Bodnar is HubSpot's CMO, and he opened this conference talk with the chart he had to explain to HubSpot's CEO after May 2024, when the company's own inbound-marketing engine collapsed. His reading is that buyers now have those early conversations with chatbots instead of reading a company's blog, so the value of a visit matters and the volume doesn't.
…the rules of marketing have changed, and we have to change with them. They changed pretty drastically for HubSpot in May of 2024. And I want to bring out my great friend, Kipp Bodnar, the CMO at HubSpot, to go through this story because he is the one that had to explain this to our CEO, Yaminik.
So Kieran set up a little bit of what we're here to talk with you all about today. And this is not a pretty chart that anybody wants to explain to anybody, correct? And so what happened? For a long time, more visits met more customers. And that equation is now broken. And what that means for all of us in the world of marketing is that we've moved to a world where volume of visits matter to a world where value of visits matter. Because what happened in this same period of time is very fascinating. We saw an 80% drop in our traffic. We lost 140 million visits in a year. But we managed to increase our leads, our demand generation, by 20%, which seems exceptionally counterintuitive, but it's not when you realize that that core shift is in the value of the traffic we maintained and grew versus the lack of value in the traffic we lost. So this is the setup. This is the opportunity we all have. It used to be a buyer would land on a blog post, read all your blog posts, download your e-book, and spend a ton of time…
And I want to talk to you a little bit about the first stage of the loop, the express stage. And I'll let you in to a little secret. This is Kip and I's favorite stage of the loop. We are seeing a lot of things generated by AI. And that's the world we live in today. You look around the room.…
Okay, so the Taylor stage is the second step of the loop. And raise your hand if you're like me and you open Netflix and you scroll around for 15 minutes and don't end up watching anything because you're completely overwhelmed. Normally about 10 minutes in, my wife yells at me and then it's like…
Okay, everyone wants the new marketing distribution playbooks. That's what we tried to cover in the book, but I wanted to give you a snippet in one channel, something that you can actually take away and apply on a Monday.