HubSpot debuts a new AI playbook at Inbound as content marketing falters

HubSpot’s Inbound conference opened for business today on the coast opposite its usual home in Boston. With so much change hitting marketing in the past year, a new venue in San Francisco seems appropriate.

HubSpot knows firsthand the upheaval of the old marketing playbook caused by AI and the rise of LLM search tools. Early in 2025, HubSpot saw its widely admired (and successful) content marketing strategy take a hit when a Google algorithm update reduced traffic to the company’s popular blog.

As 2025 went on, marketers on and off the HubSpot platform also saw their organic traffic decline. Consumers increasingly searched with LLMs, causing a drop in referral clicks as answers with citations grew. 

So it’s no surprise what HubSpot VP of Product Angela DeFranco is hearing from customers these days, and will likely hear this week at Inbound.

“Customers are saying, ‘What was working before isn’t working anymore,'” DeFranco told MarTech. 

Content marketing strategies fail to live up to their past performance, and marketers are also anxious about other changes. Other concerns DeFranco said she hears from HubSpot customers include not knowing what’s next and needing help getting their teams to embrace AI.

Dig deeper: Traditional search still dominates, but AI is making gains in the U.S. and Europe

AI for removing the minutiae from marketing

Marketing teams using HubSpot and other platforms to provide marketing automation and email are often mired in the minutiae of nurture sequences and email automations. DeFranco said an unintended consequence is a lack of attention to brand and storytelling.

But now, with brand marketing returning thanks to AI-powered search, some marketing teams need to do a little soul searching. The inverted pyramid funnels, which showed a big group of top-of-funnel leads narrowing to a few conversions, are going away, replaced by hourglass-shaped funnels.

“What that means is the top of the funnel started to have more influence on the bottom, so it got wider,” DeFranco said. “Even small teams saw awareness and brand awareness mattered more.”

New AI-powered capabilities in HubSpot Marketing Hub will free marketers to reconnect with their brand. The features include:

• Marketing Studio, which uses AI to turn a simple brief into a whole campaign with assets like landing pages, forms and emails, while optimizing performance with built-in analytics.
• AI-powered email that automatically creates personalized content for each recipient using CRM data, replacing one-size-fits-all email blasts.
• Segmentation + Personalization: A dedicated AI-powered space that recommends and builds high-intent audience segments for targeted lead generation.

“The idea behind removing a lot of the minutiae is this is actually what AI allows you to do. It allows you to take away a lot of the work that has been on marketers’ plates and has really gotten them wrapped around the axle in terms of the process. Take a step back and think about the process,” DeFranco said. “What is the brand? How do you express it?” 

Dig deeper: Personalization magic starts with the data you can’t see

Is Loop marketing the playbook for the AI era?

HubSpot’s new playbook for the AI era is called Loop marketing. 

The Loop is an expression of how marketers use AI to communicate their story and brand. Marketers using the Loop marketing playbook use AI to help them develop content and include the “why” aspect of brand marketing. Then, it helps marketers tailor that message with context and data. Finally, the message gets amplified across channels. 

Unlike past iterations of funnels and playbooks, the Loop is dynamic. Traditional marketing moved prospects from awareness to consideration to decision in a straight line, while the Loop is constantly learning and evolving. It relies on hybrid teams of humans and AI working together. Each doing what they do best — with human creativity and AI efficiency.

HubSpot says the Loop remains true to the principles that made the original inbound playbook work: educating customers, creating value and building relationships. But the Loop playbook adapts those principles to a world where buyers are everywhere except vendor websites, where AI answers questions before buyers click and personalization at scale is essential.

The Loop has four stages: Express, Tailor, Amplify and Evolve.

• Express is where marketers define their taste, tone and point of view before bringing in AI.
• Tailor is where marketers use AI to make messaging personal, relevant and contextual.
• Amplify is where marketers diversify content across channels to meet buyers where they are.
• Evolve is where marketers use AI to measure, predict and adapt in real time so they can iterate quickly.

New data offerings to power HubSpot’s Loop playbook

For Loop marketing to work, marketers need good, quality data with context. To that end, HubSpot is making several data-related announcements this week, including its new Data Hub.

DeFranco said the HubSpot Data Hub and Marketing Hub teams are working closely together. The Data Studio product within Data Hub makes ingesting data from different sources easy.

There’s also a new Data Agent — one of 20 new Breeze agents announced today — that can analyze data to identify duplicates and find missing or incorrect data. 

DeFranco and her colleagues hope a new playbook and tools to help marketers master data and AI will ease some of their anxiety.

“Marketers are anxious, but they’re as excited as they are anxious,” DeFranco said. “They’re excited to have a playbook rooted in experimentation; excited they can scale their work with context and data.”