← Marketing Against The Grain
Marketing Against The Grain
Using Perplexity AI to Reverse Engineer a $500M Marketing Strategy
00:13:44
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Transcript9 lines
- [00:00]
Sam
Do you want to get more customers? I know you do. I'm going to show you how to steal the best marketing playbooks on the Internet to get more customers for your business. And I'm going to show it to you with a tool you're probably not using yet. And AI is going to help us do it all. Let's get into today's show.
- [00:20]
HubSpot Host
Using only 20% of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a ton of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20% of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. Learn more@HubSpot.com.
- [01:04]
Sam
Today I'm going to show you how to reverse engineer anybody's marketing with AI. And this way you can be inspired by the marketing you love and apply it to your own business. And I want to give you a story about how this all started. It all started with this company called Groons. And myself and other folks that I work with at HubSpot were basically like, I see Groons all the time, especially on Instagram. Clearly they have a big Instagram advertising strategy. It's this like, nutritional gummy thing. I don't even, you know, I'm not, not a customer. But I was like, the ads that I keep seeing are very personalized. They're relevant to some of the interests that I have. So clearly they're using some very cool data around me and my behavior on Instagram and building segmentation and building these ads. And so I was like, I'm just curious now, how is it that they are building ads like this? And so I went to their website and I was looking around and I was like, you know what? I'm going to work with AI to solve this problem. And so what I'm going to do is I'm showing you this website in the Perplexity Comet browser. So it's not Google Chrome, it's not Safari, it's the new web browser from Perplexity. And one of the things I love about Perplexity Comment is it has this assistant toggle so I can toggle this assistant on and ask it any question. And it uses the website as kind of the context to answer those questions. And it has an agent that can go through and browse the website for me. And so what's really cool is I can just ask it, hey, this Company makes amazing personalized Instagram ads that I always see and are very good. Can you explain to me how they do it, what tools they use? And what's great is it goes and looks at third party resources in addition to this website. And it's basically like Groon's. Instagram ads stand out because they combine systematic creative testing, Persona specific messaging and cutting edge technology. So what's really cool is that the Perplexity Assistant breaks down their entire strategy of how they do Instagram ads. They don't run a generic ad, they do Persona driven ad funnels and each ad matches a dedicated landing page. That's very cool. They have multichannel creative sprints. So they test rapidly as ad creative teams coordinated campaigns across meta, TikTok, YouTube, Google, et cetera. Unsuccessful creative directions are killed fast. Okay, that's cool. They have an influencer and user generated content program, advanced ad creation. That's kind of cool. But my question here is that's fun. How do they actually do this? So they have a creative tech stack and I'm like, okay, that's kind of good. And so I follow up and I'm like, what are the specific tools they use? Sometimes you want a blueprint for like, oh, I know exactly what this company does. Which Perplexity Assistant gave me an amazing summary of basically how to steal their Instagram marketing. What next is. You're like, well tactically, how do I do that? What tools do I use? And they use Meta Ad manager. They use a company called North Beam for attribution and tracking. They use ad creation platforms. They use Icon Foreplay and Atria. These folks are deep into AI ad creation because I've only heard of one of those three AI ad creation tools. So clearly I need to do a show on Foreplay and Atria because I've only worked with and seen Icon. So clearly they're like deep experts in this, which is very cool. They use Grin for influencer management. They use Shopify and the Shopify app stack. So what's really cool is that you can break down what actual tools they're using and sometimes it might find these in third party sites. I've done a version of this where it actually just looks at the source code and looks at the tracking code and code on the website. That's the cool thing of having a browser based agent. So now you have this whole AI flow that just exists to basically say, I want to understand what people are doing. And now I can just keep asking questions. I could be like, you know, how do they really use AI ad generation in their strategy and it's making a best guess, right based off of the information they have. But it's going to be a cool back and forth you can have. If you're just trying to figure out this tactic, you can just get it and it's going to come up. It's going to get some information likely from the vendors they're using, right? And then it's saying like cool. Grooms uses advanced AI generation as core part of the strategy with the platform icon AI ad maker as the technology engine. Here's how it's integrated. They have an ad GPT workflows for creative generation, automated iterative in clothing and and an AI Chief Marketing officer Icon's AI cmo. So it's basically just breaking down the features of icon, how they're using icon and the way that it's being used. So this is really cool. You can now reverse engineer anybody's strategy. And so I was thinking about this like it could apply to a big brand like Nike or a smaller brand like Groons. One