Small business owners are all saying the same thing: “My website traffic is tanking, and the stuff that used to work just doesn‘t anymore.” And they’re right. Nearly 60% of searches don’t end in a click — people are getting 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 getting 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 small business. You have tools at your fingertips that used to require expensive agency contracts. You just need a blueprint on how to use them.
HubSpot is calling this new growth playbook Loop Marketing, and anyone can use 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 shows 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, said 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 help 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 needs the context and perspectives about your business that only you can give it.
So use an AI tool — whether that’s Claude, ChatGPT, Breeze or something else that works for you — to help 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 target customer. You can ask it questions about marketing campaigns you’re doing and get real-time feedback on how to make 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 used to require expensive focus groups.
Tailor: Make Every Customer Feel Like Your Only Customer
The next step is using AI to tailor the story to your target audience.
You might be thinking, “I can already send emails to Dear {First Name}” — but you can do a whole lot better now. The history of marketing has largely been about who can make the best educated guesses possible — you find some commonality among people, guess what they want, and try to give them what you think they want.
The remarkable thing about AI is that instead of making 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 looking for, and which ones are showing intent to buy — well, you’re going to get 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.
Read the full article:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/loop-marketing
By: kbodnar@hubspot.com (Kipp Bodnar)
Publication Date: 2025-09-03