How Aira Helped Hoxton Mix Increase MRR by 52%
The Challenge
Explosive growth — without a strategic growth partner
Virtual office services provider Hoxton Mix was on a rapid growth trajectory. Business was booming, and new clients were coming in the door all the time.
The only problem? Their limited-scope SEO and paid media strategies were holding them back. Most of their transactions were coming through brand terms, and increasing spend only led to increased costs, without yielding meaningful results.
As Hoxton Mix’s CEO and co-founder Chris Sees explains:
‘We were obsessed with growth, and we were doing everything we could to retain customers and minimise churn. We were obsessive about every part of the business,’ Chris says. ‘SEO and paid media were being left behind. We knew that if we wanted to move the needle, this was something we needed to look at.’
At the time, Hoxton Mix had a single person in charge of SEO and all paid media campaigns. That person didn’t have the time or expertise required to provide the strategic input that would take Hoxton Mix to the next level.
‘They just didn’t have the hours to do it,’ Chris says. ‘We wanted an agency that we could grow with.’
Hoxton Mix saw that opportunities were being lost, especially on the pay-per-click (PPC) side.
‘Our spend was the same across the board,’ Chris says. ‘Everything we do is analytics-driven, and we had all of these metrics that weren’t being used. The bid strategy wasn’t taking advantage of the data that was there. It was a very uniform approach that wasn’t right for us.’
Hoxton Mix wanted to run experiments and try as many different advertising channels as possible, which they weren’t doing at the time. But most of all, Hoxton Mix wanted to work with a strategic partner who could spot opportunities and recommend strategies that would help them grow their business even faster.
‘We didn’t want to be the ones always saying, “hey, let’s try this,”’ Chris adds. ‘We wanted to work with a team who could take a proactive approach to SEO and PPC.’
‘We wanted to work with a team who could take a proactive approach to SEO and PPC.’
The Solution
A team of experts who can grow with them
When Chris began looking for agency partners, Aira stood out right from the start.
‘Their proposal was very strong,’ he says. ‘We went to their offices and they’d done a lot of research on our competitors, the terms we’re trying to rank for, and opportunities they saw, especially on the PPC side.’
Until then, Hoxton Mix was almost ready to give up on PPC, Chris says.
‘PPC hadn’t been productive. We’d thought maybe it just wasn’t for us.’
Their Aira account manager convinced them that there were more paid media opportunities to explore.
‘At the time, the organic side was completely dominating the PPC side,’ Chris says. ‘So that was great to hear in the initial onboarding.’
Aira built an annual strategy around quarterly deliverables: research in Q1, implementation in Q2, etc.
Again, Chris was impressed. ‘It was very, very well thought through.’
For SEO, Aira built a solid technical on-page and content strategy designed to help Hoxton Mix rank for a mix of high-volume keywords, as well as relevant long-tail keywords, which helped them drive high-quality, high-conversion rate SEO traffic.
‘Aira gave us premium content that we would not have been able to get before,’ Chris says. ‘With their help, we published reporting on business during the pandemic that the press would pick up. We never would have gotten anything close to that before.’
But it was Aira’s work on the PPC strategy that really changed things for Hoxton Mix:
- Aira utilised machine learning to ensure that Hoxton Mix were bidding the right amount for each user based on their likelihood to convert
- Aira looked at average lifetime value (LTV) of each customer and set up a target cost-per-action (tCPA) bid strategy to achieve optimal profitable customer acquisition, allowing them to scale spend efficiently
- Then, they introduced a value-based bidding strategy to achieve a target return on ad spend (tROAS) based on the predicted lifetime value of the different packages Hoxton Mix provides. This allowed Hoxton Mix to spend more to convert users who were likely to provide more value to the business over the course of their subscription
- Aira also introduced Facebook remarketing to drive action in users who had come to the site and not converted, and also targeted users across LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter to gain upper-funnel awareness.
Throughout the entire process, Aira made strategic suggestions based on their expertise, experimented, and A/B tested constantly.
‘With Aira, we tried things…It wasn’t stagnant. It wasn’t the same thing over and over again,’ Chris says. ‘Running concurrent experiments is a great way to find out what works and what doesn’t, and we certainly got that working with them.’
'With Aira, we tried things…It wasn’t stagnant. It wasn’t the same thing over and over again.'
The Results
52% higher MRR and 756% increase in transaction volume
After working with Aira for nearly two years, Hoxton Mix saw significant improvements: their MRR increased by 52%, and their monthly transaction volume increased by 757%.
The changes to their PPC were particularly noticeable.
‘They helped us grow a lot across the board, but especially with PPC,’ he says. ‘We have achieved excellent results within a very short time in both revenue and ROI.’
Hoxton Mix and Aira finished their partnership at the end of 2021. Chris credits their work together with a broad spectrum of improvements: the quality of the work they did was higher, the volume was higher, and the level of strategic guidance was higher than before.
Thanks partly to Aira’s guidance, Hoxton Mix has even been selected to be part of the Google for Startups Accelerator.
‘We enjoyed working with them and we got what we wanted,’ he says. ‘The people we worked with are all young, hungry and passionate about what they do. And that's exactly what we wanted.’
‘The people we worked with are all young, hungry and passionate about what they do. And that’s exactly what we wanted.’