HubSpot Loop Marketing EXPRESS STAGE Deep-Dive Part I

Here’s the short version: “Express” is the first stage of Loop Marketing and the most overlooked. It’s where you slow down, plant your flag, and decide three things with real clarity: your voice and vibe, your point of view, and exactly who you serve.

Get this right, and everything that follows gets easier. Skip it, and the rest of your loop turns into noise.

Now let’s dig in and make it practical.

What “Express” Really Means

Express is not fluffy. It’s the work that turns generic content into a recognizable brand people trust.

Think of it as three locks you need to click into place:

1. Voice and vibe
   How do you sound when you show up in the world? Playful, direct, technical, inspirational. Choose on purpose. Document it so your team and your AI tools can mirror it without guessing.

2. Point of view
   What do you believe that most of your industry ignores or gets wrong? What will you defend on a podcast, in a boardroom, and in your copy when it counts? This is your take on the problems you solve and how you solve them.

3. Ideal customer profiles or personas
   Who are you really for? What do they care about, fear, and dream about? How do you want them to feel when they meet you, click your ad, or read your email?

Without these, the rest of Loop Marketing struggles. Tailor becomes aimless. Amplify becomes noisy. Evolve turns into optimizing chaos.

Why Express Matters Even More With AI

AI runs on context. If you don’t feed it who you are, it will feed you what everyone else already sounds like.

Clarity gives AI something meaningful to mimic. It gives your team permission to create with confidence. It also keeps your sales, marketing, service, and leadership messages aligned when multiple humans touch the brand across channels.

If your marketing is a band, Express is where you tune the instruments. You would not hit the stage before you tune. Do not ship content before you codify voice, point of view, and ICP.

The Debate You Might Be Having Too

We had a lively debate about Loop Marketing. Is it about the buyer’s journey, a new visual, or a push to use AI inside HubSpot? Here’s my take.

Loop is a playbook for hybrid teams of humans and AI. The buyer still moves in their own non-linear way. Our job is to build systems and language that meet them with consistency. Whether you love the loop, the flywheel, or a sticky note on your monitor, none of it works if Express is sloppy.

Make Express Tangible In One Week

Use this as your working plan. Keep it simple and concrete.

Day 1: Voice and Vibe

• Pick five traits that fit how you speak. Example set: warm, direct, human, educational, a little fun.

• Define do’s and don’ts with side-by-side lines.

  • Do: short sentences, active voice, clear verbs.

  • Don’t: clichés, filler, jargon.

• Write three sample paragraphs in your voice. One for a landing page, one for a sales email, one for a LinkedIn post. These become calibration pieces for your team and AI.

Day 2: Point of View

• List your Top 10 beliefs, Top 10 mindsets, and Top 10 core values as a team.

• Turn each belief into a one-sentence stance.

  • Example: “AI assists, it does not replace. Trust before transaction.”

• Pick three stances you want to champion over the next quarter. Build content around them.

Day 3: ICP Clarity

• Identify one primary ICP and up to two secondary ICPs.

• For each, capture five truths:

  • Jobs to be done

  • Frustrations that slow results

  • Desired outcomes

  • Buying triggers

  • Words they use that you should mirror

• Write a Feeling Statement for each ICP.

  • “After working with us, they feel confident and organized, not overwhelmed and behind.”

Day 4: Package It As A Playbook

Create a short, skimmable document your whole org can use:

• One-page Voice and Vibe

• One-page Point of View

• One-page ICP

• Three calibration samples
  Keep it under six pages. Make it easy to update.

Day 5: Teach Your AI

• Load your playbook into your AI assistant as a persistent system reference.

• Create prompt starters your team can copy:

  • “Use our Voice and Vibe. Target the Primary ICP. Anchor on POV stance number two. Draft a 150-word intro and keep sentences under 18 words.”

• Save those starters in a shared doc so everyone pulls from the same stack.

Doing This Inside HubSpot

If you live in Marketing Hub, set your foundation so the platform helps your humans stay aligned.

• In AI Data Sources, complete:

  • Ideal Customer Profile with pains, outcomes, and sample language.

  • Brand Identity with voice traits and tone rules.

  • Products and Services with clear benefits and proof points.

• For each Campaign, add campaign-specific nuance while staying inside the core rules.

