“For a long time, more visits meant more customers. That equation is now broken. … 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%.”
Marketing Against The Grain · Media & Creator Economy · September 2026
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.
Transcript
Super excited to be here to talk about why your marketing is broken, but better yet, how we can all fix it. All of the things that used to work are really drastically changing, and it's not that we're doing something wrong. It's really that 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 on your website. Now they're having those conversations with ChatGPT, with Claude, and the entire buying motion has changed. The best way for me to explain this to you might be a model we're all very, very familiar with. The old funnel. Every marketer loves a funnel. The old funnel was very effective. In the inbound marketing era, it worked great. It was very linear. You put more visits in. It was easy to get a lot of visits. You got customers out of the bottom. The new funnel, the AI era funnel, is exceptionally different. It looks way more like an hourglass. Up top, awareness has really broadened. It's scattered out completely because you have a ton of new channels. You have creators. You have AI search. You have endless new platforms being built. But what's happened is all those platforms want to keep people on their platform. So it's gotten way harder to get people to actually come from them to your website. So getting visits has never been harder. But AI has made personalization, tailoring your content, finding and messaging the relevant buyers easier than ever. And because of that, the conversion rates are actually getting a lot better. And it's easier to increase your conversion rates, which brings this hourglass funnel to life. So we are in this new era of marketing with a very new shaped funnel. And for this new era, we are going to posit that you need a new framework and playbook for doing marketing. Kieran Flanagan I, when we lost all that traffic, set out to build a new playbook. We call that playbook the loop. We have a book coming out on Tuesday. We're very excited about it. Thank you for being here. And the loop has four very simple but important steps that any marketer can follow. The first is all about expressing your taste and judgment with AI. The second is tailoring your content to your audience and the channels they live in. The third is amplifying your message across the new modern buying channels where your buyers are hanging out and spending their time. And then the fourth, and maybe one of the most important ones, is all about evolving. Taking the lessons you learned in real time and applying them so that the next loop you run gets smarter and gets better results. You run one loop for a campaign, for a tactic, and it compounds over time. Your results get better and better. That is the plan. We're going to take you today through the entire loop in detail. Not everything, but we're going to give you some of the highlights we think are the most important.
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. Everybody here has access to the same tools, the same prompts, the same models. And it's not that... The output AI has given us is bad. It's just that we see it everywhere. It is the sea of sameness. Now, why does that even matter? Well, for a hundred years, the last hundred years, the hardest part of marketing has actually been making things. Marketers have had to figure out how do I spend the amount of time I have to make things for my customers, and that took a lot of time, a lot of resources, and a lot of effort. That's just no longer the case. AI can generate an infinite amount of stuff about anything. And so the hard part has actually drastically changed. Making is no longer the problem. Choosing is the problem. Choosing what to make. When the cost of production is free, judgment is the only thing that has a price. And I want to really emphasize that. When the cost of production is free, judgment is the only thing that has a price. And so that's why you will hear a lot about taste. You have to have taste. Taste is the foundational part of how you be an incredible marketer today. And Kip and I truly believe that, taste and judgment. But what do we mean by taste? What does that even mean? Taste is when a man creates a beverage drink that tastes horrible, the flavor tastes horrible, and he refuses to change it because he knows people consume his beverage not because of the taste of the drink, but because of what it says about how they want to express themselves. That's Red Bull, a $10 billion company. Taste is putting water into a beer can, calling it liquid death, and marketing it to the punk kids who are embarrassed by the drink that they're holding. That company is now worth over $1.4 billion. Taste is putting a 50-cent eye patch on a perfectly sided model with the strapline that says the man in the Hathaway shirt. All Gavi sold out Hathaway shirts for years based upon that single ad. And the absence of taste is Jaguar ignoring 70 years of heritage, creating an ad without a single car in it, an ad created for award shows, not for people who buy Jaguar cars and seeing their sales decline 97% over a six-month period. Taste is such an important part of marketing today. It is being able to understand what will resonate with your customers long before it ever does. And here's the exciting thing for all us marketers. AI does not have taste. AI will give you the medium of everything it was trained on. And that's where all of your competitors live. It means you have two choices. You can either outsource your taste to AI, or you can actually describe your taste to AI and teach it what it is. And this is the most important lesson from this section. You never outsource your taste to AI. You instill your taste to the AI so it creates things that are uniquely you. But how do you do that? Well, we have something in the book called the taste profile. You basically write your taste down. Now it sounds simple, but there's some complexity in there. You have to understand three core things. You have to understand who your customer is. How do I garner trust for them? How do they talk? You have to understand your stories, your brand stories, your product stories, the why you story and why now story. And most importantly, you have to understand what resonates with my customers. Why will they stop scrolling for me? Why will they spend a little part of their precious time during that day with the things that I create? Now in marketing, we've called these things brand style guides or writing style guides or positioning docs that live in folders that no one ever reads. The taste profile is a living, breathing artifact. It updates each and every time when you're doing marketing and the more you learn about your customer, the better it gets. And every time AI creates something for you, it reads it before it creates that thing. Let me give you a quick example. The left-hand side is a web page created without a taste profile. You could package this up and sell it to any SaaS company, insert their logo and strap line, and it looks like 80% of SaaS companies today. The web page on the right has been instilled with our taste profile. It's uniquely us, differentiated. And that's the value of doing this. So the taste profile has two core building blocks. It has your customer taste. It understands all of the context about your customer and your brand taste. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. We are near 100,000 subscribers. Kip and I won our first YouTube flag. Please, please, please, please, please. So that's Express. Now that I've actually created my taste profile, I want to craft marketing for my customer. I'm going to hand back to Kip to take me through the tailor stage.
