Start-up marketing in the age of AI

The way people buy things has fundamentally changed.

Web traffic is down, intent is higher than ever and AI is shaping decisions before prospects even hit your site. As a start-up, you can't rely on yesterday's funnel to fuel tomorrow's growth.

That's why HubSpot created Loop Marketing, a new playbook that helps start-ups stay relevant, move faster and grow smarter. Join us to learn how to turn AI into your growth engine, not your replacement.

In this exclusive session led by Anna Gordon, we'll dive into Loop Marketing – a practical framework designed to help start-ups navigate and thrive in an AI-driven world.

You can expect fresh insights, hands-on demos and strategies you can apply to your small business right away.

Topics covered in this session

• The new state of marketing: 60% of Google searches now end with no clicks. Learn why AI referrals are reshaping the funnel and how high-intent traffic is fundamentally different.

• Loop Marketing: HubSpot's new framework designed to help you launch campaigns in days, not months, and adapt faster than the market shifts.

• The strategic changes that win, and tools to help: How to cut through the AI noise with authentic, taste-driven content, even on low budgets.

About the speaker

Anna manages the HubSpot for Startups program for UK and Ireland and partners with investors, accelerators and incubators.

She's passionate about connecting start-ups with the right knowledge, tools and network needed to scale.

Prior to HubSpot, Anna worked at Enterprise Ireland where she both advised and secured investment for Irish tech start-ups and SMBs.

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Transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today.

For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.

I'm pleased to introduce Anna Gordon, who's the Head of HubSpot for Startups in the UK and Ireland. In this session, Anna will share a practical framework designed to help start-ups navigate and thrive in an AI-driven world.

If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email to you with the recording and further resources later today.

Over to you, Anna.

Anna: Amazing. Thank you so much, Caitriona, and thank you, everyone, for joining, maybe on your lunch break or just before.

Let's get into today. As Caitriona mentioned, I'm Anna, and I manage HubSpot for Startups for the UK and Ireland. Before we get into the content, I'll tell you a little bit about HubSpot and HubSpot for Startups.

For those of you who don't know HubSpot, we are an agentic customer platform. We have everything you need for managing your sales, marketing and services all in one place.

On the HubSpot for Startups side, our goal is to connect start-ups with the right go-to-market tools, network and resources they need to scale effectively. What that really means is working with amazing partners like Enterprise Nation, as well as VCs, accelerators and incubators.

We try to share go-to-market learnings through educational resources, programming and events. That could be webinars or in-person events.

And last but not least, we do have discounts on HubSpot available through our HubSpot for Startups programme as well. That gives access to up to 90% off HubSpot. I'll just leave the QR code there for a second.

So let's get to know each other a bit before we kick off. If you could pop in the chat who is currently using AI in marketing already. You can put either daily, weekly, rarely or not yet.

The reason I ask is because, particularly at HubSpot, we saw that adoption in marketing was a bit quicker generally. People got really excited about generative AI and using AI to ideate and create content. Adoption in sales was probably a bit slower. So I just want to get an idea of whether people are using AI in marketing, or maybe you're mainly using it in your personal life to plan trips, or in sales.

Okay, so quite a mix here. Some daily, some not yet, some rarely. Hoping to educate you and inspire you to do more with AI in marketing today.

This one as well, you can either write down in your notebook or, if you're comfortable sharing, if you are in marketing directly or you're a founder doing marketing yourself. What is the boldest or most creative thing you've done to generate leads?

This is really to get you into the mindset of the session today. It's about creativity in marketing and constantly iterating, doing things that are a bit more against the grain. So just if people want to share anything creative.

Going old school, so getting footballers handing out flyers. I have actually heard this a bit, that sometimes going old school can help. People are constantly getting emails and messages, so flyers can still work for certain industries, especially if it's more B2C.

Creating an email newsletter. Nice. Perfect. People can keep typing there to inspire everyone else, or if you want to just keep it for yourself, that's fine too.

Someone said they made a cake and sent it to every business they wanted as a client, with a slice missing. The cake was a pie chart and they were the missing piece. I love that. I've seen people do creative things like that for interviews too.