• Reuse your calibration samples as snippets when you brief ChatSpot or any AI assistant connected to your HubSpot workspace.

The result is simple. Social, ads, web, email, and sales assets all sing from the same sheet.

How To Know You’re Express-Ready

• You can hand a new writer your playbook and get a first draft that sounds like you.

• Sales and marketing tell the same story in different rooms.

• AI output feels like a helpful teammate, not a stranger.

• Your team spends less time asking, “Does this sound like us?”

Common Pitfalls To Avoid

• Old rules you never revisit. Re-read your playbook each quarter and sharpen it.

• Traits without proof. If you say “we’re bold,” show bold choices in your examples.

• Personas by job title only. Capture feelings, not just functions.

• Letting tools lead. Tools assist. Humans decide who we are.

Options To Move Forward

Option 1: Lightweight DIY Sprint
Use the five-day plan above.

• Pros: fast, focused, low cost.

• Cons: you may miss blind spots.

Option 2: Guided Workshop
Run a half-day Express workshop with a facilitator.

• Pros: outside perspective, faster decisions.

• Cons: requires prep and team time.

Option 3: Full Brand + AI Enablement
Build the playbook, wire it into HubSpot, and train your AI workflows.

• Pros: end-to-end system, higher quality at scale.

• Cons: more investment up front.

Assumptions To Call Out

• You have at least one clear ICP. If not, do customer interviews before you codify voice.

• Your leadership will uphold the playbook. If not, the work won’t stick.

• Your team will actually paste prompts instead of freestyling every time. Make it easy.

Next Steps

1. Block a two-hour working session this week to draft Voice and Vibe, Point of View, and your primary ICP.

2. Write three calibration samples in your chosen voice. Save them where your team and AI can use them.

3. Fill out your HubSpot AI Data Sources for ICP, Brand Identity, and Products.

4. Pick one live campaign and run it through your new playbook. Check for message consistency across the ad, email, landing page, and sales follow up.

5. Want a shortcut? Share your rough notes and I’ll turn them into a six-page Express Playbook your team and your AI can use right away.

When you slow down in Express, everything else accelerates. This is how you build trust, create with confidence, and help your customers flourish.

TRANSCRIPT

Liz Moorehead: And we're all back and we're all reunited. Max isn't sick. I'm not in Georgia. George, you're back from vacation and chat. I feel like you're the most consistent person for our

George B. Thomas: Yeah, right.

Liz Moorehead: few weeks.

Chad Hohn: Well, you know, sometimes, I mean, I'm gone. Every now and again

George B. Thomas: Chad's like, I do what I can I

Chad Hohn: I do. I show up here.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: dabble. We dabble. Well, gentlemen. Are we ready to dig back into our second part of our conversation about Loop Marketing?

Max Cohen: What did I miss?

Liz Moorehead: George, you wanna help out on that one? Other than everything.

George B. Thomas: yeah, I mean everything. So here's the thing. One of the things I said in the previous, uh, episode about loop marketing, and by the way, if you're a listener and you're like Max right now, and you're like, what did I miss? Uh, go back and listen to the other episode. Because I talked about things like everywhere I looked on the internet, everybody was trying to cover loop marketing in one video.

It's impossible. Um, I, we talked about how HubSpot themselves even said like more coming on the actual loop marketing page because they know they need to build it out. And my brain went to like seven to eight different things in each of the stages that are like more across the entire organization.

Instead of just marketing or even like, sectors of marketing. And so we, we were able to do what I'd call a, a pretty good job at an overview of loop marketing and tease in the fact of like, we were gonna do an episode per, uh, stage of this to kind of dig in deeper and really give people the, the juice or the meat or whatever analogy you want to use.

And so, um.

Liz Moorehead: The ta.

George B. Thomas: The TT to go along with the steak, whatever it's 'cause 'cause we are serving up a seven course, uh, loop marketing meal over the next, uh, couple weeks. And, and again, we'll probably put it all together for some type of pillar page, loop marketing piece of content. We all four episodes, actually, I'm sorry, it'll be five overview and then an episode for each, uh, of the, of the stages.

