What is inbound marketing, and where do loop marketing and buyer personas fit?

Inbound marketing is a way of winning customers by being useful before you sell. You publish content that draws the right people to you, helps them decide, and looks after them once they buy. HubSpot calls the stages attract, engage and delight. Buyer personas decide who it is for, and Loop Marketing is HubSpot's 2025 update for AI search.

This guide covers what inbound marketing is, how the flywheel differs from the funnel, how to build buyer personas and put them to work in HubSpot, what HubSpot's Loop Marketing changes, and where contextual marketing and user generated content fit. It finishes with how a B2B team runs all of it in HubSpot.

What is inbound marketing?

HubSpot, which pioneered the method, defines inbound marketing as a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences. The idea is simple. People research before they buy, so a business that answers their questions earns the first conversation.

Outbound marketing works the other way around. Cold calls, bought lists and interruptive ads go to people who did not ask. Inbound brings people who are already looking: they found your guide in search, clicked an ad for an offer they wanted, or were referred by a customer. Most Australian B2B teams run both. Inbound is the part that builds on itself, because a useful page keeps bringing people in long after it is published.

HubSpot splits the method into three stages:

• Attract. Draw in the right people with content and conversations that make you a trusted adviser. Blog posts, guides, search, social and paid campaigns all sit here.
• Engage. Give them insights and solutions that fit their problems and goals, so buying from you is easy. Landing pages, offers, forms, email nurture and the first sales conversation sit here.
• Delight. Help customers succeed after they buy. Onboarding, service, check-ins and asking for reviews and referrals sit here, and happy customers send new people back to the attract stage.

We have run this in HubSpot for clients who started with no marketing at all. For Flint Group, a new mortgage broking firm, the plan followed those three stages: a Learn section written to be found in search, email nurture for each loan type, and automated check-ins after a loan settles to encourage repeat business and referrals. New inbound opportunities went from 650 in April to 2,500 by August.

What is the difference between the inbound funnel and the flywheel?

The funnel was the first picture of inbound. Strangers come in at the top, a smaller number become leads, fewer again become customers, and the funnel ends there. The flywheel, which HubSpot adopted in 2018, bends the same stages into a circle so customers feed growth instead of being the end point. In HubSpot's words, "funnels produce customers but don't consider how those customers can help you grow."

The practical difference shows up in where you spend effort. A funnel team pours almost everything into getting new leads. A flywheel team also funds service, onboarding and referrals, because a customer who refers two more is cheaper than two new leads from ads. HubSpot's Loop, covered below, is the third version of the same idea.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a short, research-based profile of one type of buyer: what they are trying to get done, what worries them, how they research, and what makes them say yes. HubSpot describes personas as fictional, generalised characters that capture the needs, goals and behaviour patterns of your customers.

We build personas around buying behaviour, because job title on its own is a weak guide. Two operations managers with the same title can buy in completely different ways. One reads every review, compares three vendors and wants the detail in writing. The other has one conversation, decides they trust you and goes ahead. Each needs different content and a different follow-up, and a persona built on title alone would treat them the same.

Keep the persona separate from the company. Your ideal customer profile, or ICP, describes the businesses you want: industry, size, revenue, location. A persona describes the people inside those businesses and how they buy. Most B2B teams need both, and HubSpot stores them in different places: the ICP in your brand settings, and the persona on each contact.

How do you build buyer personas?

From evidence, over a few weeks, with the people who talk to customers every day. This is the process we run in persona workshops, and the order matters.

1. Survey your own team first. Send a short questionnaire to sales, service and leadership about who buys, why and what nearly stops them. A Google Form is enough. It does not need to live in the CRM.
2. Pull the numbers from HubSpot. Win rate, deal size and time to close by segment show which buyers are worth designing for. Closed-lost reasons show what puts people off.
3. Ask customers directly. A short survey or a handful of conversations with recent customers tests what your team believes about them.
4. Draft, then check. Put rough personas in front of the team before writing them up properly. The early read catches the persona that does not exist and the one everyone forgot.
5. Name the triggers. For each persona, write down what makes them start looking, the questions they ask at each stage, and what they need to see before they talk to sales.
6. Keep the set small enough to write for. Our clients usually land on three to five, with one or two marked primary.

We ran it on ourselves too. Our personas used to be job titles, like "the marketing manager". We rebuilt them from our own win rates, deal sizes and time to close, because those showed who actually buys from us and how quickly.

For the Australian Institute of Fitness we ran several workshops over a few weeks, with time between them to collect customer information, and came out with five personas that went into the sales tools. For Enable College, one workshop agreed a single picture of each type of student, covering their goals, challenges, worries and characteristics, and every piece of content after that was written for one of them.

How do you use buyer personas in HubSpot?

A persona document that sits in a shared drive changes nothing. The value comes when every contact in HubSpot carries a persona, because then segments, content, emails and reports can all follow it.

