The Brand NEW AI Marketing Strategy for 2025

Summary

Marketing Against The Grain

Episode: The Brand NEW AI Marketing Strategy for 2025
Date: September 16, 2025
Host: Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot CMO) with guest host Asia Frost

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Brief Overview

This episode introduces and unpacks "Loop Marketing"—HubSpot's innovative, adaptive marketing framework designed for the AI-driven environment of 2025. Kipp and guest co-host Asia Frost (stepping in for Kieran Flanagan) dive deep into how AI is transforming marketing, discuss why traditional funnel-based strategies are breaking, and share actionable insights about competing in an increasingly complex digital world. The pair detail HubSpot’s hands-on experiences, highlight tactical shifts necessary for marketers, and outline the four key phases of Loop Marketing: Express, Tailor, Amplify, and Evolve.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Broken State of Marketing in an AI World

• Decline of Traditional Channels:
  • Stat: "58.5% of Google searches are now ending without a click, which is kind of bonkers..." (Asia, 01:59)
  • AI is intercepting traffic and eroding predictable demand-generation paths that marketers relied upon.
• Saturation and Competition:
  • Rising ad costs, email engagement declines, and oversaturation plague all digital touchpoints.
  • "People are overspending on ads or sending twice as many emails—that is... flooding their audiences and just dropping performance at a pretty exponential rate." (Kipp, 02:23)

2. From “Pit of Despair” to Learning-Focused Growth

• After “dark days” of plummeting results, HubSpot’s team shifted its mindset and strategy, embracing rapid learning and experimentation.
• "We've never been able to do better marketing at HubSpot than we're doing right now." (Kipp, 03:25)
• The need for a dynamic, iterative framework inspired Loop Marketing.

3. What is Loop Marketing?

• A Step Beyond Inbound:

  • “Inbound marketing was very linear... The average business a decade ago had way more simplistic business models… Now, they need a framework that matches the complexity of their business and the changing landscape of the world of AI.” (Kipp, 04:44)
  • The consumer journey is no longer a straight line—Loop Marketing reflects this complexity.

• The Four Phases:

  1. Express – Define and distill brand identity, voice, and messaging (Asia’s favorite phase).
  2. Tailor – Deep personalization at scale, using AI to dynamically adapt communications to individual customer data.
  3. Amplify – Strategic content distribution, including emerging practice of AI Engine Optimization (AEO).
  4. Evolve – Ongoing learning and optimization in real time, closing the loop for continuous improvement.

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Deep Dive: The Loop Stages

Phase 1: Express

• Human First, AI Enhanced:
  • "Express is all about bringing your brand voice... to life. This is a very human phase." (Asia, 06:16)
  • Core creative ideas are first crafted by humans, then AI is used to stress-test resonance and optimize message delivery.
• Feedback Loops Powered by AI:
  • Example: "I surveyed a thousand marketers... I ran that same survey through a Claude project... The Claude project was within 90% accurate... Survey: thousands of dollars, weeks to run. Claude: $20 and it took 20 seconds." (Kipp, 09:08)
• Tactical Tips:
  • Gather qualitative/quantitative data about your audience (emails, support tickets, call recordings). (Kipp, 10:24)
  • Align creative teams to distill genuine brand perspective, codify into actionable style guides, and validate with AI. (Asia, 10:57–11:25)
  • “Is it remarkable?... Would somebody talk about that?” (Kipp quoting Brian Halligan, 11:25)

Phase 2: Tailor

• Beyond Tokens—Truly Personalized Communications:
  • AI-driven personalization now leverages unstructured data: website behaviors, content downloads, self-descriptions, etc. (Asia, 13:13)
  • "Emails that feel like they could have only been written for that individual contact… a person getting that email responds… in a totally different way than a fill-in-the-blank, Mad Libs style email." (Asia, 13:13)
  • Results: "We saw, I think, an 82% improvement in conversion rate from adding personalization to email." (Asia, 14:36)
• Implementation:
  • "What data do I have access to that really gives me unique insights on my audience?" (Kipp, 15:23)
  • Utilize CRM data, third-party tools (HubSpot Data Hub, Clay), and AI to dynamically generate high-performing, deeply tailored content.

