The Loop Marketing Playbook

HubSpot’s Spotlight with Yamini Rangan and Karen Ng took INBOUND by storm. With the announcement of HubSpot’s latest marketing playbook, The Loop, Rangan acknowledged the marketing shift we have all witnessed over the past years, and how we ensure we embrace the changes brought by AI, and capitalise on their advantages.  

What is the Loop?

The Loop was the highlight of the keynote, but what actually is it? Essentially, it's a continuous cycle that references and invites action on every stage of your marketing strategy. The Loop is important, as it symbolises the new era of marketing, and a new period of artificial intelligence-oriented decision making.

The big emphasis in the Loop and Rangan’s keynote itself, is that you cannot have AI without human interaction. However, human interaction by itself is no longer sufficient. Each stage of the loop therefore contributes to creating a strategic partnership with AI, playing on the strengths of both to fully transform your marketing capabilities. 

The Loop has 4 key points: Express, Tailor, Amplify and Evolve. Each stage not only plays a pivotal role in your marketing strategy, but is there to work alongside technology, to ensure you’re getting the most out of it. 

What are the stages and what do they mean?

Express: 

The first step and therefore your introduction into the Loop, is that you must know exactly who you are, without AI. This first stage makes our work as human’s take center stage, where it is our job to create prompts on the basis of knowing exactly who and what our business is about. This is a crucial step, setting up the whole Loop, and determining whether you can then properly invite the power of AI onto your team. Without human prompt, AI is generic and bland, which is why you really need to “Express” your prompts, properly. Your prompts then kickstart the Loops' entire journey, and when you return to the “Express” stage again, they’ll be even better. 

Tailor: 

Tailoring is the second stage of the Loop, and is where you now need to bring in your AI tools to further build on what you’ve just expressed. This again emphasises the need for human input, as proper AI tailoring to your business model and goals, cannot happen without it.  

Amplify: 

The Amplify stage is where you drive the growth of your business with AI. The keynote placed a big focus on how we’re witnessing the switch from SEO to AEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, whereas AEO stands for AI Engine Optimisation, or Answer Engine Optimisation. AEO is the optimisation of your content for the benefit of AI technologies. 

Where we previously wanted to rank highly on google searches, AI sites are increasingly a source of new business, which means, your marketing strategy needs to be tailored to ranking on them. The Amplify stage of the Loop therefore helps with this, helping your company increase its visibility in such searches. 

Yamini’s focus on the Amplify stage made insightful reference to HubSpot’s journey to finding an AEO strategy that works. Making light of their previous mistakes, and humanising the trial and error behind the successful use of AI. HubSpot’s blog content witnessed a big downturn in interest, which prompted an intervention on their marketing strategy, and acceptance that times are indeed changing. This prompted an exploration into new lead sources, e.g, through personal LinkedIn pages, and since this technique adaptation, they’re seeing better results than ever. 

The shift from SEO to AEO undoubtedly puts us in unknown territory, changing techniques as we’ve previously known them and forcing us to experiment how we’ve never before. Yet, like anything, if this is properly researched and embraced, it also allows our marketing to reach heights it’s not seen.

Evolve:

The final stage of the Loop is to evolve. This references the importance of acting on all of the above and using what you’ve learnt to better your next cycle of the Loop. For instance, knowing how to measure success, when to measure it, and then when to bring in AI to strengthen your strategy. This then kickstarts the process all over again and allows you to enter the Loop stronger each time.

You can then measure the significance of the loop against their scorecard, which allows you to understand if you’re using the loop well. 

Conclusion:

Overall, the main message of Yamini Rangan’s keynote and the Loop itself, is to understand what your role is as a marketer, and what is that of AI's. The Loop is therefore your source to refer back to and keep you on the right track of your partnership. With the insecurity we sometimes face through new AI territories, the Loop symbolises a reassuring partnership, rather than an ultimatum between human or tech. 

As we make the shift into the new era of marketing, HubSpot makes clear that the Loop is there to capitalise on AI, and utilise our strengths as humans to make this happen.

Steadman Hub are the only HubSpot dedicated recruiters in the UK, read more about what we do here: About Us | Steadman Hub