1. Create the personas in the Persona property. In HubSpot, go to Settings, then Properties, search for Persona and open it. On the Field type tab, choose to add another persona and fill in the name and details. HubSpot's guide to creating and editing personas has the steps.
2. Set the persona on each contact. Three ways, and most portals use all of them: a form question that maps to the Persona property, a workflow that sets it from what you already know, and sales setting it after the first call.
3. Build a segment for each persona. Segments, which HubSpot previously called lists, can filter on the Persona property, and a segment is what most other tools in HubSpot can act on.
4. Put the segments to work. Smart content shows each persona a different version of a page or email. Workflows send each persona its own nurture path. Reports show which persona turns into pipeline.

The pattern we set up in HubSpot portals. Smart content rules for emails read segment membership, so the segment step is what connects a persona to personalised content.

Two of our published projects show the pattern. For Renaissance Retirement Living we rebuilt the workflows on lifecycle stage and set up three persona nurture paths. For AUSMAR, persona workshops came first, and the finished site gives each persona its own mega menu while smart content swaps the messaging on segment membership.

When a workflow sets the persona, two rules stop it doing damage. First, it only fills the field when the field is empty, so it never overwrites a persona that sales set by hand. That also lets you fill gaps from weaker evidence, such as a job title that clearly reads as a business owner. Second, decide in advance which persona wins when a contact fits two. Build the workflow as branches in priority order, with your catch-all persona as the last branch, so a contact who matches two gets the nurture you ranked higher and can still be moved by hand later.

What is HubSpot's Loop Marketing?

Loop Marketing is the framework HubSpot announced on 3 September 2025, at INBOUND 2025, as "the new playbook for growth in the AI era". It has four stages, and these are HubSpot's own descriptions:

• Express. "Define your taste, tone, and point of view before bringing in AI."
• Tailor. "Use AI to make messaging personal, contextual, and relevant at scale."
• Amplify. "Diversify content across channels to meet buyers where they are."
• Evolve. "Iterate quickly and effectively with AI."

HubSpot's reason for the change is search. Its announcement cites SparkToro's 2024 study finding that 60% of Google searches end without a click, and HubSpot's CMO Kipp Bodnar put it plainly: "The old funnel assumed customers would come to you." When an AI answer or a search summary gives the buyer what they need, the blog post that used to bring them to your site gets fewer visits, so the content has to work wherever buyers are reading.

Stage names from HubSpot's inbound marketing and Loop pages. The short labels under each stage are our summary of how each one shows up in a HubSpot portal.

Cassy, who wrote this guide, co-hosted our HubSpot User Group session in Brisbane on the move from inbound to Loop, a few weeks after it launched. It walks through each stage and the HubSpot tools that go with it, including brand identity settings, smart content, segments and campaign tools.

Has loop marketing replaced inbound marketing?

HubSpot positions the Loop as its new playbook, and says in the same announcement that it "still remains true to the principles that made Inbound work": educating customers, creating value and building relationships. So the method has changed and the principles have not.

That is how we explained it to clients when it launched. The funnel still exists in some form. What the Loop gets right is that people arrive at different levels of intent. Some find you through a first search, some have already compared vendors in an AI tool and arrive ready to talk. Put all of them through the same welcome sequence and you lose the ones who were further along. In HubSpot terms, the Loop asks you to define what each level of intent looks like, and to change what you send when a contact moves between them.

HubSpot's brand identity feature, on Professional and Enterprise subscriptions, is the clearest Express tool: HubSpot's AI references it when it drafts blogs, landing pages and case studies, so a weak brand identity produces weak drafts. On the Amplify side, why a site can rank on Google and still be invisible to AI covers what changes when buyers ask an AI tool instead of searching.

What is contextual marketing, and how does HubSpot do it?

Contextual marketing means showing each person content that fits what you already know about them: who they are, where they came from, and how far along they are. It is the Tailor stage of the Loop, and HubSpot's tool for it is smart content.

A smart content module shows different versions of the same block depending on who is viewing. On website pages, landing pages and blog posts the rules can use ad source, country, device type, referral source, preferred language, segment membership, lifecycle stage or a query parameter. Marketing emails go to known contacts, so email rules use segment membership and lifecycle stage. Pages need Content Hub Professional or Enterprise and emails need Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise. Each module uses one rule category, and the first rule that matches wins.

Persona is not a smart rule on its own. You build a segment for each persona and point the rule at the segment. Our published work has a few versions of this:

• Familiarity. For Enable College, ads led to landing pages whose smart content changes depending on how well the visitor already knows the college.
• Persona. For AUSMAR, the site swaps its messaging by persona on segment membership.
• Relationship. For Tribeca Financial, smart content makes every automated email come from the client's own adviser, in that adviser's voice.

Behaviour-based emails are the next step. Emailing people because of a page they viewed covers it, including what the Spam Act allows, and post-purchase emails from order history does the same for ecommerce.

