How Inbound Marketing Is Changing in the Age of AI

0:00John Jantsch:So what if the same people that taught millions of businesses to build marketing funnels to generate inbound leads admitted maybe some of that's dead because they're the ones that killed it? Their own traffic dropped 80 % almost overnight, but revenue kept climbing anyway.

0:28John Jantsch:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz. My guest today is Kip Bodner. He's the CMO at HubSpot, where he spent over 15 years since the company had a little less than$10 million in revenue at that time. He also co-hosts the podcast Marketing Against the Grain and serves on the board of Gusto and SimilarWeb. We're going to talk about his new book, co-written with Kieran Flanagan, and it's called Loop, Outlearn, Outmarket, and Outgrow. So, Kip, welcome to the show. John, thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be here. So when I read your co-offer's name, I just immediately go into this Irish accent, which is terrible.

1:07John Jantsch:I love it, please. He has a great Irish accent. Do the whole show in it if you want. Well, I'm afraid that people get very tired of that, but it's just, it's such an Irish name. Oh, completely. I mentioned the idea of HubSpot's traffic numbers going down. Was there a, like, a time period? I mean, HubSpot's not alone. Tons, tons of people have. Yeah, I was going to say, you guys had just done such a good job of building a lot of organic traffic. Was there, like, a day when somebody said, this is a problem, like, we actually, we need to do something about this? There's a couple of things. One, before this all happened, we knew it was going to be a risk for the future.

1:47So we bought a company called The Hustle. We diversified well beyond the blog, but we lost 140 million visits over the course of a year. And so what happened was between the rise of AI and Google doing a bunch of algorithm updates, you saw a pretty dramatic, like at the start of that, it wasn't like you lose a little bit of visits and then it got gradually worse. It's like it dropped off pretty good, pretty quickly. And it's like, oh gosh, there has to be a better way. And if this is happening to us, I'm sure it's happening to others and will likely, or will likely happen to others. And we need to get ahead of all of this.

2:24John Jantsch:Just from my own experience, our traffic is probably down 50 % from its, you know, from its high. But we pretty quickly realized it was a lot of garbage traffic. A lot of it was garbage traffic. It's a key insight for everyone. Yeah. I mean, and you guys did, you know, you had the listicles. I mean, you had all the stuff that drove eyeballs that probably wasn't very high value traffic. So in some ways, are we better off, you know, not having to try to chase that? Look, I think we're better and worse off at the same time. I think the ability to bring people to a site that you owned and you controlled and you could really shape their interactions versus being more reliant on podcasts and YouTube and TikTok and Reels and everything else that's out there, you know, which you're limited to those platforms and their guardrails and their rules.

3:16That's probably the tough trade-off. Are we better off for maybe not wasting as much time and effort on people who are never going to buy our products? Also probably a good thing. So I think like everything in life, there's good and bad. Yeah.

3:30John Jantsch:So one of the things you talk about in the book is the idea of the marketing funnel being dead. What's something that Loop does that the funnel maybe structurally didn't or couldn't? Yeah. So if I think about Loop as our framework for how you actually do marketing in this post AI world and the reason for that, you have to optimize for learning. AI, what it actually does is it enables you to scale your brains, your taste, all the things that make you and your company really good and allows you to do a lot more. but you can also do a bunch of crap. And you can also fail to learn and compel in those lessons.

4:06So what Loop does is it gives you a playbook to kind of do any marketing tactic or campaign that you want. And there's kind of four simple steps to it. First is you work with AI to express your ideas and get them into content that's really remarkable and personal to your audience because AI can bring all that context together, your customer interviews, what people are saying to you about online, conversation your sales teams are having, and turn all of that into really great content with you based on your insights and your perspective. Then the other thing we found at AI I was really good at is helping you tailor the second part of the framework to make that content deeply personal on an individual basis.

4:48Then AI has opened up new distribution channels and that's the third step, amplification. Those are things like answer engine optimization, working with influencers. AI has transformed advertising. It's made advertising far more scalable than I think it was in the pre-AI world. And the four-step is evolve. The one thing that AI really does well that nobody's really taken on yet is it helps you codify your learnings and put them into systems that keep getting smarter every time you use them. And so that's what we set out to do. We wanted to answer the question, like every market I talk to is getting yelled at by their CEO.

