Ep 024: Paris Childress of Hop Online Offers 4 Major Service Pillars - SEO, Content, PPC, and Social

Thank you guys, welcome back to another episode of Growing Your Agency. I'm your host Ryan Shank. Today, super, super excited, we are here with Paris Childress from HopOnline. Paris, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you too, great to be here.

Yeah, this is awesome. So I was checking out your site, I noticed that you are a Google Partner, you're reviewed and verified on Clutch, a Moz Partner. Tell us a little bit about the business? Are you full service? Are you just doing paid? Tell us a little bit about HopOnline.

Sure, sure. Well, we're full service and we've been around for about 10 years. We're based in Sofia, Bulgaria. I started the company— I'm originally from the US and I moved out here in 2005 and then started the agency in 2009. And we started, we started mostly as a PPC-focused agency, and then a few years later it shifted much more into SEO. And then later things more or less balanced out. So now we really have 4 major service pillars and those are SEO, content marketing, PPC, and social, which is mostly Facebook.

Do people come to you for one pillar or do people come to you because they say, hey, you know, this is my business, these are my goals, what do you recommend?

A lot of times they come with a need for one of the services, and typically it's SEO. And what we find is after we talk to them, they don't necessarily need what they think they need, or they might need that plus a few other things.

Sure.

We try as much as possible to show them the bigger picture and to get them to think holistically about how a multichannel strategy usually has the best overall outcome.

Yep.

We get clients in the door with something like an SEO audit or maybe a PPC audit, and then we're actively looking to cross-sell and to upsell them over time into the other areas.

So how do you get them? Let's talk about that for a while. And actually, I kind of want to take a step back. So you started, moved to Bulgaria in '05, '09 you started the agency. How did you, what did you do first? You know, I know a lot of people listening, watching, you know, they want to kind of break out and, you know, maybe start their own agency. How do you get that first client? You have no, you know, uh, company reputation, potentially no brand reputation, maybe a personal reputation or contacts. Like, how do you get that first client when you have no case studies, nothing to, you know, nothing really to show?

Yeah, I think in my case, and I think this is typical for a lot of people that eventually start an agency, the first client comes before you even start the agency. And then you find yourself in a situation that that person refers you to another person, and maybe the third person comes in, and suddenly you realize, oh, actually I have 2 or 3 clients that need my service, or they want my expertise, and I don't even have a way to send them an invoice. Or maybe I should formalize this thing. And that was the story with me. Um, just, I started working almost as a freelance consultant with somebody. Yep. And then a few weeks in, he asked me for an invoice, and I said, well, I can't really do that. So I guess that means I have to go and start a company so that I can give you that invoice. That's how we started. And I think this accidental agency's founding is how it works with a lot of people because they're really good at something and people naturally gravitate towards them and want to work with them. And then at some point it clicks and they realize I can make a business out of this. And then they take the next step.

That's interesting. It's almost like the accidental entrepreneur. It's like you have a skill, people are just, you know, by nature wanting to like purchase, you know, or hire that skill for them as a consultant. And then you're like, oh, this is, this, this is, this can be something bigger. That's really interesting. So then, so then now nowadays kind of shifting gears. So before you kind of had someone, they sort of hired you freelance, you shifted it into the business. Now, how are you acquiring clients? Because you said, you know, I know that you said you hook them and you get them in through audits and stuff like that, but how are you actually going after those clients and getting them to even agree to an audit?

Yep. Most of our leads right now are inbound, and those are coming from Moz. That's typically our best lead generation source.

And is that from being on like the directory, being like a preferred agency on Moz, or is it from articles? Okay.