Phase 3: Amplify

• Distribution for the AI Age—AEO Crash Course:
  • Kipp: "Distribution is undefeated… As long as your message isn't terrible, you will win." (17:30)
  • AEO (AI Engine Optimization):
    • “It breaks down into many of the same pillars that SEO did... content tactics, on-page, technical, authority building.” (Asia, 18:23)
    • Key Difference: Develop hyper-specific, bottom-of-funnel content tailored to persona-use cases—what AIs (and thus, users) now seek.
  • Memorable Example:
    • Instead of “10 RV passes across New Zealand,” now: “The five animals a family from America would want to see while visiting New Zealand.” (Kipp, 21:46)
    • "If you just feed educational insights without tying it back to your product, the AI engine won't know to recommend you." (Asia, 22:44)
  • New Authority Signals:
    • "We're optimizing for brand mentions and not backlinks because AI engines do not care about backlinks... They do care about how many shout outs your brand is getting on... Reddit and LinkedIn and Quora." (Asia, 23:29)

Phase 4: Evolve

• Real-Time Learning for Rapid Iteration:
  • "When you're in a period of big transformation, learning is your advantage..." (Kipp, 25:12)
  • Dynamic personalization based on referrer—“You can now do dynamic personalization just for people coming from the LLMs [Large Language Models].” (Kipp, 26:34)
• Tactic:
  • “Set up, use Breeze Assistant or get your ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude connected with your HubSpot data and start asking... questions about projects or campaigns so you can learn how to make them better the next time.” (Kipp, 30:41)
• Cultural Shift:
  • “The conversations we have are very different. Before they were very problem centric. Now they're very much learning centric.” (Kipp, 28:05)
  • Use "experimental pods"—small teams dedicated to quick experimentation and shared learning across the org. (Asia, 28:26)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the existential challenge:

  • "58.5% of Google searches are now ending without a click, which is kind of bonkers..." (Asia, 01:59)

• On brand voice and creative pride:

  • "Express is all about bringing your brand voice, your brand identity, your brand style to life. And this is a very human phase." (Asia, 06:16)

• On AI-augmented feedback:

  • "Survey was thousands of dollars and took a few weeks... Claude project was $20 and it took 20 seconds." (Kipp, 09:08)

• On personalization’s evolution:

  • “Our coolest learning is... if you take a lot of unstructured data... and you feed that into AI, it can craft these personalized emails that feel like they could have only been written for that individual contact.” (Asia, 13:13)

• On strategy change:

  • "Now, we want to talk directly to the marketing manager at a 200-person logistics company who actually feels pretty good about their lead gen strategy, but needs a lot of help for ABM for enterprise." (Asia, 19:44)

• On new authority signals in AEO:

  • “AI engines do not care about backlinks... They do care about how many shout outs your brand is getting on places like Reddit and LinkedIn and Quora.” (Asia, 23:29)

• On urgency in learning and adapting:

  • "You can't be acting two months later. You need to be acting tomorrow." (Asia, 26:39)

• On the new marketing team dynamic:

  • "Before they were very problem centric. Now they're very much learning centric..." (Kipp, 28:05)
  • “You three people, your whole mission right now is actually just to learn as quickly as possible and you're going to share your learnings every week so the rest of us learn with you.” (Asia, 28:26)

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Actionable Recommendations (All Timestamped)

| Phase | Recommendation | Timestamp | |------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|------------| | Express | Audit and update your style guide to ensure authenticity and resonance with your audience | 29:35 | | Tailor | Start layering dynamic data into email and landing page personalization—iterate small, scale up | 30:00 | | Amplify | Identify personas and their unique questions, map content gaps, and start creating super long-tail, hyper-specific, and bottom-of-funnel content | 30:23 | | Evolve | Leverage tools (Breeze, HubSpot integrations) to ask direct, curiosity-driven questions of your data for continual improvement | 30:41 |

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Summary Table: Loop Marketing vs. Old Playbook

| Old Playbook | Loop Marketing Playbook | |--------------------------|----------------------------------------| | Linear funnel | Dynamic, iterative loop | | Simple personalization | AI-powered, deep personalization | | Mass, generic content | Persona/use-case specific, detailed | | Static campaign review | Real-time data, instant iteration | | Backlink for authority | Social mentions/brand advocacy |

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Final Takeaway

Loop Marketing is HubSpot’s playbook for the AI marketing era: human creativity refined by AI, dynamic and evolving, grounded in deep personalization and rapid learning. Marketers should embrace experimentation, leverage new data tools, create audience-focused content, and foster a team culture focused on curiosity and ongoing improvement.

