What happens in the Tailor Stage of HubSpot Loop Marketing?

The tailor stage is a crucial component of any successful Loop Marketing strategy, and it's where marketers create personalized messaging that builds trust with customers. The challenge, however, is knowing how to effectively scale these efforts to make every customer feel understood without overwhelming your team.

As a result, mastering the tailor stage is essential for fostering deep customer relationships and driving long-term business growth.

Marketing is undergoing some of its biggest changes in years regarding how people shop and buy. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has disrupted the industry in all the ways experts have predicted (and then some). HubSpot's four-step adaptive marketing framework, Loop Marketing, is meant to act like a funnel replacement because it's a continuous marketing cycle that helps businesses grow and learn constantly. It combines the smart help of AI with the real, human touch that makes your brand special.

The four main steps of HubSpot's Loop Marketing, Express, Tailor, Amplify, and Evolve, are designed to help businesses better connect with their target audience, creating relationships that attract and keep customers while spending less money, and developing tools and efficiencies to improve their marketing efforts constantly.

How is Marketing Is Changing?

Marketing is like trying to catch water in a leaky bucket for many. The marketing funnel that used to guide customers from learning about a product to buying it is quickly withering away. The emergence of AI and how people use it is making the old funnel obsolete.

Organic traffic numbers have dropped like a stone, and businesses continue to feel the pain as AI disrupts how we do business. In the United States, websites have experienced an average drop of nearly 60% in organic search traffic. Around the world, this drop is about 52%. This isn't just happening to a few businesses; it's a big trend.

So what's causing this significant change?

Zero-Click Searches

When search engine users conduct searches, AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews give direct answers that appear above the fold on the search results page. In many cases, users can find the answers they're looking for without even clicking a link. In fact, 60% of Google searches end with no clicks.

Plus, AI answers can take up a lot of space on a search results page, pushing regular links further down the page. AI Overviews can use up to 800 pixels on the search results page, making it much harder to see organic results. 

As per Gartner, in 2026, traditional search engine use decreases by 25%. By 2028, it will drop to 50% or more as more people turn to AI chatbots for information. Google's own Search Generative Experience (SGE) could reduce publishers' organic search traffic by another 20% to 60%, which could mean publishers $2 billion less ad money each year. Just having content on your website is not enough anymore.

AI-Assisted Visitors Are Higher-Intent Buyers

On the plus side, though fewer people might be visiting sites, those who do are often much closer to making a purchase. AI-assisted buyers have often already done extensive research, so they know what they want and why they came to your site.

Traffic from large language models (LLMs) like Gemini or ChatGPT is converting 4.4 times better than regular search traffic. These users are deep into their research and ready to act, so while you get fewer visitors, the quality of those visitors is much higher.

Experiments Over Campaigns

Businesses can't just plan a long marketing campaign and "set it and forget it" anymore. Instead, they need to run quick experiments, learn from them in just a few days, and change their plans quickly. This fast way of working is called real-time iteration, and it helps businesses find out what works best for their customers faster than their competitors.

Authenticity Beats Volume

AI can create a lot of content very quickly. But AI outputs are largely bland and forgettable, and without human intervention, the copy will not create the personalized interactions customers crave. What truly stands out now is real content that has a unique point of view and genuinely understands the customer.

People look to real human experts, online communities, and trusted influencers for information they can believe and trust. This means having a clear brand voice and authenticity is more important than just publishing a lot of content.

Traffic from LLMs like Gemini or ChatGPT is converting 4.4 times better than regular search traffic.

The Heart of Loop Marketing: The Tailor Stage

After defining your brand's unique voice and understanding your audience in the express stage, the next step in Loop Marketing's continuous marketing cycle is the tailor stage. In this stage, you create messaging that feels truly personal, not just superficially personalized, for each customer.

Using all your information about your customers, you begin creating experiences that make users wonder how you know so much about them. When customers feel seen and understood, they trust your brand more, and that's a big advantage for you.

In this stage, you use an AI-powered marketing strategy to make interactions personal, relevant, and suited to each situation. It's a key part of the adaptive marketing framework that helps you meet buyers' expectations in today's fast-changing world.