We're on the recommended companies list there, and we were starting to invest a lot in our Clutch profile also, and we're getting some good leads from Clutch. We get— naturally, we get leads that just come from organic, organic traffic from our website, and we get also client referrals. So right now we're not doing any real active outbound marketing. Sure, pretty much all inbound marketing. And, and yeah, when a lead comes in, they typically fill out a pretty short form on our website and our goal, our first goal, is to get them onto a call as soon as possible. And response time is really critical. We try to respond. We are a little bit of it at a disadvantage because of the time zone differences, so sometimes the leads come in the middle of the night. Jump on them quickly, get them onto a call, and on that call, the goal is to really understand their needs and learn as much as possible about their, their business and really listen much more than and talk or sell. Yeah, things get started is, um, you know, we try to establish that personal connection over a call as soon as possible.

And are you using video calls, Zoom?

We're using mostly Google Hangouts, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and sometimes Skype.

Yep.

Um, Hangouts usually is the popular one.

Talk to me about your funnel. So they come in, they come to the website, they fill out the form. How— what do you think the percentage is of people that go from form to actually getting on a video call?

I would say that's probably 75%.

Oh wow, so it's not a big drop-off.

Okay, no, wait, let me qualify that because a lot of the people that fill out the form are pure spammers. We have to, we have to weed that out.

So I would say, I don't know, fill out the form of real leads, not, not people that want to get backlinks on your blog.

And these people are usually, these people are really actively looking and they're pretty far down, down the funnel already. Yeah, so if we get back to them in a really— the faster we get back to them, the higher likelihood we're going to get on that call. Yeah, and we're probably— yeah, probably 3 out of 4, we're eventually getting on to that, to that initial discovery call.

Got it. So 75% go to the discovery call. You do the discovery call, next step is you send them the audit. How many people are going on to the next phase? So is it from discovery call and like send audit to—

well, not actually— there was a— you skipped a step there because on the discovery call we're trying to assess whether or not we want to work on a proposal for them and send them a proposal. And they also assess us. So it's a little bit of both sides figuring out, yeah, do we like each other? And usually the discovery call ends with us telling them that you're going to be getting a proposal from us within a couple of days.

And then how many go from, how many go from call to proposal? So like how many are you kind of weeding out slash or like, all right, it's not a good fit.

It's probably, it's again, it's the majority. So most of the time, if we already— we can already pre-qualify the lead based on how they fill in the form, what information we get.

Yep.

Usually that call is— we just confirm that this is a deal that we want and we're going to work on a proposal. So I would say it's, it's probably even 80 or 90% even from the discovery call to us sending a proposal.

And then of the proposals you send, how many do you think are, are, are signing the proposal and coming on board for some type of services?

Yeah, that's, that's the key question. After the proposal is sent, sometimes they go silent. Sometimes there's a negotiation period. Sometimes they say no thanks, or sometimes they'll say yes, of course. So that's where, that's where the biggest drop-off occurs usually. So we probably, we're probably closing, I would say, roughly 20% of our—

got it.

Yeah.

Got it. Um, cool. So if you had 100 leads come through, 75% or 70 of them are going to jump on a call. Of those, 60 are going to go to proposal and then you're going to close 12 into, uh, into clients. But yeah, obviously the biggest drop-off going from proposal to client. One of the things that, um, you know, I was talking to, you know, someone else and they were talking about how they're so big into case studies in the proposal. Like, talk to me about what your proposal looks like. Just kind of curious, you know, do you have a template you use maybe in Google Google Docs or using proposal software. Yeah, talk to me about that.

It's all template-driven. It has to be, you know, for us to scale every aspect of the agency. We're always trying to create systems that can scale, and that's also true very much with the sales process. So we use templates that are— typically there are two, there are two components of a proposal. There is a presentation component where we include some custom research and some findings, and and there's descriptions of the services and case studies are in there as well. And then there is a Google Doc which is more straightforward pricing, really a pricing table for the services.

Yeah.

So the particular scope that we're recommending, and we send them, we send them both together. And usually the goal is on that next call, we do try to get them to commit to doing a second call where we can present the proposal. That's really important. For us to be able to present it rather than just send it and have them read it. So the goal is to get them to actually walk them through the presentation on that second call and then they have the pricing and usually the close rate is a lot higher when we have that opportunity.