“It’s never been a more fun time to be a marketer.” (Kipp, 31:14)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:59 – State of the market: AI’s impact on Google search and channels
• 04:44 – Why inbound marketing is now insufficient
• 06:16 – The human element in Express
• 09:08 – AI-powered market research vs. traditional survey
• 13:13 – Deep personalization and AI-crafted emails
• 18:23 – The pillars of AEO
• 21:46 – Content strategy for the AI era (specificity)
• 23:29 – New rules of brand authority for AIs
• 26:39 – The need for instant iteration
• 28:05 – Culture shift: Learning-centric team dynamic
• 29:35–31:14 – Immediate actions for each phase of the loop

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For further resources, HubSpot’s Loop Marketing playbook and prompt library are available at hubspot.com/loop-marketing.

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Hosts:

• Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot CMO)
• Asia Frost (guest co-host, Head of Content Strategy)

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Inbound. We made it to Friday. Oh my goodness. It has been a week, hasn't it? Thank you all for being here on the last day. The hotel lobbies were quiet this morning. I think people still rising out there. Asia, thanks for joining me. Today I host a podcast called Marketing against the Grain. My lovely. Oh wow. Thanks, thanks, appreciate it. Fans in the audience, thank you for listening. My normal lovely co host, Kieran Flanagan could not make the journey to inbound this year. So Asia has gracefully agreed to step in and we are going to basically give you a deep dive into loop marketing. Yaminy talked about it earlier this week, but you and I have been doing it. We've been running tests. We are in the weeds of IT deep for the last like year and a half and we're going to break down and basically share the behind the scenes of everything we've learned.

[C]

Yeah, and we're really excited to do it because we have a lot to say.

[B]

We do. And so quick little problem setting, frame setting for the YouTube audience, really people who weren't at inbound. If you're a marketer, things have been pretty broken. Right, Asia, give us the rundown as to what are the challenges the average marketer is seeing.

[C]

Oh, okay, what are they not seeing is probably the easier question to answer. Okay. 58.5% of Google searches are now ending without a click, which is kind of bonkers because for a long time Google has been the most predictable way to drive traffic and therefore demand for your business. So that's bad. We're seeing double digit traffic declines as AI intercepts that traffic.

[B]

I almost shared a picture of my inbox which is just emails from CMOS being like, what happened? What do I do? It's like an email every couple of days is basically what I receive. So you have that and then with that you have rising ad costs, you have lower email engagement rates because what's Happening as you get less traffic from search, people are overspending on ads or, or they're sending twice as many emails and that is basically flooding their audiences and just dropping performance at a pretty exponential rate.

[D]

Right.

[C]

Every other channel's getting saturated, they're getting more competitive. Things are not feeling good.

[B]

No. So let's go to the world where things are looking a lot better because I will tell you that you and I, I think, were in the pit of despair maybe, what, like a year to 15 months ago?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Like it was a dark, dark place.

[C]

It was a. We were on a lot of zoom calls where people were just kind of silent, shaking heads. You never want to see your CMO just shaking his head. I will tell you that one of.

[B]

These a lot, you know, and so.

[C]

But now we're smiling, we're coming out.

[B]

The other side and what have we learned and how have we come out the other side is what we want to share with you all today. Because I think we've never been able to do better marketing at HubSpot than we're doing right now.

[C]

Oh, certainly not. We're learning more quickly than we ever have. We're doing more interesting things than we ever have. And what are we calling this new way of working?

[B]

We're calling this new way of working in this new playbook, loop marketing. So if you missed the keynote or if you're on YouTube and you haven't seen any content on loop marketing yet, we're calling it loop marketing because, well, it's a loop and two, because it kind of builds on what HubSpot started with, inbound marketing. But inbound marketing was very linear, first of all. Second of all, like the average business a decade ago, when inbound marketing was in its prime, had way more simplistic business models. They had less revenue streams, they used way less technology. Even the average like 20 person business I talked to is exceptionally savvy and complex. And they need a framework for doing marketing that matches that complexity of their business and the changing landscape of the world of AI.

[C]

The complexity of the consumer journey.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

I mean, 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.

[B]

I call it AI add. I feel like I have AI ADD where it's like, oh, I've got this thing. I'm asking ChatGPT I use perplexity comment. If you were at the keynote this morning, and I've got, like, my assistant open in five different tabs.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And I'm, like, literally all over the place, and eventually I come back to, like, some common thread. And we need marketing that's gonna work for that. So we wanna break down what loop marketing is. We want to walk through the stages, but instead of just walking through the stages, we wanna spend a few minutes on each and get deep into, like, the tactics and the tips that you should go and do and use now to start transforming how you're thinking about marketing.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. So, Asia, why don't you break down, give us the rundown of the loop? You know, you and I have debated all of this. All of these. All of these names. Is this really right? We had a plethora of discussions. I think we landed in a great place. Why don't you kind of walk us through the loop overall, and then we'll break down kind of the tactics from there.