So that's kind of what you, you missed Max. You, you might go back. You might listen because who knows, you might actually hate something that, uh, one of us said and wanna combat against. In the next episode when we talk about, uh, you know, the next step of, or the next press of the gas pedal around the race track of

Max Cohen: The next swoop of the loop.

George B. Thomas: the swoop of the, ooh.

Liz Moorehead: it. The only other thing I think, uh, that is worth mentioning, and I think it's good for Max to hear, but also just as a reminder for our listeners who may wanna. Loop back to that episode. We also had a really good debate about why we are even here with Loop Marketing to begin with, because there is some conversation about, is HubSpot solving a problem for their platform?

Are they solving a problem for their users? Are we just rebranding the things that we already did? Wait, but what about the flywheel? So. For Max and our listeners at home, it gets a little spicy, but it was good. It's the good kind of spice

George B. Thomas: yeah. It was, it was Good Spice. Chris, Carolyn, even like, uh, reached out to me almost immediately when listening to the podcast episode and, uh, mentioned something that Liz said and, and had feelings and thoughts. So it's, it's, it's very much a. Feelings and thoughts provoking episode max. That's, that's what you missed, my friend.

Liz Moorehead: best show.

Max Cohen: I'm sure I'll have some feelings that I.

George B. Thomas: Oh yeah.

Liz Moorehead: Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, it's a

George B. Thomas: glasses around the right way.

Max Cohen: Dude, I'm here to play a ball game. Okay.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. By the way, just so you know, I'm ready now for any of the loop jokes that do happen the rest of the episode. I've got our little thing

Chad Hohn: Uh,

George B. Thomas: off the little. Alright.

Max Cohen: Prank 'em, John.

George B. Thomas: Ah.

Liz Moorehead: Okay, well this is the exact episode. Designed per, I'm just gonna move on guys. We're just gonna move on. We're just gonna keep, yep. Alright. So this is the precise episode of both, fortunately and unfortunately for all of these feelings and shenanigans because we are talking about the first step in loop marketing, which is express.

We be expressing ourselves. It's about clarity. It's about identifying your brand identity. Tone values, any way that you can get your content to move from generic to greatness, from slop to unforgettable. So George, you've already given a great overview at a high level of what we talked about last time with Loop Marketing, but I want you to just tap into that superpower of yours of simplifying the complex, right?

We've got four steps. What is express for our hubs spotters out there, and where does it fit in that cycle?

George B. Thomas: Yeah. It, it's the place where I want people to slow down. Like, I, I seriously, the, the thing that I'm worried about most, what I fear most is that marketers will rush past this part, um, because they're like, oh, we've already got that. Or somebody put that in place five years ago, or like, we've got this.

You need to slow down and you need to kind of look at what you have or build in what you need to build upon what maybe you have or if you don't have anything that you're paying attention. Because again, I feel like most marketers we're busy. We're trying to keep up. Uh, you know, especially in the world of HubSpot and HubSpot updates and a, you know, AI and AI changes and like, just take a deep breath because the express part of this.

Um, it, it's what, it's what makes or breaks everything that follows in loop marketing. And, and so here's the deal, like when I think about express, it's where you plant your flag, okay? You plant your flag in the ground and you say, this is who we are. This is what we wanna sound like. Um, it's the, this is who we help and here's how we show up differently than the rest of everybody else.

And, and if you think about loop marketing cycle. Express tailor, amplify and evolve The four stages, or swoops or swooshes of the, of the Loop Express sits right at the start, and it sits at the start for a reason. It's, it's again, that foundation. Every strategy, every email, every piece of AI generated content that you create later, every podcast episode, every video, whatever it is, depends on how clear you are here.

In this express stage. And so again, with, without it, without that clarity, without the context to kind of move forward, your tailor stage is aimless. Your amplify stage becomes noisy, and your evolved stage ends up optimizing what could potentially be chaos. So like. Again, think about what you should be thinking about or to simplify maybe this into like three main things, what you should be doing in the express.

I feel like, and we're gonna probably talk about this in a little bit more in today's episode, uh, one voice and vibe right in, in express. I want you to think about voice and vibe. How do you, how do we sound like when we show up in the world, what do we sound like when we show up in the world? Who do we wanna be for years?