Got it. I always think that's so interesting. It's so funny how similar like just sales cycle, sales funnels are between, you know, industries, products, just walks of life, you know, even, you know, no matter what, right? I think like sales funnels are very similar. Even, you know, even with us, we're a product SaaS-driven business, you're more service-driven business, right? But it's still kind of the same things that we're doing in order to go from like top of funnel, moving people along and then getting them to ultimately close into a client. So let's talk about that. Once they are a client, you know, what is the first thing, you know, obviously you have a bunch of different, you know, types of services that you do and you're going to recommend throughout the process, hey, I think you should maybe do some content, maybe supplement it early with some PPC. Like, what is, you know, how do you onboard them? How do you manage your clients? Are you using, you know, Basecamp, any Trello project management software? Like, talk to me about, like, I guess the day-to-day management of these clients.

Yeah, I'll just continue on with the lifecycle. So, when we find a client, that's when the real work starts. And the onboarding process, I want to really emphasize to the other agency listeners out there that the onboarding process is so important because that's really the first impression that that client gets of your agency. And it's very tempting to really just celebrate after you close the deal and then just pass it off to a project team. And if the project team hasn't been properly briefed on the deal and they don't really understand what you've been talking about or what, what the salesperson has sold. Yeah, first month, uh, that experience can be quite, quite bad for the client, and that's the first impression. We call this the honeymoon period, and the onboarding process has to be there to make that honeymoon period as successful as possible for the— for that new client. So we're typically looking to, as quickly as possible, exceed expectations of that client with whatever service we have engage them with. We don't try to upsell too soon. We want to first really deliver and over-deliver on what they signed up for, even if that's just an SEO audit or maybe analytics audit. We want them to get that within the first 30 days and just say, wow, this is more than I even expected. Very naturally, things will progress from there. We'll get them— typically get them onto a retainer agreement and then be in a position to upsell at some point in the future.

So talk to me about pricing. So you mentioned retainer. I'm curious, is it retainer based on just services? Is it based on percentage? Is it based on ad spend, like tier percentage of ad spend, a blend? You know, I hear this all the time. Do you ever do pay per lead? Like, talk to me, I guess, about your pricing and also like your pricing philosophy.

Okay, let's start with pricing philosophy. I think that's the best place. Um, we— I think that the right philosophy is to price based on value, and the more that you can quantify and measure the value, the better position you're going to be in as an agency owner or as an agency person.

Yep.

To price according to value. If, if I can show that, that we can increase someone's sales, uh, 2 times or 3 times, or we can deliver return on investment or return on ad spend of 5x or 10x, I can much more easily justify much, much higher prices. So we go in thinking that we want to validate our pricing based on the value that we think we can bring, and then we have to justify that value. And then in terms of the actual pricing models, it does vary by the service. With organic non-paid services like SEO and content.

Yep.

The pricing tends to be more driven by time and materials based. So we have, we have hourly rates that we apply to some, some types of activities. Other activities we charge for a piece of content, like a content campaign, which involves the creation and promotion of a piece of content. That could be anything from a blog post to a larger premium type of content. Like infographic or something like that. So on the organic side, it's a little bit more customized either around the time that we think it's going to take or we bundle some of these activities into campaigns and we price it by campaign. On the paid side with PPC and social, it's percentage of ad spend.

Okay, and is it just percentage of ad spend or does it like tier up?

There are typically tiers to that and sometimes there's a bonus or performance kicker if we exceed the goals that are set and we do want to set specific goals. So yeah, usually it starts with the smallest budgets, it's usually 12 to 15% And then as the budgets get larger, it goes down from there. The percentage goes down.

Awesome. And then, um, when, you know, when you are managing ad spend for clients, like talk to me about, I guess, the reporting back to them. I'm always so curious, um, maybe just because I think of myself as a client and I know that like, I don't really care about the intra, like, you know, click-through rate and ad position, like, are you reporting that to your clients and do they care about it or do they really care about like, what's my spend? How many leads or sales am I getting? What's my cost per lead, cost per sale? Yeah.