[C]

That sounds great. All right, so we've got four phases of the loop. Hopefully everyone is familiar with these four phases by now. Express, tailor, amplify, and evolve. The first phase is actually my favorite. And, Kip, we were talking about this earlier, and you were kind of shocked. I think you would have said I was an amplify gal.

[B]

Yeah, I'm an amplify guy, so I would assume.

[C]

I'll take that.

[B]

It says a lot about you, what stage of the loop you're, like, the most into. And, yeah, it's like the new sorting hat from Harry Potter, but you're an express gal.

[C]

I'm an express gal. Tell us why I'm going to. So, okay, Express is all about bringing your brand voice, your brand identity, your brand style to life. And this is a very human phase. And I think that that's why I really appreciate it. You actually don't know this about me, Kip. You know that I'm evolved, but you don't know that. When I'm not working on HubSpot, I am a creator, and I run a very successful substack, and I use a lot of AI but the core content creation that I do, it's all me. Before I ever bring AI into the picture, then I'm figuring out, okay, what do I want to say? And how can I say it in a way that no one else but Asia Frost can? And to me, that's what Express is all about. And then I'm using AI and I'm using all my data to Say, well, how is this going to resonate? What's going to get the best open rate? Based on my previous subject lines, I.

[B]

Think what's really important that I want everybody to understand is, and I think it goes back to the first time I met you. The first time I met you, you were about to finish college and you were writing and you were hustling and writing, and you to this day are one of the best writers I know. And so if anyone was going to be threatened by AI and do I need to write anymore and all of the fear that's out there, it'd be somebody like you. Sure. Right. Like you. Like, this is like core germane to who you are as a person and instead you're saying no. It's actually the part I'm the most excited about.

[D]

Yes.

[B]

Which to me is like way different than most people expected us to land here. Right.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

I think other people are starting to catch on too. I'm talking to other writers who are really excited about the opportunity to distill what makes their voice really special. And I think that this is even more germane for brands. Distill what makes your brand special, codify that and then bring in AI to help scale and amplify that.

[B]

So what I love about the Express Stage is just what you said, that AI can build upon your own creativity, your own point of view, your own voice.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

The other thing is I'm instant gratification isn't soon enough kind of person. You know, ditto.

[C]

Who among us doesn't love instant gratification.

[B]

As most marketers are? You know, we like the dopamine of checking the ad click, the rates and the email performance and all of that. And one of the things I've always not loved about marketing is like the market research feedback side of it, because it took a long time and it was really expensive.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And I think the thing I like most about this Express Stage is I can get that feedback instantly.

[D]

Yes.

[B]

You know, I can basically have the data on my target audience and then share whatever I've written or whatever presentation I've designed, what doesn't really matter and get feedback from that audience. Like. So, for example, what I would share with all of you is I surveyed a thousand marketers about loop marketing before Inbound and I ran that same survey through a cloud project I made with all of the data about our lovely customers and community at HubSpot. It was basically the same. It was like the Claude project was within 90% accurate of where the survey was. Survey was Thousands of dollars and took a few weeks to run. Claude project was 20 bucks and it took 20 seconds.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

That's so cool.

[A]

Real quick, I know you're thinking to yourself, okay, Kip, this sounds amazing, but what do I actually type into? Chat GPT? We've got you covered. That's why we've built the Loop Marketing prompt library. Over 100 prompts that take you from theory to real execution. Whether you need to craft your style guide, personalize emails, or get real time insights, this is exactly what we're using to grow our business right now. Get it right now. Click the link in the description below. Now, let's get back to the show.

[C]

I think you bring up a really good point about the express phase, which is it's also contingent on understanding your customer really well and stress testing those concepts against what you know about your customer. So it's not just, you know, you off in a corner doing watercolor. It's okay. How is this actually going to resonate with the people that I'm trying to reach?

[B]

Yeah, so I think we should give people like the. If you're going to go be really successful at this point and what would you go and do right now? I'll start and I'd love for you to add, I think you need to collect some qualitative and quantitative data about your audience. So you have data about them in HubSpot or whatever CRM you're using. Right. You also have emails with them, support tickets, call recordings, all of that. You need all of that to kind of know who they are and what their problems are relative to your company. I think that's the first. First thing. What would you say the next step needs to be?

