The way customers discover and engage with businesses is changing, fast. Traditional inbound marketing funnels, once the gold standard, are no longer enough on their own. Search behaviour is shifting, AI is delivering instant answers before users ever click a link, and customer journeys are fragmented across dozens of channels. If your marketing still relies on static campaigns and linear funnels, you’re already behind.
That’s why HubSpot has introduced Loop Marketing, a new playbook designed for the AI era. Built as a dynamic, cyclical framework, Loop Marketing combines the creativity of humans with the speed and scale of AI. The goal? To help businesses grow faster, smarter, and more sustainably in a world where marketing can’t stand still.
At Forbidden, we’ve been diving into what this means for SMEs and HubSpot users. In this blog, we’ll unpack what Loop Marketing is, how it works, and most importantly, what it means for your business.
Loop Marketing is HubSpot’s response to a fundamental problem: the funnel is broken. For years, businesses were taught to attract, convert, close, and delight customers in a linear way. But customer behaviour no longer follows a straight path. Journeys are circular, continuous, and powered by AI-enabled discovery.
Loop Marketing reflects this new reality. It’s an iterative system designed to be in constant motion, where every campaign feeds into the next. Instead of a one-and-done approach, the Loop thrives on repetition, learning and optimisation - helping businesses get sharper, more personalised, and more effective with every cycle.
At its core, the playbook consists of four key stages:
Express – Define your voice and brand identity.
Tailor – Personalise content and campaigns at scale.
Amplify – Share and distribute your message across channels.
Evolve – Learn from data and optimise for continual growth.
This isn’t just theory. It’s a practical framework designed to help businesses combine the best of human creativity with the efficiency and intelligence of AI.
Your business voice is your competitive edge. The Express stage is all about defining that voice and making sure it shines through every piece of content. This isn’t just about writing a brand guide and filing it away. It’s about using AI tools to analyse customer conversations, reviews, and behaviour to understand what resonates with your audience and then amplifying that in your messaging.
With Express, you can:
Build a clear brand tone of voice that feels authentic and consistent.
Rapidly test different creative ideas, headlines, or campaign angles.
Use AI as a sounding board to refine and sharpen your storytelling.
Generic content doesn’t cut it anymore. Tailor is about making your marketing feel personal at scale. Using the data in your CRM, AI can help segment your audience into meaningful groups and create content that speaks directly to their needs, pain points, and goals.
Think personalised emails that don’t just insert someone’s name, but actually reflect their buying stage. Or landing pages that adapt based on who’s visiting. This stage is where you take the unique brand identity from Express and ensure it lands with the right people, in the right way.
Once you’ve expressed your voice and tailored your message, it’s time to get it out into the world. Amplify is about spreading your content across every channel where your audience spends time; from your website and email, to social media, podcasts, and AI-driven discovery platforms.
HubSpot’s new Marketing Studio makes this easier by allowing teams to collaborate visually in one place and orchestrate campaigns across multiple channels. The focus here is reach and consistency: ensuring your voice is heard everywhere that matters.
The final stage is about never standing still. With Evolve, you constantly review performance, analyse what’s working (and what’s not), and refine your approach. AI helps speed this up with real-time insights, predictive analytics, and recommendations for optimisation.
This stage turns your marketing into a feedback loop. Each campaign becomes smarter than the last, and every action you take builds momentum. For SMEs, this is where real ROI is unlocked, because you’re not just running campaigns, you’re running a system of continuous improvement.
So, why should you care about Loop Marketing if you’re running a scaling business? Here are the key takeaways:
1. The funnel is outdated. Customer journeys are no longer linear, and neither should your marketing be. Loop reflects the way people actually buy today.
2. AI is reshaping discovery. With Google searches increasingly answered by AI before a click even happens, you need a marketing system that’s flexible and ready to compete in this new reality. Your brand and personality have always been important, but it's never been more important to be consistent and memorable. Vanilla brands are likely to suffer the most in the medium-longer term as the content will just blur into the background if unmemorable.
3. Personalisation drives engagement. Tailored content isn’t optional anymore—it’s expected. Loop makes it easier to deliver personalised experiences at scale.
4. Continuous learning = stronger ROI. Instead of starting from scratch with each campaign, the Loop turns every campaign into an opportunity to learn, refine, and grow.
5. It future-proofs your marketing. Loop isn’t about replacing everything you’ve built—it’s about enhancing it. It slots into your existing CRM and campaigns, adding a layer of speed, insight, and intelligence.
We caught up with our Strategy Director & Founder, Ash Collyer, to get his take on what HubSpot’s new Loop Marketing means for SMEs.
“For over a decade, inbound marketing has been the engine of growth online. The playbook was clear: create valuable content, rank well on search, and deliver a website experience that converts. Brands who nailed that formula built a predictable pipeline of leads.
But the landscape has shifted. The rise of AI, the explosion of new marketing channels, and buyers who now do more independent research before ever speaking to a vendor have upended the old rules. Even once high-performing brands are finding it harder to sustain the same results. And that disruption is only going to accelerate as AI matures.
Loop Marketing feels like the natural next chapter. It gives SMEs the opportunity to take what already works and amplify it - blending the proven fundamentals of inbound with the intelligence and scale that AI makes possible.”
The marketing world has shifted. Static funnels and one-off campaigns won’t cut it anymore. With Loop Marketing, HubSpot has created a framework that helps businesses thrive in an AI-first landscape, balancing human creativity with AI-powered efficiency.
For SMEs, this isn’t just a new playbook - it’s a chance to future-proof your marketing, connect more deeply with your customers, and grow smarter.
Loop Marketing helps you Express your voice, Tailor your message, Amplify your reach, and Evolve your strategy in a continuous cycle of improvement.
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