AI transcript
0:00:07 Welcome to the Next Wave podcast, the show where we sit down with the people shaping the future of business and technology.
0:00:15 Today’s guest is Kip Bodnar, the Chief Marketing Officer over at HubSpot, one of the most influential marketing leaders in the world.
0:00:21 Kip is on the front lines of how AI is transforming marketing from boosting productivity and reshaping roles
0:00:26 to rethinking how brands actually stand out when everyone has the same tools.
0:00:32 We dive into HubSpot’s brand new loop marketing playbook, the bold idea that taste beats tactics,
0:00:38 and even how they drove a 400% increase in email engagement using AI personalization.
0:00:43 So if you’re a creator, entrepreneur, or just someone curious about the future of marketing in the AI era,
0:00:47 this episode is packed with insights you don’t want to miss.
0:00:50 So let’s jump right in with Kip Bodnar.
0:00:55 Hey Kip, thanks so much for joining us on the show today. I really appreciate you being here.
0:01:01 Matt, thanks so much for having me. I’m honored as a lover of all things AI to be on the next wave. Big deal.
0:01:03 Yeah, man, we’re going to definitely nerd out on this one.
0:01:11 So what I want to dive into to begin with is I want to learn a little bit about what the day-to-day looks like of a CMO over at HubSpot.
0:01:15 You know, I just kind of want to start by exploring my own curiosity a little bit here.
0:01:28 It’s a great question. When you’re like running a marketing org for a scaled company, what you’re really doing is figuring out what are the reactive problems I have to go and solve immediately that are super urgent.
0:01:33 And how do I not let those distract myself from like the big priorities that we have.
0:01:34 And so that’s at a high level.
0:01:45 But what that really means is I actually just like doing a lot of real marketing, making content, writing, copywriting, approving web pages, talking about campaigns.
0:01:53 We have a big event this week inbound, obviously, so prepping and planning and making sure, you know, everybody in attendance is having a great time.
0:01:58 You’re trying to basically tell a story across a big team of people.
0:01:59 It’s awesome. It’s a lot of fun.
0:02:03 And I get to use AI all the time, which makes my life very happy.
0:02:13 Yeah, yeah. And you’ve got the Marketing Against the Grain podcast with you and Kieran, which I almost feel like that podcast probably keeps you like finger on the pulse.
0:02:18 You’ve got to know what’s going on in the world of AI and tech because you’re jumping on a podcast this week to chat about it.
0:02:23 Yeah. What’s interesting, right, is I grew up in a household where both my parents were teachers.
0:02:28 And so I learned the most important lesson, which is like teaching something is how you learn something.
0:02:28 Right.
0:02:31 Right. And so that’s basically what doing a podcast is.
0:02:37 It’s like it’s a forcing function where like I got to record two days a week, which means I got to know what I’m going to talk about two different times a week,
0:02:41 which means I got to constantly be reading, using, learning.
0:02:49 And then I record and explain, which makes it like actually really set in and like make sure that I’ve actually grasped the concepts that I’m trying to figure out.
0:02:50 Yeah, a hundred percent.
0:02:52 I mean, I’ve experienced the same thing.
0:02:58 Turning around and making videos about it is why I know as much about AI as I do is I don’t want to get stuff wrong.
0:03:00 So I really want to dive deep and understand it.
0:03:01 That’s my honest question.
0:03:04 If you didn’t do videos, how much less do you think you would know?
0:03:07 I think it’s like for me, like at least no half is less.
0:03:08 Yeah.
0:03:08 Yeah.
0:03:11 You know, I would I would be way short of where I am.
0:03:15 Like making stuff in public is like a cheat code for learning.
0:03:16 Totally.
0:03:18 I’m in the same exact boat.
0:03:22 If I wasn’t making videos about it, you know, I’d probably still be nerding out about AI.
0:03:28 I’m still kind of like a tech guy, but I would probably be blind to like half of what’s going on.
0:03:28 Right.
0:03:32 I’d probably only be touching the tools and using the stuff that really, really benefits me.
0:03:36 And then anything where I’m like, I don’t see a benefit for my own purposes.
0:03:38 I probably wouldn’t be paying attention to.
0:03:42 But because I make content, I’m sort of watching the entire landscape.
0:03:43 That’s how I feel, too.
0:03:44 Yeah.
0:03:44 Yeah.
0:03:50 I’m curious when it comes to the actual CMO role, how has it evolved with the emergence of AI?
0:03:54 Are there things that you used to do as a CMO that you don’t have to anymore?
0:03:55 How has that role changed?
0:03:57 Well, I think there’s a lot that’s changed.
0:03:59 More that’s changed that stayed the same.
0:04:04 I mean, I think a massive amount has changed on like the personal productivity side, for example.
0:04:05 Right.
0:04:13 Like we have this amazing prompt that we put in Anthropic that goes and gets all of our Asana data and bakes me a custom dashboard.
0:04:14 Right.
0:04:24 So like I can get this amazing, super dialed in summary of how we’re doing at kind of any time live in a really great format.
0:04:25 So like that’s one example.
0:04:26 That’s pretty great.
0:04:32 One of the biggest things that have changed my life is we have this Claude project all about our target customers.
0:04:37 So everything we know about them, what they like, what they don’t like, interviews, transcripts, all of that.
0:04:40 And I can just go ask them what they think about things.
0:04:46 And what’s interesting, Matt, is like I’ve gone and done that and I’ve also gone and run like big surveys.
0:04:50 The results are almost always very similar and it’s way cheaper, way faster.
0:04:55 So it’s just like, I feel like I have the pulse of feedback of like, are we doing something right?
0:04:57 Are we doing something that’s good?
0:05:01 Much better now in the AI era than like in the pre-AI era.
0:05:05 And then I just personally feel just like 10x more productive.
0:05:06 Right.
0:05:11 Like I just feel like I can get so much more done in terms of research, packaging.
0:05:13 I love Perplexity Comet.
0:05:20 I haven’t talked to you since it came out, so I don’t know if you’re a big Comet person, but like I have all these shortcuts made of Perplexity Comet to just basically,
0:05:24 shortcut, like just how I consume package and process information.
0:05:26 And that’s like, that’s been a game changer for me.
0:05:34 Do you have any other like little productivity hacks that you’ve learned with AI that have really sped up other areas?
0:05:44 I think my big productivity hacks are like make a custom GPT or cloud project that’s a prompt engineer so that you can always generate really good prompts.
0:05:50 And so you just get way better first or second shot output of anything you’re doing with the frontier model.
0:05:52 Like that is for sure.
0:05:57 The second thing is AI taking over just like repetitive tasks.
0:06:01 Like the fact that Comet can take over my browser and fill out forms and do all of that.
0:06:14 And anything I know I have to do repeated, I can just make a shortcut for and give it instructions and the context and then just bang it out and it’ll have it go off and do it a tab while I’m doing something else.
0:06:21 And then the biggest thing is that Comet can do things across tabs so I can like do multiple documents or things at once.
0:06:25 And that has proven to be like a game changer as well.
0:06:28 And just like the workflow of how I get stuff done.
0:06:28 I love it.
0:06:39 One thing I’ve just gotten into and this is very, very recent for me is I just started using Whisperflow where you press down a key on your keyboard and you just talk into your microphone.
0:06:44 And it’s almost like the old dragon naturally speaking kind of thing, right?
0:06:47 Where you can just sort of like dictate and it will type for you.
0:06:53 But what Whisperflow does is it actually listens to you and then cleans up what you just said.
0:06:55 So if you repeat yourself, it cuts out the repeats.
0:07:00 If you say uh or um or have pauses or any of that kind of stuff, it cuts it all out.
0:07:07 It sort of listens, understands the intention, and then writes up the text in a sort of cleaned up format.
0:07:10 And so I’ve actually started using that when I’m like writing content.
0:07:16 Sometimes I’ll use it inside of ChatGPT and just sort of brain dump my thoughts and then have it respond to me.
0:07:19 I’ve gotten into like the whole vibe coding thing, right?
0:07:24 When I’m using Cloud Code, I’m in there just speaking what I want the app to do and it’s interpreting it.
0:07:32 So that to me has been a pretty big sort of change for me just in the last like week or so that I found really, really beneficial.
0:07:35 I’ve been using Willow Voice, which is a similar product.
0:07:38 I’m an investor in Willow, so I’m biased when you use them versus Whisper.
0:07:43 But like the use case they and the other tools out there solve, to your point, is freaking magic.
0:07:45 First of all, it’s so much faster.
0:07:53 You save a ton of time and you can do it in whatever window you are in because they have access to like your system controls on your Mac, at least.
0:07:54 Yeah.
0:07:55 I’m a Mac user.
0:07:58 So ChatGPT, Slack, Gmail, all of those things.
0:08:02 It has been a massive productivity changer for me.
0:08:12 I think Voice AI in terms of like dictation is probably one of the most slept on categories of tools overall in terms of just like instant productivity gain.
0:08:13 Yeah, totally agree.
0:08:16 Now, you’ve mentioned Claude a few times.
0:08:17 Yeah.
0:08:20 Do you have like a preference between Claude or ChatGPT?
0:08:22 Do you use one over the other for different things?
0:08:24 What’s your approach to using the different models?
0:08:26 So it’s a good question.
0:08:33 I use Perplexity Max a bunch when I’m using Comet, and then I’ll pick between the different models and everything in there, depending on what I’m doing.
0:08:44 But when you talk about the core frontier models, Gemini, Claude, and OpenAI, Google, I’m using VO and now Nano Banana, like their image and video stuff is really good.
0:08:49 Claude is the most like enterprise of all of the models.
0:08:55 So if you need to collaborate with other people, like I think Claude projects are just so superior for collaboration.
0:09:03 I still think Claude is just really great at like spinning up an artifact and visualizing something or coding something really quickly.
0:09:06 So I use Claude basically for those use cases.
0:09:09 And then ChatGPT, I tend to think is better for search.
0:09:12 I like its deep research a little bit better.
0:09:12 Yeah.
0:09:17 And for some reason, I just really like the Canvas feature in ChatGPT.
0:09:27 Like if I’m writing, sometimes I will even take a draft from Claude, put it in ChatGPT, and then like edit with the AI within the Canvas feature.
0:09:36 There’s something about that kind of word processor, but like highlight a part of it and edit and get feedback or research with AI that I find very useful.
0:09:37 Yeah, yeah.
0:09:38 I would agree with that.
0:09:43 I would say with Claude, I really think there’s no better model for coding still.
0:09:48 Even now GPT-5 is out and the benchmarks show it should be better at coding.
0:09:52 My own experience, I’m still getting better results from Claude when I’m coding.
0:09:55 So, you know, the benchmarks to me mean less and less these days.
0:10:04 Yeah, and I think artifacts, even if you’re not like a hardcore coder, if you’re just a lightweight coder like me, artifacts is just an elegant way to like bring that code to life.
0:10:05 Right, right.
0:10:14 Real quick, like you just heard, the loop marketing playbook has just dropped and honestly, it’s a game changer.
0:10:16 Growth isn’t what it used to be.
0:10:21 AI has flipped the script and loop marketing is going to be your competitive advantage.
0:10:31 KIPP is giving you over 100 prompts to start your own loop marketing journey so you can differentiate your brand voice, evolve in real time, and future-proof your strategy.
0:10:35 Get it right now. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description.
0:10:37 Now, let’s get back to the show.
0:10:42 So, I want to ask you about the whole jobs question of AI, right?
0:10:42 Sure.
0:10:50 There’s obviously a lot of fear about losing jobs and that’s sort of some of the biggest pushback that the like general public has around AI, right?
0:10:52 Is that it’s going to take our jobs.
0:11:00 As a CMO of a, you know, a mega company like HubSpot, how are you approaching, you know, getting the team on board with AI?
0:11:04 So, I think AI adoption, there is some fear around it, right?
0:11:08 It’s like, oh, well, am I going to like automate myself out of a job?
0:11:08 Right.
0:11:17 And look, the best thing I have read probably in the last three years is the article by Paki McCormick called Super Intelligence Abundance.
0:11:25 And the whole thesis of that article, which it seems like by your smile you might have read, is that like, as we can do more, humans just consume more.