[C]

I would say get in a room with your core creative team or whoever is responsible for defining your brand and make sure you have a really definitive, authentic point of view on who your brand is. And then I think you take that brand and style guide and you take all the data that you've just called out that we've collected and you use that to say, okay, you know, Claude takes, tell me, does this style resonate with this Persona?

[B]

And not just does it resonate. There are two adages of HubSpot that started with Brian Dharmesh when the company started and I think are more important and more true today than they've ever been. The first is, Brian would always say is like, is it remarkable? And he meant like the Webster's Dictionary version of remarkable. Is it worthy of remark? Would somebody talk about that? Would they care about that. And AI can really help. You have a much better chance of predicting if your audience is going to care and really like about something like this thing that you're making, which is awesome and I think really important. The next part of it is we would always say, what do I have to do to win the marketing Internet this week? What do I. The thing in my industry that is being talked about in that given week and that's like a good litmus test for I'm expressing the right ideas.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Because part of what we haven't talked about is like, you do have to select the right ideas and like a filter for that is like, are people going to care and are people going to talk about it and is it going to be one of the most relevant things in my market this week or this month?

[C]

Can I be a headline? Yes.

[B]

Can I be a headline?

[D]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

Okay, so there's a couple of ways to get started with Express.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Sake of time. We got to keep moving.

[C]

Let's move on.

[B]

Okay, let's talk. Taylor Tailoring is very interesting because it really builds on this old notion of personalization, this notion of, hey, I've got these personalization tokens and I can fill in these personalization tokens with cool data and it's going to make it feel like I know that person in some way.

[C]

Cool data might be overstating it a little bit. First name, last name, company name.

[B]

I was trying to make it seem.

[C]

Like you're giving it more credit than it deserved.

[B]

Basic maybe 10 years ago, as it really was, but it is. That's where we started. Where we're at now is completely different. So you and your team have done probably more work tailoring, especially email than anybody on this planet, I would say. Tell us what you learned.

[C]

The digital marketing team has been doing some absolutely bonkers things with personalization. I think our coolest learning is we found that if you take a lot of unstructured data about a contact, so not just their first name, last name, company name, but the pages on your website that they have visited, the content that they've downloaded, how they describe their business on their website, and. And you feed that into AI, AI can craft these personalized emails that feel like they could have only been written for that individual contact, because in truth, they were. And a person getting that email responds to that email in a totally different way than a fill in the blank, Mad Libs style email. That was marketing personalization of old. If we are calling a spade a spade.

[B]

Yeah. And it's really Hard without us like taking 20 minutes and showing you all these emails. What I would just say is I've had very few holy moments in doing marketing. Reading these emails was one of them.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Where I remember very vividly being on an email thread with you and Emmy and a few people on our team looking at these early versions of that before they even got really good and just being completely blown away. I was like, oh, it felt like somebody was a human. Spent like an hour researching this company to write this perfect email to this person and instead it happened in seconds.

[C]

It's like your best sales rep who spends the most time crafting their outreach and figuring out what is going to resonate, wrote the email. But instead it's AI and it's doing it at scale. And so we saw, I think an 82% improvement in conversion rate from adding personalization to email. And this is not a new program, folks. This is not something that you know, you can send on a Wednesday and then you try something new the next week. Like that is a program that we have been iterating and trying to move the needle on.

[B]

Almost double conversion rates on an email program that you have been grinding on for 10 plus years.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Is almost impossible.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

So are we tailored people now?

[B]

I'm not, I'm not ready for the loop.

[C]

Are equal.

[B]

I'm not ready to make that commitment. No. I'm an amplify guy. I'm sorry. I know where my loyalty is. Live. We're going to get there in a second.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

But when you say that data we're talking about, you can use HubSpot's new data hub product. You can use our friends over at Clay. There's a bunch of other third party data sources. But what you're really trying to answer is the question, what data do I have access to? That really gives me unique insights on my audience. It's not that I know them at this big kind of general level, like the ideal customer profile level. It's like. No, I know them on like the contact company personal level because I have this information and can build a different relationship with them. And once you have that, then you're taking kind of a core message template and a prompt and generating these personalized emails. And we just rolled out that feature in Marketing Hub. We've been doing it very manually and very technically and we're excited to have the help of engineers to help us scale this. But it's worked incredibly well.

