What Happens in the Express Stage of HubSpot Loop Marketing?

Traditional marketing funnels and old tactics are becoming increasingly ineffective, and artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay.

However, just being plugged in isn't nearly enough, and many businesses struggle to find a way to create a continuous growth cycle. Consequently, you must combine AI's efficiency with human authenticity to develop a strong strategy, which is where HubSpot's loop marketing comes in.

Loop Marketing is the new playbook for marketing success. It guides you through an integrated four-stage process that you can use to help your business thrive and achieve sustainable growth. Starting with the express stage, Loop Marketing is a dynamic, continually moving strategy that leverages AI's advancements, but requires a decidedly human touch.

Loop marketing addresses significant shifts in buyer behavior, such as declining traffic and email engagement, by enabling faster go-to-market strategies, cultivating deeper customer connections, realizing lower acquisition costs, and ensuring continuous optimization. 

The Loop Marketing strategy has four stages: Express, Tailor, Amplify, and Evolve. While each stage is vital for achieving compound growth, the foundation for its success begins with the express stage.

The Role of Loop Marketing in the AI Era

As artificial intelligence continues to ingrain itself into every aspect of our lives, it transforms digital marketing. Old tactics are failing, and new demands are emerging. The emergence of AI means traditional search traffic is dropping rapidly. Gartner predicts search engine volume will drop by 25% by 2026. That drop has significant implications for marketers; those who can't adapt quickly will be left behind. 

• The Funnel Isn't Flowing: Discovery and evaluation are increasingly happening directly within AI tools like Google's AI overviews, ChatGPT, or Perplexity. That means many traditional search journeys are intercepted, with answers delivered directly in AI chats rather than through website links. Consequently, users are making fewer clicks to get the answers they seek.

In fact, 60% of Google searches today end in no clicks.

This dramatically reduces website traffic, fundamentally transforming interactions at the top of the marketing funnel.

• Higher Intent Buyers: Despite having fewer overall website visitors, those who visit your site are much more likely to buy. Buyers are increasingly AI-assisted; many have already conducted extensive research before they reach your website and arrive with crystallized needs and pre-qualified intent.

Large Language Model (LLM) traffic, for instance, converts 4.4 times better than traditional search traffic. This means marketers now need to optimize for these high-intent visitors and provide frictionless, personalized experiences.

• Experiments Over Campaigns: The pace of change in customer behavior and AI advancement is so rapid that traditional long-term campaigns are less effective. Success now hinges on launching lightweight experiments, learning from them in a matter of days, and pivoting faster than the competition.

• Authenticity Beats Volume: AI has lowered the barrier to content production, flooding the market with generic material that is less reliant on authentic, authoritative interactions and more bland, valueless content. Make no mistake: authenticity and value are at a premium, and defining your brand voice and tone is crucial. To truly resonate with your audience, you need a unique point of view. Human perspectives, community building, and trusted influencers are paramount.

The role of Loop Marketing is significant. Loop Marketing allows you to address these shifts by providing a framework where AI moves faster, humans move smarter, and businesses grow better. Early adopters are already seeing remarkable results, demonstrating the power of this approach. For example:

These statistics underscore why defining your brand's unique identity and deeply understanding your audience, the core of the express stage, is a best practice and a necessity for growth in the AI era.

The Express Stage of Loop Marketing: Defining Your Distinct Brand Identity

The express stage is the first step in Loop Marketing. It focuses on defining and articulating your unique brand identity with a deep understanding of your audience. It's about answering fundamental questions such as "What is your story?" and "And who cares?"

That means before campaigns can begin, you must know your audience and yourself. That means understanding your brand, what you do to help your customers, and your role in the marketplace. By knowing what you provide to the market, you can more effectively market to those needing your services. 

Key Activities in the Express Stage

The Express stage involves several critical activities, all centered around establishing a strong, authentic brand foundation:

1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): The journey begins by identifying who you're talking to. This means understanding their goals, challenges, and what truly matters to them.
   
   AI tools can accelerate this process by efficiently mining reviews, call transcripts, comments, and community chatter to unearth deep customer insights.
   
   For instance, you can use Breeze Assistant or HubSpot Connectors for Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude to summarize data from your CRM about your highest-value customers, revealing their pain points from deal notes and engagements.
   
   

2. Craft Your Brand Style Guide: Once you understand your audience, the next step is to define what makes your brand uniquely different, valuable, and superior to the competition.
   
   These insights are then distilled into a simple, shareable style guide. This guide should capture your brand's unique point of view (POV), mission, values, visual identity, tone of voice, dos and don'ts, and non-negotiables. This collaborative human process ensures alignment on your brand's emotional, cultural, and functional essence before AI documents and scales this identity.
   
   HubSpot's Brand Identity tool allows you to create an AI style guide that captures your distinct perspective across campaign materials. Uploading your style guide to this tool ensures that everything you build with AI reflects your unique taste at every touchpoint.