0:11:28 Like, we have an endless ability to consume.
0:11:30 I’ll give you like a very practical example.
0:11:33 AI video is getting really good, right?
0:11:34 You’ve used it.
0:11:35 It’s getting really good.
0:11:49 However, I can go and make the same brand creative ad that I might run on YouTube, for example, for a few hundred dollars versus hundreds of thousands of dollars because I don’t have to hire actors, a director, do a photo shoot, and everything, right?
0:11:52 Does that mean that I don’t need those people anymore?
0:11:53 No.
0:12:08 What it actually means is I actually now want to go make 300, 3,000 different really hyper-customized targeted brand ads for different markets, for different segments of my business because people are going to respond better to them.
0:12:16 I’ll still spend the same amount of money, if not maybe even more money because I’m getting better results, but I’m going to spend it in a different way.
0:12:25 So I think the challenge with this is there are going to be some roles where you just need less humans in those roles.
0:12:33 But overall, you’re still going to need just as many people is my hypothesis in all this because you’re going to want to do more and you’re going to get better results.
0:12:39 And that’s what we’re seeing is we’re getting a lot better results and when you get better results, you don’t go into cost-cutting mode.
0:12:43 You don’t say like, hey, I want to spend less doing this thing.
0:12:47 You’re like, no, I want to get as much of that value or that revenue as I possibly can, right?
0:12:49 So I think that’s what’s happening.
0:12:52 I think some people are just going to have to do some skill transformation.
0:12:59 And if you’re just dead set in doing one very specific job, I think the next few years will be hard.
0:13:04 Like, for example, like translation, we know has a bunch of product market fit with AI.
0:13:16 So like if you’re somebody who used to be a translation person, you probably need to move into more of like a native content creation with AI role versus just manual translation, for example.
0:13:18 Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
0:13:25 I almost see it as like every individual inside of an organization becomes much more scalable than they used to be, right?
0:13:33 Like every individual is going to be so much more capable of outputting and doing a lot more with the same amount of effort they’re currently putting in, right?
0:13:42 Nobody’s asking you to do a ton more work, but you’re able to get a lot more done with the sort of existing amount of effort that you’re putting in.
0:13:45 Exactly. And that’s where we’re at.
0:13:58 And I find the best individuals, the best teams right now have the right balance of like, I’ve really embraced AI, but I also know that AI needs a lot of context, support, help and guidance for me as a human.
0:14:06 And when those things come together, we can create a new, better business result than either one of us could individually, right?
0:14:07 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
0:14:09 Let’s talk about marketing.
0:14:15 How have you seen like marketing costs shift with AI now in the picture?
0:14:19 Obviously, we’re seeing like a huge overhaul in the way people do marketing.
0:14:23 SEO is becoming less of an effective marketing strategy.
0:14:26 Like where is like the marketing spend going?
0:14:29 Where is the marketing spend sort of disappearing?
0:14:29 Yeah.
0:14:35 If you want to have a nice cry, go to like the marketing subreddit, the SEO subreddit.
0:14:40 There’s like a bunch of you just go take a toll through the online communities in the marketing world.
0:14:43 It’s kind of bleak times and there’s good reason for that, Matt.
0:14:52 It’s because AI has disrupted a lot of how traditional marketing worked because now answers are free everywhere, thanks to LLMs.
0:14:57 And so companies used to get a lot of traffic to the websites by providing answers on their website.
0:14:59 Google would index them.
0:14:59 People would come.
0:15:02 So you’re having people search traffic kind of go down.
0:15:07 And so you’re seeing a big drop in click through rates from Google and traffic from Google.
0:15:12 So that’s a challenge that a lot of people are facing because people are living more in these LLMs.
0:15:15 They’re also just like visiting your site less.
0:15:22 Like if I can ask chat GPT all my questions, I don’t have to go to your website and look through 10 different pages of your website.
0:15:23 So you’re getting less visits there.
0:15:25 So that’s another challenge.
0:15:29 Because people are getting less visits, they’re spending more money on ads, right?
0:15:30 Because they want to make up the difference.
0:15:31 It’s like, oh, I lost these visits over here.
0:15:32 I want to get more visits.
0:15:35 Well, all these online ad models are auction models.
0:15:39 So like the more competition, the more expensive they’re going to be.
0:15:41 So ad prices are going up.
0:15:43 And then so then people are sending more email.
0:15:45 And so email is becoming flooded.
0:15:53 There’s this like basically chain of effect that has happened because AI has changed how people work, learn, and interact online.
0:16:01 And what I’m here to tell everybody is I’ve been through the trough of despair on this over the last, I would say, year and a half to two years.
0:16:04 And we’ve lost tons of visits, tons of traffic, all of it.
0:16:05 I’ve seen all of it.
0:16:09 The beauty is with this change comes a lot of opportunity.
0:16:12 And we can talk a little bit about what that opportunity looks like.
0:16:27 But that, I actually think that there has never been a more exciting time to do marketing, to be a business owner who cares about marketing, who wants to grow their business through marketing, because there’s a bunch of new stuff that is on the horizon that creates a bunch of new opportunity.
0:16:28 Right, right.
0:16:33 There’s almost like a new term that’s popped up, and I’ve heard it with different acronyms, right?
0:16:44 I’ve heard like AIO and AIEO and AEO, basically optimizing for the artificial intelligence and the large language models instead of the search engines.
0:16:57 So that’s going to be a really interesting field that I think is going to pop up as people just, in my opinion, SEO in the past, for lack of a better explanation, was kind of like figuring out how to game the search engines, right?
0:17:02 You’re trying to figure out how do I do the thing that the search engines want to see to get my rankings to the top.
0:17:05 And I feel like we’re starting to see the same sort of thing in AI now.
0:17:11 Like, what sort of things do I need to do to get the AI to reference me when those questions are asked?
0:17:15 Whether that leads to more traffic or not, that’ll still be kind of to be determined.
0:17:16 So there’s a few things.
0:17:18 I’m in the AEO camp, for what it’s worth.
0:17:20 AI engine optimization, AEO.
0:17:27 But, and the metrics there look different, because you’re looking at like how many times are you mentioned for the kind of question.
0:17:30 The questions your buyers would look at, and it’s not just about visits.
0:17:31 It’s definitely very different.
0:17:36 But the foundations of traditional search engine optimization still matter.
0:17:43 Like, if you don’t have public information on your website or on YouTube or wherever, the LLM can’t access it.
0:17:47 They don’t know that you would be relevant for that person on that topic, right?
0:17:52 So you still have to tell great public stories, have a great website.
0:17:56 And, Matt, one of the things I would tell you is that it’s a lot more instant than it used to be.
0:18:00 Like, I remember like 10 years ago, I’d be like, oh, do this inbound marketing thing.
0:18:02 Create a blog, write some articles.
0:18:08 And, like, in, like, six months, Google will finally index you, and you’ll get ranking, and you’ll get a bunch of traffic.
0:18:21 And now it’s like, if you and I were to make a video on this, like, very trending AI topic today and publish it, we would be cited and be getting views to that video almost instantaneously if it was, like, a big, important topic.
0:18:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.
0:18:25 I’ve noticed that myself.
0:18:32 I’ve put out YouTube videos and then a week later been asking perplexity a question, and it’s referencing the video that I made a week ago.
0:18:33 Same, same.
0:18:34 Yeah, yeah, it’s crazy.
0:18:41 I do feel like a lot of the sort of philosophies behind SEO will probably still apply to AEO, right?
0:18:43 So I’ve been doing digital marketing for 16 years now.
0:18:45 This has been, like, my full-time gig.
0:18:55 And the thing I used to tell people when it comes to SEO is quality content, like, just making stuff people want to read and want to share is the trick to SEO, right?
0:18:59 You know, you get people to land on the page if they stay on the page for a long time and read your article.
0:19:01 That’s a signal to Google that they liked it.
0:19:16 Well, a lot of these engines, right, when you’re using perplexity, when you’re using ChatGPT and Cloud and all these tools that have access to search the web, they’re actually still tapping the APIs of, you know, Google or Bing or whatever the search engines are.
0:19:24 So the thing that got you to rank with SEO is still going to be the thing that probably gets you to mention in the artificial intelligence models as well.
0:19:35 Well, when you have a period of transformation of anything, right, whether it’s AI technology, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s anything, you’re sometimes tempted to throw the old out.
0:19:42 And I think what you and I are saying is what people have been doing in, like, traditional search engine optimization, for example, it’s still relevant.
0:19:45 There’s just some new stuff you have to do on top of it.
0:19:49 So you’re not throwing it out, but you have to build upon it.
0:19:51 And I think that’s what the exciting opportunity is.
0:19:57 You’ve built these really good skills over the last five to ten years, and now you just need to build some new skills to take them to the next level.
0:19:58 Yeah, yeah.
0:20:00 So I want to actually get into the marketing.
0:20:02 Let’s get into, like, the meat of it.
0:20:09 I know you guys have the Loot Marketing Playbook, which I believe is dropping the day this episode is dropping.
0:20:12 So you should be able to access it now as this episode goes live.
0:20:17 But one of the things you mentioned in the playbook is that taste beats tactics.
0:20:19 I’m curious if you can sort of explain what that means.
0:20:32 Okay, so I’ve been spending the last 18 months trying to get out of the trough of despair and get into this new happy land and then figuring out, can I help all the other marketers come with me to this new happier land?
0:20:34 And a bunch of us put our heads together.
0:20:36 We came up with a new framework to do marketing.
0:20:37 We call it Loot Marketing.
0:20:44 And part of that framework is the last ten years of marketing were very mechanical, Matt.
0:20:48 Like, it was like, oh, can I tweak my little copy on my Facebook ad?
0:20:53 Can I change my link mapping to get more search visits?
0:20:54 It’s very tactical.
0:21:01 Now, AI helps you automate so much of the tactics that, like, tactics don’t really differentiate you much more.
0:21:04 Taste actually differentiates you.
0:21:12 And taste always feels like, to I think most people, this, like, ambiguous thing of, like, yeah, that person has good taste or that person has bad taste.
0:21:28 But all taste really is, to me, and I think it’s true, is somebody or some group of people who have looked at and consumed such a high volume of information on a specific topic that they know what’s good and bad and can articulate why it’s good and bad, right?
0:21:32 And that is what your customers need now.
0:21:36 So if you’re a company out there, it’s not enough to just, like, put out boring stuff.
0:21:41 You have to say, hey, I know what my customers actually care about.
0:21:43 I know what they think is cool.
0:21:47 I know what channels they work and consume information in.
0:21:54 And because of that, I’m going to make sure I live and play and tell my stories in a way that’s going to really, like, work for them.
0:22:04 And I’m going to get away from the knob and dial turning and more into helping my customers know, like, I deeply care about them and know what they think is cool and interesting.
0:22:05 Yeah, yeah.
0:22:13 That’s really interesting because I remember several years ago when I was doing a lot of, you know, building funnels and landing pages and all of that kind of stuff.
0:22:23 You had the Russell Brunson’s of the world going out there and saying, hey, if you change your button from yellow to green, you’re going to boost your conversions by, like, 3%.
0:22:26 And, you know, everybody was trying to do these little, like, micro-optimizations.
0:22:33 But now in a world of AI, we can split test that stuff at scale and pretty much anybody can do that kind of thing, like, right out of the gate.
0:22:33 Exactly.
0:22:42 And what’s wild, though, is, like, for you, right, like, I could go run a deep research project and know more about you than I could have ever known before, right?
0:22:58 So then subsequently, I can know that about a group of customers, which means I can intimately know what they want and I can give that to them instead of guessing that they might like a color button difference because somewhere in their subconscious, they’re, like, more inclined to think that’s a better option, right?
0:22:59 Right, right, right, right.
0:23:00 Exactly.
0:23:13 And I mean, you know, full disclosure, I’ll admit it, whenever I do a podcast episode, I’m interviewing somebody, I always run their name through deep research, through perplexity, through ChatGPT, and pull up as much as I can about that person.
0:23:16 And that’s at everybody’s fingertips now, right?
0:23:25 Like, even in the podcasting content creation world, the ability to get just tons of information on any topic, any person, anything you want is available to everybody.
