Earlier this month HubSpot unveiled their new Loop Marketing playbook. This is a new four-stage framework for growth in the era of hyper-competition and digital distraction. Here's why manufacturers really need to take notice.
If you’re a contract manufacturer, you’ve likely seen the shift in how customers interact with your marketing and sales teams:
Organic website traffic is dwindling. SEMrush reports that 60% of searches don’t result in a click.
Buyers are doing most of their research before talking to sales. Gartner says 68% of decision-making happens before a brand is even contacted.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are shaping the conversation. Prospects are researching you and your competitors with or without your input.
Peer communities, social platforms, and AI overviews are paramount. They are replacing traditional search and validation journeys.
AI has given the customer new power in the buying process. Prospects and customers don’t need to visit your website to research solutions anymore. They don’t need to download your content to find answers to their questions.
Since the advent of ChatGPT and Google’s AI overviews many brands have seen a marked decline in organic traffic.
And at INBOUND 2025, it was revealed traditional funnel conversion rates have declined by 40% in the past five years.
The old model of marketing teams, filtering buyers through stages of awareness, before handing prospects over to sales for conversion, is well and truly over.
Instead, buyers zigzag. They research in bursts, check with peers, ask AI, read reviews. They ghost you, then pop back up out of nowhere. They can come in and out of your orbit at any stage, smashing the tidy sequences we once mapped out for them.
We're no longer in control of the buyer's journey.
And that's exactly why Hubspot have developed the Loop marketing methodology.
Loop marketing is designed for a new, messy reality. It sees growth not as a funnel or wheel, but as an infinite loop where insights, content, engagement, and optimisation continuously can feed each other to create ongoing marketing momentum.
HubSpot believes there are two critical forces that are essential if we want to influence B2B buyer behaviour in this age of distraction and infinite scroll:
A defined brand with a distinct sense of drive and purpose
AI-powered personalisation that delivers the right message to the right person at the right time
This is not about making more noise, it's about marketing precision.
As Hubspot put it;
“Your goal is not just to be everywhere, but to be where it matters most.”
The Loop is designed to help you stay aligned, agile, and visible in a rapidly changing digital ecosystem.
It starts by helping you structure your team, plan your resources, and configure your martech stack so you’re ready to engage with customers where they are - seeking information and support across multiple channels in different ways.
The Loop playbook enables you to prepare, publish, and distribute content that can be discovered by both humans and agentic AI. It ensures your message is consistent, amplified across different media, in different formats., and shareable by trusted third parties.
With AI integrated into your process, it keeps targeting and personalising interactions so your message reaches prospects at exactly the right moment.
Best of all, it promises to optimise campaigns in real time, sharpening messaging, reallocating spend, and nudging prospects closer to a decision based on the freshest intent signals.
There are four pulses of activity which HubSpot say will continually power the marketing loop.
These pulses are the heartbeat of your growth strategy, each one feeding energy into the next. Skip one and the loop loses momentum. Nail all four and you keep prospects and buyers in your orbit until they are ready to buy (and buy more).
The first pulse is brand expression. This approach starts with defining your brand DNA and creating the messaging that reflects the unique value you bring to your ideal customer.
For contract manufacturers, this means more than listing capabilities. It is about owning your technical authority, reliability, and back story, while letting your culture and problem-solving approach shine through the content you publish.
Make it stronger next cycle: Use feedback from prospects and customers to tighten your story. Update case studies with fresh results. Highlight innovation projects to keep your message current.
Once your messaging is clear, adapt it to the priorities of different stakeholders: procurement, engineers, specifiers.
Make it stronger next cycle: Analyse which messages resonate best by persona or industry segment. Train your AI tools to deliver more relevant answers. Refine dynamic website content and build deeper personalisation rules for each buyer type.
Push your message further, but do it intelligently.
Make it stronger next cycle: Double down on the formats and channels with the highest ROI. If video drives more engagement than whitepapers, shift your content mix. If LinkedIn ads outperform email nurture, reallocate spend.
Here’s where the loop comes alive. The process doesn’t end. Every campaign gives you data to refine the next one.
Track engagement patterns, content performance, and buying signals in real time.
Monitor which topics pull prospects back into your orbit and which make them drop off.
Use AI to identify trends you might miss manually.
Until now, the tools for AI-driven marketing have felt out of reach for most manufacturers - too complex, too expensive, or too hard to implement.
HubSpot has now levelled the playing field. The tools exist to personalise at scale, automate repetitive work, and spot buying signals you would never catch manually.
But, a word of warning. While these AI tools can help you tailor and amplify, the initial pulse of brand expression still needs to come from the heart of your organisation, your people.
You need to do the initial brand work before the Loop can begin to operate. Without that process of defining your purpose, sharpening your positioning, and building a clear brand identity, AI risks amplifying noise instead of meaning. Finding an agency to help workshop and document those brand insights will be vital.
In 2025 and beyond, the manufacturers that master the loop will be the ones with a brand capable of staying visible and relevant even as the market changes around them.