Guys, you know, Liz, you know, I've been showing up in the word happy, helpful, humble human like that. That's my voice, that's my vibe. Um, but for you listening to this, are you playful? Are you direct? Are you technical? Are you inspirational? This becomes your language, DNA and, and you can kind of hand to your team and hand to your AI tools.

Uh, there's a word here that you've gotta kind of be paying attention to what HubSpot. HubSpot said, and it was kind of an undertow in different areas. There's gonna be hybrid teams. So when you're thinking about the express and all of these things, voice and vibe, and what I'll talk about here in a minute, it's because you gotta let the team needs to know, humans need to be educated, but AI needs the context, or AI needs to be on board or educated to that thing as well. The next thing that I think is highly important, and again, I've talked about this historically in other podcasts and stuff, is like one of the things that I think was the most fascinating thing that I did for my AI assistant. And for my team is, I literally have a document that is top 10 mindsets, top 10, uh, beliefs and top 10 core values.

Well, that, what does that do? Well, that, that creates a point of view. What do you believe in your organization, in your industry, in your products and services? What do you believe that others might not? So you've gotta have that point of view. That's it's our take on the world. It's our take on the problems we solve.

It's our take this, by the way, listeners, is how you rise above the copycat content that is bound to happen, that is already happening, and you create thought leadership that builds trust. You build, uh, thought leadership that sticks. And the third thing that I wanna mention here, Liz, is ideal customer profiles or personas.

Um, who are we really for? We're literally having a meeting later today at Sidekick Strategies about like, Hey, in 2026, who do we want to serve? Because I want the team to be passionate about who we're serving. And so I literally threw this out of like, moving forward in 2026, do we want our ideal client profile to be gaming companies?

Do we want it to be, you know, pet companies? Do we want it to be. Churches because I know the humans inside the organization and things that they're passionate about. And if they could be helping these ideal client profiles or customer profiles, these personas with things that they're already passionate about, now, do we enter a world where it's a win-win situation versus just taking what's coming down the funnel and closing it and saying, this is who we're for because this is who's showing up.

Right. And, and so when you think about that, does your AI or hybrid team. Know about, uh, what they care about, what they fear, what they dream of, um, and how you make them feel, how you make them feel. Understood how you can, um, pull the lever of feeling before you ever try to sell or grab their wallet. Right?

And so when you combine those three, Liz, I think it makes a good package of what express is. It's your voice and vibe. It's point of view and it's the, uh, ideal customer profiles or personas that you, with, that you get clarity and, and again, you mentioned it before I even started talking about this, but with clarity, this is like clarity is your ultimate content accelerator.

I mean, it gives AI something meaningful to mimic, it gives your team permission to create confidently without second guessing tone or message every single time they go to create something. Liz, and I'll shut up here in a second. But the way I like to think about this is if, if it, if your marketing was a band, okay, express is where you tune your instruments.

' cause if you don't tune your instruments before you all start playing, then it's gonna be chaotic. It's not gonna sound good and nobody wants to hear it anyway. So people have to slow down. They've gotta tune the instruments in the express stage. Wow. That was some loud Dunking brother. That was the double D coming in at the very end. Anyway, that's, that's what,

Chad Hohn: Oh yeah,

George B. Thomas: We, we don't need that

Max Cohen: I'm at the slurp stage.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. There you

Chad Hohn: slurp.

George B. Thomas: There we

Chad Hohn: Welcome to Hub Heroes.

George B. Thomas: so yeah. So that's what I would say about Express and where my mind goes.

Liz Moorehead: Yeah, I mean, I think a really good way to think about it, and this is how I teach it a lot. 'cause I, I work with a lot of companies and brands to do messaging strategies and content style guides and people will often think they need one. Or the other, they do not realize they need both because your messaging strategy is what you say and your content and style guide is how you say it.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: And it's a really thi it's a really critical thing to keep in mind. We always learned that when we, when we were younger kids. So it's not just what you say, it's how you say it. You have to have. Both. You have to have that really dialed in, clarified view of what our expression is. How do we say things?

How do we talk about things? That is how people start to connect with you. But also, again, like we always like to talk about here, you know, humans buy from humans. There's a lot of automation thrown in the mix here now, but ultimately at the end of the day. Or if you just wanna even get a little bit more practical about it and you wanna step away from the human side, you wanna do it.