So just to get the energy up and get people sharing. Thanks, Helen.

So moving into the content for today, what are we talking about? I'm going to put things into context a bit in terms of start-up challenges and opportunities, then go into what's changing in marketing, and then look at the new marketing playbook in the age of AI, which we've called loop marketing at HubSpot. Then we'll have questions at the end as well, so you can pop those in the chat or the Q and A box.

So, first, some challenges and opportunities. Some of these things aren't unique to start-ups, but they help set the scene.

It can be difficult in the early stages to have a clear understanding of your ICP. Really being able to establish that early is important. We've been talking about buyer personas and ICPs at HubSpot for years, and I still think they're the cornerstone of any good marketing or sales strategy.

There's a lot of noise out there, but it always comes back to having clarity on the ICP, which should inform all your marketing assets.

There are also challenges around the funnel. Lead generation can feel unpredictable and scattered in terms of where leads are actually coming from.

Some of this comes down to the buyer's journey changing. In the past, people might have gone to Google to research a CRM like HubSpot, or one of your B2C products. Now, people are increasingly looking at AI overviews or using LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude to do that research.

So as a founder, it's really about starting to think about how to optimise for AI, or answer engine optimisation, which is kind of the next evolution of SEO.

Awareness is also more scattered. Customer attention is spread across YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, podcasts and other platforms. Buyers are spending more of their time scrolling on social, listening to podcasts and connecting in forums.

It's worth thinking about how you can join the conversation by connecting with your audience where they already are.

Visitor intent is higher than ever. Because a larger volume of traffic is coming from AI referrals, leads are often further along the buying journey by the time they get to your website. So having a really seamless website experience is more important than ever to capture that high-intent traffic.

Experiments are more important than campaigns. Luckily, that tends to suit start-ups and small businesses because you don't always have a rigid three-year or even one-year marketing plan. The ability to constantly iterate and stay flexible is a huge advantage.

And finally, taste beats tactics. When ChatGPT exploded and generative AI became the big topic, a lot of content suddenly became very easy to create. The downside is that it also created a huge amount of noise.

That means it's more important than ever to have a unique point of view. Your taste, your judgment and your perspective matter more.

So when we talk about the new marketing playbook in the age of AI, what is that?

At HubSpot, we've called it loop marketing. I'm going to break it down, and I think start-ups actually have an advantage here because you can rebuild a lot of your tactics from the ground up.

Years ago, HubSpot really coined the term inbound marketing and used the flywheel as the model. But now we've evolved that into loop marketing, which is really about a constant cycle of iteration and adapting to the market.

There are four stages to this.

1. First is Express. That's about expressing who you are, your taste, your tone, and really drilling down into your ICP and your unique brand.

2. Second is Tailor. That's about tailoring content to your customers and using AI to make your interactions more personal, contextual and relevant.

3. Third is Amplify. That's about meeting buyers where they are across the channels where they spend time.

4. And fourth is Evolve. That's about evolving in real time, iterating quickly and effectively with AI.

So if we go a bit deeper into Express, this is really about getting specific on your ICP. That means understanding their goals, their challenges and their intent.

You may already have created an ICP in the earlier stages of your company, but it's important to revisit that as you scale. Even HubSpot did that. Early on, we had one persona, Marketing Mary, and then over time that evolved as the business and the market evolved.

As your company grows, your products, services and customer pain points may change too, and your ICP has to move with that.

Next is defining your voice and tone, and really what makes your company unique. Then it's about testing your content and seeing how that resonates with your audience.

Just to focus for a minute on ICP, it can really be broken into five essentials.

1. The first is firmographics and demographics, things like industry, company size, geography, income level or education.

2. Then pain points and needs.

3. Then behavioural signals, which are the difference between what people say and what they actually do. Behavioural signals might include using certain tools, hiring certain roles, attending certain events or patterns in buying behaviour.

4. Then buying behaviour and process itself. For example, a big bank is likely to have a much longer buying process than a small business.

