Ep. 287- What's Up THIS WEEK:🍏SIRI AI Issues!🔎Google AI Overviews IMPACT!🫣The Baldwins?

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are back for what's up this week from the do this not that podcast presented by marigold this is our super short episode where we break down what's going on this week in business and marketing and life and then we still have our awesome episodes the rest of the week so what's going on well apple is really screwing up this ai stuff i don't know about you all but Siri on my phone has only gotten stupider, not smarter. And Apple this week announced that they're indefinitely pausing, rolling out a lot of the new AI features on all the phones that had the capabilities to have all these AI features.

1:14So anybody that has an iPhone 15 or an iPhone 16, you know, you have all the options. You're supposed to have all the options, all this cool AI stuff, but it's not going to be available because Apple can't seem to get it right, which is really bonkers from a marketing perspective because for the last six months and all their commercials they keep showing all these ai features and they're selling iphone 16 saying you're gonna have all these ai features but you're not you can't get access to them i mean can you do that in your company run ads saying hey we got all this cool stuff but by the way no clue when it's going to be available so uh i they need to work on siri i mean it is frustrating on a good day the only feature that is available that is actually something i do not use is the categorization of emails as you're receiving them you know they updated the email mail app but what's interesting is you know they have all these categorizations now as you receive your mail where it can go into promotions tab or updates tab or whatever tab but people aren't using it okay less than 32 percent of people are actually using the new categorizations for those people that have the option to use them People are turning it off because it kind of stinks.

2:21So Apple's got a lot of work to do to get their AI stuff straightened out. Speaking of AI, let's talk about Google for a second. There's some new data related to the AI overviews in Google's search results. This is a big deal. Listen, if you get traffic to your website from Google, and by the way, who doesn't? If you're running paid ads on Google, this matters in a big, big way. So we all know these overviews, these AI overviews in Google. They are the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of the search results, and they provide those super quick answers whenever you ask a question. But now there's some new data out there from advanced web ranking, and it's showing that Google AI overviews now appear in 42.51 % of search results.

3:11That is up 8.83 percentage points from the previous quarter. That's a lot. why does this matter? So this matters because if you're driving your traffic from Google, you're doing paid ads from Google, people are getting the information they need from Google without leaving Google. They don't need to go to your site. Okay. And we're seeing it impacting a lot of things in marketing. The thing that it's impacting the most are what we call informational searches as opposed to a transactional or navigational search. So what is an informational search. This is when people are looking for simple answers.

3:48So things like this, how to bake a cake, or what is CRM software, or benefits of cloud-based accounting software, or best project management software for startups. It's simple questions that then can get simple answers. And these are the queries, these informational searches that are no longer leading to click-throughs in the same way as it did before back to your site. And so for an example, if you look at one category specifically in the category of careers, despite search demand more than tripling, it's gone up over 334%. The top three ranking positions lost a combined 4.3 % click-throughs in the past quarter because of AI overviews.

4:37So you're no longer getting that same traffic. Now, Google's got to work on this because they're in the business of driving people all over the place. But right now, it's a problem. So if your site is, you know, real content heavy, it's all about blogs and informational content, and you're trying to pull people off of Google onto your site, and you're not seeing the traffic, number one, everybody should be analyzing. If you're not looking at your search traffic, you're not looking at your paid ad costs on Google, you are just sleeping on something that's really, really important right now. And of course, you're going to really need to think about diversifying your traffic.

5:10We're focused on this. YouTube is going to become that much more important. The social media platforms, that much more important. And of course, our old friend email, emails can become more and more important as these AI summaries and overviews, not just in Google, but on ChatGPT and Claude and everywhere else become more prevalent. So thinking about and analyzing where your traffic sources are coming from, because it is changing big time. So what else is coming up? Well, March 17th, which is only a few days away, is St. Patrick's Day. Let's go. You got your green ready? Now, on St. Patrick's Day, there is one marketing tactic that is the most overused marketing tactic of all time.

5:51And I want to share with you whether or not you should do it or not, What is the most overused marketing tactic on St. Patrick's Day? Come on. It is the shamrock emoji in your email subject lines. And you know I love subject lines. So believe it or not, people still think they shouldn't use subject line because too many people use them. But that's just not the case. On average, less than 10 % of all promotional emails are using emojis in their subject lines. OK, and the other wild stat, and this is all according to subjectline.com, the biggest growth area for emojis in email subject lines is actually business to business promotional email, seeing a rise of 20 percent over the last six months alone in use.

6:33Now, so do do emojis increase open rates for all email? Yes, they do. Don't even play that game of me. Now, the question, though, is should you use a shamrock on St. Patrick's Day since everybody's going to be using a shamrock on St. Patrick's Day? And believe it or not, the answer is still yes. Emojis on St. Patrick's Day or any major emoji holiday like Valentine's Day will still increase your open rates by about 10%. On the consumer side, it'll be about 12%. On the business side, about 9%. It still causes your email to stand out. It still is a little fun. It allows you to participate in the holiday in some sort of there's nobody that's off brand for.

7:18OK, so, yes, emojis on St. Patrick's Day are still OK to do. All right. And totally useless information. I'm watching something now that nobody else is watching, and I'm going to strongly say nobody should be watching it. So there's a new show on TLC called The Baldwins. OK, and this is a show where they're following around Alec Baldwin and his wife, Hilaria Baldwin. And let me first say the thing that happened on the set of, of Russ, which without Baldwin, the tragedy where he accidentally shot that woman is just horrific and terrible. And I don't want to even make light of that in any way, but this show, okay, this show follows their life independent of that whole situation.

8:03Okay. And they have seven kids. I think Alec Baldwin is like 65 years old and he has seven kids and the kids are young. I mean, he's got a little baby that can't be more than like two. Okay. Another kid that's like four and seven, seven kids and they have eight animals. And it is so stressful to watch this show because I'm like, dude, I don't, I would lose my mind. Anybody out there with seven kids? Good for you. Amazing. I salute you. I can't even handle having seven pairs of socks. Okay, this is stressful to watch. So I'm not all in on the Baldwin. It's on TLC if you want to check it out. And by the way, I think a great rule, which everyone's going to throw me hate on, I don't think that you should have, for every human being you have, you have to have a matching animal in your home.

8:59Okay, we have four kids. Let's have four animals. I don't think that's a thing. They got to calm down. Seven kids and eight animals? what are we doing anyway? Um, the other thing is please public service announcement. I am watching love is blind season eight. I am not fully caught up. I'm like on episode six or seven or whatever. And I can't go on social media because you clowns out there keep posting what's going on. This is not cool. I try to block people. I try to block certain, uh, uh, keywords and everyone just keeps posting about it. We need, there needs to be rules. Okay. There needs to be rules put out there that there needs to be like a grace period of like 60 days.

9:38I don't know what, but this is ridiculous. So everyone stop posting about it because you're ruining it for people like me. Anyway, listen, a few things. We are almost out of spots for Eventastic. This is our giant free virtual conference. It's about all things events, in-person events, virtual events, speaking, public speaking, exhibit hall sales, swag, you name it, eventastic.com. It is going to be bonkers. We have thousands of people registered, but we only bought a certain number of virtual seats. I'd love you to be there. You are cool. If you don't share information about love is blind, then you're cool.

10:18If you do, I don't want you going because you and I are not friends, but we are friends. So thanks for being here and I'll talk to you later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. lastly if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free visit guru events.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John Martha Stewart and me guru events.com check it out