0:23:28 But the difference is really that taste, right?
0:23:32 Like, figuring out, all right, which of these topics do we drill in on?
0:23:39 Which of these things do we think our specific demographic, our specific audience is going to be interested in us talking about, right?
0:23:49 That information is more of a sort of taste, a sort of a learned skill by going through the motions, but anybody has access to all of the information that we have access to now.
0:23:50 Yeah.
0:23:58 One of the big things that you have to understand in this next wave of marketing is that there’s information symmetry, that everybody has access to everything.
0:24:01 It used to be that companies had more information than the people buying the stuff.
0:24:04 Now everybody kind of has access to the same thing.
0:24:08 And there’s new opportunities that come with that access to information, like you’re saying.
0:24:12 That sort of leads perfectly into my next question.
0:24:19 It’s how do brands actually stand out when anybody can create like really pretty decent content with AI?
0:24:23 And now almost anybody can create little like software apps.
0:24:26 I wouldn’t say like somebody can go and make a clone of HubSpot, right?
0:24:31 But somebody can go and create like a little software app that they can turn around and market and sell.
0:24:35 It just seems like it’s so democratized now.
0:24:38 How does somebody stand out when anybody can do that stuff?
0:24:43 So yeah, so there’s a few ways that I think you can stand out to answer your question very directly.
0:24:44 Even just use the web app example.
0:24:47 If anybody can vibe code an app and sell it, that’s great.
0:24:53 But if I’m a brand and if I have a real business, can I vibe code an app and give it away for free?
0:25:01 Because I don’t need to monetize it because I can use it to provide another layer of value to enrich my core product and service offering, right?
0:25:03 And so like that’s what we’re talking about.
0:25:09 We’re talking about using AI to do the next order level of tactics.
0:25:20 And how I kind of think about this is can you use AI to create really good campaign assets that are like really relevant to your audience?
0:25:31 And like I said, can you use things like a cloud project or what have you to basically simulate a customer and get real-time feedback from that simulation so that you actually know it’s good and it’s going to work?
0:25:40 The other thing that we don’t talk enough about with AI is the biggest challenge in marketing has always been the guessing game.
0:25:47 Oh, I’m going to try to segment my audience, guess what they want, and send my best guess to these different groups of people, right?
0:25:48 Like that’s been marketing.
0:25:50 Now, I don’t have to guess.
0:25:53 I can say I know specific things about each of these individual people.
0:26:05 And based on what I know, AI will create a custom message for that person that is relevant to them that’s our best guess not just for a group of people but for that one person.
0:26:21 And it turns out in doing that, like Matt, we’ve been doing that at HubSpot, our conversion rates have gone up 100%, 200%, 300%, 400% because it turns out it’s a way better experience to have AI guessing just about me than just to like lump me into this broad swath of humanity, right?
0:26:22 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:26:23 No, I mean, I’ve seen it firsthand, right?
0:26:26 Like HubSpot is one of my sponsors on my YouTube channel.
0:26:30 I think we’ve been working together for almost two years now on the YouTube channel.
0:26:35 And I have custom playbooks with HubSpot that are like Matt Wolf’s custom prompt playbooks.
0:26:44 And so when I’m doing sponsors on my channel, a lot of times I’m shouting out a playbook with my name, my face on it that we know is going to be super, super relevant to that audience.
0:26:47 Yeah, because it’s like, oh, they have a connection with you.
0:26:53 And so we’ve already like gotten on that same level of commonality with them and they’re going to be just from the jump more interested.
0:26:54 Yeah, yeah.
0:26:55 And I love what you said.
0:26:58 So there’s a marketer you’re probably familiar, Frank Kern, right?
0:27:02 He’s probably one of the most well-known internet marketers, right?
0:27:04 He had a concept called moving the free line, right?
0:27:12 He used to teach this concept of moving the free line where, you know, at one point the free thing you gave out was like a blog post and then you would sell them off the blog post.
0:27:15 And then it became like e-books and people were giving away e-books and that’s what you were selling.
0:27:28 And the value of the thing you’re giving away for free, you want to constantly keep on moving that up so that the free thing gets more and more and more valuable so that people see, well, if this is what you’re giving away for free, well, then the paid thing must be really, really feasible.
0:27:34 So, like, I feel like AI really, really increases people’s ability to move the free line, right?
0:27:42 Now people can just create a little software app and give that away for free before selling them on the bigger product they’re trying to sell.
0:27:53 Yeah, like, look, even if you’re selling consultant services, you can give away a lightweight app that just shows how your unique perspective and insights on the problem, right?
0:27:59 Like, there’s a lot of leverage that comes with just demonstrating value in a very clear, easy way.
0:28:00 Yeah, absolutely.
0:28:05 So, with this playbook you guys are putting out, there’s what I think you call the dynamic loop and it’s got four steps.
0:28:08 Express, tailor, amplify, evolve.
0:28:12 I’m wondering if maybe we can kind of go through and break down each of those four steps real quick.
0:28:13 Yeah, of course.
0:28:15 So, everything will be on loopmarketing.com.
0:28:19 So, if I talk fast or if you get confused, go check out loopmarketing.com.
0:28:27 But, yeah, so we call this Loop Marketing and it’s basically a four-stage playbook that, Matt, I was out to solve this problem.
0:28:37 If you do marketing right now at a business, your CEO comes to you and says, hey, I need you to, like, AI-ify our marketing and make our marketing AI first and get way better results.
0:28:38 Go and do that.
0:28:39 And everybody’s like, well, I don’t know.
0:28:40 How the hell do I do that?
0:28:43 Like, what does that actually look like?
0:28:47 And so, I want to give people a very easy set of things that they can go do.
0:28:50 So, you kind of went through the four stages.
0:28:51 The first step is Express.
0:28:53 And that is literally just like, hey, I got this idea.
0:29:03 And now, thanks to AI, I can get that idea out in the world really quickly at a really good quality because I can use Nano Banana, VO3, HubSpot.
0:29:08 You can use a bunch of different things to basically go from idea to assets or campaigns really quickly.
0:29:09 And that’s really powerful.
0:29:13 And you can then subsequently run more campaigns and learn faster.
0:29:20 The next thing we have is tailoring, which is just what we were talking about a couple minutes ago, which is like, how do you use AI to create personal message?
0:29:27 So, it’s like the difference between, you know, going to a department store and buying a suit in the men’s section versus like going to a tailor and the tailor makes your suit.
0:29:29 Like, man, tailor makes your suit.
0:29:30 That’s fancy.
0:29:32 That fits in a whole different way.
0:29:36 And that’s kind of what getting these very personalized messages is about.
0:29:42 And that might be in the form of ads, email, SMS, WhatsApp.
0:29:45 But those types of tailored messages perform much better.
0:29:50 You need to send less of them to get the same level or better level of engagements.
0:29:52 And that’s like something anybody can go and do tomorrow.
0:30:00 We just rolled out a really awesome email AI personalization product today at Inbound when the show is coming out.
0:30:01 So, like, that’s a way to do it for email.
0:30:03 But you can do it across all those channels.
0:30:11 Then the next step here is all about amplification, which is like, how do you take that message and get it out to people, get it out to the world?
0:30:20 And the biggest thing that’s changed there, as we talked about earlier, is AEO and all of the crazy things that are happening with how people are researching and interacting.
0:30:21 But there’s also influencers.
0:30:24 Like you said, like, we work with you at HubSpot.
0:30:25 You work with other brands and everything.
0:30:33 And there’s never been a better, more cost-effective way to reach your target audience than partnering with content creators and influencers.
0:30:35 It’s an incredible opportunity.
0:30:48 And AI actually just makes that identification, like the workflow of creating the content, partnering, working so much easier now that it’s actually available to all these businesses.
0:30:54 And then the last step we have is Evolve, which is basically, it used to be, Matt, you’ve done marketing.
0:30:58 You would run a marketing campaign and then you do your campaign retrospectives.
0:31:03 You remember those where, like, maybe a week, two weeks, three weeks later, you’d look back and be like, all right, how’d this thing do?
0:31:05 Well, now you don’t have to wait anymore.
0:31:12 Because these AI tools make reporting and insights so easy, you can kind of see how it’s going in real time, make adjustments in real time.
0:31:19 And even once it’s done, with the HubSpot and Cloud Connector, I can just, like, get information into my Cloud.
0:31:25 I can have artifacts, like, build custom charts and everything for me based on the questions I have about this specific campaign.
0:31:30 And I can make decisions instantly around how I make the next one better.
0:31:35 So that’s why I think of it as a loop, because you kind of close off with, like, oh, I’m learning these things.
0:31:36 Then I’ll start all over again.
0:31:38 But this time I’ve got, like, more insights.
0:31:40 And those insights kind of compound over time.
0:31:45 Now my marketing is just going to get better and better every week and every month because of that compounding.
0:31:46 Right.
0:31:48 You mentioned this sort of email thing that you guys are coming out with.
0:32:00 I saw on another podcast that you were on recently, as part of my perplexity research, that you guys recently increased your email engagement by upwards of 400%.
0:32:02 Is that using what you’re talking about?
0:32:03 Like, what does that look like?
0:32:04 What is…
0:32:04 Yeah, yeah.
0:32:07 So it’s basically we productize what we were doing, Matt.
0:32:13 And the initial, like, beta of this was we created prompts.
0:32:18 We enriched the people we’re emailing with data about, hey, this is their job.
0:32:19 This is their business.
0:32:21 These are the things that we think they would be interested in.
0:32:27 Then we passed that data and a prompt through to OpenAI, through the API, to generate an email.
0:32:31 You know, the prompt is basically, like, this is the thing we want to communicate to them.
0:32:32 This is the data.
0:32:34 This is what we want this email to look like.
0:32:39 And OpenAI will write that email just on a one-to-one basis, push it back into HubSpot, and we’ll send it.
0:32:47 And so now we’ve just done that so you don’t have to do the API and all of the crazy work that we had to do when we were first, like, validating the idea, right?
0:32:50 So does it feed in some information from, like, the HubSpot CRM?
0:32:51 So the email…
0:32:55 You’re using CRM data to know, to make that email way more personal.
0:32:56 Gotcha.
0:33:00 So everybody was getting a slightly different email than everybody else, right?
0:33:03 And it’s even a little bit more than slightly different.
0:33:09 Like, if you look at some of the examples, like, I looked at one for, like, a coffee shop owner, and it had, like, coffee puns throughout.
0:33:17 You know, like, it was, like, very contextual, where you would be like, oh, no, like, somebody wrote this email just to me.
0:33:19 It wasn’t like personalization tokens.
0:33:23 It felt like, oh, somebody really put some thought and wrote this just to me.
0:33:29 But you were able to do that because you had good data, and then the AI was able to take it from there and make it really compelling.
0:33:30 Yeah, yeah.
0:33:40 So what advice would you have for, you know, brand new creators, brand new entrepreneurs that are just now sort of building something from scratch?
0:33:44 Like, how would you approach it if you were giving advice and somebody just starting to build something now?
0:33:48 Because I do think there’s a lot of people that are like, well, what’s the point, right?
0:33:50 Because, you know, AI can do a lot of this stuff.
0:33:53 If I build a business, it’s hard to build the moats, right?
0:33:55 So what advice would you give to somebody starting today?
0:33:57 Well, I’m going to answer that.
0:34:03 The first thing, though, Sam Altman has a statement that I very much agree with, that the more you use AI, the dumber you realize it is.
0:34:06 You know, like, he said that in different flavors.
0:34:08 That’s a paraphrase of over the years.
0:34:13 And I wonder if you agree with me that the more you use AI, you understand its limitations.
0:34:14 Definitely.
0:34:14 Right?
0:34:18 And I’m here to tell everybody there’s massive limitations still.
0:34:28 And some of those limitations are actually even just around, like, the software, the data connections, things that are outside of the core models that still just take a lot of time and effort to do.
0:34:31 It’s not that we’re not going to get there, but it’s not like we’re going to get there tomorrow.
0:34:33 It’s going to take years to get there.
0:34:37 First of all, I don’t think anyone should have the attitude of, like, oh, my gosh, I should just give up.