5. And finally, value and retention potential.

There are a lot of tools out there to help define your ICP. HubSpot has a Make My Persona tool, which has recently been updated with more AI features. I've also included a free ICP builder from our agent network.

The key point I want to make here is that once you've got those ICP insights in a document, and once you've got your brand guidelines documented too, that context becomes really powerful if you're using LLMs.

You don't want to start from scratch every time you open Claude or ChatGPT and say, "This is my ICP, now create a social media post." What you can do instead is create things like projects in Claude or custom GPTs in ChatGPT, upload all of that context, and make sure the tool is always referencing it.

That allows you to create content that's much more refined and much more aligned to your audience.

That leads us into the next stage, which is Tailor. Once you've set your voice and your ICP, it's time to think about how you tailor your content to your customer or prospect.

This is really about making your message personal, not just personalised.

Years ago, in sales and marketing, it felt impressive to use basic personalisation tokens, so an email would begin "Hi Anna" and that alone felt tailored. But that's table stakes now.

It's really about going beyond that and creating genuine relevance.

For smaller companies, it's not always possible to personalise every interaction manually, unless you're only focusing on 10 accounts. But if you have a bigger volume of leads, you can't realistically treat each one like a segment of one by hand.

So AI becomes really useful here. It can read intent signals and help match content to what someone actually needs. That creates one-to-one relevance at scale.

To break it down, tailoring comes down to enriching your data with intent signals. Intent signals might include someone visiting your pricing page or checking out a competitor. These are signals that tell you what they care about.

That's not new. CRMs have done versions of this for a long time. In sales, for example, if you see that someone has just hired a new CMO, that might be a trigger to reach out with something relevant to that.

The difference now is that AI makes it much easier to do this at scale.

There are a number of enrichment tools out there for this, like Clay, and there are also built-in tools in CRMs like HubSpot. The important thing is having as much relevant data as possible on your customers and prospects, so you can act on the right signals.

Then you can use AI to craft hyper-targeted content. If someone has visited your pricing page, you can use an AI email writer to follow up with a message that reflects that action.

I'd still say, especially for start-ups and early-stage companies, it's really important to keep humans in the loop. When trust matters, and especially when you're trying something new, human quality checks still matter. Don't try to automate absolutely everything.

That brings us to Amplify, which is about engaging your audience where they already are.

I should say, depending on your industry, this can look very different. There may be really niche forums where your audience spends time. So this is not about trying to be on every major platform. It's about knowing where your ICP actually lives.

Just to explain how HubSpot thinks about this, years ago we built a huge library of content around inbound marketing. But even in 2022, before AI Overviews really took off, we could already see that people were spending less time on blogs and more time on social, podcasts and newsletters.

So we diversified. We invested in podcasts, newsletters, YouTube and social. What these channels have in common is that they are people-driven.

People are increasingly going to people-driven channels because there is now so much AI-generated content. That means platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube and podcasts are becoming even more important.

If you're more B2B, a simple place to start is LinkedIn, both your business brand and your personal brand. Often personal brands can get stronger engagement.

If you're more B2C, maybe that means leaning more into TikTok or YouTube.

Reddit is also really worth paying attention to. It's one of the most commonly cited sources in LLMs right now, because people see it as more authentic.

So think about how you can start to diversify into those channels.

At HubSpot, that shift changed our demand mix. Educational content is still really important to us, but people-driven channels have become a much bigger part of the mix.

Another key part of amplification is answer engine optimisation, or AEO.

You may think your company is too early-stage to think about that, but I don't think it's too early at all. It's worth understanding how you are showing up in LLMs now.

If you're not sure, there are tools that can help you see this. HubSpot has a free AEO grader, and there are others too. Even if your score is very low, that's useful because it gives you a baseline.

So how do you improve? One thing is showing up where AI learns, on platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Another is creating content that AI can quote. At the moment, AI tends to cite things like FAQs, listicles, comparison pages and quote-based content, because it's looking for direct answers rather than whole pages.

