Loop Marketing is HubSpot’s new marketing playbook, designed to align with today’s shift in consumer behaviours and the reliance on AI from both marketers and consumers. The idea is to move away from a linear buyer’s journey that takes people through a funnel of Awareness > Consideration > Decision and reimagines it as four-stages that ‘loop’ with additional learning each time you move through it.
In HubSpot’s words: “Marketing funnels aren’t flowing. Old tactics aren’t working… Loop Marketing is a new four-stage approach that combines AI efficiency and human authenticity to drive growth. It loops. It learns. It gets sharper every time you use it.”
The four-stage approach
- Express (who you are)
- Tailor (your approach)
- Amplify (your reach)
- Evolve (in real-time)
The first thing you might notice here is that the individual steps aren’t exactly unique or even new to most marketers. This playbook is not supposed to completely reinvent how you do things, but rather introduce a different way to approach what you already know and understand, finding new ways to succeed in a fast evolving industry.
Most seasoned marketers will already have a strong sense of brand voice and brand rules for their organisation, as well as how to express that brand to the outside world. This coupled with personas and ideal customer profiles puts you in a good position to start ‘expressing’.
Even the idea of tailoring your content isn’t a new concept, and many will be familiar with developing content marketing strategies that includes adapting the content we create and the messaging we share for our different audiences. What’s ultimately changed here is the data we have access to and the tools we have to personalise the content at scale and speed. If you're not already, now is absolutely the time to start leveraging this.
Amplify is arguably one of the most interesting stages of the playbook approach - again, it’s something we’re already used to doing in marketing, but the pace of which we now have to do it is massively accelerated. With AI playing such a large role in content creation, and with consumers constantly tuning into new channels and ways to consume content, amplifying content is far beyond a trusted channel strategy and now relies on more content and channel experimentation.
The evolve stage also goes beyond how many marketers work today - most of us are tied to KPIs and results, but the analytics don’t necessarily change how we think day-to-day. With more experimentation comes more data and better opportunities to pivot, based on what’s working and what’s not. The evolve stage of the Loop Marketing playbook is all about learning and optimising to maximise results.
Even if the whole process still sounds familiar, the playbook has been created with AI in mind. It’s designed to leverage AI at every stage of the approach, helping to generate content, understand audiences, provide actionable insights and optimise marketing execution.
This is a key difference from how many marketers work today. Up until now, AI tools have often been used as an add-on, while Loop Marketing builds them in from the ground up and ensures AI is used to improve how marketers work, making processes more efficient.
Why now?
During the HubSpot Spotlight talk at Inbound 25, Yamini Rangan, chief executive officer at HubSpot, stated that “60% of Google searches end in no clicks”.
For an industry that has spent the best part of 25 years learning how to get found on Google, the idea that more than half of those finding you don’t even click on the link is a little worrying.
This is all part of a wider trend and a great example of how AI is changing the way we work and think, potentially without even realising it. For those still using Google regularly, AI generated results are changing how we consume the information.
If the answer that shows at the top of Google, the AI summary, gives a satisfactory result, then no click is even needed. In essence, this changes how we think about Google. It’s still important, but it’s now important for different reasons.
Where writing blogs and creating lots of top-of-funnel content to rank well, focusing on SEO as a key marketing tactic has worked well in the past, this same content may no longer perform through these channels. So you need to rethink how, where, when and what content is used.
With AI becoming everyone’s favourite assistant, users are often more educated on the subject or challenge by time they reach your website. AI summarises the search journey, pulling information from multiple sources to provide an answer. Even when you look for recipes now, you can ask ChatGPT or Gemini to provide a nice recipe for something, without ever clicking through to an actual recipe website.
Building a new marketing hypothesis
Your business will get fewer visits to the website, but the ones that visit are more likely to buy as they are more engaged and further in their buyer's journey.
We’re in the age of “AI assisted buyers” and traffic from LLMs is more likely to convert, with AI essentially replacing the traditional awareness stage and even large parts of the conversion stage of the traditional funnel. That's not to say content for the early stages of the buyer's journey isn't important, but it relies on a change in how and where this content is found.
Content and campaign creative needs to be highly relevant, feel personal, and needs to be faster to produce, leaning on AI to support this. We’re in a time of experimentation. Try something, see if it works, and quickly move on if it doesn’t. That’s where the Loop Marketing playbook neatly fits in.
It’s about quality and importantly, authenticity.
Does Loop Marketing replace Inbound Marketing?
Not as such. Many of the principles of Inbound Marketing are still relevant today, but they aren’t enough to rely on as your marketing strategy. Content marketing has already helped fill this gap over the years, bringing in stronger consideration for different channels and paid options as well.
Loop Marketing brings in new aspects of using AI to help speed up your processes and better reach your intended audience, creating content for the channels they can be found on, today and in the future.
Your marketing strategy and overall approach to marketing is potentially under threat in an age where consumers change how they think, how they research and how they interact with content daily. Loop Marketing helps you reposition your marketing strategy to combat this.
How does Loop Marketing fit the Deeply Digital content circle methodology?
Loop Marketing is perfectly set up to fit into the Deeply Digital content circle methodology.
The Deeply Digital content circles don’t position marketing campaigns as being linear, it's is all about how you start with the idea before moving on to how you consider the audience, the messaging and positioning, the assets and eventually the promotion.
Once you’ve developed the content, the whole concept is that it can be used in a myriad of ways, none of which have to consist of a linear path or journey. Instead, the content should be used however best to reach your intended audience. Be that through lots of regular TikTok and Instagram updates or more considered, videos or LinkedIn posts - it’s whatever works for your audience.
AI also fits into every part of the content circles and all of the tools that HubSpot offer fit into our content circle methodology as a way to execute the overall plan.
Ready to get started with your next marketing campaign?
Deeply Digital crafts valuable content to captivate and convert audiences using our content circles framework. It’s an approach that integrates strategy, creative execution, and performance optimisation to deliver impactful content marketing solutions, aligning with Inbound Marketing, Loop Marketing and account-based marketing playbooks.
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