0:34:39 AI is going to do all of this, and I don’t have a chance.
0:34:45 And so if you, let’s say you agree with that, that, hey, all right, I want to start this business because AI is not going to eat my lunch.
0:34:47 Then it’s like, what do I actually do?
0:34:54 And the thing you actually do is, can you know your prospective customer base better than anybody else?
0:34:56 This kind of goes back to that topic of taste.
0:35:01 Can you just understand their problems, their pain, what they need more deeply than anybody else?
0:35:03 Because I don’t care how good a model gets.
0:35:10 They’re never going to know the deep pain of the 5,000 people you’re out there trying to help or whatever your market is, right?
0:35:18 And if you do that, and then you just obsess about building a product to solve that pain, as well as marketing.
0:35:25 So it’s like content storytelling around that pain, traditional search engines, but that now are AEO optimization.
0:35:35 Maybe you build a little lightweight web app on, you know, Claude artifacts or with Claude code that you’re using to help demonstrate that you understand what they need.
0:35:37 Like, that’s what I would do.
0:35:45 And I think you will find that you get deep, deep traction quickly if you’re just like very focused on the market you’re serving and understanding their pain.
0:35:46 Yeah, yeah.
0:35:48 There’s two things I want to say about what you just said there.
0:35:51 One, going back to like finding the limitations.
0:35:59 It’s funny because I just saw a tweet this morning from a friend of mine named Riley Brown, who’s building an app called the Vibe Code app, I believe.
0:36:02 And he posted a tweet today saying that he’s hiring.
0:36:04 He’s looking for video editors.
0:36:12 He’s looking for storytellers and writers and all of these people to help him with his content marketing strategy for his new app.
0:36:15 And like half the replies are people going, well, you’re an AI guy.
0:36:16 Why do you hire anybody?
0:36:18 Why don’t you just hire AI to do this stuff for you?
0:36:21 And it’s like, I mean, there’s the limitation, right?
0:36:24 Like I wouldn’t trust AI to go edit my videos for me yet.
0:36:29 I wouldn’t trust AI to go and actually do a lot of the actual chopping and the motion graphics.
0:36:32 There’s still a lot of limitations in that area yet.
0:36:41 But I almost feel like from the general public, the 30,000 foot view of people that just kind of see AI as a concept, they believe like, hey, I could just do anything for you.
0:36:43 Why are you trying to hire for this?
0:36:45 I thought that was interesting.
0:36:46 I think it’s super interesting.
0:36:52 And to build on that, the one thing I would say to all of those people is that humans are social creatures.
0:36:54 I’m fascinated by two studies.
0:37:02 One is the Harvard Longitudinal Study that showed of the people who lived the longest and had the happiest lives, it was because they had the best social connections.
0:37:05 And then the next, the most recently, there’s been a different study.
0:37:15 I was just listening to the Plain English podcast by Derek Thompson about this, where people who have superior memories, who are less likely to get Alzheimer’s, dementia, all of those things.
0:37:25 There’s been findings that the part of their brain that is developed by intense frequency of social interaction was just far more developed than everybody else.
0:37:26 They just had way more social interaction.
0:37:44 And so if you’re going to build a great business and you’re going to sell a product or a service and you think you can do it without that social connection, without the humanity, without the need for those people to tell the story, be the face of those stories, then I don’t think you understand people that well.
0:37:45 Right, right.
0:37:46 That’s totally true.
0:37:51 I mean, I feel like when you’re building a business, it would be really tough to just do it on your own, right?
0:37:54 Even with my own YouTube video, I have a producer who I bounce ideas off with.
0:37:57 I’ve got three different editors who help me edit my videos.
0:38:02 You know, we’ve got Darren here in the background who’s helping us make sure this podcast comes out really good, right?
0:38:06 Like, I feel like I would probably fail if I wasn’t working with other people.
0:38:07 I need that help.
0:38:08 I want the ideas to bounce.
0:38:09 I want that interaction.
0:38:15 I think that is so powerful to grow a business, and I don’t really feel like I get the same feeling with AI.
0:38:16 No, definitely not yet.
0:38:17 I don’t even think it’s close.
0:38:18 Yeah.
0:38:34 The other point I wanted to make about what we were just saying, too, is when it comes to, like, the advice of somebody just getting started, the advice that I find myself giving is that I don’t really feel like there’s a better time in history to rapidly sort of iterate and test things.
0:38:43 You can come up with an MVP of any software you want, run some Facebook or Google ads to it, and find out pretty damn quickly if it’s going to work or not.
0:38:46 And if it doesn’t, turn around and try something else, right?
0:38:55 This is the best time in history to make an MVP quickly, test it, and then when you find that thing, the thing that, okay, this is clicking with people.
0:38:58 This is getting people opting in for my free tool or whatever.
0:39:00 Okay, now maybe you’ve found your niche.
0:39:04 Let’s go in a little bit deeper on that, build it into something bigger, turn it into a business.
0:39:10 But I feel like this is the best time in history to, like, test stuff at scale.
0:39:11 Couldn’t agree more.
0:39:21 I’d even make the argument that if you are a curious person who likes to learn and you’re willing to, like, apply and take action on what you learn, that it’s almost impossible to not be financially successful now.
0:39:29 Like, if you just do something every day and learn about it every day, within, like, a year or two, you will probably have more money than you need.
0:39:30 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
0:39:37 There’s one sort of last quick rabbit hole I want to go down with you before we wrap up here, and it’s just following my own curiosity again.
0:39:44 Are there any AI tools or software platforms or things that just have you really excited that you’ve just been really impressed by lately?
0:39:45 You know what?
0:39:49 I think what Eric and the folks over at GenSpark do is very remarkable.
0:39:50 I’ve heard GenSpark.
0:39:53 I’ve heard that term flown around, but I actually haven’t tried it yet.
0:39:54 Okay, yeah.
0:39:57 So GenSpark, what they’re doing, Matt, is pretty remarkable.
0:39:59 They’re just building these very focused use cases.
0:40:06 I discovered them because they have a really good slide builder that, like, you can do a slide outline and create great presentations with it.
0:40:18 They just wrote out this AI designer that’s kind of like a true, like, AI-first version of Canva that can, like, make T-shirts or posters or kind of whatever you want to do.
0:40:21 But they have all these vertical AI apps.
0:40:22 I think there’s, like, 12 of them now.
0:40:24 And they’re just really good.
0:40:26 And, like, they’ve built a good user experience.
0:40:28 They’re still really early.
0:40:36 But, like, that is the one to me that I go back and use that nobody really talks a lot about that I think are doing, like, a real nice job.
0:40:37 Gotcha.
0:40:37 Yeah, yeah.
0:40:40 I’ve been hearing about GenSpark, I feel like, for a little while now.
0:40:44 And I remember going to the website and playing with it, like, I don’t know, maybe a year ago or something.
0:40:48 But I’m assuming it’s probably evolved quite a bit since then.
0:40:49 So I think it’s about time for me to go in there.
0:40:53 Try the designer and some of the new, the designer and the slide thing.
0:41:03 Like, if you just have GPT-5 make you a slide outline and then have it go build it in GenSpark, as long as you have, like, a creative style guide, tell it the colors and the fonts and all that kind of stuff, it does a really nice job.
0:41:04 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
0:41:05 I’ll have to go check that out.
0:41:09 And then so to sort of wrap this thing up, let’s wrap it up with the Loop Marketing playbook.
0:41:14 I mean, maybe give us the quick elevator pitch of why somebody would want it and then how do we go get it?
0:41:17 Okay, so you’re going to want to go to loopmarketing.com to get this playbook.
0:41:20 I think there’ll be a link down in the description below here.
0:41:23 But you’re going to want it because you’re frustrated with your marketing results.
0:41:26 Like, if you’re anybody, you’re not happy with where your marketing results are going.
0:41:33 And what I’m trying to do is give everybody a playbook of how to do and think about marketing in this post-AI era.
0:41:39 And it’ll give you something easy to communicate with your co-workers, your boss, everything about this is what we should be doing.
0:41:41 Here are the prompts, here are the apps, here are the tactics.
0:41:45 We didn’t even scratch the surface of what is available out there.
0:41:47 It’s a very robust playbook.
0:41:48 Go check it out.
0:41:50 And that’s what I recommend doing next.
0:41:50 Yeah, yeah.
0:41:51 I can attest as well.
0:41:52 I mean, I’ve seen the playbook.
0:41:55 It’s like tactics and steps, and there’s things that you can do.
0:42:00 And sometimes there are prompts, right, that you should just go and use that prompt to go take advantage of it.
0:42:04 But it’s trying to demystify, oh, what do I do with this AI stuff?
0:42:07 It’s like, go do these specific things, and this is how you do these specific things.
0:42:15 And they won’t be all of the stuff you do, but, man, is it a great place to start, and it’s a great way to shift how you’re doing your marketing in this post-AI world.
0:42:16 Very cool.
0:42:18 So, loop marketing, again, I’ve seen it.
0:42:19 It’s in-depth.
0:42:21 It’s a huge, huge resource.
0:42:22 Super awesome.
0:42:24 Well, awesome, Kip.
0:42:28 Thank you so much for hanging out, and, I mean, nerding out about this stuff with me.
0:42:29 It’s always a blast when I get to chat with you.
0:42:29 Thank you for having me.
0:42:30 This has been a blast.
0:42:31 It’s an honor.
0:42:31 Thank you so much.
0:42:40 If you remember just one thing from this episode, it’s that in an AI world where AI automates the tactics, what truly sets you apart is taste.
0:42:45 Your ability to deeply understand your audience and discover what actually resonates.
0:42:47 So, here’s your action item.
0:42:58 Take one piece of your current marketing, maybe an email, a landing page, or even a social post, and run it through an AI tool to tailor it for a specific audience segment.
0:43:01 See how personalization changes the response.
0:43:07 And don’t forget, you can grab HubSpot’s brand new Loop Marketing Playbook right now at the link in the description.
0:43:18 Also, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to like and subscribe on YouTube, follow us on Spotify, and share this episode with someone who wants to help build the future of marketing.
0:43:32 We’ve got more on the next wave in just a minute.
0:43:38 But first, I want to tell you about HubSpot for Startups’ State of AI in Startup Go-To-Market Report.
0:43:41 There are some really eye-opening findings here.
0:43:45 Get this, VCs are now making AI adoption a funding requirement.
0:43:53 Nearly half of venture-backed startups dedicate over 25% of their go-to market stack to AI tools, and it’s paying off big time.
0:43:55 72% see improved upsell rates.
0:43:59 37% have lower customer acquisition costs.
0:44:05 And some startups are scaling to $60 million in ARR with just 30 employees.
0:44:14 So, whether it’s customer service, sales, or marketing, AI is driving measurable ROI in hours, not months.
0:44:15 So, don’t get left behind.
0:44:18 Download HubSpot’s Free State of AI in Startup Go-To-Market Report now.
0:44:23 Seriously, stop what you’re doing right now, look at your podcast player, and click the link in this episode’s show notes.
0:44:27 See how AI-powered startups are growing faster while staying lean.
0:00:15 Today’s guest is Kip Bodnar, the Chief Marketing Officer over at HubSpot, one of the most influential marketing leaders in the world.
0:00:21 Kip is on the front lines of how AI is transforming marketing from boosting productivity and reshaping roles
0:00:26 to rethinking how brands actually stand out when everyone has the same tools.
0:00:32 We dive into HubSpot’s brand new loop marketing playbook, the bold idea that taste beats tactics,
0:00:38 and even how they drove a 400% increase in email engagement using AI personalization.
0:00:43 So if you’re a creator, entrepreneur, or just someone curious about the future of marketing in the AI era,
0:00:47 this episode is packed with insights you don’t want to miss.
0:00:50 So let’s jump right in with Kip Bodnar.
0:00:55 Hey Kip, thanks so much for joining us on the show today. I really appreciate you being here.
0:01:01 Matt, thanks so much for having me. I’m honored as a lover of all things AI to be on the next wave. Big deal.
0:01:03 Yeah, man, we’re going to definitely nerd out on this one.
