Loading summary
Transcript5 lines
- [00:01]
A
We know that marketing is changing. We know that Google search traffic is disappearing, but no one has given us the new marketing playbooks. Well, I am deep in the labs, and I really do mean that. I'm deep in Perplexity Labs. And what I'm going to show you is a potential new marketing playbook that can create you a bunch of money using just Perplexity Labs. I'm going to show you how we can turn Perplexity Labs into an incredible marketing colleague that can actually help you extract more money from your audience. And who wouldn't want to do that?
- [00:35]
B
We'll be right back to today's show, but first, I got to tell you about a week that you're not going to want to miss. It is a highlight of my year every year. It is inbound, which is HubSpot's annual event where we bring together the best attendees, the best speakers, the best experts in sales, in marketing, and customer success in AI. We all learn together and we all figure out how to grow our businesses better in the coming year. And this year, it's no exception. It's a fire lineup. It's going to be at the Moscone center in San Francisco, California, September 3rd through the 5th. So it's a great way to kind of close out Q3 and kick off Q4 really strong and have your heads right for 2026, because you're going to learn and hear from Amy Poehler, Dario Amadi of Anthropic, Dharkesh Patel, Sean Evans from Hot Ones, Marquise Brownlee, Glennon Doyle, and the world's best speakers and experts across marketing, sales, customer service, AI. They are all at Inbound. Hundreds of amazing sessions. And, you know, it's more than just the sessions. It's about the networking. It's about learning from your fellow attendees, you, your peers, understanding what people are doing really well, where people are getting stuck. That is how you break out. That is how you are going to grow better and faster in 2026. You're not going to want to miss it. You can go to inbound.com register to secure your ticket and your spot for Inbound 20.
- [02:20]
A
Right. So we have not focused that much on Perplexity Labs. On this podcast, this YouTube channel to date, that's all going to change. I'm kind of obsessed with Perplexity Labs, and what I want to do is show you a potential new marketing playbook that I believe is going to be one of the staples of how we do marketing in the future. We're going to do it all through Perplexity Labs, with a little help from Claude, we've got three core steps, and it's all really focused around how I believe we are going to change from marketing to a broad set of people, which we Generally call in B2B marketing. Your ICP, your ideal customer profile. Who is the ideal customer that would actually buy your products and services? And this is a fictional representation of your customer and usually includes a broad swath of people who could all have some sort of interest in your product or service because it solves a core pain point for them that typically has. How we do marketing, we create content for them, we create ads for them, and it's quite broad because we have to hire a bunch of marketers to market to that audience. Now, the thing that AI allows you to do is to market to what I call micro versions of that audience in a more personalized way. And I think this is a very new thing for marketing because 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. So what is a micro audience? Let me show you. This is an example of a micro audience. And we are going to build this using Claude to build a version of your ideal customer profile. So basically, your icp, which has been a staple of marketing forever, but I want to give you a cloud prompt that actually can build that for you if you don't have it because you need it to do micro audience marketing. So your ideal customer profile, that's one prompt. You're going to get that. Then I'm going to give you a pretty killer prompt that you're going to use in Perplexity Labs to turn your icp, your ideal customer profile, into a bunch of micro audiences like this, they're going to give you an intense signal, and we're going to talk a little bit about intense signals. I call them Hunts, and I'm going to tell you why I call them Hunts. But they're like a way that you can actually segment your icp, your ideal customer profile, into many smaller audiences that allow you to do more custom and tailored marketing and more creative things to that audience. It talks about their pain points, it gives you their core hook, which in this case is the reason they would buy HubSpot, and then it gives me some suggested campaigns. We're going to take all of that information and then pass that to another Perplexity Lab prompts to be able to actually create your marketing collateral to market to these micro audiences. Now, what is Perplexity Labs? 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. And so the assistant is able to do things like crawl the web and then research a PDF and then write some code to do something, all to give you back your response. And I'm going to show you that in action. So it's kind of like a little marketing team working for you when you want to do the kind of stuff that I'm going to show you can do lots of different tasks on, all from a singular prompt. And it's pretty cool. Ux, right? I can create these things called spaces, which are really projects in ChatGPT. I create a space, I say this is building hunts around micro audiences. I'm going to tell you what a hunt is. I've copyrighted all of this stuff, so do not start copying and branding my stuff. This is all my stuff. I'm only joking about that. Feel free to. So I call it Hunts. These are my previous ones that we're going to get into here. I was running one just right before we went on this pod