What are marketers saying about HubSpot’s Loop Marketing playbook?

In April 2025, HubSpot held a Spotlight event in New York City to introduce new products and features. The company traditionally reserved Spotlight events for its Inbound Conference, where they served as the latest product showcase, but Inbound was still five months away.

The April crowd was understandably anxious. HubSpot wrote the playbook for inbound marketing, where marketers used content and search to drive prospects to their websites for conversion. And the strategy worked — until it didn’t.

In late 2024, HubSpot experienced a large drop in organic traffic to its blog. In a scene that would have been unthinkable 18 months earlier, HubSpot speakers at the April event in New York declared the inbound strategy dead. 

Much of the blame for inbound’s demise fell on AI. More people used LLMs to research products and services, and the LLMs served up answers, not clicks. The spigot that controlled traffic sent to websites was slowly closing.

Then, at last week’s Inbound Conference in San Francisco, the company unveiled a new playbook for the AI age: Loop Marketing. 

HubSpot says the Loop retains much of what made the inbound playbook successful: educating customers, creating value and building relationships. But the Loop playbook adapts those principles to a world where buyers are everywhere except vendor websites.

The reaction of the marketing community to Loop Marketing is, expectedly, mixed. HubSpot employees and users were certainly excited.

For marketers who are critical of how many companies conduct B2B marketing today, the new playbook is more of the same. They say it relies too much on high-volume content strategies, performance metrics and dreams of a level of efficiency no one has ever reached, despite years of trying.

Still others claimed to quickly be overdosing on the Loop Marketing hype.

The fall conference season is just getting underway, and Loop Marketing is just the first buzz phrase to hit marketers in the head. There will be more to come. You were warned.

The post What are marketers saying about HubSpot’s Loop Marketing playbook? appeared first on MarTech.