3. Generate Creative Concepts: With your ICP and style guide, you can claim your market corner with creative concepts. Inspired by your style guide, these concepts will tell buyers precisely why they should choose you.
   
   Based on your established brand guide, Breeze Assistant can help generate campaign ideas and content concepts.

4. Build Your Content Strategy: The final step in the Express stage is to plan how this foundational story will come to life across various formats and channels. HubSpot's Marketing Studio is a valuable tool that allows you to upload your campaign brief and generate a mix of recommended content assets by channel and format.
   
   You can further test and refine your content by researching customer feedback (e.g., call transcripts, past content performance), uploading it to an LLM, and asking for specific recommendations on what resonates most.

The Imperative of Human Authenticity

In an era where AI can generate content in seconds, the critical differentiator is the taste humans bring to the process. Through context, perspective, and a unique point of view, brands develop a relationship with consumers.

Without a crystal-clear style guide, informed by your brand's essence, AI-generated output will fall flat, becoming bland, forgettable, and indistinguishable from competitors. The Express stage ensures that every word AI writes and every multimedia asset it helps produce is unmistakably you.

This stage recognizes that everyone can access the same AI tools, but the difference lies in what you feed them. To borrow a line from Disney's The Incredibles, when everyone is super, no one is. If you want to stand out in a marketplace where everyone uses the same superpowered tools, you'll need to do something that makes you different.

Combining profound audience insights with your brand's distinct taste to tell your unique story is how you'll most resonate with your target market. Effectively expressing your brand allows you to transform AI from a content factory into a powerful engine of growth, ensuring that every AI-generated piece reinforces your competitive positioning and speaks directly to your prospects' specific needs.

Measuring Success in the Express Stage

The primary metric for the Express stage is efficiency. This involves measuring how effectively you match your business's story to how your buyer needs to experience it. Key metrics to track include:

• Content Speed: The average time it takes to create and publish content. AI can produce much more content than an individual, though it still takes a human touch to bring it to life. The expectation is that content speed will increase as AI assists in creation, and continued advancements mean better content over time. This aligns with Loop Marketing's aim for faster go-to-market strategies through AI-powered creation, launching campaigns in days rather than months.

• Content Cost: Your budget divided by the number of assets created. The expectation is for content cost to go down due to AI efficiency. AI allows content and insight gathering to be done even more quickly, and automated prompts can continue to improve efficiency.  

By focusing on these metrics, businesses know their initial efforts in defining brand identity and understanding their audience build a strong foundation for their brand as they move into subsequent stages of Loop Marketing.

Effectively expressing your brand identity using AI means your message can be created faster and better, improving efficiency and positively impacting the bottom line.

The Express Stage is the Foundation for Loop Marketing

The Express stage is the bedrock upon which the entire Loop Marketing strategy is built. A clear, authentic brand identity and deep customer understanding established here flow directly into and empower the other stages:

• Tailor Stage: With a well-defined ICP and style guide from the Express stage, you can tailor your messaging to individual customer needs. The tailor stage uses unified customer data and AI to create truly personal, contextual, and relevant interactions at scale, moving beyond generic personalization to experiences that make prospects feel genuinely understood. The Express stage ensures that even personalized content maintains your brand's unique voice.

• Amplify Stage: The clear story and brand identity crafted in Express enable effective Amplify efforts. This stage focuses on diversifying your content across channels, optimizing for AI engines (AEO), and partnering with trusted creators and communities to meet buyers where they are. A strong brand foundation ensures consistency and authenticity across these diverse touchpoints.

• Evolve Stage: The insights and content developed in Express, then tailored and amplified, are continuously refined in the Evolve stage. Here, AI tracks real-time performance, delivering recommendations to iterate quickly and effectively. The clearer your initial brand identity (Express), the more effectively AI can learn and optimize future campaigns, creating a compounding competitive edge.

Starting Strong In The Express Stage

In a dynamic world of AI-powered marketing, the era of set-it-and-forget-it campaigns is over. Loop Marketing is an industry disruptor, providing a necessary adaptive framework that combines AI efficiency with human authenticity to navigate marketing in ways that can transform the industry.

The Express stage is your critical starting point. It's where you define who you are as a brand and who your customers are with unparalleled depth and clarity. By investing in developing a robust brand identity and a deep understanding of your audience, you transform AI from a generic content generator into a powerful growth engine that speaks with your unique voice.

Embracing the Express stage means building a strong strategic backbone for all your AI-assisted content and campaigns. It ensures that every subsequent marketing effort, from personalized emails to multi-channel campaigns, is rooted in authenticity, relevance, and a clear purpose. Don't let your marketing fall flat in the AI era; start by expressing your distinct brand identity, and watch your growth loop gain unstoppable momentum.

Need a hand? Connect with one of our HubSpot-AI-certified consultants to see if you're a fit for Loop Marketing.