Gimme a good old human.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. The side. Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: Yeah. If you don't have this kind of stuff dialed in, what's gonna happen is if you're everybody on your sales team, your marketing team, everybody's gonna be agreed on the what. And then every piece of content, every website page you create, every blog article you create under that kind of omniscient voice will all sound different depending on who wrote it. That's gets a little dicey. So I wanna dig into this clarity piece just for one layer deeper. 'cause you already started touching upon this. George, and actually I'll put this up to Max and Chad as well. When we take a look at this clarity of expression that HubSpot is really pushing with this first stage, why is that important right now, particularly with the context of ai? 

Chad Hohn: Like for me, you know. And not, and not a marketer Right. Is not a marketer, uh, necessarily, but I am human. Yeah. And I do, uh, en encounter a lot of marketing in my day-to-day life as we all do. Um, and I think like the. Being able to keep everybody on the same page in, in your platform gives your anything that anybody sees on anything.

'cause not, you know, sometimes in an organization that's even larger, like the same person who's doing some of the social media stuff, isn't doing some of the web stuff and isn't doing some, you know, like different people are doing those different pieces sometimes. And like the, the things that HubSpot's pushing you, to me coming at it from a technical perspective as always, uh, is to make sure that everybody's on the same page if they're performing.

All of this in Marketing Studio is using the ICP AI data source setting. And so, uh, ideal customer profile and then the brand identity. Uh, section as well of your AI data source as well as the products and services. And then finally, crafting for each campaign you build to be more specific, if it's outside of your normal, but built from that foundation so that everybody's on the same page.

That way when you see some ad on, you know, somewhere if you're seeing an advertisement or if you're seeing any kind of content. Um, or any kind of, you know, that's related, that's being pushed through a marketing source, that it all stems from that same, you know, mission or same company, uh, customer profile, same company perspective.

You know, all the things that you're solving for is the same across all of it if you're able to use the platform to accomplish it. I think that's the beautiful part of like, if you're fully using all the tools, that's the. That's the ideal way to look at it. You know, if you're trying to say what are they solving for and how do you do it in the system, right?

Um, so there's all those different features, buzzwords, or whatever, if you will, um, that I just listed out that are all things that they want. That they, that at least in their documentation, they say this is the, the where you would go to do that. To make sure that everybody is evolving between your AI and your humans doing the.

All the stuff and, and your message is the same 'cause it's great. Uh, when you know, when you see weird stuff across multiple, this happens a lot with smaller organizations. Like I have some friends who manage some construction company ads and like sometimes you see what these people do. On their own and you're like, Ooh.

Yeah. Like, I mean if I, you know, saw that on Facebook in two different, it's just like, not even the same or it takes you to page that says nothing about what the A's about. Right. And so this, I think, will help with that. Right. That's the idea anyway.

Max Cohen: Can I be so for real,

Liz Moorehead: Yeah.

Max Cohen: I've never been more lost in a conversation than I am at this moment right now.

Liz Moorehead: Fascinating. Tell us why.

Max Cohen: I don't even know what we're talking about at this point, and I've been paying attention. I don't know like the, like I, I, I, I, what was the original question you had asked? Chad, Liz.

Liz Moorehead: Uh, all I had asked was that why was this type of clarity in the, in the context of express, this specific stage, why is it important against the context of AI and what's happening in content right now?

Max Cohen: I don't even know what that means. Can, my brain can't, can't process that at all.

Liz Moorehead: So, let me

Max Cohen: and I'm looking, I, I'm like looking at the loop marketing like playbook page and. I've, I've, I've, my brain is just completely shutting off. Like I've gotten to this point where I'm like looking at like, you know me how, like when I, when I talk about the flywheel a lot and I'm like, there's these very natural sort of progressions through where these chevrons meet and it really makes a lot of sense.

I'm trying to apply that same, and maybe you guys can tell me. I'm just looking at this the wrong way. Right. But I'm trying to take that same idea, especially looking at stage four, which is evolve and how it swoops back up into express. And I'm sitting here wondering is this, is this insinuating that you're constantly re re-express yourself and constantly revisiting expression? the time, like, because the, like the, the visual just doesn't work for me. Right. And maybe I just don't get it.

