The New AI Tool That Can Disrupt Things
As a small or mid-sized business owner, you’re always looking for ways to gain an edge over your competition. You know the importance of effective marketing to reach new customers and grow your business.
Getting your business consistently displayed in the search results is a constant battle, but what if there was a search engine that gave you, your business, and even your customers more?
Introducing Perplexity (https://www.perplexity.ai/), and it may be the latest threat to Google’s dominance.
What is Perplexity AI?
If Google and ChatGPT (version 3.5) dated, married, and had a kid, it would probably look like Perplexity.
Launched in 2022 and investors like Jeff Bezos, Perplexity is a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system that can understand and generate human-like text on virtually any topic. It’s like having an expert marketing copywriter, SEO specialist, and content strategist and business advisor rolled into one powerful AI assistant.
Unlike traditional search engines like Google that simply match keywords to existing web pages, Perplexity can dynamically create brand-new, original content tailored to your specific needs. It draws from a vast knowledge base spanning science, history, current events, pop culture, and more to craft informative and engaging marketing materials.
Google vs. Perplexity AI: A New Era of Search
For decades and even today, Google has reigned supreme as the go-to search engine for finding information on the internet. You may not know it, but Google has used AI for years to help rank websites. It’s also no secret that Google began as a search engine and has evolved to straddle the fence between a search engine and an answer engine.
What’s the difference? Simple. A search engine provides an endless list of things to helpful links to match your search query while an answer engine strives to provide a direct answer.
If you need a plumber and type “Plumber near me” into Google, you’ll get a list of local plumbers. That’s an example of what happens with a search query.
If you type in how tall is Tom Cruise, you’re clearly looking for a single answer. He’s 5’7″. There’s nothing to search for there. You want THE answer. That’s what an answer engine gives you.
But, as we all know, language has its nuances which makes replicating that with a computer of any kind a challenge. That’s why we have AI tools that attempt to provide both answers as well as search results. That’s how Perplexity AI was born.
Perplexity AI is a large language model that can dynamically generate human-like content from scratch based on your query. It draws from a vast knowledge base spanning science, news, pop culture, and more to provide insightful, nuanced responses.
The core difference is that Google retrieves and ranks pre-existing web pages based on their relevance to your keywords. Perplexity AI, on the other hand, creates brand-new content tailored specifically to your question or prompt. This allows for much more natural, contextual, and comprehensive answers.
Google’s search results are limited by the finite number of web pages in its index, which can quickly become outdated. Perplexity AI continuously learns and updates its knowledge base, providing the latest information on any topic.
How Can Perplexity AI Help Your Business?
Powerful SEO Content Creation
One of the biggest challenges for small businesses is creating enough high-quality content to rank well on Google. Perplexity can effortlessly generate blog posts, website copy, ebooks, and other content optimized for your target keywords and SEO best practices. No more struggling to feed the content beast! Now, you can use your machine to help gain traction with Google’s machine.
Customized Ad Copy and Messaging
Crafting compelling ad copy and messaging is an art. With Perplexity, you can simply describe your product or service and your target audience, and it will generate customized ad copy that is more likely to resonate with your customers. This let’s move away from the generic, one-size-fits-all messaging.
Social Media Content Scheduling
Staying active and engaging on social media is crucial, but also incredibly time-consuming. Perplexity can create weeks’ worth of unique social media posts, updates, and content tailored to each platform with a single prompt. Schedule it out and focus on other priorities.
Automated Email Campaigns
Email marketing is still one of the most effective channels, but creating personalized emails that convert is challenging. Perplexity can generate high-converting email copy for any campaign – promotions, newsletters, nurture sequences, and more – in seconds.
On-Demand Market Research
Need insights into industry trends, customer behavior, or competitive analysis? Just ask Perplexity to research any topic and compile the key findings into a polished report. No more tedious manual research! The possibilities are truly endless. While AI can’t completely replace human creativity and strategic thinking (yet!), Perplexity AI is an extraordinarily powerful tool for small and mid-sized businesses looking to gain a competitive edge through smarter, more efficient marketing.
Competitive Intelligence
Perplexity can research your competitors, analyze their marketing strategies, identify gaps and opportunities, and provide actionable insights to help you gain a competitive edge2. This level of in-depth competitive analysis would typically require hiring expensive consultants.
Product Ideation and Development
Struggling to come up with new product or service ideas? Perplexity can ideate novel concepts by combining insights across different industries and domains. It can also help refine product specs, features, and marketing positioning.
Customer Service and Support
Leverage Perplexity’s natural language abilities to build chatbots and virtual assistants that can provide personalized customer support at scale. This frees up human resources while delivering superior customer experiences.
Data Analysis and Visualization
For data-driven businesses, Perplexity can analyze complex datasets, identify patterns and trends, and automatically generate visualizations and reports to derive meaningful insights2.
Automated Business Plan and Proposal Writing
Creating detailed business plans, investor pitches, RFP responses, and proposals is extremely time-consuming. Perplexity can streamline this process by automatically generating first drafts tailored to your specific business and audience.
Multilingual Communication
If you operate in multiple regions or have an international customer base, Perplexity can fluently communicate in dozens of languages. Use it to create localized marketing materials, translate documents, or facilitate cross-cultural conversations.
The key advantage of Perplexity AI is its ability to augment human intelligence and automate cognitive tasks across virtually every business function23. This levels the playing field for smaller firms, allowing them to operate with the marketing sophistication and efficiency of major enterprises.
Helps With SEO?
With Google’s introduction of SGE (Search Generative Experience) probably in May of 2024, you need to get used to seeing AI and search results together. The big question about this new addition to Google’s search results is that we don’t really know where Google is getting the links and videos they are displaying there, but there seems to be a huge overlap between the results Perplexity shows and what is displayed in SGE. We just don’t yet understand the connection, but we think there is one.
Oh Yeah, Advertisements
Last but pretty far from least, coming in July, Perplexity will begin to display ads in their results. We don’t yet know what that will look like, but considering that they have 15 million monthly users and growing at a shocking rate of 20,512%. As of this writing, there are nearly 500,000 searches conducted on this platform monthly.
Users of Perplexity are an eclectic bunch that you’d like to have at any party including artists, musicians, programmers, professionals, writers, and “others” whatever that means. These users have a growing loyalty with 65% of users saying they only use this platform whereas most say they use Perplexity and Google together.
Imagine getting a chance at advertising on Google before it became the 900-pound gorilla it is today. For some business owners, this may present an interesting opportunity.
Final Thoughts
Look, we get it. You might be suffering from “New Tool Exhaustion”. You may trust AI like you trust a national politician or maybe even a president (Yes, that little). But, all Google does is bring you search results which, without a doubt, is a really good thing. Perplexity has the potential to be your search engine, answer engine, and possibly your new best friend given how conversational it is.
Given that, it’s worth a look. That’s all we’re saying. Decide for yourself.
Cliff Tillery, MBA is the Chief Operating Officer and SEO Director at Make It Loud which is a digital marketing firm located outside of Atlanta Georgia. More than 14 years ago, he started search engine optimization at this award-winning agency and has taught digital marketing skills to business owners at the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce, the Gwinnett Entrepreneur Center, and other groups.