0:01:11 So what I want to dive into to begin with is I want to learn a little bit about what the day-to-day looks like of a CMO over at HubSpot.
0:01:15 You know, I just kind of want to start by exploring my own curiosity a little bit here.
0:01:28 It’s a great question. When you’re like running a marketing org for a scaled company, what you’re really doing is figuring out what are the reactive problems I have to go and solve immediately that are super urgent.
0:01:33 And how do I not let those distract myself from like the big priorities that we have.
0:01:34 And so that’s at a high level.
0:01:45 But what that really means is I actually just like doing a lot of real marketing, making content, writing, copywriting, approving web pages, talking about campaigns.
0:01:53 We have a big event this week inbound, obviously, so prepping and planning and making sure, you know, everybody in attendance is having a great time.
0:01:58 You’re trying to basically tell a story across a big team of people.
0:01:59 It’s awesome. It’s a lot of fun.
0:02:03 And I get to use AI all the time, which makes my life very happy.
0:02:13 Yeah, yeah. And you’ve got the Marketing Against the Grain podcast with you and Kieran, which I almost feel like that podcast probably keeps you like finger on the pulse.
0:02:18 You’ve got to know what’s going on in the world of AI and tech because you’re jumping on a podcast this week to chat about it.
0:02:23 Yeah. What’s interesting, right, is I grew up in a household where both my parents were teachers.
0:02:28 And so I learned the most important lesson, which is like teaching something is how you learn something.
0:02:28 Right.
0:02:31 Right. And so that’s basically what doing a podcast is.
0:02:37 It’s like it’s a forcing function where like I got to record two days a week, which means I got to know what I’m going to talk about two different times a week,
0:02:41 which means I got to constantly be reading, using, learning.
0:02:49 And then I record and explain, which makes it like actually really set in and like make sure that I’ve actually grasped the concepts that I’m trying to figure out.
0:02:50 Yeah, a hundred percent.
0:02:52 I mean, I’ve experienced the same thing.
0:02:58 Turning around and making videos about it is why I know as much about AI as I do is I don’t want to get stuff wrong.
0:03:00 So I really want to dive deep and understand it.
0:03:01 That’s my honest question.
0:03:04 If you didn’t do videos, how much less do you think you would know?
0:03:07 I think it’s like for me, like at least no half is less.
0:03:08 Yeah.
0:03:08 Yeah.
0:03:11 You know, I would I would be way short of where I am.
0:03:15 Like making stuff in public is like a cheat code for learning.
0:03:16 Totally.
0:03:18 I’m in the same exact boat.
0:03:22 If I wasn’t making videos about it, you know, I’d probably still be nerding out about AI.
0:03:28 I’m still kind of like a tech guy, but I would probably be blind to like half of what’s going on.
0:03:28 Right.
0:03:32 I’d probably only be touching the tools and using the stuff that really, really benefits me.
0:03:36 And then anything where I’m like, I don’t see a benefit for my own purposes.
0:03:38 I probably wouldn’t be paying attention to.
0:03:42 But because I make content, I’m sort of watching the entire landscape.
0:03:43 That’s how I feel, too.
0:03:44 Yeah.
0:03:44 Yeah.
0:03:50 I’m curious when it comes to the actual CMO role, how has it evolved with the emergence of AI?
0:03:54 Are there things that you used to do as a CMO that you don’t have to anymore?
0:03:55 How has that role changed?
0:03:57 Well, I think there’s a lot that’s changed.
0:03:59 More that’s changed that stayed the same.
0:04:04 I mean, I think a massive amount has changed on like the personal productivity side, for example.
0:04:05 Right.
0:04:13 Like we have this amazing prompt that we put in Anthropic that goes and gets all of our Asana data and bakes me a custom dashboard.
0:04:14 Right.
0:04:24 So like I can get this amazing, super dialed in summary of how we’re doing at kind of any time live in a really great format.
0:04:25 So like that’s one example.
0:04:26 That’s pretty great.
0:04:32 One of the biggest things that have changed my life is we have this Claude project all about our target customers.
0:04:37 So everything we know about them, what they like, what they don’t like, interviews, transcripts, all of that.
0:04:40 And I can just go ask them what they think about things.
0:04:46 And what’s interesting, Matt, is like I’ve gone and done that and I’ve also gone and run like big surveys.
0:04:50 The results are almost always very similar and it’s way cheaper, way faster.
0:04:55 So it’s just like, I feel like I have the pulse of feedback of like, are we doing something right?
0:04:57 Are we doing something that’s good?
0:05:01 Much better now in the AI era than like in the pre-AI era.
0:05:05 And then I just personally feel just like 10x more productive.
0:05:06 Right.
0:05:11 Like I just feel like I can get so much more done in terms of research, packaging.
0:05:13 I love Perplexity Comet.
0:05:20 I haven’t talked to you since it came out, so I don’t know if you’re a big Comet person, but like I have all these shortcuts made of Perplexity Comet to just basically,
0:05:24 shortcut, like just how I consume package and process information.
0:05:26 And that’s like, that’s been a game changer for me.
0:05:34 Do you have any other like little productivity hacks that you’ve learned with AI that have really sped up other areas?
0:05:44 I think my big productivity hacks are like make a custom GPT or cloud project that’s a prompt engineer so that you can always generate really good prompts.
0:05:50 And so you just get way better first or second shot output of anything you’re doing with the frontier model.
0:05:52 Like that is for sure.
0:05:57 The second thing is AI taking over just like repetitive tasks.
0:06:01 Like the fact that Comet can take over my browser and fill out forms and do all of that.
0:06:14 And anything I know I have to do repeated, I can just make a shortcut for and give it instructions and the context and then just bang it out and it’ll have it go off and do it a tab while I’m doing something else.
0:06:21 And then the biggest thing is that Comet can do things across tabs so I can like do multiple documents or things at once.
0:06:25 And that has proven to be like a game changer as well.
0:06:28 And just like the workflow of how I get stuff done.
0:06:28 I love it.
0:06:39 One thing I’ve just gotten into and this is very, very recent for me is I just started using Whisperflow where you press down a key on your keyboard and you just talk into your microphone.
0:06:44 And it’s almost like the old dragon naturally speaking kind of thing, right?
0:06:47 Where you can just sort of like dictate and it will type for you.
0:06:53 But what Whisperflow does is it actually listens to you and then cleans up what you just said.
0:06:55 So if you repeat yourself, it cuts out the repeats.
0:07:00 If you say uh or um or have pauses or any of that kind of stuff, it cuts it all out.
0:07:07 It sort of listens, understands the intention, and then writes up the text in a sort of cleaned up format.
0:07:10 And so I’ve actually started using that when I’m like writing content.
0:07:16 Sometimes I’ll use it inside of ChatGPT and just sort of brain dump my thoughts and then have it respond to me.
0:07:19 I’ve gotten into like the whole vibe coding thing, right?
0:07:24 When I’m using Cloud Code, I’m in there just speaking what I want the app to do and it’s interpreting it.
0:07:32 So that to me has been a pretty big sort of change for me just in the last like week or so that I found really, really beneficial.
0:07:35 I’ve been using Willow Voice, which is a similar product.
0:07:38 I’m an investor in Willow, so I’m biased when you use them versus Whisper.
0:07:43 But like the use case they and the other tools out there solve, to your point, is freaking magic.
0:07:45 First of all, it’s so much faster.
0:07:53 You save a ton of time and you can do it in whatever window you are in because they have access to like your system controls on your Mac, at least.
0:07:54 Yeah.
0:07:55 I’m a Mac user.
0:07:58 So ChatGPT, Slack, Gmail, all of those things.
0:08:02 It has been a massive productivity changer for me.
0:08:12 I think Voice AI in terms of like dictation is probably one of the most slept on categories of tools overall in terms of just like instant productivity gain.
0:08:13 Yeah, totally agree.
0:08:16 Now, you’ve mentioned Claude a few times.
0:08:17 Yeah.
0:08:20 Do you have like a preference between Claude or ChatGPT?
0:08:22 Do you use one over the other for different things?
0:08:24 What’s your approach to using the different models?
0:08:26 So it’s a good question.
0:08:33 I use Perplexity Max a bunch when I’m using Comet, and then I’ll pick between the different models and everything in there, depending on what I’m doing.
0:08:44 But when you talk about the core frontier models, Gemini, Claude, and OpenAI, Google, I’m using VO and now Nano Banana, like their image and video stuff is really good.
0:08:49 Claude is the most like enterprise of all of the models.
0:08:55 So if you need to collaborate with other people, like I think Claude projects are just so superior for collaboration.
0:09:03 I still think Claude is just really great at like spinning up an artifact and visualizing something or coding something really quickly.
0:09:06 So I use Claude basically for those use cases.
0:09:09 And then ChatGPT, I tend to think is better for search.
0:09:12 I like its deep research a little bit better.
0:09:12 Yeah.
0:09:17 And for some reason, I just really like the Canvas feature in ChatGPT.
0:09:27 Like if I’m writing, sometimes I will even take a draft from Claude, put it in ChatGPT, and then like edit with the AI within the Canvas feature.
0:09:36 There’s something about that kind of word processor, but like highlight a part of it and edit and get feedback or research with AI that I find very useful.
0:09:37 Yeah, yeah.
0:09:38 I would agree with that.
0:09:43 I would say with Claude, I really think there’s no better model for coding still.
0:09:48 Even now GPT-5 is out and the benchmarks show it should be better at coding.
0:09:52 My own experience, I’m still getting better results from Claude when I’m coding.
0:09:55 So, you know, the benchmarks to me mean less and less these days.
0:10:04 Yeah, and I think artifacts, even if you’re not like a hardcore coder, if you’re just a lightweight coder like me, artifacts is just an elegant way to like bring that code to life.
0:10:05 Right, right.
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0:10:37 Now, let’s get back to the show.
0:10:42 So, I want to ask you about the whole jobs question of AI, right?
0:10:42 Sure.
0:10:50 There’s obviously a lot of fear about losing jobs and that’s sort of some of the biggest pushback that the like general public has around AI, right?
0:10:52 Is that it’s going to take our jobs.
0:11:00 As a CMO of a, you know, a mega company like HubSpot, how are you approaching, you know, getting the team on board with AI?
0:11:04 So, I think AI adoption, there is some fear around it, right?
0:11:08 It’s like, oh, well, am I going to like automate myself out of a job?
0:11:08 Right.
0:11:17 And look, the best thing I have read probably in the last three years is the article by Paki McCormick called Super Intelligence Abundance.
0:11:25 And the whole thesis of that article, which it seems like by your smile you might have read, is that like, as we can do more, humans just consume more.
0:11:28 Like, we have an endless ability to consume.
0:11:30 I’ll give you like a very practical example.
0:11:33 AI video is getting really good, right?
0:11:34 You’ve used it.
0:11:35 It’s getting really good.
0:11:49 However, I can go and make the same brand creative ad that I might run on YouTube, for example, for a few hundred dollars versus hundreds of thousands of dollars because I don’t have to hire actors, a director, do a photo shoot, and everything, right?
0:11:52 Does that mean that I don’t need those people anymore?
0:11:53 No.
0:12:08 What it actually means is I actually now want to go make 300, 3,000 different really hyper-customized targeted brand ads for different markets, for different segments of my business because people are going to respond better to them.
0:12:16 I’ll still spend the same amount of money, if not maybe even more money because I’m getting better results, but I’m going to spend it in a different way.
0:12:25 So I think the challenge with this is there are going to be some roles where you just need less humans in those roles.
0:12:33 But overall, you’re still going to need just as many people is my hypothesis in all this because you’re going to want to do more and you’re going to get better results.
0:12:39 And that’s what we’re seeing is we’re getting a lot better results and when you get better results, you don’t go into cost-cutting mode.
0:12:43 You don’t say like, hey, I want to spend less doing this thing.
0:12:47 You’re like, no, I want to get as much of that value or that revenue as I possibly can, right?
0:12:49 So I think that’s what’s happening.
0:12:52 I think some people are just going to have to do some skill transformation.
0:12:59 And if you’re just dead set in doing one very specific job, I think the next few years will be hard.
0:13:04 Like, for example, like translation, we know has a bunch of product market fit with AI.