George B. Thomas: this is,

Max Cohen: And I'm not saying this is bad,

Liz Moorehead: You are not wrong.

Max Cohen: no one knows how to do this in this crazy age. Especially when we, we just, we, we just figured, we just became comfortable with, with the fact that we could instantly turn ourselves into a Pixar character.

Uh, and then before we were even comfortable with that, uh, so a two came out and we're like, we don't know what real life is anymore because we could literally create anything. We can't trust video at all. Right. And then when I think,

Chad Hohn: blur

Max Cohen: someone who sees this is gonna be like, uh, what It sounds like a lot of like woo, woo, uh, you know, craziness that is a a thousand times deeper than like most marketers are gonna be able to understand.

I don't know.

George B. Thomas: so first of all, let me just say this, max, I love you

Max Cohen: I love you

George B. Thomas: because I think that you are expressing, pun

Liz Moorehead: Uh.

Max Cohen: blue collar marketer. Okay.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, you're, you're, you're expressing how I feel a lot of humans will feel in the moment. And this is why I said it inbound, these words, I believe everything that was on each of the slides for the four phases or stages.

I don't necessarily agree with the visual of the loop. Now I understand what was trying to be portrayed of like. It's just a crazy time in the world and buyers are doing all these things, but because buyers are doing all these things, marketers, they, they think in like steps to get things accomplished.

Now, while I do believe that you might iterate your voice and tone over time or like we are at psychic strategies, we're, we're pausing for a moment to see like, what do we want our future? Ideal customer profiles to be that we wanna start targeting or uh, attracting, right To go back to some terminology that we all know. But Max, really the crux of the conversation that what Liz was trying to start there is like. So many marketers are going to think that they need to do this AI stuff. They're gonna be HubSpot users. They may not have even used chat GPT or clawed up until this point. And so they're literally getting their feet wet and they haven't heard the words of context and how AI needs context to actually give you an output that is consistent with what you might wanna put into the world.

And so like clarity is important. But to have clarity, you said Max, something that I love, most marketers aren't ready for the deep exploration that they're gonna have to take to get the clarity that they're gonna need.

Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.

George B. Thomas: Listen, I'll go back to the fact that we have the document about beliefs, mindsets, and core values.

I only have that because I went on a year and a half exploration with Liz on another podcast called Beyond Your Default, to which then I used AI to reverse engineer. Out of all of those episodes, what must be the beliefs, mindsets, and core values of the human doing this, to then be able to feed it back into AI for clarity in which it should create in this manner or way.

And I know we're getting to a, a question that is gonna be more of like, well, how do you do said thing? So I don't wanna spoil that. Like how, how do you train your ai? 'cause there's outside of HubSpot and there's inside of HubSpot that wanna talk about that. But Max, I don't think that the loop is a track that marketers are actually following.

The loop is what the buyer is doing. Stages are more of a, I guess I'll use linear set of things that you might wanna think about doing in the production or creation of the things that you're creating. I'll, I'll shut up Liz. I think you had some thoughts too. 'cause we both were shaking our head no

Liz Moorehead: You're not

George B. Thomas: time when Max was having his, uh, you know, crisis

Max Cohen: My episode. Wait, but wait, what do you mean about the, the customers are doing the loop.

George B. Thomas: So I

Max Cohen: when I go out and buy a Snickers bar, I'm not expressing tailoring or amplifying

George B. Thomas: no, no, no. But you are, you are running through a loop of thoughts in your brain. Do I want a Snickers today or do I want this? Should

Max Cohen: about the buyer's journey, though. That's the buyer's journey.

George B. Thomas: I, I don't disagree, but that's where this was born from. If you hear the original story, literally, I, I'll just, here's what I heard. Uh uh, here's what I heard.

I heard somebody was standing in front of a room not to be mentioned, and they were talking about how everything was changing and SEO was broke and this is happening. And they literally were making this hand gesture as they were talking. And somebody said kind of like a loop and Exactly. And that's where Loop Marketing was born from what I've been told by sources I would believe.

And so again, I, I say I don't know if it's a great visual, but I do believe in the things that we talk about in each one of these stages to be important and true. And see here's the world that we live in right now. Is it is confusing 'cause you're trying to, you're trying to roll up the inbound methodology.