[C]

Yep, that's exactly right.

[A]

The old playbook is slowing you down. AI broke the funnel Loop marketing fixes it. It's a new era for marketers. AI is capturing search traffic. Channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before. HubSpot's loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption. It's the system your marketing team should use to move faster, connect deeper, and grow smarter. The modern growth playbook for the AI era built by HubSpot, designed for today's marketer. Get the Loop marketing [e-mail] loop marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind.

[B]

Okay, so this is the. I would say the step that you get the most benefit of immediately is tailoring the comms that you're asking.

[C]

You need good data. I think you're right to call that out. And that's why we've been banging the drum about data for a while now.

[B]

I agree with that.

[C]

But if you have the data, I think that you can see some great stuff here.

[B]

Okay. We have a lot of time on it. We know we got to give Amplify a few.

[C]

I know. Okay. Okay, well, we'll give Kip Amplify.

[B]

Well, as. As I said, I'm a self professed fan of the Amplify because I believe distribution is undefeated and that when all else fails, like get your message in front of people and as long as your message isn't terrible, you will win.

[C]

Well, your message isn't terrible because you've expressed it well and you've tested it.

[B]

I see what you're doing there. I like it. I would say that you know more about AI engine optimization than 99% of the humans on this planet. You've spent a lot of time doing it. Are citations in perplexity in ChatGPT. Thanks to the work you and the amazing team are doing are going up, up and up.

[D]

Yep.

[B]

Everybody here is like, okay, I want to do that. What do I need to do?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

So for everybody in the room and everybody watching, give us an AEO crash course because it's one of the most important parts of Amplify. We'll talk about a couple of other parts, but I want to make sure we get to aeo.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Well, I will just say that is a very nice compliment. AEO is also very nascent. So if you are overwhelmed or nervous or simply don't know what you're talking about. Well, the good news is nobody does. No one does. Yeah, I know a little more, but I still don't know a lot because it's changing all the time and it's A very new field. So that's just my little disclaimer like, please feel like you can dive in here and catch up very easily. The cool thing about AEO is that it breaks down into many of the same pillars that SEO did. Different techniques, different tactics. And some of the underlying whys are different. But I like to think about it as your content tactics, your on page or your technical tactics, and your off site or authority building tactics.

[B]

I have one clarifying question for the audience because I've had a lot of conversations with AEO and I want to bring it for everybody on the pod.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Is what I used to do in traditional search engine optimization, is that foundational and I still need to do that, or is that something I need to throw out and do something differently before you break down everything, like help people understand? So I'm getting that question over and over again all the time.

[C]

I get this question too. I would say that the heart of good SEO, if you were doing SEO well, you were producing great content that was meant to educate and be valuable for your Persona. And that I don't think has changed.

[B]

I agree.

[C]

Now the mechanics of it have changed pretty dramatically. And the specific nature of the content that you're producing, that's also changed pretty dramatically. But as long as you're producing great content like that, that is the heart of a good AEO strategy as well. And people get really nervous when I start talking about and we can go into it like the hyper long tail content that we are now producing. We have gone from publishing the ultimate guide to content marketing which is very broad, very generic. Anyone who wants to do content marketing in this audience could read that guide and we would want you to read that guide. And now we want to talk directly to the marketing manager at a 200 person logistics company who actually feels pretty good about their lead gen strategy, but needs a lot of help for ABM for enterprise.

[B]

I think this is a very important insight for everybody to understand because when you are going back and forth with an LLM, you're having a very personal, personal, detailed conversation that is just for you. Right. And it's got memory of who you are. So it's giving its answers based on who you are and the problems you're trying to solve. Because of that, the information that needs to be provided to both people and robots needs to get more personal and more detailed. That's. That's what you're telling us.

[C]

That is at the crux of it.

[D]

Yes.

[C]

When you Google something, you're probably going to get a Pretty similar result. To me when we ask ChatGPT the same question, we are going to get very different results because ChatGPT knows that you always like Travis Kelce sweaters and that I really like Christy dawn dresses. I did see that in your chatgpt history once. I've been sitting on that for years.

[B]

I was trying to find this one particular sweater he wore was really good.

[C]

Did you find it?

[B]

I don't like the Amare outfits, but I like. No, I never found it because I think it was like, you know, custom. Yeah, I think it was. I think it was a custom pre release kind of situation. Yeah. Okay.