to make sure it was working and really good. And so let's get into the three steps, right? We want to get to, hey, I want to get to my micro audience and then I want to market to that micro audience and I want to see why this is so much better and going to create me a lot of money because that's what we are here to do as marketers to create those sales. So I actually have started to put these into Google Docs again. There's nothing that intuitive about an icp, an ideal customer profile. You should all have them. I do want to show that the tools like Claude now and OpenAI are really good for building these or even just refining what you have over time because it has access to your internal tools and it can pair that with external data. And so what this one here does is basically say, okay, we're going to build an ideal customer profile for HubSpot and we're going to use internal data. So you can see here I'm using Google Drive, I'm telling it to pull docs with a seed list here, which is like customer Persona, win rate, case study any of these things that exist in the file name or title. Prioritize the 10 most recently edited files because you want them to be most up to date. Then I look at external resources, things like analyst reports, things like LinkedIn jobs, things like tech stacks, things like funding signals, things like community pains. I have a couple of little like special sauce things in here, right? LinkedIn jobs, past 90 days, the kind of tech stack only ones with 50 reviews, kind of the set Reddit and these kind of community threads that are only in the last 12 months. And then it does a little stuff here that I won't get into to explain because it will take me for a little more time. But it does some like figuring out of what are these external sources are the most important, how to stockmark those. And then it gives me this output format, right? And it basically says, hey, company product snapshot, the core Persona. What are their success metrics? What are their typical pain points, what competitors do they use, what are differentiators? What are exclusion flags like you think people that you definitely do not want to market because they're outside of your icp. Bunch of things like that. You can see if I run it in again. If you get this, we'll share this for sure as part of this episode. You'll get it in the comments. If you want to run that, you can change it again to your taste. Everything I share is not meant to be for copy and paste. They're meant to be for. For building blocks. So you kind of copy them, edit them, build on top of them. I think of AI in some ways, like Lego blocks. And so you copy the things that look good and then you edit, refine to your needs. And so you can see here it's created this ICP. So it ran across 324 sources, internal and external. And then would create me this and basically talks about who is an ICP for HubSpot's CRM. And so it goes through the company and the product snapshot, the core buyer Persona, the known success metrics. And these are important for the hunt we're about to do to create a micro audience. The typical pains, the competitors, the differentiators. Like how you can differentiate for this audience. Things like AI powered automation, things like all in one platform. We have that. Awesome. And that's like really true. We win a lot because of the all in one exclusion flags. I think this is wrong. So I refine that. We have lots of great companies, 10 less employees, industries that require on premise deployment. Pretty true. So you can see here, it's like got some stuff in here that heavy Salesforce customization. Old Salesforce is heavy customization. So you can see this got some pretty good exclusion flags. So we've got an icp, right? I thought there's like this feature is so boring. But I just love it that you can save all of this to a PDF. And now we are going to go and say, okay, well we would typically go then build marketing around this ideal customer profile. Typically some email, all of these different things. And again, it's because you need to have a broad enough audience that it makes sense to hire marketers to market to them. And AI changes that AI allows you to have a huge marketing team without ever having to hire a lot of marketers. And so you could break down these audiences into micro audiences. Now we're going to get into the Perplexity Labs prompt. And so what am I doing here? I want to describe the prompt a little bit. So basically what the prompt is doing is it's creating a little assistant that's my micro audience hunter and marketer, copyright current Flanagan. It's going to input the icp. Remember our ICP is the ideal customer profile. And then it is going to output these micro audience cards that we are able to just input in to another assistant to run campaigns. Now what it's doing here, I'm going to try to explain this really simply because this is going to show you the value of Perplexity Labs. It's going to do a bunch of different things all chained together of all. It parses the document, it parses this PDF that we give it and basically looks for the baseline KPIs. This is going to be important. So what is a baseline KPI? Let me explain the thought process here. And you can do whatever would work for you. What I have is the known success metrics. Like these are the things that our ideal customer profile is usually responsible for. And so for us, it's always going to be things like pipeline velocity, grow the sales team, grow revenue, all of these different things. Now, one of the things I could do is create micro audiences around our known KPIs, a micro audience that's going to be clustered around people who want to grow revenue, who want to generate more pipeline, who want to improve the productivity of the sales