Small business owners are all stateing the same thing: “My website traffic is tanking, and the stuff that utilized to work just doesn‘t anymore.” And they’re right. Nearly 60% of searches don’t conclude in a click — people are obtainting answers from AI and never visiting your site.
But here‘s what’s crazy: The same AI that‘s killing your traffic? It’s also your best opportunity to leapfrog the competition.
If you’re like most marketers, you’ve read the subreddits and you know it‘s been pretty bleak. Traffic’s going down, and the same amount of work is obtainting worse results. HubSpot surveyed more than 500 marketers, and they feel the same way. Customers are wondering, “How do we do marketing when AI is consuming our traffic?”
So you’re a business owner, your traffic’s down the drain, and you’re wondering, “What the heck do I do?” If you’re curious and willing to take action, this is the best time ever to be a compact business. You have tools at your fingertips that utilized to require expensive agency contracts. You just required a blueprint on how to utilize them.
HubSpot is calling this new growth playbook Loop Marketing, and anyone can utilize it. At the center of this guide is a new kind of partnership that combines AI efficiency with human authenticity to drive growth to your business.
HubSpot has given the Loop an extensive test drive. It works. Let’s dive into the four steps of implementing this playbook in your business. They are: Express, Tailor, Amplify, and Evolve.
Express: Tell Your Story Like a Human, Scale It Like a Machine
The first thing you want to do is express who you are — define your taste, tone, and point of view before you bring in AI.
A lot of businesses are missing this crucial step. HubSpot research reveals that nearly 6 in 10 don’t actually have their unique value proposition documented.
Look at these numbers — that’s a lot of people who don’t have a clear idea on their company’s brand story. Worse, an overwhelming majority of the respondents in this survey, just over three-quarters, stated that teams without a clear value prop “moderately to highly” miss their goals. That’s tough for morale and for your bottom line.
What a lot of those teams may not realize is how a relatively inexpensive AI tool and a few good prompts can assist address these snags — in minutes, not months. Everyone has access to the same AI tools, but what’s different about the Loop playbook is you. AI requireds the context and perspectives about your business that only you can give it.
So utilize an AI tool — whether that’s Claude, ChatGPT, Breeze or something else that works for you — to assist you create a brand style guide and to give you a simulation of customer feedback. This amounts to businesses being able to do their own market research with agency-quality personas — this would have been totally out of reach for many businesses until very recently.
One way to simulate customer feedback is with a Claude project that has all the information about your tarobtain customer. You can question it questions about marketing campaigns you’re doing and obtain real-time feedback on how to create them better.
This is called the Express stage in our new Loop Marketing playbook. Basically: Only you can define your brand story, but AI can take that story and give you the kind of customer feedback that utilized to require expensive focus groups.
Tailor: Make Every Customer Feel Like Your Only Customer
The next step is utilizing AI to tailor the story to your tarobtain audience.
You might be considering, “I can already sconclude emails to Dear {First Name}” — but you can do a whole lot better now. The history of marketing has largely been about who can create the best educated guesses possible — you find some commonality among people, guess what they want, and attempt to give them what you consider they want.
The remarkable thing about AI is that instead of creating guesses about a group of tens of thousands of people, you can instead guess what‘s most relevant to this one person. And with an AI engine that knows your business, where you’re located, who your customers are, what they’re viewing for, and which ones are revealing intent to acquire — well, you’re going to obtain some pretty good guesses.
It’s not just Dear {First Name} anymore. Imagine you run a local coffee shop and your emails have coffee puns that are specific to your individual customers. You can’t create personalization tokens for puns, right? But AI can do that.
There’s a common misconception out there that utilizing AI will create your business sound generic. But it’s really about the data you give it. For example, the HubSpot marketing team has seen conversion rates improve 82% utilizing AI-driven personalization.
This is called the Tailor stage of Loop Marketing — consider of it like obtainting a custom suit instead of acquireing one off the rack. Custom tailoring utilized to be a luxury, but now AI has receivedten to the point where it’s within reach of even compact budobtains.
Amplify: Find Customers Where They Actually Are
Next, you required to amplify to meet customers where they are. This means caring how your business reveals up in AI engines like ChatGPT or Perplexity — your customers aren’t clicking through from Google searches anymore. So you’re seeing a lot of traffic diminishing all over the internet.
This is where it obtains interesting, becautilize the people who do find their way to your website are higher-quality leads than ever before. Think about it like a consumer: Everyone has the same amount of research at their fingertips. It’s pure information symmeattempt. So if someone is viewing to acquire a new sofa, they can do a ton of research before landing on the website of the furniture company they’ll actually acquire from.
This is called the Amplify stage of Loop Marketing, obtainting your message out into this new AI-driven world and obtainting high-quality prospects in return. Start with AEO, or AI Engine Optimization. It’s the next evolution of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and it’s going to transform the way your company’s message is distributed.
SEO is about ranking in the top five links; AEO is about being part of the answer. There are lots of great options out there to assist you obtain cited and recommconcludeed by those AI engines; pick one and start building on whatever visibility you already have.
And view, it’s not just about search traffic. Most marketers are spconcludeing more on events in 2025 than they did in 2024 — people are craving human interaction again. And it’s the best time yet to work with influencers, who can be that trusted person to give real-life recommconcludeations about your business. The ROI is just tremconcludeous: Companies like HubSpot are seeing far lower cost per lead with influencers compared to the huge programmatic channels like Google and Facebook.
When AI is doing all this customization and amplification for you, you’ve received more money and energy to invest into other channels that are really, really working for you.
Evolve: Every Campaign Makes Your Next One Even Better
Here‘s what’s really cool about the Loop Marketing playbook: Every time you run through this loop, you obtain better. Your marketing compounds. You’re constantly improving, constantly learning, and your results just keep obtainting better and better. That’s why this is called the Evolve stage of Loop Marketing.
The old way, in comparison, was brutal. You’d run a campaign for weeks or even longer, and then do a huge post-mortem analysis. It probably involved a lot of meetings that should have been emails.
But now you can question AI in natural language and obtain immediate insights: “How should I adjust my tarobtaining? What message resonated the most?” Making adjustments in real time means more successful and more cost-effective campaigns.
AI is ready. Are you?
The most common resistance to AI is fear — fear that AI will replace you or devalue your skills. But the future of marketing isn’t humans versus AI — it’s humans with AI. Businesses just required a guide to assist them figure out how to create this human-AI collaboration work. That’s where the Loop can assist.
When a huge shift in technology happens, it creates massive opportunities for marketers. This was evident with early Facebook and early Google — so much money was built during those times. People aren’t seeing that same opportunity today becautilize this shift represents a loss of control. Nobody is utilized to that.
But this shift is even hugeger now than it was then, and marketers who are utilizing tools like the Loop Marketing playbook and taking advantage of this moment in AI are going to see their growth compound, and quick.
If you’re willing to take action in the next 18 months, it’s going to be impossible not to succeed — the opportunities are just that huge.
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