What’s Up THIS WEEK: AEO Is the New SEO 🔍 Best Time to Host a Webinar?

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 to break down what's going on this week in business and marketing and life. And then we saw all of our other episodes later in the week. So what's going on? Well, SEO is rapidly changing. Search engine optimization, how we all mess around with our websites, we try to show up higher in the rankings on Google, it's changing now the big thing that everybody's talking about is aeo answer engine optimization and it's because of ai you know search engine journal just released data saying that google's ai generated summaries known as ai overviews they appear now in approximately 47 percent of search results that's when you go to google you search the thing it shows up all that ai stuff at the top.

1:28And answer engine optimization, this AEO stuff, is really based around this idea that your website's content needs to now directly answer user queries, especially in this new answer-driven approach that we're so accustomed to doing now with ChatGPT and all the other tools. Unlike SEO, you know, which focuses just on ranking high and playing all the games on the results pages, AEO is trying to allow people to receive those concise and authoritative answers. Now, here's the interesting stuff. As of this past week, ChatGPT announced that they have about 800 million weekly active users. That is an increase from February when they had 400 million active users.

2:17It is growing so fast. Now, MP Digital shared this week, which is what we all need to be thinking about in terms of what we need to be doing as marketers, whether you're a business or consumer marketer, that ChatGPT is now weighing heavily on pulling from sites that have listicles on their site and are answering core questions. Like for example, you know, best dog breed or top CRM platform, having this stuff on your website, forget about the keywords. Now having on your website these listicles and core questions mentioned and answers. That is what's showing up in the AI overviews. That's what's showing up on ChatGPT.

2:58So for example, let's say you're a direct to consumer marketer. You're promoting some sort of skincare brand, right? You would have on your site, you would ask and answer a core question like, what skincare routine should I follow for dry skin? And that may sound so basic, but that's what people are looking for. And then you have to answer it on your site and that's what gets picked up by Chachaput and perplexity and Claude and you name it. And then you also want to have listicles. Listicles are becoming more and more important. I know how ridiculous they feel, but this is how you're going to show up in the results.

3:31So for that same skincare brand, you might say seven must have ingredients in a skincare routine for dry skin. And on the B2B side, let's say you are an HR software platform. You would ask and answer a bunch of core questions like, how can I automate onboarding for new employees? Or you may have listicles that say, you know, six onboarding workflows you can automate this quarter. The reason this is going to become a much bigger deal and the reason that you need to become an expert in creating these questions and answers on your site all throughout it and these listicles is one of the big things is what Apple said this past week.

4:06So Apple is reportedly planning to redesign safari that's their search engine to focus primarily on ai search engines so this is directly from apple eddie q which is this he's the senior vice president of services at apple he testified he testified this past week that safari searches dropped for the first time last month and he believes users are you are choosing ai tools over regular search engines and this is what he He said he believes that AI search providers like OpenAI, PerplexedAI, Anthropic will eventually replace traditional search engines like Google. So if you're not thinking about the content in your site and you're playing the same old SEO game, you're going to lose.

4:56All right. What else is going on? Well, in marketing news that is kind of I don't want to say it's ridiculous, but it kind of is. Did you see this this week that Chuck E. Cheese? Yes, the place we go and play very expensive video games. They have launched a branded media network. Oh, my God. Does everybody need to have a media network? Is this really happening? So Chuck E. Cheese has launched the CEC, the Chuck E. Cheese Media Network, which it touts as one of the largest family friendly digital out of home networks in the United States. The restaurant network spans more than 3 ,000 digital screens with more than 500 locations.

5:34Oh, my God. Listen, I feel bad. Somewhere out there, there's a marketing manager. And I don't know if you've been. I haven't been to Chuck E. Cheese in years, thank God, because the place is a little bit rough, if you ask me. But the mascot is a rat, like an actual rat. Now, they've upgraded the rat. The rat used to be very scary. It would cause nightmares. mares. That was the freakiest, wildest, ugliest mascot on earth. But now they have a newer rat and the rat is less ugly, but it's still a rat. So imagine you're the marketing manager for Chuck E. Cheese and you're like, we need to compete with a Mickey Mouse, okay, which happens to be a mouse.

6:12I never really thought about that, but it's not a rat, okay? We need to go compete with all these friendly, nice things. We have a rat and the whole place is gross. It just is. And everyone's like, oh no, no, the pizza's really good there. If you think the pizza is good at Chuck E. Cheese, you have no idea what good pizza is. Now, me saying this is probably going to ruin me ever getting Chuck E. Cheese as a client, but that's okay because I don't think it's in my wheelhouse to get people to go and give a lot of money to win tickets for some garbage prize. Anyway, sorry, Chuck E. Cheese. What else is going on?

6:46So new data out there about webinar marketing from Contrast. This is actually really interesting. And it actually matches up the data they're saying about what's working in webinars as a marketing vehicle. It lines up exactly with what my agency is seeing almost to a T. So contrast is saying that right now, Wednesdays and Fridays have the highest average registration rates. If your webinar is on a Wednesday or a Friday, it is getting the most registrations. And we are seeing that too. I think so many people are sleeping on Fridays for a webinar. it's like this day where you better yourself you consume content so if you're not testing fridays for a webinar i think you're missing that out big time also and this is exactly what we see 2 p.m has the highest average attendance rate over 50 attendance rate when your webinars are 2 p.m from contrast now 50 is pretty high for a show up rate i don't think people are averaging that i think that's a little bit of garbage but we do see that 2 p.m is the is the perfect time any time from really 11 to 2 p.m.

7:51You can't do it earlier and you can't do it later. The other interesting thing coming out regarding the webinar data is that more than half of all webinar registrations happen in the week before the webinar goes live, meaning that you're not going to get a lot of people to register for that webinar until that week of. So you got to go crazy heavy that week of. And it says here 78.9 % of registrations happen in the two weeks before the event goes live. So really, you need to be thinking about your two-week-out strategy, send more emails than you should, do aggressive retargeting. You got to go bananas.

8:27All right, let's get into some ridiculous news this week. So I always like checking in on Meghan Markle's new podcast. So Meghan Markle has a new podcast that started about a month ago. Okay, it's called Confessions of a Female Founder. And I don't know, I try to listen to it. It's got to be one of the worst things of all time. I don't care if you like it. You're wrong. It's terrible. And it came out of the gate. It was like the number one podcast when it came out of the gate. And usually the first few months of a podcast, I can tell you because I have one, you do really well because everyone's like checking it out.

9:02She has been out for a month. Okay. And for the overall top list, she's already fallen out of Spotify's top 100 in both the US and the UK. Nobody's listening to thing i'll give you a wild stat i just saw so this ridiculous podcast we we're in two categories we're in marketing okay and we are in business now in the marketing category i have no idea why on the apple charts we sit right now at number three out of 55 000 marketing podcast that's pretty wild but we also on the business charts the business charts is very very hard to do well in so right now we are sitting at number 67 on the business charts on apple her show is at number 62 we're only five behind her show and she has so much marketing firepower do you realize how bad that is because this show is trash and for us to only be a few spots behind her is ridiculous we are going to pass her i'm going to report back on that it's going to be amazing um all right i I don't know what we talked about.

10:07I never know what we talk about here on the show. Listen, I appreciate you. If you leave this thing a review, then maybe we'll beat Meghan Markle. We can do it. Because when you leave a review, it circulates the show. And imagine that you leave a review and you are the reason we beat Meghan Markle on the charts. That would be phenomenal. All right, you're awesome. Have a great week. 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.

10:44Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.