Well, the higher up you go in the organization, the less people care about the micro conversions or vanity metrics. They really just want to see sales growth, lead growth. Or a clear return on investment. We use Google Data Studio for all of our reporting. And I think that's the way to go because these reports are—

did you build a template? And I've heard a lot of people using Google Data Studio and, you know, back in the day, not even the day, like a year ago, people were using all these like Ninja Cat and these like, you know, reporting, whatever. Garden, Agency Analytics, that sort of thing. Did you, do you just find that you're, it's just super customizable? It's a Google product, you can plug in stuff like, yeah, yeah.

Google Data Studio, when it came out, I immediately knew that this is going to be our new reporting backbone.

Yep.

Natively integrates with all of the Google products and there are, there's something called Supermetrics, a Supermetrics connector.

Yep. My, my, uh, the guy who manages our ads, uses Supermetrics and just boom, gives me a sheet and it's like got all the stuff in it.

Yeah. So with Supermetrics, you can pull in, you can pull in all non-Google product data, which starts with Facebook ads. So we do have templates and we have developed some nice templates based on the types of services. And typically the first page of that report is going to be your really high-level view to your C-level or real decision maker. And that's going to show here's what you invested, and this is the result, either this number of leads or here are the sales and this is the return on ad spend. And we always really want to bring it back to a return on investment, and that should— that story should be clear on that first page of that report. And then page 2, page 3, we dive into more details. We can show things like the click-through rate and top-performing keywords, best-performing ads if they care, but usually it's the people who care more of the The people who are on the marketing team there, you know, they're interested in some of those more micro KPIs. So we have that for them.

That's awesome. And then in terms of cadence, are you doing, you know, are you sending it weekly and then maybe doing like a weekly, biweekly, monthly, like meeting on the calendar? How does that look?

Well, we send a weekly email with an update of how the week went. And we attach the report or we link to the report. And sometimes the clients look at that, sometimes they don't. And we try to get them either on a bi-monthly, twice-monthly, or a once-per-month call where we really open up that call with the report.

Yeah, totally.

This is what happened over the past month. Here's how much— either this is what we created, this is how much you spent on these platforms, and this is the result. And then we really want to take that as a starting of the conversation. So we will say, what we learned this month is that these things don't work, and that's fine, and we've identified waste and we're going to stop doing that. These things are clearly working and we're going to continue doing them. And then we have a few new ideas of what could work that we haven't tried yet. What do you think about this? Yep. And then that makes the client really, really feel like a partner in this. And a contributor to the strategy. And that's really the purpose is the report should be— the report has to demonstrate that you are delivering value, but it's also there for you to tell a story and to lead a conversation about strategy.

Absolutely. What, you know, what is the most bizarre thing a client has asked you to do? Do they get involved in copy of that? I used to get involved, I used to get so nitty-gritty and I would be like, no, no, no, I think the ad should say this and they would be like, okay, that's so subjective and it's your personal opinion and I don't know why you think that, but then they would almost entertain me in this and then I've learned over the years, I need to step back, let the data do the talking, let the, you know, specialist agency, the guys running it do that. But yeah, I'm curious if, you know, the— I'm sure you get some clients, right, that are just so hands-on and like, it's got to say, you know, this, and you're like, people don't search for that. I was talking to— by the way, this is kind of a random— I was talking to an agency that is a PPC agency, and he was saying that he was like, look, we have to advertise ourselves on Google with keywords as SEO agency because people will search SEO agency but then want to do paid ads. Like, they just don't, they just don't know. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, they think SEO is just like marketing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm curious, like, if people are ever driving you to do stuff and you either have to do it or like push them, you know.