You're trying to roll up the buyer's journey. You're trying to shove it into something that really is a, a marketer's playbook to get the things out for the methodology and the, the journey. But people are looking at it as it's like all in one encompassing and it's not,

Max Cohen: Yeah, I mean, I'm still in the camp that this is, this is a big sign that says use AI tools. Like, and I, I hate that. I hate it. I hate being in that mindset. Right? But when I look at this, and it's, and it, and it clearly use, it says, literally says, use ai. Like, it, it, it, and it, and again, don't get me wrong, we gotta give people a framework to do it.

I'm all for it. Right? Um, but I, I take umbrage with the idea that this is, this has anything to do with the buyer's journey. Like, that's a fundamentally separate concept. Um, but yeah, it's, it's weird. You know, I, I will say it would be weird from an optic standpoint for them to come out with some kind of strategy that terminates at the end.

Know what I mean? Like that 'cause then it's like, oh wait, it looks just like the original inbound methodology, which looked like it ended, but really didn't. 'cause it always had that thing underneath it when I went all the way back to the front and then they just, they just curvature it when they did the flywheel.

Right. Um, but yeah, I mean it the, you know, what would be the most like useful thing for me and I think for a lot of other people that might be a little bit more smooth brained like me. Is looking at express, tailor, amplify and evolve and breaking down. Okay, what does that literally mean without the, you know, uh, God.

It's like, it is just like a white woman's Instagram, words that are on top of it. You know what I mean? Like this to me, it's like, live, live, laugh, love, evolve,

Liz Moorehead: white woman in the room, I'm fine with it.

Max Cohen: right? I,

Chad Hohn: It's approved.

Max Cohen: right?

George B. Thomas: canceled. Not

Max Cohen: looks like something that people would have on wooden plaques in their kitchen. Right?

Liz Moorehead: living, laughing, loving with HubSpot.

Max Cohen: And, and,

Liz Moorehead: no, I completely agree.

Max Cohen: I just wanna know what this stuff actually mean?

Like, I, I, I, I, when I look at it, I just, it's not tangible, you know what I mean? Inbound was tangible. It was easy, it was simple. This ain't, dude,

it's not. 

Liz Moorehead: I gotta be honest. I, I'm feeling a little, I, I gotta drop in with my thoughts here, George. First, number one, I'm feeling a little vindicated because Max, in our last episode, I was the one who was like, not as hilarious as you, but going like, what, what is this? And why are we here? Because I could not figure, are you trying to solve for a product?

Are you trying to, like, are we, are we replacing, are we not replacing the flat? Where's the inbound method? Like what is. What is happening here, because this is the first time they've rolled out something where I've looked at it, and even though I will admit, and we talked about this on previous episodes with the Flywheel, I was like, flywheel, Ew.

But like I got where they were coming from. I understood like there was a real ethos behind it. And this, I'm just kind of like, okay, so we're loop marketing now.

George B. Thomas: It's, it's a marketer's playbook to hybrid teams and AI usage, let's call it what it is.

Max Cohen: and don't get me wrong, I think it's just explained in this overly fluffy way. That makes it really difficult to understand the, the, the, the, what are you literally doing through each one of these stages? Because you can do that for inbound. You can like go, it's like, yeah, attracting games into delight sounds pretty amorphous, but you, you can explain what you're literally doing like behind each one of those words.

Liz Moorehead: If you're to take express, it's really simple. It is a messaging strategy and your content style guide. That's literally it.

George B. Thomas: But,

Liz Moorehead: that's it.

Max Cohen: am I, am I explaining it right? If it's, it's you define your buyer persona. I'm still, I'm gonna call it buyer persona until the day I die. Okay. Um, so, yeah. Yeah.

George B. Thomas: got you on

Max Cohen: but it, but it also sounds like, uh, creating a ton of documentation that makes your AI understand how to talk like you.

Liz Moorehead: Yeah.

George B. Thomas: Yes.

Max Cohen: Where is that written? Anywhere in this playbook. It's not

George B. Thomas: well, that's, this is why we're having this episode.

Max Cohen: should we be the ones that have to do it?