5:25So, well, why is our traffic down and how do we do AI in this AI world? Like, what the heck do we do? We wanted to, I wanted to write something that I could hand to anybody who asked me that question and give them a real concrete answer.

5:38John Jantsch:Yeah. In fact, I just started playing with it today. It may come out earlier in the week, but Claude just introduced a, or Anthropic just introduced a skill builder that it basically just follows you around. It's like, you know, if you're going to do a process, you're going to go on Slack for this. You're going to go here. You're going to go here. and then it's just like, okay, I'll build a skill that does that. So that idea of codifying is just getting easier and easier, isn't it? I think it's a perfect example. Yeah. So you talk about something called a taste profile. I wonder if you could walk me through the solo entrepreneur, you know, who doesn't have an entire marketing team.

6:13John Jantsch:How do they build a taste profile? Well, see, this is the fun part is that the taste profile, I think is most beneficial to like the small team or the solopreneur, right? Because all the taste profile is spending a few hours to make the decisions that you know, but haven't like had the exercise to clarify all them so that you can actually then give those decisions to AI and AI knows what you want to achieve and has all the context around what you want to achieve. And so it's essentially two parts. The first is customer taste and might be as we give you a list of questions to go have AI do research for you.

6:48So if you're a solopreneur, you use those questions, go do the research, and you kind of understand what the market and the customer thinks about your category and how your product might fit into there. The second part of this is like brand taste. So like, what do you think about? Like, why does your company exist? What is your product solve in the world? What do you believe about the world that's unique and differentiated? Like, how do you think about your thought leadership? We give you very specific questions to kind of go through and get to clarity on those. And then once you have all that together, you put that in any AI tool.

7:20I do it all the time. I'll do a blank version and then I'll do a taste profile version. And my taste profile version is always way better. I actually built like an independent grader to see. And I'm normally like a C with generic AI and like I'm an A with a taste profile. And it's one simple thing that takes you a couple hours to do once. And then you probably need to update it, you know, a couple times a year, depending on how your business changes.

7:42John Jantsch:Yeah. I mean, we run across that all the time, you know, that we because we're the same. same way. We're like, look, you got to put all this stuff together. It's a little work in the beginning, but it will save you so much time and so much better output right in the end. And people want to skip that. It's like, oh, I don't sit down here and answer all these questions. It's hard. You have to make the hard choices. You know, like that's the like this is real marketing, though. Marketing is I had David Epstein on the marketing Instagram podcast recently, and he's like, look, the people who are succeeding in this new world are brain first, tool second versus tool first brain second.

8:16Right.

8:16John Jantsch:And that's what this is all about. So it's another vote for a good liberal arts degree, isn't it? Yeah, exactly right. So you talk about something in the book called the AI buyer sim. And you go as far as saying, I think that it can predict customer reactions with 90 % accuracy. First off, that's amazing. Yeah. We ought to all be using that, right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What is the I'm going to go the opposite side of you of that idea. What is the risk of kind of relying on that type of data and being wrong? Oh, I like this question. Here's the risk. Marketing, I think of marketing as this interesting relationship.

8:59And I see everything in like frameworks and graphs and charts and two by twos. And the two by two here is like how predictable the results you'll get from it and then how high or what's the magnitude of those results. Right. And so when you're trying to simulate your results and predict your results so that they're really predictable, the risk of that is that you're going to do what everybody else is doing. And when you do what everybody else is doing, you're going to get an average result. So you're going to get something that's highly predictable, but the magnitude is going to be kind of low or average.

9:30And so what you're leaving on the table is like the crazy thing that might fail a bunch of times, but when it hits really big. And that's the biggest risk in taking that. And so you should use the buyer sim for things you know, like kind of, I know how this is going to work. I have this tried and true, but for new things, I want to go outside of that and really do some wild tests.

