Building on that old formula is Loop Marketing, an approach enabling brands to adapt and continually grow in a world reshaped by AI. As a curious bunch of strategists, the team at Salted Stone has kept its eyes wide open to the not-so-subtle shifts in the landscape, and we are thrilled HubSpot has made official what we’ve been taking note of.
Here’s what you need to know, as well as a few tools to get you started.
HubSpot’s announcement of a new way of marketing shines a light on what marketers like us have felt for a long time: Customer behavior has changed. The buyer's journey isn’t as linear anymore and yet traditional marketing funnels assume a linear path. Well, no more.
It would come as no surprise that artificial intelligence has a lot to answer for. A high percentage of Google searches today are "zero-click" (60% in 2024) — thanks to AI, you can often get answers directly on the search results page without visiting a website. So businesses are now competing with AI-generated responses, not just direct competitors, all while organic website traffic shrinks.
Awareness and discovery are also scattered. Buyers don’t just use search to get answers, they use social media platforms like YouTube (the world’s second largest search platform), TikTok, and Reddit. While standard tactics like SEO-optimized blogs and gated content still have their place in marketing strategy, they need to be supplemented with other tactics.
Loop Marketing addresses these shifts in the customer journey, and with it, offers brands a playbook from which they can future-proof their businesses. In its simplest form, it looks like this:
Loop Marketing delivers faster go-to-market supported by AI, deepens customer connections, and lowers acquisition costs while diversifying channels. It's also a cyclical optimization model of continuous learning and improvement. Because winning today isn’t only about speed — out-iterating the competition matters more.
The good news is, attracting and connecting with customers today doesn’t mean ditching your entire strategy. By combining AI efficiency with human authenticity — the foundations of Loop Marketing — you can improve your strategy time and time again. This isn’t to say the fundamentals of inbound should be forgotten; rather, the approach has to evolve. That means Expressing your brand, Tailoring your messaging, Amplifying it across diverse channels, and Evolving in response to real-time insights.
In a world teeming with AI-generated content, the power of brand couldn’t be more crucial. Owning your authentic brand ensures it owns a unique point of view. It ensures that it stands out from competitors’ generic AI content. And it ensures you capture the attention of and truly connect with those you aim to do business with.
But before making a move, you need to have absolute clarity on your buyer. That means defining (or updating) your ideal customer profile so that it is a true and complete representation of who they are. Because without it, you’ll be speaking to a broad audience of many, rather than a targeted few — your best fit.
Expressing who you are must also be done consistently and cohesively across channels for it to be effective. By providing specific context (brand voice, buyer personas, pain points, and differentiators) to AI tools, you can not only communicate authentically, but also increase the speed at which your brand goes to market. Refreshing brand style guidelines will be key to success and set up your business for the second stage of the loop.
For users of HubSpot, AI-powered Breeze Assistant speeds up the Express stage. It generates campaign and content ideas by automatically analyzing your CRM and marketing data while factoring in your brand context. Then, simply plan how the story will be brought to life across formats and channels.
Personalized messaging isn’t new, however, hyper-personalization is. “Hi, First Name” simply won’t cut it anymore. To effectively “Tailor”, adapt your content to whoever is seeing it, wherever they are on the journey. You’ll start by identifying high-intent segments (with help from AI) based on behaviors and engagement, allowing messages and experiences to be adapted by industry, role, buyer journey stage, and more. The result is a completely individualized experience that feels personal and on-brand.
You can effectively tailor your message using dynamic assets, like landing pages, ads, and calls-to-action. Use HubSpot’s AI-Powered Segmentation, Personalization Agent, and AI-Powered Email — all currently in beta — to tailor experiences at scale in a fraction of the time.
Success, however, relies upon having quality unified customer data. Teams working with both structured and unstructured data in the one place have a greater chance at understanding buyers and crafting timely personalized messages that resonate.
“Amplify” sees your content diversified across channels, meeting customers where they engage while optimizing for bots too. First, optimize your channel mix. Ensure your brand is present across search engines, social platforms, and AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and the like. A great place to begin optimization is with AI tools like HubSpot’s AEO Grader for guidance on how to improve your content for AI engines.
Next, repurpose content for different formats and channels, whether that’s short-form video, social posts, or AI-optimized articles. A plethora of new AI tools are available in HubSpot to help teams create, manage, and scale production of assets. Take Marketing Studio (beta), for example, which allows teams to map campaigns across diverse platforms in one dedicated workspace.
There's also a host of new and existing content creation and repurposing tools worth testing, such as Content Remix, designed to get content out faster.
The final stage of the loop is where you learn fast and act faster. Don’t wait for quarterly reviews. Instead, shift into continuous optimization. Spot early trends in the data, experiment on the fly, and refine your strategy again and again. Every customer interaction becomes intelligence that makes your next loop cycle smarter. With help from AI, marketing teams find themselves empowered to iterate and adapt campaigns quickly and effectively.
For starters, use AI predictions to evaluate and adjust campaign performance before launch. A simple place to start is with HubSpot’s Email Engagement Optimization (beta). It allows teams to predict which recipients are most likely to engage, so that send lists are fully optimized before hitting send. And as campaigns run, lean on real-time AI-powered engagement and conversion insights from Smart Digest to maximize success.
But continuous improvement doesn't end here. When your campaign comes to completion, leverage the data to inform and improve future strategies, leaning on Breeze Assistant to analyze performance and identify improvements. You’ll enter the next iteration with intelligence that propels forward momentum, and more importantly, growth.
The traditional inbound marketing playbook isn’t enough anymore — and we welcome the change. Such a fundamental shift in customer behavior can feel overwhelming, but with HubSpot’s Loop Marketing approach, you can adapt. Its emphasis on speed, human-AI collaboration, and real-time optimization is grounded in continuous learning and improvement, which we are confident can only lead to smarter growth.
Where you start optimizing depends on what will create the most impact in your business at this moment, powered by the best of what AI and humans have to offer. Want to make the shift? Salted Stone is here to help you implement Loop Marketing to future-proof your business. Contact us to talk strategy.