HubSpot launched their new marketing playbook – Loop Marketing – a few weeks back at their INBOUND conference.
It’s worth chatting about: to get a sense of what is useful, versus what’s noise.
I’ll cover a few cynical notes first, then highlight the good stuff.
For a more detailed discussion about the topic, see also my video here:
I’ve seen a bunch of posts proclaiming that ‘Inbound is dead. Loop is the replacement.‘
And to be fair, the whole Inbound Marketing methodology has a lot of baggage.
But I think there’s a better way to position it:
Inbound marketing has always been about the customer’s journey – awareness, consideration, decision. Loop marketing, on the other hand, feels like an internal process. A playbook. A framework.
Helpful? Yes. A replacement? Not really.
When people say inbound is dead, what they really mean is that inbound has changed (or, perhaps even, is broken). And yes, it has. And is. The days of writing a top-of-funnel blog post, watching it rank, and sitting back while traffic rolls in are long gone. AI overviews and search shifts have disrupted that path.
But the customer journey hasn’t disappeared. Funnels are still helpful, even if they’re overly simplistic. People still move from problem-aware to solution-ready. So inbound isn’t dead. It’s just different. More on that in another post.
This puzzles me a little.
We started with funnels. Then came the flywheel. Now we’ve got the loop.
Cynically, it feels like someone at HubSpot HQ decided they needed a shiny new model to meet go-to-market plans. A circle wasn’t fresh enough. Four simple steps weren’t enterprisey enough. So they twisted it into a loop, hoping it sounded sophisticated.
To me? It’s just confusing. It’s still four steps. Call it what it is. Why make it harder than it needs to be?
(Admittedly, I’m a simple guy, my little brain is already overwhelmed, I just need it in a simple, linear model. Unloop the loop please.)
The other part that feels a little forced is the AI infusion.
Every step of the loop has AI sprinkled through it — sometimes meaningfully, sometimes not. It feels like someone in the room went, ‘Wait, we haven’t put AI in this step yet. Barry, can you cook up something AI-sounding for here?‘
The smart shift, I’ll admit, was moving away from AI for content creation (aka content slop via Content Remix) and into AI for personalisation. And ideally relevance at scale. That’s a far stronger use case. But right now, most of what’s on the website still has vaporware vibes – beta features, future promises, ‘sign up to be notified’, etc.
And check out these words:
“a momentum-building system and fuel for unprecedented growth.”
Please. Sounds like content slop to me.
Putting the cynicism aside…
Once you get past the naming, the forced AI, and the marketing slop… there’s actually a lot to like.
Whether you call it a loop, a playbook, or just ‘a process’, the simple act of getting a whole team aligned on a shared framework is a huge win.
Left to their own devices, marketers drift into chaos. One person is chasing TikTok, another is obsessed with SEO (ahem, I mean AEO), someone else is pouring budget into LinkedIn ads. Each has their own ‘best practice’ and together it’s a mess.
A framework gives everyone a consistent focus. It doesn’t even matter if it’s perfect. The real benefit is that it gets everyone on the same page. That alone makes loop marketing worthwhile.
Forget the ‘loop’ branding. Underneath, the four steps make sense.
Here’s how HubSpot explains it:
Here’s how we explain it:
Pretty straightforward. But sometimes, straightforward is exactly what teams need.
I particularly like how the Express stage forces you to confront your data.
It’s tempting to skip straight to tactics – social posts, videos, campaigns. But if your CRM data is unreliable, none of those tactics will be informed. Chatting with clients and prospects, we hear them admitting, ‘We don’t have data confidence.‘ That’s a great place to start, because at least it’s honest.
Loop marketing reminds us that data integrity underpins everything else.
Personalisation, not just ‘content slop’.
The Tailor stage is where the AI fairy dust actually makes sense.
Not personalisation in the [insert personalisation token] sense, but in the Amazon-style sense: surfacing the right thing, at the right time, in the right format.
Recommendations that feel relevant. Content that matches what the person actually cares about.
That’s the shift from AI-created sludge to AI-driven relevance. And it’s a good one.
The Amplify stage leans into HubSpot’s improved social and ad tools. It’s not just about publishing across channels — it’s about feeding intelligence back into the platforms.
For example, pushing HubSpot audiences into Meta or Google Ads so the ad networks themselves can optimise more effectively. That’s smart.
Finally, the Evolve stage.
This isn’t about holding a retrospective, pretending you gained ‘insights’, and then moving on unchanged. It’s about continuous iteration: taking what worked and pushing it back into the system.
Note: you don’t necessarily need to push it back to step 1 (another confusing part of the loop imagery), often you are pushing back to channels (Amplify) or updating content (Tailor).
This is where AI can help again – not to create content, but to surface patterns. Instead of manually combing through reports, you can literally ask: ‘Of the customers we closed in the last three months, what did they have in common?‘ That’s potentially a big time saver.
So far, so good. We’ve covered the four stages in a general, high level way.
What does it look like in practice?
We’ve put together a Loop Inspired Design Framework that we’re using ourselves and with clients:
We’ve attempted to guide marketing teams on what assets and activities apply at each stage.
Worth noting:
You can access the Google doc for this from our XEN Create Loop Marketing Design Framework page here.
I walk through the framework in this video:
Loop marketing is not the replacement for inbound. It’s not the magic bullet.
But… it’s a useful framework.
It gets teams aligned. It promotes data discipline in from the start. It pushes for personalisation over content slop. And it builds in continuous iteration.
If you strip away the jargon, it’s just good marketing practice in four steps. And if HubSpot calling it a ‘loop’ is what gets teams to actually do it, then fine. I’ll play along.
Be cynical about the branding, but embrace the structure. Because consistency beats chaos, and continual evolution beats standing still.
Use a framework to guide you.
Additional reading/viewing:
Originally published on my personal blog here.
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