If you're a marketer, things have been pretty broken lately. Google searches ending without clicks. Double-digit traffic declines. Rising ad costs. Lower email engagement rates.
At INBOUND 2025, HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar and Senior Director of Global Growth Aja Frost got real about how they were in "the pit of despair" about 15 months ago, and how they climbed out using a completely new approach to marketing. Meet Loop Marketing: a new framework designed for how people actually behave in an AI-powered world.
"I don't think we've ever been able to do better marketing at HubSpot than we're doing right now," Bodnar told the audience.
The numbers are stark. 58.5% of Google searches now end without a click. For years, Google was the most predictable way to drive traffic and demand. That reliability is evaporating as AI intercepts that traffic before it ever reaches your website.
The ripple effects are brutal. As search traffic drops, marketers are overspending on ads and flooding inboxes with more emails, which only accelerates the decline in performance.
"I almost shared a picture of my inbox, which is just emails from CMOs being like what happened, what do I do?" Bodnar said. "It's like an email every couple of days."
But HubSpot found a way through—and it's working.
"People used to just move in straight lines and now we see they're doing all sorts of things. They're going in places and ways that we didn't necessarily expect or plan for, and so we need a framework that is dynamic, that is adaptive, and that is a loop and not a line." - Aja Frost
Loop Marketing replaces the linear inbound marketing funnel with a dynamic, adaptive loop designed for how people actually behave in an AI-powered world.
The four phases—Express, Tailor, Amplify, and Evolve—create a continuous cycle of learning and improvement. Here's what HubSpot learned by actually doing it.
HubSpot completely transformed their content approach for AI engines.
They went from publishing broad guides like "The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing" to hyper-specific content like "How a marketing manager at a 200-person logistics company can improve ABO testing for enterprise clients."
"When you Google something, you're probably going to get a pretty similar result. When we ask ChatGPT the same question, we are going to get very different results," Frost explained.
AI conversations are personal and detailed, with memory of who you are. Content needs to match that specificity and needs to be bottom-of-funnel, tying your product directly to the solution.
Another critical shift: AI engines don't care about backlinks. They care about brand mentions on Reddit, LinkedIn, and Quora. HubSpot started deploying happy customers and getting active in forums where their audience hangs out.
One of Bodnar's favorite discoveries: AI eliminated the time and cost barrier of market research.
He surveyed 1,000 marketers about Loop Marketing before INBOUND, then ran the same survey through a Claude project trained on HubSpot customer data. The results were 90% aligned.
The difference? The traditional survey cost thousands of dollars and took weeks. The Claude project cost $20 and took 20 seconds.
"I can get that feedback instantly," Bodnar said. This means testing ideas against your target audience before you create anything, and compressing what used to take weeks into seconds.
HubSpot set up experimental pods—small teams whose entire mission is to learn as quickly as possible and share learnings weekly with the rest of the organization.
The cultural shift was dramatic.
"The conversations we have are very different. Before, they were very problem-centric. Now they're very much learning centric. Like, I have learned this thing and I want to go do something and scale this thing." - Kipp Bodnar
Loop Marketing brought HubSpot's team from despair to their best performance ever. An 82% lift in email conversions. AI engine traffic converting at 3x. A team energized by learning instead of paralyzed by problems.
"There's never been a more fun time to be in marketing," Bodnar said. "I wake up every day super excited."
Watch Kipp and Aja's full session:
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