9:49John Jantsch:So one of the things that I think a lot of people are suffering from is this, you know, even though organic traffic is way down, people are still producing stuff that AI sameness, I think you call it. A lot of people have called it that. So what's the sort of what's the marker that says, no, this is actually above all of that. This is better quality. This is, you know, this is done. I mean, is it just the amount of time you spend, the amount of research, the amount of citations? You know, I mean, what is it that makes it get out of that sameness? So I think this is what's interesting. Pre-AI, you could just be prolific.

10:27Yes. Right. You could just, hey, I'm going to outgrind. I'm going to write some stuff.

10:31John Jantsch:I remember people asking me all the time when I'd talk about blogging, how many words does it have to be? You know, like that was the. Oh, yeah. That was the topic for years. That was the marker. Yeah. And so and now it's not good enough to be prolific. Like, I call this kind of like the Taylor Swift problem. Like you have to be prolific like she is, but you also have to be great. Like the things you have to do have to be great. And you're asking me the questions like what makes great content in a world where somebody can type something into a chat GPT, a Claude and get any information they want.

11:02And what I found is that it is the things that make your that are unique to you or your business. And so that is, do you have unique data?

11:13John Jantsch:Yes. I know you have unique customers and those customers have unique stories. You yourself, if you're a solopreneur, have a unique history and framing and life story that you have to bring to the table. There is a level of like research and rigor and putting things together in clever ways. that people wouldn't expect. I think those are some of the key highlights that make, if you just go around and pay attention to what you think is good and interesting, you'll find that those are kind of the backbone of most of the things. Yeah, I tell people all the time, it's like, what's the only thing, what's the thing that only you could write?

11:49John Jantsch:Nobody else in the world could. I love that. They start thinking about that and they're like, oh, okay, I could add that. Like you said, customer stories, you know, is an easy one. 100%. Because everybody should have those. Everybody has that. Yeah. So talk a little bit about, you mentioned already, I think, answer engine optimization. How does that go beyond just writing FAQs? Yeah. So answer engine optimization is a very interesting topic. It's something that everybody's obsessed with. Like, what does ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, what do these things say about me and how do they talk about me?

12:22And the first thing you need to do is understand like how visible you are on those answer engines. So what's your visibility? And that comes in two terms, mentions and citations. Mentions are just like, do they talk about you and do they talk about you positively or negatively? Then the citations are like, do they link back to you and something you have to say? And you're right that FAQ pages are one way to do that. The three most cited resources on ChatGPT and Cloud, for example, and Gemini, for example, though, are YouTube, LinkedIn, and Reddit. So if you're not involved in YouTube, LinkedIn, or Reddit, you're probably less likely to get mentioned on the topics that are relevant to your business.

13:05The other thing you have to do for content you do own, like your website, not just FAQs. the way I like to explain it is we spent the last 20 years writing for machines who are trying to parse information like humans, right? It's like you had all this deep meta description, keyword density, all of these things. Now we have machines who act like exactly like humans. And so you need to write exactly like you're writing to a human, but simple, plain spoken, non-jargon, framed in easy chunked segments so that this machine who acts exactly like human can pick those couple sentences up. Like if you go to our CRM page, right, there's a what is the CRM box and it's three sentences and it's very in plain English explained to you what a CRM is.

13:56John Jantsch:And I think in your particular case, like all SaaS offerings, you know, there's typically pricing, you know, has been on your pages forever. For sure. But for a lot of businesses, that's a new idea or just even the fact that, you know, their whole goal was to get somebody on a phone call so that they could then explain how everything worked. How do we have to now start thinking about the fact that the buyer journey is going to go a lot farther, you know, maybe before we get that phone call and that we need to reveal a lot of information that maybe we wanted to hide because we didn't want our competitors to have it.

14:31So the reality is the interesting things, good and bad about LLMs is they will give you an answer. Right. It will always give you an answer. So if somebody asks what your price is, one, if it had, if there's just no information on the internet about it, it will make something up. If there is information, your customers are talking about it on Reddit or g2.com or some of these places, it'll aggregate that. And what I have found is it's often wrong and it's often misanchors me. It's like, oh, I think this thing is going to be$50 and it turns out it's$500. And like, wow, I was, I don't want that thing.