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, what are we watching? I was like, I don't know. I'm too overwhelmed. That is the perfect example of the world we are living in today. We are in the midst of a content deluge. This is to me one of the most alarming trends that's happening. In the last two years, we've seen a 4X increase in AI-assisted content. I don't think all of you all have seen a 4X increase in attention or views on your content. No. But that is what's happening, and it's drowning out so much of the work everyone in this room is doing. So, what are we going to actually do about it? The first thing you need to understand is that the half-life of your content is far less than it ever used to be. I'm old enough to remember when the Titanic was in movie theaters. It was there for 287 days. The average movie is now in a movie theater for five weeks. A drastic change. The half-life of your post on LinkedIn, less than 24 hours. That email you worked so hard to send out, you're gonna get half of the audience in the first two hours. We live in a very different time. Everyone is bombarded by information, and you have to tailor your information to actually break through. The way I like to think about this world of content that we live in is in this simple two-by-two matrix. And there's a few parts of this matrix. I think there are a lot of people in the dead zone. Those companies are in the slot factory. They're creating a lot of stuff, but the quality of that content is very low. There are some brilliant brands making amazing, amazing campaigns, but they're just doing it at a very small interval. They're in that invisible excellence. They get a little attention when they do that remarkable thing, but they're not doing enough. What we all have to work on moving towards is that top right, which is remarkable and relentless. It's not enough to just create great content. It has to be great content at scale. That's now possible because of AI. Remarkable content means unique, unique data, unique customer stories, unique examples, things that you couldn't go and just make asking a traditional AI model like ChatGPT or Claude. In the tailor phase, we want to move to the remarkable and relentless quadrant. How do we do that? Because that seems overwhelming. I want to tell you a very interesting story. It's about a woman named Sabrina Romanov. Kieran Flanagan I have been lucky enough to become friends with Sabrina over the last couple years. And she's a remarkable woman, but she's one person, just herself. And over the last 28 months, she's built a following of 3.4 million followers. Not a big team, not millions of dollars, one person and some time, and a very thoughtful strategy. And I want to give you her secrets today. The first secret is that she has two ways of trying to be remarkable and relentless. The first is in getting remarkable, how does she know what content actually is going to resonate with her audience and in what channels it's going to resonate in? She has two processes. The first is she starts long. She makes a long-form YouTube video or a long-form email newsletter and then cuts it into small pieces and multiplies it across all of her channels. The second strategy she uses is starting short. She'll take very quick 30-second videos, couple paragraph LinkedIn posts, and she will test 20, 30 ideas over the course of a week or two and figure out which couple of those really take off. They really resonate with her audience so much that she needs to double down and create deeper, richer, long-form content. This is the formula for content strategy and tailoring your content in the new AI era. The second part is being relentless. And it might seem crazy, but this Is Sabrina's system. It is her actual system that she uses to run all of her content. But it's actually very straightforward. She has one piece of content, either that long form or one of the hits from that short form, and then she has built an AI system that actually takes that and rewrites the scripts for video. Actually, reformats that for LinkedIn with a hook that's more important for LinkedIn because she knows what her LinkedIn audience cares about, for example. This system is what allows you to not be spending 24 hours a day building and making content. Kieran. That's how you tailor some content. One of our really critical stages is about getting that content out into the world, and that's all about amplifying it. Can you take everybody through it?
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.