Oxygen 2.0, HubSpot's first agency partner in China, established themselves as one of the leading inbound marketing agency in Asia, delivering inbound services to a handful of clients in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. As demand for their services increased they struggled to find a way to grow their agency with the high staffing costs associated with China and Hong Kong. Collaborating with Uku Inbound, an inbound marketing agency based in Cape Town, they were able to take on new clients, deliver results for their clients and increase their turnover 5x in just 12 months.

About Oxygen 2.0

Oxygen 2.0 is a full-service inbound marketing, branding, and web development agency based in Shenzhen, China and Hong Kong. They were Hubspot’s first partner in China and offer turnkey marketing solutions to Chinese SMEs and MNCs, enabling them to brand and market their products outside of China, as well as helping Western brands looking to penetrate the Chinese market.

The Challenges of Growing a Digital Agency

Before Oxygen partnered with Uku Inbound, they saw that the demand for their inbound services grow but needed to find a way to increase their capacity without significantly increasing their staffing costs.

Like many other digital marketing agencies, who have seen the demand grow for their services, Gareth Jones, Oxygen's Operations Director, faced the challenge of finding new capable staff, keeping their overheads low and delivering the quality of work that they were known for.

“We evaluated a few options to balance the additional cost of hiring new staff and increase our capacity to appropriately serve our new clients. Hiring capable staff in China and Hong Kong is not an easy task and it's very expensive. The high property prices meant that our overheads would increase significantly with a new salaries bill and larger office space.”

Gareth then turned to various outsourcing options as a possible cost-effective solution. They had used Upwork for various tasks in the past but found that they needed a more sustainable long-term solution.

“We were very close to using an agency in the Philippines, which would basically hire a marketer on our behalf.  The day before our project was due to start they demanded we pay more for their services. We thought that was a little cheeky so we canned the idea.”

That’s when Oxygen found the Uku Inbound team.

Building a Strong Partnership Drives Results

Needing to scale their inbound agency to meet customer demands while ensuring their overheads didn't skyrocket, Oxygen decided to collaborate with Uku Inbound. The Uku team started off by addressing some of Oxygen's most pressing needs which included blogging, creating content offers, social media management and engagement.

“It was important for us to build a partnership that moved beyond outsourcing. We needed someone who enabled us to work as a cohesive team. The Uku Inbound team became an extension of our own. They integrated into our project management system, interfaced directly with our clients and helped us deliver some truly remarkable results.”

The Uku Inbound and Oxygen teams use HubSpot as the backbone for their inbound campaigns.

“We use HubSpot on all our projects. It was great to have a team that could apply their digital marketing experience and help us utilize HubSpot to its full capacity. Their team is inbound certified and helped us do everything from building landing pages, defining forms, A/B testing CTA’s and setting up lead nurturing workflows.”

Significant Growth in Just 12 Months

Since partnering up with Uku Inbound, Oxygen has seen some incredible growth. They saw their monthly turnover increase 5x as a result of them delivering more successful inbound campaigns than ever before.

“We’ve grown incredibly quickly in the last year. We went from running 3 inbound retainers to now over 16 accounts. The Uku team were an integral part of that growth. We are able to deliver more inbound campaigns, create more content, deliver more ads and ultimately drive more leads for our clients. It has been a great partnership for us. We’ve developed a close friendship with Dane and his team in the process.”

What lies ahead for Oxygen? Growth! Oxygen is setting up a sales office in the UK, have established a design office in Gdansk, Poland and are looking to move some of their operations to Cape Town, South Africa.