0:13:16 So like if you’re somebody who used to be a translation person, you probably need to move into more of like a native content creation with AI role versus just manual translation, for example.
0:13:18 Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
0:13:25 I almost see it as like every individual inside of an organization becomes much more scalable than they used to be, right?
0:13:33 Like every individual is going to be so much more capable of outputting and doing a lot more with the same amount of effort they’re currently putting in, right?
0:13:42 Nobody’s asking you to do a ton more work, but you’re able to get a lot more done with the sort of existing amount of effort that you’re putting in.
0:13:45 Exactly. And that’s where we’re at.
0:13:58 And I find the best individuals, the best teams right now have the right balance of like, I’ve really embraced AI, but I also know that AI needs a lot of context, support, help and guidance for me as a human.
0:14:06 And when those things come together, we can create a new, better business result than either one of us could individually, right?
0:14:07 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
0:14:09 Let’s talk about marketing.
0:14:15 How have you seen like marketing costs shift with AI now in the picture?
0:14:19 Obviously, we’re seeing like a huge overhaul in the way people do marketing.
0:14:23 SEO is becoming less of an effective marketing strategy.
0:14:26 Like where is like the marketing spend going?
0:14:29 Where is the marketing spend sort of disappearing?
0:14:29 Yeah.
0:14:35 If you want to have a nice cry, go to like the marketing subreddit, the SEO subreddit.
0:14:40 There’s like a bunch of you just go take a toll through the online communities in the marketing world.
0:14:43 It’s kind of bleak times and there’s good reason for that, Matt.
0:14:52 It’s because AI has disrupted a lot of how traditional marketing worked because now answers are free everywhere, thanks to LLMs.
0:14:57 And so companies used to get a lot of traffic to the websites by providing answers on their website.
0:14:59 Google would index them.
0:14:59 People would come.
0:15:02 So you’re having people search traffic kind of go down.
0:15:07 And so you’re seeing a big drop in click through rates from Google and traffic from Google.
0:15:12 So that’s a challenge that a lot of people are facing because people are living more in these LLMs.
0:15:15 They’re also just like visiting your site less.
0:15:22 Like if I can ask chat GPT all my questions, I don’t have to go to your website and look through 10 different pages of your website.
0:15:23 So you’re getting less visits there.
0:15:25 So that’s another challenge.
0:15:29 Because people are getting less visits, they’re spending more money on ads, right?
0:15:30 Because they want to make up the difference.
0:15:31 It’s like, oh, I lost these visits over here.
0:15:32 I want to get more visits.
0:15:35 Well, all these online ad models are auction models.
0:15:39 So like the more competition, the more expensive they’re going to be.
0:15:41 So ad prices are going up.
0:15:43 And then so then people are sending more email.
0:15:45 And so email is becoming flooded.
0:15:53 There’s this like basically chain of effect that has happened because AI has changed how people work, learn, and interact online.
0:16:01 And what I’m here to tell everybody is I’ve been through the trough of despair on this over the last, I would say, year and a half to two years.
0:16:04 And we’ve lost tons of visits, tons of traffic, all of it.
0:16:05 I’ve seen all of it.
0:16:09 The beauty is with this change comes a lot of opportunity.
0:16:12 And we can talk a little bit about what that opportunity looks like.
0:16:27 But that, I actually think that there has never been a more exciting time to do marketing, to be a business owner who cares about marketing, who wants to grow their business through marketing, because there’s a bunch of new stuff that is on the horizon that creates a bunch of new opportunity.
0:16:28 Right, right.
0:16:33 There’s almost like a new term that’s popped up, and I’ve heard it with different acronyms, right?
0:16:44 I’ve heard like AIO and AIEO and AEO, basically optimizing for the artificial intelligence and the large language models instead of the search engines.
0:16:57 So that’s going to be a really interesting field that I think is going to pop up as people just, in my opinion, SEO in the past, for lack of a better explanation, was kind of like figuring out how to game the search engines, right?
0:17:02 You’re trying to figure out how do I do the thing that the search engines want to see to get my rankings to the top.
0:17:05 And I feel like we’re starting to see the same sort of thing in AI now.
0:17:11 Like, what sort of things do I need to do to get the AI to reference me when those questions are asked?
0:17:15 Whether that leads to more traffic or not, that’ll still be kind of to be determined.
0:17:16 So there’s a few things.
0:17:18 I’m in the AEO camp, for what it’s worth.
0:17:20 AI engine optimization, AEO.
0:17:27 But, and the metrics there look different, because you’re looking at like how many times are you mentioned for the kind of question.
0:17:30 The questions your buyers would look at, and it’s not just about visits.
0:17:31 It’s definitely very different.
0:17:36 But the foundations of traditional search engine optimization still matter.
0:17:43 Like, if you don’t have public information on your website or on YouTube or wherever, the LLM can’t access it.
0:17:47 They don’t know that you would be relevant for that person on that topic, right?
0:17:52 So you still have to tell great public stories, have a great website.
0:17:56 And, Matt, one of the things I would tell you is that it’s a lot more instant than it used to be.
0:18:00 Like, I remember like 10 years ago, I’d be like, oh, do this inbound marketing thing.
0:18:02 Create a blog, write some articles.
0:18:08 And, like, in, like, six months, Google will finally index you, and you’ll get ranking, and you’ll get a bunch of traffic.
0:18:21 And now it’s like, if you and I were to make a video on this, like, very trending AI topic today and publish it, we would be cited and be getting views to that video almost instantaneously if it was, like, a big, important topic.
0:18:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.
0:18:25 I’ve noticed that myself.
0:18:32 I’ve put out YouTube videos and then a week later been asking perplexity a question, and it’s referencing the video that I made a week ago.
0:18:33 Same, same.
0:18:34 Yeah, yeah, it’s crazy.
0:18:41 I do feel like a lot of the sort of philosophies behind SEO will probably still apply to AEO, right?
0:18:43 So I’ve been doing digital marketing for 16 years now.
0:18:45 This has been, like, my full-time gig.
0:18:55 And the thing I used to tell people when it comes to SEO is quality content, like, just making stuff people want to read and want to share is the trick to SEO, right?
0:18:59 You know, you get people to land on the page if they stay on the page for a long time and read your article.
0:19:01 That’s a signal to Google that they liked it.
0:19:16 Well, a lot of these engines, right, when you’re using perplexity, when you’re using ChatGPT and Cloud and all these tools that have access to search the web, they’re actually still tapping the APIs of, you know, Google or Bing or whatever the search engines are.
0:19:24 So the thing that got you to rank with SEO is still going to be the thing that probably gets you to mention in the artificial intelligence models as well.
0:19:35 Well, when you have a period of transformation of anything, right, whether it’s AI technology, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s anything, you’re sometimes tempted to throw the old out.
0:19:42 And I think what you and I are saying is what people have been doing in, like, traditional search engine optimization, for example, it’s still relevant.
0:19:45 There’s just some new stuff you have to do on top of it.
0:19:49 So you’re not throwing it out, but you have to build upon it.
0:19:51 And I think that’s what the exciting opportunity is.
0:19:57 You’ve built these really good skills over the last five to ten years, and now you just need to build some new skills to take them to the next level.
0:19:58 Yeah, yeah.
0:20:00 So I want to actually get into the marketing.
0:20:02 Let’s get into, like, the meat of it.
0:20:09 I know you guys have the Loot Marketing Playbook, which I believe is dropping the day this episode is dropping.
0:20:12 So you should be able to access it now as this episode goes live.
0:20:17 But one of the things you mentioned in the playbook is that taste beats tactics.
0:20:19 I’m curious if you can sort of explain what that means.
0:20:32 Okay, so I’ve been spending the last 18 months trying to get out of the trough of despair and get into this new happy land and then figuring out, can I help all the other marketers come with me to this new happier land?
0:20:34 And a bunch of us put our heads together.
0:20:36 We came up with a new framework to do marketing.
0:20:37 We call it Loot Marketing.
0:20:44 And part of that framework is the last ten years of marketing were very mechanical, Matt.
0:20:48 Like, it was like, oh, can I tweak my little copy on my Facebook ad?
0:20:53 Can I change my link mapping to get more search visits?
0:20:54 It’s very tactical.
0:21:01 Now, AI helps you automate so much of the tactics that, like, tactics don’t really differentiate you much more.
0:21:04 Taste actually differentiates you.
0:21:12 And taste always feels like, to I think most people, this, like, ambiguous thing of, like, yeah, that person has good taste or that person has bad taste.
0:21:28 But all taste really is, to me, and I think it’s true, is somebody or some group of people who have looked at and consumed such a high volume of information on a specific topic that they know what’s good and bad and can articulate why it’s good and bad, right?
0:21:32 And that is what your customers need now.
0:21:36 So if you’re a company out there, it’s not enough to just, like, put out boring stuff.
0:21:41 You have to say, hey, I know what my customers actually care about.
0:21:43 I know what they think is cool.
0:21:47 I know what channels they work and consume information in.
0:21:54 And because of that, I’m going to make sure I live and play and tell my stories in a way that’s going to really, like, work for them.
0:22:04 And I’m going to get away from the knob and dial turning and more into helping my customers know, like, I deeply care about them and know what they think is cool and interesting.
0:22:05 Yeah, yeah.
0:22:13 That’s really interesting because I remember several years ago when I was doing a lot of, you know, building funnels and landing pages and all of that kind of stuff.
0:22:23 You had the Russell Brunson’s of the world going out there and saying, hey, if you change your button from yellow to green, you’re going to boost your conversions by, like, 3%.
0:22:26 And, you know, everybody was trying to do these little, like, micro-optimizations.
0:22:33 But now in a world of AI, we can split test that stuff at scale and pretty much anybody can do that kind of thing, like, right out of the gate.
0:22:33 Exactly.
0:22:42 And what’s wild, though, is, like, for you, right, like, I could go run a deep research project and know more about you than I could have ever known before, right?
0:22:58 So then subsequently, I can know that about a group of customers, which means I can intimately know what they want and I can give that to them instead of guessing that they might like a color button difference because somewhere in their subconscious, they’re, like, more inclined to think that’s a better option, right?
0:22:59 Right, right, right, right.
0:23:00 Exactly.
0:23:13 And I mean, you know, full disclosure, I’ll admit it, whenever I do a podcast episode, I’m interviewing somebody, I always run their name through deep research, through perplexity, through ChatGPT, and pull up as much as I can about that person.
0:23:16 And that’s at everybody’s fingertips now, right?
0:23:25 Like, even in the podcasting content creation world, the ability to get just tons of information on any topic, any person, anything you want is available to everybody.
0:23:28 But the difference is really that taste, right?
0:23:32 Like, figuring out, all right, which of these topics do we drill in on?
0:23:39 Which of these things do we think our specific demographic, our specific audience is going to be interested in us talking about, right?
0:23:49 That information is more of a sort of taste, a sort of a learned skill by going through the motions, but anybody has access to all of the information that we have access to now.
0:23:50 Yeah.
0:23:58 One of the big things that you have to understand in this next wave of marketing is that there’s information symmetry, that everybody has access to everything.
0:24:01 It used to be that companies had more information than the people buying the stuff.
0:24:04 Now everybody kind of has access to the same thing.
0:24:08 And there’s new opportunities that come with that access to information, like you’re saying.
0:24:12 That sort of leads perfectly into my next question.
0:24:19 It’s how do brands actually stand out when anybody can create like really pretty decent content with AI?
0:24:23 And now almost anybody can create little like software apps.
0:24:26 I wouldn’t say like somebody can go and make a clone of HubSpot, right?
0:24:31 But somebody can go and create like a little software app that they can turn around and market and sell.
0:24:35 It just seems like it’s so democratized now.
0:24:38 How does somebody stand out when anybody can do that stuff?
0:24:43 So yeah, so there’s a few ways that I think you can stand out to answer your question very directly.
0:24:44 Even just use the web app example.
0:24:47 If anybody can vibe code an app and sell it, that’s great.
0:24:53 But if I’m a brand and if I have a real business, can I vibe code an app and give it away for free?
0:25:01 Because I don’t need to monetize it because I can use it to provide another layer of value to enrich my core product and service offering, right?