[C]

Okay. So, yeah, so the content needs to be written or created in the way that AI engines are providing responses. And that is very long tail. It's very specific. It's Persona and use case versus here's what this educational content could be for anyone.

[B]

Yeah, I was talking to an amazing HubSpot customer yesterday. Wilderness motorhomes, they rent RVs in New Zealand. So if you ever want to go to New Zealand, you should go and check them out. Pro tip. And we were talking about the type of content difference and it's like before it'd be like, oh, here are like the 10 different RV pass across New Zealand. And now it would be like no here like the five animals a family from America would want to see while they were visiting New Zealand. I think that's what you're saying the level of fidelity change looks like in like a very practical way.

[C]

That is absolutely right. I think another key thing for people to understand is that your educational content now needs to be bottom of the funnel in that if Wilderness RVs publishes that, they can't just publish a listicle of animals like they used to. They need to be. And here's how you can see. See that?

[B]

Give me a. Yeah, I don't know.

[D]

The kiwi, the kiwi bird.

[C]

I think they are the kiwis.

[B]

Yeah, Kiwis. They're because of the kiwi bird.

[C]

The puffin.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

You know, here's how you see this puffin in your wilderness rv.

[B]

How you drive there, where you buy the tickets, how you get the parking pass.

[C]

Yes. Because if you just feed humans. Well, if you feed AI engines that'll feed humans educational insights without tying it back to your product. The AI engine won't know to recommend you. And then you're making the AI engine smarter without any benefit to your business.

[B]

Okay, so your content strategy is changing dramatically. It's getting far more specific. It's getting more bottom of the funnel. And you have to tie your product and your business back to that content in a more deliberate way to make sure that you're going to get the recommendation relevant. I would say the last of the three big AO tips I think would be like, where else you do need to show up. So maybe talk about that for like real quick before we move on to the next stage.

[C]

I think you said it best. You said we're optimizing for brand mentions and not backlinks because AI engines do not care about backlinks as a measure of how credible or authoritative your brand is. What they do care about is how many shout outs your brand is getting on places like Reddit and LinkedIn and Quora. I see lots of nodding heads. So it sounds like folks are starting to really pick up on this. And that means that you need to deploy your happy customers. You need to be active in forums where your customers are and where AI engines are. And that is what's going to help you get those recommendations from AI engines.

[B]

Shout out to the HubSpot subreddit. If you're not on there yet, join the HubSpot subreddit.

[C]

Shout out to the HubSpot subreddit. Shout out to the HubSpot community team. Fantastic partner in that work.

[D]

Okay.

[C]

And I think the other nice thing about doing all of those amplification efforts on those channels is that that's also where your humans are. That's another part of amplifying. Your creators, your advocates like that are very important too.

[B]

We'll do multiple shows. You and I will come back and do a show with Kieran just on the amplify stage. We'll talk influencers, we'll talk events, we're going to talk everything. But AEO is such a big part of how amplification can change that we wanted to dive into it. And a year ago it was a decimal point of our traffic. Now it's a material amount of our traffic and our revenue. And I think that can be the same for anybody who is watching this right now.

[C]

Absolutely. And now that AI engines are referral source and HubSpot, you can know exactly.

[B]

And they convert much higher. So you want to make sure you put them on a high, high speed path towards conversion for folks coming from those AI engines.

[C]

Well, I think that's a great segue because we saw that AI engines, visitors from AI engines were converting at a much higher rate and we were like, oh, okay, let's evolve, let's adapt, let's optimize in real time.

[B]

Yeah. So that's the last step. Here is what you want to do is learn faster. When you're in a period of big transformation, learning is your advantage because everybody knows basically the same amount of information. Sure. You and I, we've been doing this for months more than people watching this. So it's like we don't know that much more than anybody else. And if you learn real hard, you can catch up or surpass almost anybody. We hope you do, and I would love that. That would be freaking amazing. What we've figured out is you need some time and some tools to focus on really quick learnings and iterations so that you can learn and evolve. Like, you just gave a great example. We saw that the conversion rate from ChatGPT traffic, for example, was really high. And so. Okay, well, now we need to change our conversion paths and the other aspects around that buyer's journey to make sure that those people can become customers as easy as possible.

[C]

Yeah, if I can actually tie it in a bow for us. Tie it in loop. I really. Getting into it, we saw that AI engine visitors were converting at 3x the rate, and so we told that to our product team who said, oh, okay, great. We need to carve this out for customers. It needs to be easy. What they also did was they're like, oh, you should start personalizing to folks that are coming from AI engines, because we know that they are higher intent, and so we need to show them different things on our landing pages. And so that, I believe, is very possible right now.

