If you’ve started using AI to help with your marketing, you’ve probably noticed a problem. The content comes out fast, but it doesn’t sound like anyone in particular. It sounds like AI.
‘I could tell you right away when a brand has published a blog or a post that is completely AI. The risk is that every brand starts sounding the same. Nothing really lands. It doesn’t really feel genuine.’ — Paula Pessagno, Digital Marketing Strategist at Pixeld
The Express stage of HubSpot’s Marketing Loop starts with competitor research and lets you develop a unique brand identity, which will then inform the content you create (whether it’s entirely human-generated or with the help of AI).
Quick summary
- Express is the first stage of HubSpot’s Loop Marketing framework, where you define your brand identity.
- It has five parts: research competitors, build an ideal customer profile, develop a distinct voice, shape a brand story, and turn it all into a style guide.
- Skip Express and every later stage inherits the same problem: generic content that blends into everyone else’s.
Watch our podcast on the Loop Marketing Express stage below.
Quick catch-up: what is Loop Marketing?
The old marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, decision) worked when a prospect’s path to purchase was more clear-cut: they Googled, clicked, read, then decided and purchased.
Now, the path is no longer straightforward.
Thanks to AI, 68% of Google searches now end without a single click, according to SparkToro. People are now getting their answers from AI Overviews, LLMs, social media, and a range of other platforms before they ever land on your site.
Loop Marketing is designed to expand your reach across these platforms. It’s split into four repeating stages: Express, Tailor, Amplify, and Evolve. Define your identity, personalise how you communicate, spread that message across channels, then measure and improve before looping back around, sharper each time.
Learn more about Loop Marketing.
What is the Express stage?
Express is where the Loop begins. It’s about locking in two things:
- Who you are as a brand,
- and who you’re actually talking to.
It’s tempting to think this is just a tone of voice exercise, but it goes a lot further. It covers your positioning, values, audience, and the specific language you use and avoid.
Without this stage, the AI you use to create content has to fill the gaps with whatever it finds online. This might be a competitor’s language or a generic industry tone.
By the end of Express, you’ll have a brand story your audience can connect with, and a style guide to make AI sound more like you and help you distribute your content faster and across more channels.
Step 1: Research the competition
Before you can sound different, you need to know what everyone else sounds like.
Look at how competitors talk online, on their websites, social posts, and how they reply to customer reviews. Does every brand in your industry adopt the same highly professional tone? Maybe that’s because it works, or maybe it’s a sign to switch it up and become the casual, conversational brand your prospects are craving.
You can use AI here to summarise key patterns and trends across your competitors. Learn what’s working, what’s not working, and find the gaps where your brand can operate.
Step 2: Build your ideal customer profile
An ideal customer profile (ICP) has replaced the old buyer persona in a lot of modern marketing thinking. Buyer personas used to be fictional characters, built to help a human writer imagine who they were writing for. AI tends to work better with a clear, factual description of who your best customers actually are.
Go beyond demographics. What are they trying to achieve? What’s the problem pushing them to look for help? What platforms are they using for research?
Your ICP might include:
- Industry, business size, or role
- Goals they’re trying to achieve
- The specific problem they’re trying to solve
- Where they go for information, whether that’s Google, LinkedIn, industry forums, or AI tools
- Objections or hesitations that hold them back from taking action
- The language they actually use to describe their problem (pulled from reviews, emails, or sales calls)
Once you and your AI tools know who you’re marketing to, the content creation becomes a whole lot easier.
Step 3: Develop your voice
This is the part most people associate with Express.
Define your brand’s personality traits, whether that’s bold, warm, direct, or understated, your preferred vocabulary, the phrases you’d never use, and how formal or casual your voice should be.
Your website might carry a more measured, expert tone, while your social channels can afford to be a bit more relaxed. Both should still sound like the same brand underneath.
Don’t skip the negative side either. Naming what you’re not is just as useful as naming what you are.
Curious about what personality archetype your business belongs to? We built a tool that helps you better understand your brand’s identity and craft more effective marketing and messaging. Check out our branding assessment.
Step 4: Shape your brand story
Once you know your voice, it’s time to build the narrative thread tying your marketing together. What’s the bigger story behind why your business exists, and what change are you trying to create for customers?
‘Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell.’ — Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and This Is Marketing
Your stories become the emotional backbone that truly connects with your customer. It might be anecdotes about your business itself, about your customers, or it might be moments you’ve crafted that perfectly encapsulate the problem your prospect is trying to solve.
Step 5: Build it all into a style guide
Everything from steps one to four needs a home, and that home is your style guide. It’s the document you hand to AI tools, so the content coming out the other side sounds like you (not like every other business in your industry running the same prompts).
A good style guide pulls all of it together in one place: your mission and positioning statement, your ideal customer profile, your voice and personality traits, the words and phrases you use and avoid, channel-specific notes on tone, and much more.
Some businesses add brand archetypes or visual guidelines too, so the same document can guide both what’s written and what it looks like.
The goal is a single source AI can draw from, containing all the information it needs to know your brand inside out. Every prompt starts from the same foundation, so you don’t have to rewrite the prompt or copy and paste the same information into your AI tool every time.
‘This is the year for the AI style guide. Get your strategy in place so you don’t sound like the rest of the AI slop being pumped out to the internet.’ — Paula Pessagno, Digital Marketing Strategist at Pixeld
At Pixeld, we build AI style guides with clients regularly. They’re incredibly detailed, and they mean you can create content faster than you could alone, and better than AI can without one.
Learn more about our AI Style Guides.
The next stage: Tailor
Express is the foundation. Get it wrong, or skip it altogether, and every later stage inherits the problem.
Once you’ve got your voice right, it’s time to Tailor the content to your customer.
We’ll cover Tailor in the next part of this series. In the meantime, you can read more about how the full Loop Marketing framework fits together on our Loop Marketing page.
If you’re ready to build your own Express foundation, we can help turn it into a working AI Style Guide your whole team can use. Get in touch with us to find out how.