of the things I did that I thought was really cool that I wanted to show you guys, one of the things I love about Perplexity comment as well is that when you have this assistant open in the browser you can also use shortcuts. So if I hit the backslash I have saved a shortcut called reverse and this is a pre written prompt that I have done that basically takes everything I'd want to know about how to reverse engineer a company's marketing strategy and put it in the context of my job. I run marketing at HubSpot and so all I can do is just pick my reverse shortcut and it is taking everything on whatever page I'm at or if I was across multiple pages and it will go and give me this information. So it's saying, hey, I'm on the Nike page. The primary CTA is to shop and buy things. Audience target segment is broad sports. It's giving me a strategy diagnosis, how they're positioning who their ideal customer profile is, their offer mechanics, funnel hypothesis. This is especially great if you are maybe a technical founder or a sales founder. You don't know a ton about marketing. You can just go and do this for a bunch of relevant companies in your industry and get a deep understanding very quickly of how they're thinking about marketing as well as doing it for companies. You admire who you think do great marketing and see how they're thinking about it. Because you can then take all of that and formulate that into your own expertise to build your own marketing, messaging, your marketing strategy, et cetera. What's really cool is it breaks down the messaging creative they're doing. Also talks about their conversion architecture. What is the actual flow to get people to convert. This is especially helpful. If we were doing this with a competitor website and you were looking at their conversion architecture, you would look at this and say, okay, great. How do I make a better and simpler conversion architecture than my competitors so that I can convert at a higher rate and win more customers? There is literally like a hundred ways you can use this to actually grow your business in a really remarkable way and really make your marketing much stronger.
- [08:26]
Narrator
Reverse engineering used to take days of manual research, but with Perplexity, it took minutes. And you can do the same thing. We've got this free guide that shows you exactly how you can turn perplexity into your competitive intelligence engine. You can analyze competitors, automate your research, and find hidden insights most people miss.
- [08:47]
Sam
We always have a stage in here about distribution and growth loops. So they're talking about SEO, channel fit, and then it breaks down what their tech stack is. And it's likely like, oh, they likely have a custom cms, definitely. All these massive companies likely have a custom CMS or content management system for their website and they can break down performance and they give us an actual playbook. And how this applies to HubSpot and gives me some experiments to run. And what's really interesting here, there's a bunch of stuff I can do this. But again, it starts a really valuable thread on how a particular company is doing marketing and the questions I might be able to ask it and how I can use it to optimize and improve my own strategy. So any company. So, like, this is a really big B2B company like ServiceNow, we'll go to their CRM page and we'll just be like, hey, reverse that. And so I've got my prompt and we could put the full detail of my reverse engineering prompt. Look for a link in the show notes. We'll give that to you. But this is just a simple prompt that I've built to basically try to reverse engineer. Could be a homepage. In this case, it's a specific product page, right? That's what's cool. Could be an Instagram account, anything related to marketing. It doesn't have to just be like the broad website of a company. It could be a specific product page, anything. If you want to really get a detailed summary of the other side of it, not what the user experience is, but what the marketer on the other end is thinking trying to accomplish in the technology that they're using. This, I think, is one of the most underrated hacks in marketing today. The fact that you can quickly and easily reverse engineer anybody's marketing strategy is remarkable. And if you're curious and you're a student of marketing, if you literally just did this for a day, you would probably know more about your competition or the most admired brand's web and marketing strategies than most people working at those companies. And that's pretty awesome. I wanna tell you about a podcast I love.
- [10:56]
HubSpot Host
It's called Creators Are Brands. Hosted by Tom Boyd. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Creators are Brands explore how storytellers are building brands online. From the mindsets to the tactics to the business side. They break down what's working so you.
- [11:13]
Sam
Can apply that to your own mission.
- [11:15]
HubSpot Host
They just did a great episode called why youy Perfect Content Isn't Working. Do this instead with Courtney Johnson. It's a great show. Listen to Creators Are Brands wherever you get your podcast.
- [11:29]
Sam
So I've shown you how to do this. I'm gonna give you the prompt. This again is all using the Perplexity Comment browser, using their agent. And again, if this is something you're gonna do on the regularly, you can can just build the shortcut like I showed you. And it's really awesome. Very simple to do this, but it can basically put you at the center of anyone's marketing strategy and really let you build and scale your business. I hope this was helpful. You can go download Perplexity Comment and give this a try for yourself and we'll see you next time on Marketing against the Grain. Sam.