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How to Structure your Digital Marketing Proposal

Like most proposals, a digital marketing proposal has many different components that need to be considered regardless of the goals. After viewing your digital marketing proposal a client needs to understand:

• What are the goals and objectives of the engagement?
• What work is going to be done? 
• When is everything going to be done?
• How much it’s going to cost?

In this guide, we’ll cover all of these different facets and what you should be thinking about when putting together a proposal that will close.

Overview & Goals

In your digital marketing proposal, one of the first items you want to address is an overview and goals. This sets the tone of the proposal and highlights everything that you’re working towards.

If you aren’t able to properly identify your client’s goals there is going to be misalignment from the beginning and it makes it less likely that you will be selected because everything else that follows won’t be applicable. 

Take the time to truly understand what your client is looking for and how you’re able to support them.

Scope of Work

Digital marketing is incredibly broad and can encompass many different areas. Within your digital marketing proposal, it’s essential to include all the different components that you will touch on. 

We’ve included a few examples of what may be included within your digital marketing proposal. Whatever you decide to include within your scope, make sure that everything aligns back to goals.

SEO

If your client is looking for help increasing organic traffic, SEO may be one of the strategies you might employ. When putting together a digital marketing proposal including SEO, think of the different tactics that would help accomplish your client’s goals. 

From keyword research, technical SEO, content strategy, and on-page optimizations, there are many different areas that you might include.

Remember that within proposals you want to get as specific as possible in what your strategies and tactics may accomplish.

PPC

PPC is a great option for many clients looking to quickly increase their conversions. If you’re pitching paid ads or paid social to your clients determine what will be included. How much optimization is there when managing ads? Are you going to create the landing pages or will those be provided to you by your client?

Social Media

Social media can be a time-consuming part of your scope. When you’re putting together a digital marketing proposal, try and accurately estimate what the work will look like so you will avoid future scope creep. 

When it comes to social media within your digital marketing contract, help your potential clients understand how you will be supporting them. Will this include strategy and execution? Or just one or the other?

Consider budget, goals, your bandwidth, and experience when structuring your scope of work.

Content Strategy

For clients that are working to increase their content – whether it be on social media, for their website or blog, to support landing pages, or better understand what their competition is doing, content strategy may be included within your digital marketing proposal. 

Get specific on what will best accomplish your client’s goals and how you will do that.

Design

The last potential digital marketing area we’ll cover within this digital marketing proposal is design work. If you’re considering having design be within your proposal, you’ll want to ensure that there are visual elements that support your pitch. 

Showing a portfolio with your proposal is incredibly helpful in understanding your capabilities and the excellent work you’ve done for your previous clients.

Timeline

Once you know what you’re going to be including within your digital marketing proposal, it’s time to outline how long it will take to accomplish. Sometimes clients will come to you with a specific timeframe that they want things to be completed by. This often occurs if their launching a new product, redesigning a site, or have other goals they want you to align with. 

Be realistic on the timeline because this is your first step in building trust with your client and your ability to manage expectations.

Communicate with your potential client what you’re able to work on in tandem and where are the bottlenecks within the strategies you’re proposing.

Presenting a timeline can look like a content calendar, a physical timeline that shows the different deliverables mapped out against a calendar to visually see the dates or a simple timeframe that says an estimated amount of time each area will take. 

Include the information that is necessary and call out any estimates in advance.

Pricing & Fees

Tiered Pricing

The larger your scope is, the more it’s going to cost. If you know your client is price conscientious consider creating a tiered system to your scope. This can be structured in a good, better, best model of what you would recommend that would help accomplish the client goals. 

Type of Engagement

When putting together the pricing, determine what type of engagement makes the most sense for you and your client. This may be a retainer, hourly, or project-based. This will impact how you structure your payment and how much to charge your client.

Duration vs Market Value

One large consideration when figuring out the pricing is thinking about how long the project will take to execute vs how much the information is worth. Oftentimes clients will want to charge you a lower hourly rate but that doesn’t always account for the years of time you’ve spent building this expertise. Understand what the market rate for this type of work is and the potential ROI that will bring the client.

One way of determining your rate is to consider your value as a full-time employee or the cost that it would be for them to hire a full-time employee for this type of role. Calculating this number backward can just give you additional information for which you can work off of.

How to Present Your Digital Marketing Proposal

The more complicated your digital marketing proposal is, for example, the number of different types of digital marketing your proposing, the more information you need to provide. 

For example, if you’re putting together a proposal that includes: SEO, PPC, social media, content strategy, and design work, it may be challenging to include all of this within a single document and have it be cohesive. 

The amount of information that’s included within the scope of work will influence how the proposal is delivered.

Another consideration within your digital marketing proposal presentation is to determine if case studies would be valuable to show. The larger the scope and the higher the cost, the more information is needed to close the deal. 

Digital Marketing Pitch Example

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