Charlotte Content Marketing was recently featured in the Charlotte Business Journal, and man…what an honor! CCM Founder Andrew Rusnak was interviewed about how our podcast production solutions drive leads and form stronger customer relationships, and he shared a bit of inside knowledge about the long-term benefits of podcasting for business owners.

You can read the full story here, but you’ll need a Charlotte Business Journal subscription. For those without a subscription, we’ve included some excerpts below:

“Andrew Rusnak, whose company Charlotte Content Marketing produces The Doc Dudes, says the human connection in podcasting just works.

“It’s a sales tool, yeah, but it offers the ability to showcase authenticity,” says Rusnak, adding that these “preselling opportunities for business” can be more effective than traditional advertising.

“People tune out ads, so how do you cut through the clutter and at same time provide value and relevant content? Podcasting is a way to do that. It’s almost a one-on-one where you are in room with them and able to ask questions.”

“Rusnak with Charlotte Content Marketing says some marketing teams are creating short reels or video clips that appear to be part of a larger podcast but were intended for social media all along. The value, he says, is that podcast content and social-media posts add to brand awareness in the way marketing teams are always chasing search-engine optimization.

“SEO used to just be about a website. These days we call it Search Everywhere Optimization,” Rusnak says. “We are not just focused on websites because with AI search, you’ve got to be hitting on all cylinders across all platforms, and it all has to tie in together. AI is training off of podcast transcripts. It’s an omnichannel approach to digital marketing.”

Although AI search has been a thing to one degree or another for a while now, it’s only really come into its own over the past 12 months. 2025 saw more people using LLMs as search engines more often, and this has led many business owners in the Charlotte Metro region to ask, “Should I be optimizing my content marketing strategy for AI?”

While we’d love to give a simple “yes” or “no” answer to that question, we’ve got another answer: “It depends.”

In this episode of the Charlotte Content Marketing podcast, founder Andrew Rusnak dives into the realities of social media marketing for 2026 in Charlotte and beyond, putting out a call to business to look beyond deceptive metrics and flawed content strategies.

The evidence against AIOs generating clicks is overwhelming, based on extensive research from SEO titans like Ahrefs. Their studies reveal significant drops in Click-Through Rates (CTR), particularly for high-value informational keywords.

But, herein lies the rub: While click through has gone down for informational queries, we’ve been ahead of the curve for at least a year now. The truth is that AI does a decent job at answers questions. We won’t go into all of the ins and outs of generative AI and how it works, but essentially, these models train from massive amounts of data available on the web (think Wikipedia, only interactive.)

Because AI can answer basic questions like “How many cups are in a gallon?”, you’re going to lose clicks if that’s the kind of content you’re producing. Plain and simple, top-of-funnel content that used to draw in potential customers is no longer viable.

In other words, if AI can reproduce the answer, that’s not the kind of content you want to target.

Reddit and SEO can be the perfect pair, but only if you use them wisely. In this episode of The Charlotte Content Marketing Podcast, CCM Founder Andrew Rusnak discusses the dos and donts of using Reddit as a part of your business’ SEO strategy.