have deep significance related to how your content is perceived by your audience, which can stifle your brand’s growth.

The main takeaway is you shouldn’t be using an LLM to write your content for you! Here’s why…

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The 6 Types of Content Your Business Needs to Survive

10/6/2025

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the 6 types of content your business needs to survive

When we talk to business leaders who are looking at implementing a formal content strategy, they’ll often ask, “What kind of content do I really need and what’s optional?” Their goal is to make sure that they’re dedicating enough time, personnel, and budget to cover the fundamental elements of content marketing so that they don’t miss out on the kind of online engagement that attracts leads, drives sales, and retains customers.

Now, if you’re asking this because you want to know how to do the bare minimum to check the “content marketing box,” that’s clearly the wrong approach! But, if you want to understand the basics of content marketing because you need a starting place to help shape your content strategy before you invest more to scale up your efforts, this quick guide will give you the information you’re looking for without overcomplicating things.

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<<Previous

How to Allocate Your Marketing Budget

Email Marketing Best Practices Checklist

Email Marketing Best Practices: Lessons Learned from Purging Over 30,000 Unread Emails

How AI Failures Prove People are Still Better at Offering Helpful Advice

The 6 Types of Content Your Business Needs to Survive

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