This is one of the, this is what one of the things that makes, makes the job so fun is that you have all, all flavors of clients and different sizes of companies, different levels of knowledge and sophistication. The key is figuring out how to adapt to every type of client and still provide a good service and still convince them that, that you're adding value to their business. So we really believe strongly that the more educated a client is, the better that client's going to be and the longer they're going to stay with us. And that might go against the typical thinking that an educated client might realize that they can do it themselves, or they might realize that they should be bringing it in-house. That's not really the case. I think the more educated the client is, the more they appreciate the services that we're bringing to them, and the more likely they are to stay with us for a longer period of time. So a lot of what we do also when we interact with clients, and sometimes the clients want to micromanage, we take this as an opportunity to educate them. Yeah. Spend a lot of time teaching them about the ins and outs of these platforms and updating them on trends in the industry. And that's really important. And the more that they learn, the less they— the more that they learn, the more that they start trusting us. They start micromanaging us. And apart from that, we have— you asked me earlier about project management tools. We use Asana. Yeah. And with Asana, we bring our clients into that platform. Where they have full visibility of their project. They can see who's doing what, they can see every task, every deadline. And that also lets— I think a lot of times if they feel like my agency's not doing anything, what's going on, haven't heard from them, we always encourage them to go in there and really keep up with our— even with our day-to-day tasks.

Yeah, because they can see, they can see kind of the activity. That's what I like. I, I, uh, When I was working with an agency a few years ago, and it was just in Trello, but it's just— and I also thought though, I don't know, I'm always like skeptical, and I was like, I feel like they're just doing stuff just so I see, because you get like notifications, you know, I feel like they're just kind of moving things around, but that's just like the skeptic in me, but I'm sure they were doing great stuff. So, okay, awesome. This has been probably the longest that we've done in a while. One of the things I want to wrap it up with that I always ask everyone, like, what is your morning routine?

Great question. Well, as of the past year, the first thing I do, I get up early and go for a swim.

Oh, swim in a pool?

Yeah, swim in the pool. There's a pool nearby, so I get in a good swim. Yeah, and that really helps me. It helps me wake up, clears my head. Yeah, really gets me prepped for the day. And then, and then I come home, and by the time I come home, my, my wife and kid are starting to wake up, and we get breakfast going.

And then what's for breakfast typically?

Egg sandwiches.

Egg sandwiches? What kind of bread?

Over easy wheat bread.

Wheat bread over easy, cheese?

Absolutely, cheese and tomato, sometimes a little bit of prosciutto ham.

You go, whoa, okay, wow.

I layer it up. So we got toast, prosciutto ham, nice slice of tomato, and then the fried egg over easy on top with cheese.

The egg on top, all the toppings on the bottom, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard of.

It's easier that way. It's easy to eat that way, I think. If you put a slice of tomato on top, it's gonna slide off.

Yeah, I get kind of like, like, like squirt everywhere, like mush. I don't know, that's— I don't— I've just never— I've never seen it that way ever in my entire life. I might have to do some research today just to see.

Give it a try.

Hey, I'm not opposed to— I'm open-minded, you know. I'm a big podcast guy now. I'm open-minded. I'm learning.

There's a lot of ways to do an egg sandwich, so you gotta try, you gotta try everything.

I used to be a really big egg sandwich guy. I'm from Maryland. They have this disgusting meat called scrapple that I used to like be really into. I don't know if you're familiar with it. Um, so I would not recommend it nowadays. Um, but it was, it was really good back in the day. Um, all right. It's like Spam, but just all the scraps. In, uh, you know, from like, I guess, a farm. I don't know. Uh, all right, Paris Childress, thank you so much for, uh, for joining us today. Where can everyone find you?

You can find us at hop-online.com. That's our website. And you can find me on LinkedIn. So anybody listening, feel free to connect, and I'll look forward to meeting some of you.

All right, awesome. Thank you so much, Paris Childress, Hop Online. Thanks for joining us and growing your agency.

Thank you too, Ryan. It was a real pleasure.

All right, take care.

Yep, you too. Right.