0:25:03 And so like that’s what we’re talking about.
0:25:09 We’re talking about using AI to do the next order level of tactics.
0:25:20 And how I kind of think about this is can you use AI to create really good campaign assets that are like really relevant to your audience?
0:25:31 And like I said, can you use things like a cloud project or what have you to basically simulate a customer and get real-time feedback from that simulation so that you actually know it’s good and it’s going to work?
0:25:40 The other thing that we don’t talk enough about with AI is the biggest challenge in marketing has always been the guessing game.
0:25:47 Oh, I’m going to try to segment my audience, guess what they want, and send my best guess to these different groups of people, right?
0:25:48 Like that’s been marketing.
0:25:50 Now, I don’t have to guess.
0:25:53 I can say I know specific things about each of these individual people.
0:26:05 And based on what I know, AI will create a custom message for that person that is relevant to them that’s our best guess not just for a group of people but for that one person.
0:26:21 And it turns out in doing that, like Matt, we’ve been doing that at HubSpot, our conversion rates have gone up 100%, 200%, 300%, 400% because it turns out it’s a way better experience to have AI guessing just about me than just to like lump me into this broad swath of humanity, right?
0:26:22 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:26:23 No, I mean, I’ve seen it firsthand, right?
0:26:26 Like HubSpot is one of my sponsors on my YouTube channel.
0:26:30 I think we’ve been working together for almost two years now on the YouTube channel.
0:26:35 And I have custom playbooks with HubSpot that are like Matt Wolf’s custom prompt playbooks.
0:26:44 And so when I’m doing sponsors on my channel, a lot of times I’m shouting out a playbook with my name, my face on it that we know is going to be super, super relevant to that audience.
0:26:47 Yeah, because it’s like, oh, they have a connection with you.
0:26:53 And so we’ve already like gotten on that same level of commonality with them and they’re going to be just from the jump more interested.
0:26:54 Yeah, yeah.
0:26:55 And I love what you said.
0:26:58 So there’s a marketer you’re probably familiar, Frank Kern, right?
0:27:02 He’s probably one of the most well-known internet marketers, right?
0:27:04 He had a concept called moving the free line, right?
0:27:12 He used to teach this concept of moving the free line where, you know, at one point the free thing you gave out was like a blog post and then you would sell them off the blog post.
0:27:15 And then it became like e-books and people were giving away e-books and that’s what you were selling.
0:27:28 And the value of the thing you’re giving away for free, you want to constantly keep on moving that up so that the free thing gets more and more and more valuable so that people see, well, if this is what you’re giving away for free, well, then the paid thing must be really, really feasible.
0:27:34 So, like, I feel like AI really, really increases people’s ability to move the free line, right?
0:27:42 Now people can just create a little software app and give that away for free before selling them on the bigger product they’re trying to sell.
0:27:53 Yeah, like, look, even if you’re selling consultant services, you can give away a lightweight app that just shows how your unique perspective and insights on the problem, right?
0:27:59 Like, there’s a lot of leverage that comes with just demonstrating value in a very clear, easy way.
0:28:00 Yeah, absolutely.
0:28:05 So, with this playbook you guys are putting out, there’s what I think you call the dynamic loop and it’s got four steps.
0:28:08 Express, tailor, amplify, evolve.
0:28:12 I’m wondering if maybe we can kind of go through and break down each of those four steps real quick.
0:28:13 Yeah, of course.
0:28:15 So, everything will be on loopmarketing.com.
0:28:19 So, if I talk fast or if you get confused, go check out loopmarketing.com.
0:28:27 But, yeah, so we call this Loop Marketing and it’s basically a four-stage playbook that, Matt, I was out to solve this problem.
0:28:37 If you do marketing right now at a business, your CEO comes to you and says, hey, I need you to, like, AI-ify our marketing and make our marketing AI first and get way better results.
0:28:38 Go and do that.
0:28:39 And everybody’s like, well, I don’t know.
0:28:40 How the hell do I do that?
0:28:43 Like, what does that actually look like?
0:28:47 And so, I want to give people a very easy set of things that they can go do.
0:28:50 So, you kind of went through the four stages.
0:28:51 The first step is Express.
0:28:53 And that is literally just like, hey, I got this idea.
0:29:03 And now, thanks to AI, I can get that idea out in the world really quickly at a really good quality because I can use Nano Banana, VO3, HubSpot.
0:29:08 You can use a bunch of different things to basically go from idea to assets or campaigns really quickly.
0:29:09 And that’s really powerful.
0:29:13 And you can then subsequently run more campaigns and learn faster.
0:29:20 The next thing we have is tailoring, which is just what we were talking about a couple minutes ago, which is like, how do you use AI to create personal message?
0:29:27 So, it’s like the difference between, you know, going to a department store and buying a suit in the men’s section versus like going to a tailor and the tailor makes your suit.
0:29:29 Like, man, tailor makes your suit.
0:29:30 That’s fancy.
0:29:32 That fits in a whole different way.
0:29:36 And that’s kind of what getting these very personalized messages is about.
0:29:42 And that might be in the form of ads, email, SMS, WhatsApp.
0:29:45 But those types of tailored messages perform much better.
0:29:50 You need to send less of them to get the same level or better level of engagements.
0:29:52 And that’s like something anybody can go and do tomorrow.
0:30:00 We just rolled out a really awesome email AI personalization product today at Inbound when the show is coming out.
0:30:01 So, like, that’s a way to do it for email.
0:30:03 But you can do it across all those channels.
0:30:11 Then the next step here is all about amplification, which is like, how do you take that message and get it out to people, get it out to the world?
0:30:20 And the biggest thing that’s changed there, as we talked about earlier, is AEO and all of the crazy things that are happening with how people are researching and interacting.
0:30:21 But there’s also influencers.
0:30:24 Like you said, like, we work with you at HubSpot.
0:30:25 You work with other brands and everything.
0:30:33 And there’s never been a better, more cost-effective way to reach your target audience than partnering with content creators and influencers.
0:30:35 It’s an incredible opportunity.
0:30:48 And AI actually just makes that identification, like the workflow of creating the content, partnering, working so much easier now that it’s actually available to all these businesses.
0:30:54 And then the last step we have is Evolve, which is basically, it used to be, Matt, you’ve done marketing.
0:30:58 You would run a marketing campaign and then you do your campaign retrospectives.
0:31:03 You remember those where, like, maybe a week, two weeks, three weeks later, you’d look back and be like, all right, how’d this thing do?
0:31:05 Well, now you don’t have to wait anymore.
0:31:12 Because these AI tools make reporting and insights so easy, you can kind of see how it’s going in real time, make adjustments in real time.
0:31:19 And even once it’s done, with the HubSpot and Cloud Connector, I can just, like, get information into my Cloud.
0:31:25 I can have artifacts, like, build custom charts and everything for me based on the questions I have about this specific campaign.
0:31:30 And I can make decisions instantly around how I make the next one better.
0:31:35 So that’s why I think of it as a loop, because you kind of close off with, like, oh, I’m learning these things.
0:31:36 Then I’ll start all over again.
0:31:38 But this time I’ve got, like, more insights.
0:31:40 And those insights kind of compound over time.
0:31:45 Now my marketing is just going to get better and better every week and every month because of that compounding.
0:31:46 Right.
0:31:48 You mentioned this sort of email thing that you guys are coming out with.
0:32:00 I saw on another podcast that you were on recently, as part of my perplexity research, that you guys recently increased your email engagement by upwards of 400%.
0:32:02 Is that using what you’re talking about?
0:32:03 Like, what does that look like?
0:32:04 What is…
0:32:04 Yeah, yeah.
0:32:07 So it’s basically we productize what we were doing, Matt.
0:32:13 And the initial, like, beta of this was we created prompts.
0:32:18 We enriched the people we’re emailing with data about, hey, this is their job.
0:32:19 This is their business.
0:32:21 These are the things that we think they would be interested in.
0:32:27 Then we passed that data and a prompt through to OpenAI, through the API, to generate an email.
0:32:31 You know, the prompt is basically, like, this is the thing we want to communicate to them.
0:32:32 This is the data.
0:32:34 This is what we want this email to look like.
0:32:39 And OpenAI will write that email just on a one-to-one basis, push it back into HubSpot, and we’ll send it.
0:32:47 And so now we’ve just done that so you don’t have to do the API and all of the crazy work that we had to do when we were first, like, validating the idea, right?
0:32:50 So does it feed in some information from, like, the HubSpot CRM?
0:32:51 So the email…
0:32:55 You’re using CRM data to know, to make that email way more personal.
0:32:56 Gotcha.
0:33:00 So everybody was getting a slightly different email than everybody else, right?
0:33:03 And it’s even a little bit more than slightly different.
0:33:09 Like, if you look at some of the examples, like, I looked at one for, like, a coffee shop owner, and it had, like, coffee puns throughout.
0:33:17 You know, like, it was, like, very contextual, where you would be like, oh, no, like, somebody wrote this email just to me.
0:33:19 It wasn’t like personalization tokens.
0:33:23 It felt like, oh, somebody really put some thought and wrote this just to me.
0:33:29 But you were able to do that because you had good data, and then the AI was able to take it from there and make it really compelling.
0:33:30 Yeah, yeah.
0:33:40 So what advice would you have for, you know, brand new creators, brand new entrepreneurs that are just now sort of building something from scratch?
0:33:44 Like, how would you approach it if you were giving advice and somebody just starting to build something now?
0:33:48 Because I do think there’s a lot of people that are like, well, what’s the point, right?
0:33:50 Because, you know, AI can do a lot of this stuff.
0:33:53 If I build a business, it’s hard to build the moats, right?
0:33:55 So what advice would you give to somebody starting today?
0:33:57 Well, I’m going to answer that.
0:34:03 The first thing, though, Sam Altman has a statement that I very much agree with, that the more you use AI, the dumber you realize it is.
0:34:06 You know, like, he said that in different flavors.
0:34:08 That’s a paraphrase of over the years.
0:34:13 And I wonder if you agree with me that the more you use AI, you understand its limitations.
0:34:14 Definitely.
0:34:14 Right?
0:34:18 And I’m here to tell everybody there’s massive limitations still.
0:34:28 And some of those limitations are actually even just around, like, the software, the data connections, things that are outside of the core models that still just take a lot of time and effort to do.
0:34:31 It’s not that we’re not going to get there, but it’s not like we’re going to get there tomorrow.
0:34:33 It’s going to take years to get there.
0:34:37 First of all, I don’t think anyone should have the attitude of, like, oh, my gosh, I should just give up.
0:34:39 AI is going to do all of this, and I don’t have a chance.
0:34:45 And so if you, let’s say you agree with that, that, hey, all right, I want to start this business because AI is not going to eat my lunch.
0:34:47 Then it’s like, what do I actually do?
0:34:54 And the thing you actually do is, can you know your prospective customer base better than anybody else?
0:34:56 This kind of goes back to that topic of taste.
0:35:01 Can you just understand their problems, their pain, what they need more deeply than anybody else?
0:35:03 Because I don’t care how good a model gets.
0:35:10 They’re never going to know the deep pain of the 5,000 people you’re out there trying to help or whatever your market is, right?
0:35:18 And if you do that, and then you just obsess about building a product to solve that pain, as well as marketing.
0:35:25 So it’s like content storytelling around that pain, traditional search engines, but that now are AEO optimization.
0:35:35 Maybe you build a little lightweight web app on, you know, Claude artifacts or with Claude code that you’re using to help demonstrate that you understand what they need.
0:35:37 Like, that’s what I would do.
0:35:45 And I think you will find that you get deep, deep traction quickly if you’re just like very focused on the market you’re serving and understanding their pain.
0:35:46 Yeah, yeah.
0:35:48 There’s two things I want to say about what you just said there.
0:35:51 One, going back to like finding the limitations.
0:35:59 It’s funny because I just saw a tweet this morning from a friend of mine named Riley Brown, who’s building an app called the Vibe Code app, I believe.
0:36:02 And he posted a tweet today saying that he’s hiring.
0:36:04 He’s looking for video editors.