15:08I was expecting it was going to cost a very different amount. So I look at this as like, you have to provide that information because if you don't, you're going to have buyers who are going to get an answer anyway, and it's not an answer you want them to get. And so you're going to have to operate more transparently than I think that you want. And by the way, I think that's a good thing. I think you're probably likely going to attract more people by doing that than by hiding.

15:33John Jantsch:So one of the steps you mentioned was evolve. What does that look like day to day for a marketer? Yeah, so the way I think about the evolution of marketing and what it means to evolve is like it used to be, I'd say I had a Google AdWords campaign on. Maybe I'm running a Google AdWords campaign. I run a weekly email campaign. It used to be, well, all right, like once a month, maybe once every couple of weeks, I'll look and see how that's going. Right. and I'll look and I'll make a few little tweaks. Now it's like, I can, you know, at HubSpot, we have our Breeze assistant, like our version of Claude inside HubSpot.

16:10It's like, you can ask any of these insights anytime you want and get instant learnings and change much faster, right? And be like, oh, not only do I, can I get this information? I can get recommendations from this thing that's really smart and knows my business, right? And then I can actually change way more rapidly. The other part of what evolve means is you have some system. You run your business off systems. And in the AI world, there are agents, there's skills, there's workflows. You can actually have AI update your systems based on what you learn. And that's the big unlock. Before AI, you couldn't do that.

16:51You would have to remember, oh, I need to go make this change to my system based on this thing I learned.

16:56John Jantsch:And by the way, it's in eight places. Exactly. It's in eight places. Oh, my cousin Tim actually set this up for me. So I got to wait until he's back from vacation so that he can update it for me. Now you can just have it do it in the background and like run a reoccurring task. And that is transformative because we all know the power of compounding, right? Like you do that. You have it update a smart learning every week. Half a year in, you're like getting massively better results. Yeah. With real data. With real data. All right. Here's the big question. You ready? I'm ready, please. Is inbound marketing dead?

17:32I think inbound marketing, as we know it is dead, because it was predicated on a world where information was scarce and knowledge was scarce. Now knowledge is abundant and actions and attention are more scarce. And so I think the loop framework, as well as all the work that everybody's doing in the marketing world today, is trying to go beyond that old world and help companies thrive in this new one.

17:59John Jantsch:Did you have to actually be the one to tell Brian and Dharmesh that? We had a nice debate. You know, the loop book that everybody's going to read on September 22nd started as like a 10 page memo that I wrote. OK. And the name of that memo is in bail marking is dead. And it wasn't even called loop at the time, but it was all these observations that you and I are talking about. But this was, you know, 18 months ago, you know, a long time ago. All right. So for small business owner, this is always the hard question, actually. Small business owner reads the book. What's the one page they should act on this week?

18:37John Jantsch:You don't have to cite a page number. As an author also, I know when people ask me that, I'm like, I don't know. I wrote that 18 months ago. But what's the one concept? How's that? That they should act on this week? Yeah, we talked about it earlier in the show. I think you should fill out your taste profile. It's early on in the book. because that way your AI tools have all the context of you, your business and your taste, and they will just make far better decisions. Even if you don't know it, it will happen. Do you, one thing that we've found, like if I tell somebody, you need to fill out your taste profile, they sit there and they go, I can't answer all these.

19:16John Jantsch:But if I actually ask them the questions, interview them, all of a sudden they'll talk for hours. So that's a tip you might give people. Well, first of all, I love that. And second of all, if you're listening to this show and you're feeling that way, have a friend, have your spouse, have somebody just, you know, open the book, write down the questions separately and just record you. And then by the way, you can just upload that video to AI and you won't have to ever type or write anything and it will take care of it all for you. Plus it sort of automatically gets your voice and tone. Yeah, exactly.

19:45John Jantsch:And all that kind of stuff. That's a great point. Yeah, awesome. Well, Kip, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you'd invite people to connect with you, find out more about Loop and everything else you're up to. Yes. So you can obviously learn more about HubSpot at HubSpot.com. You can find the book at loopmarketing.com. And then for me, you can find me on Marketing Against the Grain on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

20:15Awesome. Thanks, John. Appreciate you having me.