Closing the Loop with Loop Marketing

Within the next two years, HubSpot expects 95 percent of buyer journeys to begin not with a search engine or website but with a large language model like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.  Companies today need to craft a new playbook for an entirely new era of marketing. Lucky for them, in LOOP: Outlearn. Outmarket. Outgrow, HubSpot Chief Marketing Officer Kipp Bodnar and Senior Vice President of Marketing Kieran Flanagan draw on their combined experience to prepare marketers for what comes next. CRM Editor Leonard Klie spent time with them to close the loop on loop marketing.

CRM: What is loop marketing, and how is it different from traditional marketing?

BODNAR: For decades, teams relied on a traditional marketing funnel. Customers were introduced to new products, learned more about them on the company’s site, and then bought them. That world doesn't exist anymore.

The funnel was built for a linear journey. But buyers don't move in a line anymore. They bounce across channels, AI assistants, creators, and communities. They might never visit your website. They come to you having already selected or ruled you out. 

FLANAGAN: With loop marketing, teams build a multichannel system so they show up wherever buyers are. Teams can move fluidly between stages. Every buyer interaction generates data, which sharpens targeting and drives more interaction. The system gets smarter every time you use it. 

CRM: What are the benefits of loop marketing?

BODNAR: Teams with big budgets used to be the ones who won. They could pay for focus groups and create more content until something landed. But loop marketing isn’t powered by dollars alone. The teams that experiment quickly and scale what works will get ahead. 

Now, everyone is a full loop marketer, testing ideas with AI-powered customer profiles, building with AI, and shipping. Loop marketing moves fast, and so do the people powering it.

FLANAGAN: Loop marketing also makes messaging more personal. In the past, segmentation grouped people by job title or industry, then sent the same message to thousands of people who shared a characteristic. With loop marketing, every person gets treated as a segment of one. Messaging targets who they are and what they've researched.

CRM: In the book, you identify a four-stage loop marketing framework. What are these stages?

BODNAR: The four stages are Express, Tailor, Amplify, and Evolve. Express is where you encode your judgment and define exactly who you are, who you serve, and what makes your brand unmistakable. In Tailor, teams create personalized content at scale.  Amplify is distribution. Buyers have scattered across YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, podcasts, and AI assistants. Teams build a process for working with creators and optimize content for AI search engines. In Evolve, teams review how campaigns perform, then feed the results back into the system to inform improvements. 

These stages are cyclical. Once running, all four stages run simultaneously and feed each other in real time. 

CRM: We keep hearing that companies have had a hard time finding value in AI. Why is that, and how does loop marketing quantify those benefits?

BODNAR: Most teams are bolting AI onto yesterday's workflows without doing any foundational work. Loop marketing structures how teams approach AI so they can actually reap the benefits. We start by defining the brand’s unique point of view. Then, we build a digital buyer simulation with AI to test the messaging behind every campaign. The teams that win have positioning that speaks to real humans. AI is used to scale their reach.

FLANAGAN: The other problem is slop. When everyone has access to the same AI tools, everything sounds the same. That’s why everyone is so obsessed with taste — it tells you what "good" looks like. Loop marketing puts taste first. Before you touch a single AI tool, you encode your point of view, brand voice, and creative instincts. Then, you invest time in understanding your buyers so you can speak to them directly. With those pieces, marketers can increase their reach 10 times without adding to the sea of slop.