Oxygen serves clients in the Mainland Chinese, Hong Kong and international markets looking to increase their sales qualified leads and revenue. Like many agencies, their biggest challenge largely involved justifying their client’s spend on marketing. This challenge was amplified by the attitudes of the local market that didn’t understand inbound and didn’t believe in large upfront investments for content creation. Oxygen knew inbound worked but were lacking a coherent way to prove to clients that their marketing efforts were worth the investment.
Initially, Oxygen used a slew of tools to manage campaigns for clients like Madmimi and MailChimp for email, Hootsuite for social media, Unbounce for landing pages, Squarespace for websites, Google Analytics for tracking, Pipedrive for CRM, and at the centre, using Zapier to tie all them together. Although Zapier is a powerful integration tool that allowed them to execute on campaigns, the team still did not have a great way to make all these tools work together to report back to clients in a meaningful and efficient manner. If one link in the chain of integrations broke, the whole business was essentially halted – an efficiency and productivity nightmare for any agency.
Oxygen aimed to build a coherent, repeatable model for success with their clients. While searching for a better way to predict, execute and repeat success with their clients, Oxygen found HubSpot’s marketing materials.
Managing director, Gareth Jones, and company founder, Dan Beach, began seeing immediate value before they ever signed on as HubSpot Partners. "When we spoke to the sales rep, what stood out was that it wasn’t so much a sales process as it was a consultation to see what we were doing with our marketing and where we might have been going wrong."
Getting Educated on Inbound MarketingThe Oxygen team focused on the foundations of the inbound marketing methodology with their channel account managers. They taught the team not only how to use an inbound strategy for Oxygen to generate more quality leads at the top of the funnel, but also how to build a consistent inbound marketing offering for their clients – many of whom were doing inbound for the first time.
With the team fully equipped, Oxygen began executing on clients’ campaigns using the inbound methodology. "With HubSpot and the inbound methodology, there is an obvious path to generating leads, and ultimately ROI."
By bringing all the tools Oxygen uses to manage their clients into one place, Oxygen was finally able to complete effective closed-loop reporting. With clear and measurable results, Oxygen could better build ROI projections for their clients. Having this type of reporting available meant that many leads and clients that were very sceptical of the inbound process began to see the results and understand the actual value of their investment.
"Because HubSpot makes inbound campaigns consistent, we can benchmark success to a point where we can predict how many sales qualified leads a client can expect throughout the campaign, meet, and often exceed those expectations. For the client and us, this creates very easy to measure KPIs, which focuses on success, as opposed to why they’re not ranking for a keyword they like, why they don’t have more fans on Facebook, or why their email list isn’t growing faster. It focuses the campaign on the metrics that matter to their bottom line and our ongoing engagement."
Using HubSpot’s breadth of data and powerful reporting tools, Oxygen can bring all the pieces of a campaign together. The more complete a picture they have of how potential buyers are behaving, the better able they are to (1) identify opportunities for improvement and (2) pinpoint successful strategies to replicate. "So with HubSpot we know, for example, that an SQL came from LinkedIn, read which blog, clicked which CTA, and downloaded which offer. This means we can optimize for that kind of success to make it repeatable."
"Consistent long-term results meant that clients would opt for longer retainers and have a high chance of renewal. Now we have more retainers; we can deliver better results to those clients we have and keep them on longer, which means we don’t have to always be on the hunt for new business. It’s a win for us and the client."
Optimizing for their own funnel.