And another is creating shortlist-style content. That means things like "X versus Y", "Alternatives to X", or other decision-stage queries. That's where buyers are already quite far along, and it's often where AI starts to shape recommendations.

So if you're just starting to build content or audit what you already have, it's worth thinking about those formats and how they might show up in AI.

For HubSpot, improving in this area helped make us number one in AI visibility in our category, and AI leads went up by over 1,000%.

So the final stage is Evolve. This is about constant iteration, learning quickly and acting faster.

A lot of this comes down to knowing what to measure and optimise, and then using AI to sharpen your strategy and outcomes.

One of the useful things about AI is speed. You can build content quickly, test ideas quickly and learn quickly. It means you can move through feedback loops much faster than before.

There are lots of metrics you can look at here. Traditional ones like click-through rate still matter. You can also look at things like AI visibility, share of voice and citations if you're starting to track AEO.

And then you can think about velocity, how quickly you're getting things out, learning from them and making changes.

The key point is that this is a loop. You don't win by launching once. You win by learning from what you launch and then using those insights to improve.

So just to summarise the four stages.

1. Express is about getting clear on who you are, your ICP, your tone and your brand.

2. Tailor is about making your message personal, not just personalised.

3. Amplify is about diversifying across the channels where your audience actually is.

4. Evolve is about iterating quickly, measuring what matters and using AI to speed up learning.

You do not need to do all of this at once. Even if you take one action from each stage over the next 30 to 60 days, that's progress.

For Express, that might mean revisiting your ICP as a team.

For Tailor, it might mean reviewing a recent email or campaign and asking how relevant it really felt.

For Amplify, it might be as simple as running your company through an AEO grader to get a baseline.

And for Evolve, it could be choosing one metric to focus on and tracking it consistently.

So I know we're nearly on time, but we do have a few minutes for questions. Happy to take some.

Caitriona: Thanks, Anna. We've got a question in from James. Do you think it's important to own your audience in B2B marketing, or is a borrowed audience still effective if you're in front of your ICP, for example through podcast guesting?

Anna: That's actually a really good question. I'd say a mix of both.

HubSpot is obviously a bigger company, so maybe not the perfect example, but we do use both owned and borrowed audiences. We have our own email lists and media channels, but we also rely heavily on partners and external communities.

For example, HubSpot for Startups is all about working through borrowed audiences by partnering with organisations that already have access to start-up founders.

So I'd say, especially depending on the stage of your company, a healthy mix of both is ideal. Owned audiences are incredibly valuable, but borrowed audiences are a great way to reach new people.

Caitriona: Thank you. A question from Rashi. Are there any programmes or activities HubSpot has to support start-ups?

Anna: Yes. That's really what I mentioned at the beginning with HubSpot for Startups.

Through that programme, eligible start-ups can access up to 90% off HubSpot. Because it's a global programme, we also run region-specific activities. I cover the UK and Ireland, so that might mean events in London or Dublin, as well as various educational sessions and other support for founders.

So yes, HubSpot for Startups is the main programme to look at.

Caitriona: Thank you. What's one underused opportunity that start-ups should be investing in right now?

Anna: I think one underused opportunity at the moment is still AEO.

We're only at the start of that journey. I don't think most start-ups are thinking enough yet about how they show up in AI-generated answers, and that makes it a really useful area to start exploring now.

Even just benchmarking where you are today is a good step.

Caitriona: And finally, a question from Helen. If you've already trialled HubSpot, can you access the offer on an existing account?

Anna: If you've only done a free trial, then yes, you can still apply, because that's not the paid version.

If you're already using a paid version of HubSpot, there are additional eligibility criteria, and in most cases you can't apply the start-up discount to an existing paid subscription.

But if anyone wants to ask about their specific situation, they can contact me. My email is agordon@hubspot.com.

Caitriona: Thank you. Thanks so much. We've just come to the end of the session now. A few people were asking about the recording. This session is being recorded, and we'll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.

Thanks so much for joining us on today's webinar. Thanks, Anna, for your presentation, and we'll see you soon.

Anna: Thanks, Caitriona. Have a good one, everyone.

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