0:36:12 He’s looking for storytellers and writers and all of these people to help him with his content marketing strategy for his new app.
0:36:15 And like half the replies are people going, well, you’re an AI guy.
0:36:16 Why do you hire anybody?
0:36:18 Why don’t you just hire AI to do this stuff for you?
0:36:21 And it’s like, I mean, there’s the limitation, right?
0:36:24 Like I wouldn’t trust AI to go edit my videos for me yet.
0:36:29 I wouldn’t trust AI to go and actually do a lot of the actual chopping and the motion graphics.
0:36:32 There’s still a lot of limitations in that area yet.
0:36:41 But I almost feel like from the general public, the 30,000 foot view of people that just kind of see AI as a concept, they believe like, hey, I could just do anything for you.
0:36:43 Why are you trying to hire for this?
0:36:45 I thought that was interesting.
0:36:46 I think it’s super interesting.
0:36:52 And to build on that, the one thing I would say to all of those people is that humans are social creatures.
0:36:54 I’m fascinated by two studies.
0:37:02 One is the Harvard Longitudinal Study that showed of the people who lived the longest and had the happiest lives, it was because they had the best social connections.
0:37:05 And then the next, the most recently, there’s been a different study.
0:37:15 I was just listening to the Plain English podcast by Derek Thompson about this, where people who have superior memories, who are less likely to get Alzheimer’s, dementia, all of those things.
0:37:25 There’s been findings that the part of their brain that is developed by intense frequency of social interaction was just far more developed than everybody else.
0:37:26 They just had way more social interaction.
0:37:44 And so if you’re going to build a great business and you’re going to sell a product or a service and you think you can do it without that social connection, without the humanity, without the need for those people to tell the story, be the face of those stories, then I don’t think you understand people that well.
0:37:45 Right, right.
0:37:46 That’s totally true.
0:37:51 I mean, I feel like when you’re building a business, it would be really tough to just do it on your own, right?
0:37:54 Even with my own YouTube video, I have a producer who I bounce ideas off with.
0:37:57 I’ve got three different editors who help me edit my videos.
0:38:02 You know, we’ve got Darren here in the background who’s helping us make sure this podcast comes out really good, right?
0:38:06 Like, I feel like I would probably fail if I wasn’t working with other people.
0:38:07 I need that help.
0:38:08 I want the ideas to bounce.
0:38:09 I want that interaction.
0:38:15 I think that is so powerful to grow a business, and I don’t really feel like I get the same feeling with AI.
0:38:16 No, definitely not yet.
0:38:17 I don’t even think it’s close.
0:38:18 Yeah.
0:38:34 The other point I wanted to make about what we were just saying, too, is when it comes to, like, the advice of somebody just getting started, the advice that I find myself giving is that I don’t really feel like there’s a better time in history to rapidly sort of iterate and test things.
0:38:43 You can come up with an MVP of any software you want, run some Facebook or Google ads to it, and find out pretty damn quickly if it’s going to work or not.
0:38:46 And if it doesn’t, turn around and try something else, right?
0:38:55 This is the best time in history to make an MVP quickly, test it, and then when you find that thing, the thing that, okay, this is clicking with people.
0:38:58 This is getting people opting in for my free tool or whatever.
0:39:00 Okay, now maybe you’ve found your niche.
0:39:04 Let’s go in a little bit deeper on that, build it into something bigger, turn it into a business.
0:39:10 But I feel like this is the best time in history to, like, test stuff at scale.
0:39:11 Couldn’t agree more.
0:39:21 I’d even make the argument that if you are a curious person who likes to learn and you’re willing to, like, apply and take action on what you learn, that it’s almost impossible to not be financially successful now.
0:39:29 Like, if you just do something every day and learn about it every day, within, like, a year or two, you will probably have more money than you need.
0:39:30 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
0:39:37 There’s one sort of last quick rabbit hole I want to go down with you before we wrap up here, and it’s just following my own curiosity again.
0:39:44 Are there any AI tools or software platforms or things that just have you really excited that you’ve just been really impressed by lately?
0:39:45 You know what?
0:39:49 I think what Eric and the folks over at GenSpark do is very remarkable.
0:39:50 I’ve heard GenSpark.
0:39:53 I’ve heard that term flown around, but I actually haven’t tried it yet.
0:39:54 Okay, yeah.
0:39:57 So GenSpark, what they’re doing, Matt, is pretty remarkable.
0:39:59 They’re just building these very focused use cases.
0:40:06 I discovered them because they have a really good slide builder that, like, you can do a slide outline and create great presentations with it.
0:40:18 They just wrote out this AI designer that’s kind of like a true, like, AI-first version of Canva that can, like, make T-shirts or posters or kind of whatever you want to do.
0:40:21 But they have all these vertical AI apps.
0:40:22 I think there’s, like, 12 of them now.
0:40:24 And they’re just really good.
0:40:26 And, like, they’ve built a good user experience.
0:40:28 They’re still really early.
0:40:36 But, like, that is the one to me that I go back and use that nobody really talks a lot about that I think are doing, like, a real nice job.
0:40:37 Gotcha.
0:40:37 Yeah, yeah.
0:40:40 I’ve been hearing about GenSpark, I feel like, for a little while now.
0:40:44 And I remember going to the website and playing with it, like, I don’t know, maybe a year ago or something.
0:40:48 But I’m assuming it’s probably evolved quite a bit since then.
0:40:49 So I think it’s about time for me to go in there.
0:40:53 Try the designer and some of the new, the designer and the slide thing.
0:41:03 Like, if you just have GPT-5 make you a slide outline and then have it go build it in GenSpark, as long as you have, like, a creative style guide, tell it the colors and the fonts and all that kind of stuff, it does a really nice job.
0:41:04 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
0:41:05 I’ll have to go check that out.
0:41:09 And then so to sort of wrap this thing up, let’s wrap it up with the Loop Marketing playbook.
0:41:14 I mean, maybe give us the quick elevator pitch of why somebody would want it and then how do we go get it?
0:41:17 Okay, so you’re going to want to go to loopmarketing.com to get this playbook.
0:41:20 I think there’ll be a link down in the description below here.
0:41:23 But you’re going to want it because you’re frustrated with your marketing results.
0:41:26 Like, if you’re anybody, you’re not happy with where your marketing results are going.
0:41:33 And what I’m trying to do is give everybody a playbook of how to do and think about marketing in this post-AI era.
0:41:39 And it’ll give you something easy to communicate with your co-workers, your boss, everything about this is what we should be doing.
0:41:41 Here are the prompts, here are the apps, here are the tactics.
0:41:45 We didn’t even scratch the surface of what is available out there.
0:41:47 It’s a very robust playbook.
0:41:48 Go check it out.
0:41:50 And that’s what I recommend doing next.
0:41:50 Yeah, yeah.
0:41:51 I can attest as well.
0:41:52 I mean, I’ve seen the playbook.
0:41:55 It’s like tactics and steps, and there’s things that you can do.
0:42:00 And sometimes there are prompts, right, that you should just go and use that prompt to go take advantage of it.
0:42:04 But it’s trying to demystify, oh, what do I do with this AI stuff?
0:42:07 It’s like, go do these specific things, and this is how you do these specific things.
0:42:15 And they won’t be all of the stuff you do, but, man, is it a great place to start, and it’s a great way to shift how you’re doing your marketing in this post-AI world.
0:42:16 Very cool.
0:42:18 So, loop marketing, again, I’ve seen it.
0:42:19 It’s in-depth.
0:42:21 It’s a huge, huge resource.
0:42:22 Super awesome.
0:42:24 Well, awesome, Kip.
0:42:28 Thank you so much for hanging out, and, I mean, nerding out about this stuff with me.
0:42:29 It’s always a blast when I get to chat with you.
0:42:29 Thank you for having me.
0:42:30 This has been a blast.
0:42:31 It’s an honor.
0:42:31 Thank you so much.
0:42:40 If you remember just one thing from this episode, it’s that in an AI world where AI automates the tactics, what truly sets you apart is taste.
0:42:45 Your ability to deeply understand your audience and discover what actually resonates.
0:42:47 So, here’s your action item.
0:42:58 Take one piece of your current marketing, maybe an email, a landing page, or even a social post, and run it through an AI tool to tailor it for a specific audience segment.
0:43:01 See how personalization changes the response.
0:43:07 And don’t forget, you can grab HubSpot’s brand new Loop Marketing Playbook right now at the link in the description.
0:43:18 Also, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to like and subscribe on YouTube, follow us on Spotify, and share this episode with someone who wants to help build the future of marketing.
0:43:32 We’ve got more on the next wave in just a minute.
0:43:38 But first, I want to tell you about HubSpot for Startups’ State of AI in Startup Go-To-Market Report.
0:43:41 There are some really eye-opening findings here.
0:43:45 Get this, VCs are now making AI adoption a funding requirement.
0:43:53 Nearly half of venture-backed startups dedicate over 25% of their go-to market stack to AI tools, and it’s paying off big time.
0:43:55 72% see improved upsell rates.
0:43:59 37% have lower customer acquisition costs.
0:44:05 And some startups are scaling to $60 million in ARR with just 30 employees.
0:44:14 So, whether it’s customer service, sales, or marketing, AI is driving measurable ROI in hours, not months.
0:44:15 So, don’t get left behind.
0:44:18 Download HubSpot’s Free State of AI in Startup Go-To-Market Report now.
0:44:23 Seriously, stop what you’re doing right now, look at your podcast player, and click the link in this episode’s show notes.
0:44:27 See how AI-powered startups are growing faster while staying lean.
Want Kipp’s Loop Marketing Prompt Library (over 100 prompts)? Get it for free: https://clickhubspot.com/elm
Episode 74: Is SEO really dead—and if so, what’s the number one marketing skill you need to stay ahead in 2025? Matt Wolfe (https://x.com/mreflow) and Kipp Bodnar (https://x.com/kippbodnar), CMO of HubSpot, unravel the post-AI marketing landscape and the strategies you’ll need to thrive.
Kipp Bodnar is one of the world’s most influential marketing leaders and the Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, where he is pioneering the integration of AI into every layer of modern marketing. Known for his hands-on expertise and his “Marketing Against the Grain” podcast, Kipp dives into how AI is upending everything from day-to-day productivity to industry-defining strategy.
This episode explores why “taste” trumps tactics in an AI-first world, how HubSpot achieved a 400% boost in email engagement using AI personalization, and why anyone can build faster, smarter, and more standout brands by mastering the new dynamic marketing loop. Matt and Kipp break down the brand new Loop Marketing Playbook, the death (and rebirth) of SEO, and what it means to optimize for AI engines instead of search engines.
Check out The Next Wave YouTube Channel if you want to see Matt and Nathan on screen: https://lnk.to/thenextwavepd
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Show Notes:
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(00:00) AI’s Impact on Marketing
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(05:35) AI Productivity and Automation Hacks
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(06:28) Wispr Flow: Streamlined Voice Dictation
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(11:00) Super Intelligence Abundance and Human Consumption
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(14:50) Decline in Website Visits
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(18:33) SEO Principles Apply to AEO
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(21:00) Taste Differentiates: Know Your Audience
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(24:38) Leveraging AI for Marketing Success
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(27:00) “Moving the Free Line” Concept
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(30:50) Real-Time AI Reporting Loop
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(34:40) Understanding Customers Beats AI
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(38:18) Optimal Time for MVP Testing
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(41:14) Post-AI Marketing Playbook
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(42:32) Personalization Is Key in Marketing
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Mentions:
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Kipp Bodnar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kippbodnar/
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HubSpot Loop Marketing: https://www.hubspot.com/loop-marketing
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Marketing Against the Grain podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-against-the-grain/id1616700934
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Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/
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Intelligence Superabundance: https://www.notboring.co/p/intelligence-superabundance
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Genspark: https://www.genspark.ai/
Get the guide to build your own Custom GPT: https://clickhubspot.com/tnw
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Check Out Matt’s Stuff:
• Future Tools – https://futuretools.beehiiv.com/
• Blog – https://www.mattwolfe.com/
• YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/@mreflow
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Check Out Nathan’s Stuff:
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The Next Wave is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by Hubspot Media // Production by Darren Clarke // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