team, whatever it may be. And so I just want to make the distinction here. I am purposely going after new rise in phrases, things that we would not have thought of before that are going to be in these LinkedIn job ads. And I'm going to show you so I'm going to explain how that is. If it sounds like what does he mean here, don't worry, I'm going to quickly explain that. So basically, it parses out the KPIs here, parses out the buyer roles. Right. We have core buyer roles in here as well. It parses out the buyer roles in section 2, core buyer Persona parses out the category words in section one, it parses out the market tier and then differentiators. Differentiators is pretty important. It's number six. So how you can differentiate for this audience. So it's parsed that this information and it has that information here. Now this is the important part. This is a hunt. How are we going to start to categorize folks into different clusters? And again, I have 20 different hunts. This is just one example of how you can do it based upon KPI key phrases. And what it's going to do is it's going to go and look on LinkedIn. It's going to look for people that are part of your category words, which are what we are in section one, the kind of company and product snapshot. It's going to look for buyer roles. So companies that are hiring these buyer roles, these job titles that we got here, if we can find companies that are hiring for people who would use HubSpot, that is a great audience to market to because we know they are looking to move the needle on things that HubSpot can move the needle on. I'm looking to hire people that would use HubSpot. But the cool thing it's doing to create the micro audience is it's looking for KPI phrases that are specifically not in the baseline KPIs. These are the KPIs that we know our ICP is generally in charge of. And so we would usually always market to these folks. But micro audiences are how I can create smaller versions of my audience and market to them in more custom and tailored ways. In this example, what it's doing is looking for mentions of new metrics they're accountable for that we may not have seen before. Right. And so how it does this is it says, okay, well I'm starting to see this new metric, these job ads are saying that isn't mentioned in your baseline KPIs. And what I'm going to do is cluster companies by the metric. So if a bunch of companies are advertising jobs against this new metric, I cluster all of them together and then I have a simple score that is an intent and fit score. And the intent is basically clustering companies together in groups. And so if five or more companies all have the same metrics, they're in my high tier group, high intent group because we found a new metric that lots of companies are talking about and that is top of the group for me to want to go out and create some tailored marketing towards. And the fit is basically, you know, are they SMB and mid market? It's just employee count, pretty self explanatory. So to just recap on that, what are we doing here? We are basically taking our ideal customer profile. Then we are looking for companies that are advertising for our ideal job titles right within that customer profile. And you can see that here the core buyer Persona has different job titles. So there's a bunch of different job titles that go in there. We're looking for companies that are hiring those job titles. And then we're specifically focusing on the KPI part to create micro audiences. We are saying, hey, we want to know what new KPIs these people are being held accountable for. And I want you to split them into groups. By the mention of that new KPI and the group of companies that are all mentioning the same KPI together, that's going to be high intent because that is a real one we want to pay attention to. There's obviously something happening there. They are all talking about these new metric and then there's a slide in scale. So maybe only two companies are talking about this metric. So that's like less intent. And then we have fit and then it outputs into this micro audience. Right? It has a micro audience card format. And so you can see here I describe it into the catchy name. Because you need a marketing name. You have a signal, you have a pane, you have a hook and you have a suggested marketing campaign that you'll run to them. And so I ran this one and you can see it ran for some time. It went through a bunch of data and it started to pull back a bunch of things for us. And I thought some of them were really cool. These pipeline velocity optimizers. Three mid market companies posted job ads in the last 45 days. And I'm going to talk a little bit about this 45 days because it's important in how you can actually move the range in terms of how many companies you want to come back. And they talked about lead prioritization and pipeline velocity. I'm drowning in unqualified leads and my sales pipeline moves too slowly cause I missed revenue targets. And so it has a hook on how we can solve that. And then it has a suggested campaign, talks about fit and intent. Intent is obviously three out of five because it's only three companies mentioned that and that's because I've got pretty stringent parameters on how it's going to actually pull back companies. It talks about conversion rate and Maximizers. So three SMB mid market companies posted job ads in the last 45 days mentioning lead qualification and conversion optimization. And we talk about the pain, we talk about the hook, and then we have a suggested campaign for them. And on and on it goes. Attribution analytics seekers. So you can see it's done this micro audience. It started to create micro audiences around these new Ryzen KPI's that people are being held accountable for.