What is user generated content, and does it belong in B2B inbound?

User generated content, also called consumer generated marketing, is content your customers create about you: reviews, testimonials, social posts, community answers, photos and videos. It works at every stage of the flywheel because buyers trust other buyers more than they trust you.

In B2B it mostly takes three forms: Google reviews, short client quotes on landing pages, and case studies built with the client. The hard part is asking at the right moment. A HubSpot workflow can ask when a project closes or a ticket is resolved well, and a workflow that actually collects testimonials walks through the setup. For Google reviews, personalised Google review links in programmatic email sends each customer straight to your review form from HubSpot. Get the customer's permission before you publish what they wrote, and use their words as they wrote them.

How does a B2B team run inbound marketing in HubSpot?

In this order. Each step depends on the one before, and teams that start at step five usually come back to step one within a quarter.

1. Express: set the foundations. Agree the ICP and a small set of personas, then load them into HubSpot: the brand identity settings and the Persona property.
2. Map content to persona and stage. A simple grid: personas across the top, attract, engage and delight down the side, one question each buyer asks in every cell. Our guide to B2B content and SEO covers how to write for search and AI answers.
3. Build the offers. One landing page per offer, with one form and a clear call to action. What a landing page is and how to test one and our call to action examples cover both.
4. Tailor with segments and smart content. A segment per persona and per lifecycle stage, smart content on the pages that matter most, and a nurture workflow for each persona.
5. Run it as one campaign. Tie the content, emails, ads and landing pages to a HubSpot campaign so they report together. How to stop running five disconnected campaigns for one launch shows the setup.
6. Delight and evolve. Onboarding emails, service check-ins and a review request after a good outcome, then a monthly look at which personas and channels turn into pipeline, and a persona refresh every year.

Inbound only pays off when marketing and sales agree what a lead is and what happens next, which is the revenue operations side of the work. What RevOps actually is explains how the two connect, and if you are deciding whether HubSpot's CMS should host the content, read what HubSpot Content Hub does and who it suits.

Frequently asked questions

What is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is a way of winning customers by being useful before you sell. You create content and experiences that draw the right people to you, help them decide and look after them once they buy, instead of interrupting people who did not ask.

What are the three stages of inbound marketing? Attract, engage and delight. Attract brings the right people in with useful content. Engage helps them decide with offers, nurture and sales conversations. Delight helps customers succeed after they buy, so they come back and refer others.

What is a buyer persona? A buyer persona is a research-based profile of one type of buyer: their goals, worries, how they research and what makes them say yes. The most useful personas describe buying behaviour, since two people with the same job title can buy in very different ways.

Where do you set buyer personas in HubSpot? In the Persona contact property. Go to Settings, then Properties, open Persona and add each persona on the Field type tab. You can then filter segments, saved views, forms and reports by persona.

What is HubSpot's Loop Marketing? Loop Marketing is the framework HubSpot announced in September 2025 for marketing in the AI era. It has four stages: express, tailor, amplify and evolve. It keeps inbound's principles of educating customers and building relationships, and adapts them to buyers who get answers from AI before they click.

Has loop marketing replaced inbound marketing? It has replaced the inbound funnel as HubSpot's playbook, but HubSpot says the Loop stays true to the principles that made inbound work. In practice it adds two things to inbound: a stage to define your brand before using AI, and personalising by intent instead of sending everyone the same journey.

Read next

• B2B content and SEO in HubSpot
• What is a landing page, and how do you test one?
• Call to action examples, and the psychology behind them
• How to stop running five disconnected campaigns for one launch
• Emailing people because of a page they viewed, without breaking the Spam Act
• What RevOps actually is, and why most companies get it wrong

Sources

• What is inbound marketing, HubSpot, for the definition and the attract, engage and delight stages.
• The flywheel, HubSpot, for the flywheel and the quote on funnels.
• Why HubSpot retired the funnel for the flywheel, HubSpot blog, for the 2018 move.
• HubSpot introduces the Loop: a new playbook for growth in the AI era, HubSpot company news, 3 September 2025, for the four stages, the relationship to inbound and the Kipp Bodnar quote.
• Loop Marketing strategy, HubSpot blog, for how HubSpot describes the Loop against the funnel.
• 2024 zero-click search study, SparkToro, the source HubSpot cites for the 60% figure.
• Create and edit personas, HubSpot Knowledge Base, for the Persona property steps.
• Create segments, HubSpot Knowledge Base, for segments, previously called lists.
• Create and manage smart content rules, HubSpot Knowledge Base, for the rule types, subscriptions and rule order.
• Generate your brand identity context with AI, HubSpot Knowledge Base, for brand identity.
• Flint Group, Australian Institute of Fitness, Enable College, Renaissance, AUSMAR and Tribeca Financial case studies, Neighbourhood.

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Neighbourhood sets up inbound marketing, personas and smart content in HubSpot for Australian businesses, as part of our RevOps and HubSpot work.