The Top 8 Elements of Winning Digital Marketing Proposals

A digital marketing proposal should always be a reflection of your creativity. This means that every document you send to your clients should help you stand out while keeping a level of professionalism. 

The only way your clients are going to entrust you with their branding and image is if they know you’re reliable. A great way to show that is by starting your business relationship with a beautifully designed, error-free proposal. 

In this article, we’ll explain how to create an engaging proposal your clients will love, as well as how to incentivize them to agree to your terms quickly. 

Conduct a successful discovery meeting

Before you start creating your digital marketing proposal, you need to talk to your client and find out whether you’re on the same page as them. Before doing this you can always consult digital marketing firms, in particular, the Fancy Lab performance-driven marketing agency in order to make sure that your proposal affects all the interests of your client.

In this meeting or call, you need to learn:

• Who the client is
• What kind of problem they are experiencing
• What they expect you to accomplish
• Are you the right person for the job
• What their budget is
• When they expect to see results

You don’t want to waste time by creating and sending a proposal to leads that will never turn into clients. Think of your discovery meeting as the ultimate lead qualification. You should use the opportunity to understand what the client’s goals and needs are. 

A lot of the time, people don’t have a great understanding of marketing, which leads them to create unattainable goals. Use your discovery meeting to find out what their short- and long-term goals are and how they expect you to achieve them. 

For example, if your potential client wants you to get them on the first page of Google overnight and they don’t even have a website, you’ll have to explain why this wouldn’t work. 

In the majority of cases, your clients won’t have lots of technical knowledge. That means that you’ll have to level with them and make sure you’re on the same page before you agree to anything. 

Once they understand how your process works, how big their budget should be and what type of results can they count on, you’ll be able to create a high-quality marketing proposal your client will be able to follow. 

Grab attention with the cover page

Marketing and PR are all about creativity, grabbing attention, and leaving a great first impression. With that in mind, you’ll have to use the cover page of your digital marketing proposal wisely. 

We recommend using a high-quality photograph that will set the tone of your proposal. Having a beautiful cover page will set you apart from your competitors, so make sure you include your branding for easier remembering.  

You don’t have to put too much information on the cover itself. Let the content of your proposal do the talking, while your cover page can grab the attention.

Our proposal report analyzes all the proposals that get sent through Better Proposals and this year we found that including a cover makes it 4,6% more likely it will get signed.  

This is a quick step you can take to secure a better chance of winning the deal. 

Keep your introduction short

We know that once you choose the right proposal template, you’ll start personalizing your document and get the urge to include a lot of information about your company. 

However, this would be counterproductive. If you use the starting point of your digital marketing proposal to talk about yourself, you’ll lose the client’s attention. They probably already know a lot about your services, your company and a bit about your previous working experience. 

The point of the marketing proposal is to show how you can help your clients market their brand, products and services. Make sure to keep the focus on them and how your service will bring them tangible benefits. 

Think back to the conversation you had during the discovery session and the issues your client mentioned. Assure them that you understand their needs by describing the problem at hand in their own words. 

Once you ease them in, shortly explain how your solution will help. You’ll go into more detail in other chapters, so there is no need to write a long introduction. 

Make sure to personalize your proposal by including your client’s name. Seeing how you’ll have to use their name through your proposal, save time by utilizing merge tags. That way you can name your client once and let the automation do the rest. 

Make sure your timeline is easy to understand

Once you start writing about your solution, remember to keep everything simple. As we already mentioned, your clients won’t have the same level of technical knowledge so make sure to explain everything in plain language. 

Although your proposal, you should talk about the benefits of your services. Even though you’ll detail specific processes, make sure to talk about increased brand awareness, raising the number of impressions, sales and retaining customers. 

Create an overview of your process by breaking it down week by week. Show what you’ll start with. Most commonly, it will be research into their customers and audience. Explain the importance of this step and how the research will help you create better and more personable content. 

If you’re working with a team of marketers, explain what roles they play and what projects they’ll work on. 

Mention how you’ll choose topics for blogs, promotional materials and social media posts. A bonus tip is to mention their previous content and how you’re going to build on it. Clients will love to read about you including their blogs and articles in your process because it reassures them that they were on the right track. 

After all, marketing tends to be a lengthy process, and building on older blogs can help you secure a better SEO ranking than writing new ones. 