- [16:49]
B
Hey everyone, if you're like me, you love learning from the best and you just love learning, period. And a podcast that is all about learning is one that I love. It's called Billion Dollar Moves. It's hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings. It's brought to you by HubSpot Media. And Sarah's awesome and she covers really what it takes to build a remarkable business. She's a venture capitalist, she's a strategist. She asks really hard questions and wants to find the highs and the lows from the most successful builders and entrepreneurs of our time so that we can all learn from them and make our own billion dollar moves. She's got a great episode around the Big Bet mindset and how you really build bold change for your company. It's awesome. You're going to want to check that out as well as all of her episodes are awesome. Highly recommend. You can listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts.
- [17:42]
A
And so that's how we create these kind of micro audiences. Now I have a bunch of micro audiences around a single hunt. So a hunt in this case is go look at job ads and use KPIs to break apart micro audiences. I'm going to give you an example of another hunt to show you there's an infinite number of ways that you can actually do this. And so what do we do then? Well, then we actually just want to create a marketing kit for that audience. And so you can see here we're going to use Perplexity Labs again and we have a multi channel campaign kit. So we have the cluster name, we have the top KPI. So we're going to go after one of the micro audiences. We're going to go after the very top one because that has the best fit and intent. As a reminder, that is micro audience pipeline velocity optimizers. And we are going to go after this one and create a campaign around It So we have our cluster name, we have what is the top KPI. So remember this was the Ryzen KPI that was not in our baseline of KPIs. We have Cluster which is only three mid market companies. I'm going to show you how you can make this many many more. We talk about the core pane, we talk about the hook, we talk about the CTA book, a pipeline velocity assessment and then you can see here we tell Perplexity to create a snapshot using firmographics detect stack overlap. 1 line comment Pain summary. So it does like a little cluster snapshot of the micro audience. Talk a little bit about the target and CSV. Then this is the meat of it which is the campaign assets. So you can change this out for what would work for you. And this is just an example we're showing. It will create a LinkedIn carousel, it will create a email sequence, it will create a landing page wireframe. Because we can hypothesize in the future that you will create micro sites for all of your micro audiences. Right. Each one of them will come to our website specifically designed for that micro audience need. And then we're going to create a 30 second video script in LinkedIn or TikTok. We can ask it to recommend a budget and tell us how to do this. Give it a little bit of formatting. And so in that way I simply pass my micro audience to Perplexity Labs and because it's able to stitch all of these things together, it starts to run that campaign for me. So it talks about the cluster snapshot. It says they on average have 250 to 350 average headcount. Headquarters are in tech forward regions like they're in New York, Dallas, Houston. Primarily B2C funding because we went and asked it to go to Crunchbase. Look at this tech overlap. Salesforce CRM considering alternatives HubSpot Marketing Hub outreach Sales loft. So we can start to get an idea of their tech stack Common Pain which is pretty cool. This is your targeting CSV. This is actually for uploading into ad platforms and so you can upload a CSV of companies to target. I think it's 300. So this is just again for demo purposes. These are your campaign assets. So it creates your different LinkedIn carousel ads. Now what I would say is if I was doing this for realreal as a little tip for you all, I would have a separate prompt per campaign asset. When you try to stitch in multiple asks like create this asset, this asset and this asset and will not do A good job creating the assets is a whole other show. But I want to give you an example of how you use a micro audience with AI to create a full campaign. But what I will do is come back and show you how I would create the campaign and up level what you see here. Because I would actually have a specific prompt per campaign asset along with a style how to create something pretty amazing. It still does a pretty good job like creates a LinkedIn carousel, has card one, card two, card three, talks about your pain point, understands the cluster, understands how to market to them, creates a quick email sequence that you can send to these companies. Again, because this is a micro audience and pretty targeted in this case there's only like three companies in it. But I'm show you how you can actually increase that. The landing page wireframe is just for illustration purposes that you could actually have it build out