What Happens in the Tailor Stage?

The tailor stage involves several essential steps:

1. Enrich Customer Data: The first step is gathering as much information as possible about your customers. This isn't just their names; it includes what they do on your website (behavioral signals), what they seem to be looking for (intent data), and other helpful information about their situation (contextual information).

   You can use AI tools to add new details to your customer records, including changes in their jobs, activities their companies are doing, or answers to specific questions important to your business.

   Then you can combine and improve customer information from all your different computer programs, creating unified customer data that gives you a better picture of each person.

2. Target by Intent: You can use your data to identify groups of people showing signs of wanting to buy something and segment them into smaller groups, like marketers have been doing for the past several years, using AI-powered segmentation tools to build segments based on behaviors and interests.

3. Personalize Your Message: Now that you know who you're talking to and what they're interested in, you can create messages that feel like they were made just for them. Tools like a personalization agent can create unique landing pages and CTAs for each group you've identified.

   You can use AI-driven dynamic email personalization to create an email for each person that appears to be written just for them. The goal is to start with "a cohort of one," where everyone feels like they are the only person you're talking to.

4. Human Quality Review. Even with excellent AI tools, Human and AI collaboration is vital to the Tailor stage. A human team member should review messaging using AI to ensure:

   • Brand voice and tone are the same across all messages.

   • Personalization is natural, not creepy or too informal.

   • Any facts about the customer or company must be correct.

   • Your value props should match the customer's needs.

   • Calls to action must make sense for the specific stage of the customer's journey.

   This step ensures that your AI-powered marketing strategy keeps its human touch and builds trust-first marketing with your audience.

Why Does Tailoring Matter?

In today's marketing world, personalization is an expectation. Your customers don't want generic messages; they want to feel like you know them and can anticipate their needs. This builds trust in the middle of the buying journey, when customers decide how important doing business with you can be.

That means you have to make the most of every visitor. The Tailor stage helps you maximize each interaction, guiding those high-intent buyers closer to a purchase. It's a key part of a momentum-building system that helps your business grow even when the marketing landscape is tricky.

How We Measure Success in the Tailor Stage

Engagement is your main goal in the tailor stage. This means determining how much your messaging connects with your prospects and whether they are appropriately personalized.

The key metric to track here is click-through rate per channel. This measures how often people click on your emails, ads, or other content after they see it. The more relevant and personalized your messages are, the more people will click. Higher engagement leads to better conversion acceleration and engagement optimization, moving your customers more smoothly through the buyer's journey.

Loop Marketing: The Future is Here

The tailor stage is an essential part of the Loop Marketing framework. This adaptive marketing framework is designed to help businesses survive and truly shine in the age of AI. It's a momentum-building system because every step enables you to learn and improve, improving the next cycle. 

The Other Stages of Loop Marketing

Express Stage: In the Express stage, you determine your brand's unique story and point of view. It's about understanding your ideal customers and what they care about. Create a special "style guide" that tells your AI tools how to speak in your brand's voice. The Express stage turns AI from a simple content maker into a strong growth engine, building compounding insights for your brand's competitive edge.

Amplify Stage: Get your story out to the world. In the Amplify stage, you share and learn how to make your brand visible to AI search tools and partner with trusted content creators. This stage is focused on creator economy alignment, building genuine relationships, and showing up in communities where your customers already spend time. By diversifying your channels, the amplify stage helps increase your pipeline velocity by reaching the right people through voices they trust.

Evolve Stage: In the Evolve stage, you constantly learn and adjust your marketing plans based on campaign performance. You make changes through data-driven refinement and run experiments to make improvements in real time, not just after they're over. Every campaign becomes a learning lesson, making you leaner, more agile, and generating insights, building a more decisive competitive advantage with every cycle.

Bringing Your Story to Life

In a world where customers have more choices and expect more, the Loop Marketing framework is essential. Its adaptive marketing framework ensures your business stays relevant and grows by integrating a human touch to AI-powered tools. By understanding and mastering the tailor stage, you're building relationships and creating a momentum-building system to help your business succeed now and in the future.

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