You can use social proof to help you further demonstrate how your services will help them achieve their goals. It can be a review, a shortened version of a case study, or something else. Just make sure to keep it short - get right to the point. 

Ease the client in by focusing on flexibility

Social media trends change overnight, which means that you can’t plan out your campaigns too far ahead and you always need to be flexible. 

All your marketing and PR efforts are created in a certain Zeitgeist, meaning you need to be aware of what’s going on in the world and be able to shape your content accordingly.

Reassure your clients that you’ll continually monitor your previously written and scheduled content and have a head start if anything needs to be changed. 

If you’re offering social media management, you need to explain that you won’t just create content and post it. You'll also keep an eye on comments and other engagement and continue the communication with the followers. 

Flexibility is a must, even if you’re offering different types of marketing services. Make sure to include a description of your process and whether the client will receive the content beforehand and be able to edit it. 

Turn to the professionals when it comes to pricing

The placement of your pricing section is very important. Include it in the later stages of the digital marketing proposal, once you already explained how your services will bring benefits to the client. That way, the client will be in a better position to agree to your price. 

Make sure to avoid naming your pricing section Price or Cost, because it will cheapen your proposal and make it look like an invoice. As our research suggests, the best way to name the pricing section is with words like Investment and ROI. 

The way you structure your price is also important. 

You could price by:

• The hour
• A monthly retainer
• The individual piece of content
• The package of services
• The results
• The value

We don’t recommend charging by the hour because it doesn’t give you an incentive to finish the work earlier. If you’re getting paid hourly, you’ll drag out your work in order to get paid more. 

This means that if you finish earlier, there is no reward, which leaves you working on the same projects, without any place for growth. If you’re charging by the value or results, you’ll be incentivized to finish your projects quicker, which will lead you to take on more projects. 

However, you can charge by the value and results only if you’re certain of your expertise and know the exact benefits you’ll bring to your clients. If you can’t promise an uptick in brand awareness, reach, the number of impressions and sales, you’ll have to structure your price accordingly. 

The last piece of advice is not to upsell your clients. The client is looking to you to tell them what type of services do they need. If you leave it up to them to decide, it will confuse them and slow down the agreement process. 

A single package that includes all the necessary services is a better solution than showing your clients 3 different packages with different prices. 

Make sure to include the marketing budget as well if you’re offering social media and PPC ads. 

Include the next steps in the digital marketing proposal

Now that your digital marketing proposal is almost complete, you need to explain to your client what happens next. All our proposals come with an integrated digital signature option which lets your clients sign them without needing to print them. 

There is also a payment integration that allows the clients to pay their first fee through PayPal, Stripe and GoCardless. 

Make sure to explain what happens once the client agrees to your terms and conditions. 

• Do they need to send you any materials?
• Will you need access to social media pages or WordPress?
• Do you need to have a meeting with their team?

Write it all in your proposal in order to speed up the process. 

If you use Grammarly, it will work on your proposal template, making sure you send an error-free document. Once your proposal is finished, send it to your team members first, so that they can look it over and make changes if necessary. 

Our bonus tip is to avoid sending your proposal on a Friday because it will slow down the agreement process. Stick to other days of the workweek. 

Ace the follow-up process with proposal analytics

One of Better Proposals' features we all know and love is proposal analytics. It lets you know when your proposals are opened, forwarded, signed and paid. 

If your clients opened your digital marketing proposal but haven’t signed it, check how much time they spend on each of the chapters. It will give you a better overview of what might be keeping them from signing it. 

In the case that your client opened the proposal and closed it once they reached the pricing section, try sending them an email in which you explain how you helped another client in a similar situation reach their goals and experience ROI quickly. 

Now is the time to link to a long and detailed case study that didn’t fit in your proposal. This will show them that you’ve experienced a lot of success previously and give them more confidence in choosing you over your competitors. 

It will also showcase your professionalism because creating one of those detailed but clear case studies is no easy task. 

Our bonus tip is to send a few free social media posts they could use because it gives them tangible value and helps build a relationship with the client. 

Conclusion

Now that you’ve read our actionable guide on how to write a high-quality digital marketing proposal, you can start on your own. Luckily, you don’t have to do it from scratch, because Better Proposals offer a lot of prewritten templates that will speed up your proposal process. 

Sign up for a 2-week free trial and experience the ease of creating and sending web-based proposals and learn for quick the whole process could be when you partner up with a reliable sales tool.