a prompt to actually create a micro site for each micro audience. So you can imagine you would direct each micro audience to a specific site just for them. And because you can use tools like Replit, Lovable, all of these tools to easily create websites, it can make a lot of sense with AI, whereas before it wouldn't have. And then you can actually create this video script. And if I was doing this, I would create a video script, plug it into VO3 and I would have my video assets for these micro audiences. So this is an example where I take a micro audience card, I can plug it into an AI assistant. Perplexity Labs in this one shot prompt did a pretty good example. I'll come back with another episode and show you how you can use a micro audience and have a campaign agent probably do something maybe much better than you see on this screen. Because I'm going to teach it how to do each individual campaign asset. But again, I think if I'm starting out and I want to start to create some real revenue for my company, this is good enough for me to actually start to go and do some stuff for recommends how you use your budget. Again, this is for illustration purposes. You can actually put some stuff in here around context of your company. What is my budget? All of that stuff will actually help it give you some better recommendations. Now why do I keep saying pay attention to the 45 days? Because if I want to change how broad this will go, I have basically ruled that it's looking for companies that have posted on LinkedIn in the last 45 days those jobs. So you could obviously go back 90 days, 180 days a whole year would actually give you A lot more companies. And then you could actually change your seed list, right? The amount of KPI key phrases. You could actually tell it to return the new KPI seed list. And I've done that. I basically say, hey, like give me all of the new ones that you found. And then I look at them and I basically say to them, okay, take that seed list and go out and find another like 15, 20 KPIs in these job ads that would fit into that cluster of seed phrases. So I could go then from like 15 new KPIs to 30 to 45 to 60. The new KPI phrases, the more companies it can go after that has mentioned those and cluster them together and say, hey, here's a new phrase that was mentioned by two companies. Here's another one that was mentioned by three, here's another one mentioned by four, here's another one mentioned by five or 20 companies, right? And so you can go after more companies in that way. So the number of days since the job ad has been posted and the number of key phrases in that seed list, these kind of KPIs. So to give you a quick example, this is only one, right? So again, micro audiences, one, you could have hundreds. And so this is another example which I call kind of stack synergy signals. And what it would do is find firms that have two complimentary tools. Let's say I know that Companies that use HubSpot have Calendly and Slack, but no HubSpot. I could use that to do a micro audience on just companies that have calendly in slack and no HubSpot. And this here would go out and start to create that micro audience for me. And the reason you do this is because you can start to tailor all of your marketing more specifically for that micro audience. So for me, if I know that these people, they are in charge of these new KPIs, new that we don't really market to today. We don't say, hey, we can help you do A, B or C. We're talking about a bunch of other KPIs that our audience have had forever. We're able to tailor our content to say we can help you with those KPIs. I'm able to tailor my outreach to say HubSpot can help you with those KPIs. I'm Able to create much more video content for them to show how we would help with those KPIs. And so again, this is the beauty of micro audiences is because of AI, because I can have perplexity go create the micro audience because I can have AI start to create all of the campaign assets for the micro audiences. I can actually go out and do much more tailored marketing at scale. So 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. Create one video for a broad ICP or ideal customer profile. So your ideal customer profile is your foundational audience and you break that into micro audiences and then you use AI to personalize your marketing to those micro audiences. Hopefully this illustrates a couple of things. There is going to be new ways of doing marketing that AI is going to enable. It shows you some of the awesomeness around Perplexity Labs and we'll show you more in future shows because I love it and trying to give you solutions, not problems. Yes, we know search is being disrupted, but hey, there's a ton of upside in all of the things that we can start to do with AI. So that's this episode of Marketing Against Grain. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it wasn't too hard to follow. I did try to distill it down, make it as simple as I could. And if you like these kind of new playbooks, believe me, deep in the lab, there's a lot more to come. So do stay tuned and subscribe to that channel.