Marketing Against The Grain: How I Turned Perplexity Labs into a Marketing Machine

Podcast Information:

• Title: Marketing Against The Grain
• Host/Author: HubSpot Media
• Description: Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot’s CMO) and Kieran Flanagan (HubSpot's SVP of Marketing) delve into marketing trends, growth tactics, and innovation, uncovering unique strategies that offer a competitive edge beyond conventional marketing tactics.
• Episode: How I Turned Perplexity Labs into a Marketing Machine
• Release Date: June 26, 2025

Introduction

In this insightful episode of Marketing Against The Grain, HubSpot Media explores the transformative potential of Perplexity Labs in revolutionizing marketing strategies. Host A (Kipp Bodnar) shares an in-depth look into leveraging AI-driven tools to create micro audiences, enabling highly personalized and scalable marketing campaigns.

The Changing Landscape of Marketing

Speaker A begins by addressing the evolving nature of marketing:

"We know that marketing is changing. We know that Google search traffic is disappearing, but no one has given us the new marketing playbooks." (00:01)

As traditional channels like Google search become less effective, there's a pressing need for innovative marketing strategies. Perplexity Labs emerges as a potential solution, offering a new playbook to generate revenue by transforming it into a powerful marketing assistant.

Introducing Micro Audience Marketing

Defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP):

Traditionally, B2B marketing revolves around a broad Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), representing a generalized segment of potential customers. However, Speaker A emphasizes the shift towards more granular targeting:

"AI empowers us to actually scale beyond what we've been able to do in the past. So this concept is really all around how we can do micro audience marketing and how we can do all of this through tools like Perplexity Labs." (02:19)

Micro Audiences Explained:

Micro audiences are finely segmented groups within the broader ICP, allowing for highly personalized marketing efforts. This precision is made possible through AI's capability to analyze vast amounts of data and identify specific subgroups based on unique characteristics and behaviors.

Leveraging Perplexity Labs for Micro Audience Creation

Steps to Build Micro Audiences:

1. Developing the ICP: Using AI tools like Claude, marketers can create or refine their ICP by analyzing both internal data (e.g., customer personas, case studies) and external data sources (e.g., analyst reports, LinkedIn jobs, tech stacks).

2. Generating Micro Audiences: With the refined ICP, Perplexity Labs can process complex prompts to break down the ICP into numerous micro audiences. For instance:

   "We're going to build these by using Claude to build a version of your ideal customer profile." (02:19)

3. Creating Hunts: Speaker A introduces the concept of "Hunts," which are methodologies to segment the ICP into smaller, actionable groups based on specific KPIs and behaviors:

   "These are like a way that you can actually segment your ICP into many smaller audiences that allow you to do more custom and tailored marketing." (02:19)

Notable Quote:

"Perplexity Labs is like a workbench version of Perplexity. You have to be a Perplexity Pro user and it allows you to actually do kind of multi chain prompts." (08:15)

Creating Targeted Marketing Campaigns

Once micro audiences are established, Perplexity Labs assists in developing tailored marketing assets:

1. Cluster Identification: Each micro audience is assigned a cluster name and associated with specific KPIs that are unique or newly identified within the ICP.

2. Marketing Kit Development: For each micro audience, Perplexity Labs can generate a comprehensive marketing kit, including:

   • LinkedIn Carousel Ads
   • Email Sequences
   • Landing Page Wireframes
   • Video Scripts for Platforms like LinkedIn or TikTok

   "I can have a hundred videos for a hundred micro audiences versus how it works today. Create one video for a broad ICP." (14:30)

3. Automation and Personalization: The AI-driven process ensures that each marketing asset is highly relevant to the specific micro audience, enhancing engagement and conversion rates.

Example Campaign:

"Pipeline velocity optimizers. Three mid market companies posted job ads in the last 45 days. They’re drowning in unqualified leads and their sales pipeline moves too slowly because they missed revenue targets." (16:00)

This example illustrates how Perplexity Labs identifies specific pain points and tailors campaigns to address them directly.

Benefits of Micro Audience Marketing with AI

1. Scalability: AI enables the creation and management of hundreds of micro audiences simultaneously, something that would be resource-intensive manually.

2. Precision Targeting: By focusing on specific KPIs and behaviors, marketing efforts become more effective and yield higher returns.

3. Resource Efficiency: Reduces the need for large marketing teams by automating the creation of personalized marketing assets.

4. Adaptability: Allows for quick adjustments based on new data, ensuring that marketing strategies remain relevant and effective.

Notable Quote:

"These are micro audiences. Because of AI, I can have perplexity go create the micro audience... I can use AI to personalize your marketing to those micro audiences." (15:45)

Real-World Applications and Future Prospects

Speaker A provides practical insights into implementing this strategy:

"I was running one just right before we went on this pod to make sure it was working and really good." (09:00)

By continuously refining and expanding micro audiences, companies can stay ahead of market trends and address emerging needs more effectively.

Innovative Use Cases:

• Stack Synergy Signals: Identifying companies using complementary tools (e.g., Calendly and Slack but not HubSpot) to target specific marketing efforts.
• Custom Campaign Assets: Generating unique content tailored to each micro audience's needs and preferences.

Notable Quote:

"Instead of having AI replace the human and create the video asset for me, I can have human plus AI create a hundred videos for a hundred micro audiences versus how it works today." (16:30)

Conclusion

This episode of Marketing Against The Grain underscores the transformative impact of AI and tools like Perplexity Labs in modern marketing. By shifting from broad ICP-based strategies to highly targeted micro audience marketing, businesses can achieve greater precision, scalability, and effectiveness in their campaigns. The integration of AI not only streamlines the creation of personalized marketing assets but also empowers marketers to adapt swiftly to evolving market dynamics, ensuring sustained growth and success.

Final Quote:

"There's a ton of upside in all of the things that we can start to do with AI." (25:00)

Stay tuned to Marketing Against The Grain for more innovative marketing playbooks and insights driven by AI and cutting-edge technologies.