Liz Moorehead: I tell you as the content strategist person here, I would love to tell you this. You would be surprised. This is something we've talked about with content hiring and in like very old episodes. Content is the thing that makes Inbound go, and it is the thing that Inbound do not know how to do, and there aren't a ton of specialists who know how to do it.

A lot of these disciplines are things that you see at enterprise levels, like I specialize in creating messaging strategies and content style guides. Your normal inbound marketer does not know how to do it. This is not something taught. This is usually something gate kept at a higher level, and I only learned how to do it when I was a baby content manager at Quintain in 2015 when I realized no one sounds the same and there are no rules, like, so I figured out how to make rules.

But that's pretty much it, and this is the one thing that I've always found striking and very confusing. There are already terms for these things, like I love the idea of express, but like it's literally create a messaging strategy. Your messaging strategy begins with your prior personas and who they are.

That's how every one of my messaging workshops begins. You do a messaging strategy once you decide on what you're saying, then you do another workshop or set of exercises that helps you determine your voice tone. And style, which are your rules for how you sound and what you editorially look like on paper.

Like that's really what it is, and it's just like very confusing in the way that they describe it.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. I suspect the reason that they feel like they wanted to change the terminology. Maybe not to encroach on that segment, but also to like, because it's in the context of a hybrid team, like right on the front page, you know, it says express your distinct brand identity. It says like, uh, AI can,

Liz Moorehead: are built for multidisciplinary teams. Messaging strategies are not built for marketers. They are built for everyone. So like right off the bat.

George B. Thomas: Chad, I I agree with you and, and listen, I, if I'm being completely honest right now, which I, I typically am, I feel like when we entered this world of AI content creation or this express face, that I've had an unfair advantage the entire time because one of the things that I did almost four years ago when I started the business is I actually hired Liz to help me do a voice and tone workshop.

Along the entire way. I've had an entire presentation deck and information that I could feed to my AI assistant and say, this is who I am. This is how I wanna show up. And I've continued to add layers along the way, which again, if we ever get to the next question, I talk about those layers,

Liz Moorehead: we got two minutes left.

George B. Thomas: I know it's

Chad Hohn: Uh, it's an eight part series.

Liz Moorehead: No, but I think this brings up a really important point. You know what, we're gonna do a second, second version of this and that's fine. But I think this brings up the larger point. 'cause we have done lots of product rollout announcements together. We've done new initiatives, we've done new hubs, we've done, and this one has been the messiest.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: If this is the one where multiple times throughout these conversations, one summer, all of us are going, well, I guess we're here and this is what we're doing now. Not entirely sure why, but we think we kind of know why. And I think this is something that needs to be addressed because if we are sitting here for, yes, somewhat smooth brained, but pretty smart people. In HubSpot and we're confused. Can you imagine how the everyday hubspotter is feeling right now, looking at all of this Max, your face.

Max Cohen: looked at, no, I just looked down at this stupid loop marketing scorecard thing and it like, I, yeah, no, it's just like I, nevermind it, it makes it even more confusing. I'm sorry.

George B. Thomas: So, so,

so 

Liz Moorehead: at it, the more confused I get.

George B. Thomas: so here's what I'm gonna say. And, and, and Max you kinda said like, why should it be our job? It this, I was empathetic to this at the very beginning, which is why I said Team Liz. Max Chad, we're not gonna do one episode about this. There's no way. Um, it, it is our job moving forward to try to do our best to simplify the rest of these conversations We have, uh, express B two, which 'cause we didn't even get to like six of our questions that we wanna talk about.

Um, and then the rest of the, the three that we need to hit, because again. I do think that we're, uh, normal humans, but I think that we're smart humans and I think that all of us have used HubSpot for a lot of years and we're nerdy in different directions to like Liz, voice and tone, uh, you know, technical stuff.

But literally one of the conversations that we need to have is like, I I, I so wanted to get to this question, so I'm gonna tease out the next time we have the, uh. The V two of this, I so wanted to answer this question. How do you actually teach? Because Max, you said, what do you do? And, and so one of the questions, how do you actually teach your brand's voice to AI tools so they don't spit out generic content?

What particular tools or processes do you recommend? Style guides, prompts, training, et cetera. That right there will help simplify. The complexities in people's brains because we'll be able to talk about the things, the steps, the, the, have this, do this, talk to it like this in the next episode.