[B]

Yeah, you can now do dynamic personalization just for people coming from the LLMs, which is. Which is really amazing.

[D]

Right.

[C]

So it's this idea of, like, seeing something and acting on it the next day. There's no longer, like, two. You can't be acting two months later. You need to be acting tomorrow.

[B]

If you use HubSpot, I would say on this Evolve stage, you should use either Breeze Assistant or you should connect HubSpot with ChatGPT or Claude and use that ability to just text or talk. I use this app called Willow Voice that I could just dictate. And it's even faster because typing's too slow, because I have problems.

[C]

You once told me, you're like, our biggest problem is that we don't have enough time. And I was like, wow, that's a good problem to have.

[B]

That's how I feel. But you can ask very good questions, just like the CEO of Perplexity was talking about this morning. It's curiosity and questions, and that's what Evolve is about can you ask the right questions without needing a big data analyst or having to comb through a spreadsheet or a dashboard to get unique insights about a tactic or a campaign?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And then the biggest thing is you need to take that lesson, share that with your team, share that with your AI tools so that it's just part of how you do marketing going forward. You can kind of close the loop and you learn, you get that compounding benefit from doing it better every time going forward.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Well, you close the loop and then you restart the next loop smarter. That's what I love. You're not done with the loop. The loop keeps going.

[B]

No. I will say as a team that's been doing loop marketing, the biggest change I've noticed. I'd be interested what yours is.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

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 based on what I've learned versus like I'm just kind of stuck. Will you help me solve this problem?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

It's been a very drastic difference to me.

[C]

Well, we have these experimental pods set up which I think is a very tactical way to kind of bring that to life and something that certainly any business could do. We've said, okay, you three people, your whole mission right now is actually just to learn as quickly as possible. And you're going to share your learnings every week so the rest of us learn with you. You're going to have a pretty open field. Like we're going to give you some high level goals we know you should be running toward, but the way that you run, that's up to you. And I think that that doesn't just apply to the learnings from that pod. It's really brought the entire team up.

[B]

I think if you're leading a marketing team right now, you have to find some space for the team to experiment and then you have to give them bold challenges. It's like the whole four minute mile problem. Nobody ran a four minute mile until everybody ran a four minute mile. Right. Like once the person did it. I'm never running like a 10 minute mile probably, but that's, that is what it is. But don't say, hey, go make this 10% better, go double. This is what we mean. It's like have a really high aspiration. Okay, we got a couple minutes left. We want to leave everybody in person and is watching online with some things that you should go do immediately. So go through for express. What is the one thing you would tell somebody to go do right now?

[C]

I'm going to say style guide. I think style guide is really important if you don't already have one. And if you do, go back to it and see does it actually reflect your brand? Do you feel like it's as punchy, as authentic as it could be?

[B]

I love that. I would add, like make sure you have a section of that as like what my audience thinks is cool, like what are the things that they love and appreciate that like I could uniquely deliver for them because that is what's going to set you apart in this next era.

[C]

Love that.

[B]

Okay, tailoring. It's literally getting the right data and start testing email and you'll end up starting testing, I think pretty small, very small groups, a lot of human review. But I think you will eventually find a workflow that works for your company. What would you add?

[C]

I mean, I think dynamic email and dynamic landing pages, those are the two where you're going to see some really nice returns.

[B]

All right, aeo, give us the what you would go do crash course right now. AEO wise, if you don't know your.

[C]

Personas from step one, get to know your Personas and then start mapping out the unique questions that each Persona is going to be asking. Figure out where you have content, figure out where you don't and start creating that super long tail content.

[B]

All right, I love that. For evolve, set up, use Breeze Assistant or get your ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude connected with your HubSpot data and start asking that data really curious and interesting questions about the specific projects or campaigns you've been running so that you can learn how to make them better the next time when you close the loop.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

And I would say philosophically, like embrace the learning mindset. We're all learning right now. It's a super fun, It's a super interesting era of marketing. Like soak that up.

[B]

It's never been a more fun time to be a market. Never been a market in a long time. I wake up every day super excited and you wake up every day to a lot of slacks from me. And that's basically how life goes.

[C]

That's how it goes.

[B]

It's true. Thank you so much for having us, everybody. I hope that you dig into the loop. Thank you all. We'll see you real soon.