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There are lots of benefits to outsourcing your digital marketing objectives to an agency like ourselves.
Access to a dedicated team of channel experts, the use of the best tech without monthly license fees and partnerships with third-party platforms are just some of the advantages that come from working with a digital marketing agency.
But hiring a digital marketing agency is a big investment. That’s why finding an agency that matches what your company wants to achieve is essential. Putting together an effective request for proposal (RFP) is one way to find a digital agency that meet your business objectives.
Creating a specific, representative digital marketing RFP can seem quite daunting. But our free downloadable digital marketing RFP template can be modified to suit your business’s unique needs and help make the process of selecting a suitable digital agency much smoother.
A request for proposal allows businesses get details about a marketing agency they are interested to work with and then gage if they are a suitable fit. So it is important an RFP brief contains as much detail as possible. Digital marketing RFPs typically include:
A good RFP can weed out agencies that are not a good match before the pitch process starts. Most digital marketing agencies fall into two camps: niche, or full service.
Search Laboratory offers full-service digital marketing. We have teams in every channel from PPC to CRO, as well as being international digital marketing specialists, and Google Marketing Platform (GMP) Sales Partners. These qualities mean we are better equipped to help brands expand internationally or leverage the advanced features of the GMP stack than other full-service digital agencies that do not share our expertise or accreditions.
Working with an agency is a two-way relationship. The RFP process is just as much an opportunity for a digital agency to decide if a brand is a good fit, as it is for a company to review an agency. Providing a thorough overview of your business helps agencies assess if the scope of work is suitable for them. Look to include as part of a Request for Proposal document:
A digital marketing agency should act as an extension of your in-house team. So if there is anything your marketing department needs to know; the agency needs to know too.
The challenges you face will partly determine the strategy used to reach your business goals. So it is important you include all internal and external challenges in an RFP brief, as this helps the digital agency identify where and how they should prioritise their efforts.
Anything that might impact the work – from technical SEO issues, to economic instability, outlining your challenges helps a digital agency determine where they can add value.
The RFP should detail exactly what services you are looking for from an agency and what you hope to achieve. Be as specific as possible – ‘We want to increase our PPC revenue by X% in the next X months’ can influence answers much better than ‘We want someone to manage our Digital PR’.
Your budget and expected time frame will play a huge part in the strategy that is proposed. Sharing the timeline for the scope of work ensures agencies who do not have the capacity to complete the work in the timeframe are filtered out.
Being clear upfront allows agencies to propose a strategy that best uses the budget to reach your goals, rather than presenting a strategy that is out of budget and need scaling back later on.
Your marketing request for proposal needs to portray the exact results you want to gain from the work – in terms of digital KPIs and wider business objectives. Understanding the distance between your current position and your desired outcome is crucial when building an effective digital marketing strategy.
A digital agency needs to know exactly what information is needed, to respond with a cohesive RFP answer. Vague questions are likely to get vague answers. It’s difficult to compare answers between agencies, when broad or generic questions are used, as they may be interpreted differently.
When compiling your questions, think about how what you want to know (e.g. the agency’s approach to unifying online and offline data) can be related back to what you hope to achieve.
This can be done by either creating specific questions throughout (e.g. How would you approach implementing first-party data into GA4?) or outlining objectives in the brief and asking the agency to refer back to these objectives when answering each question.
Your digital marketing RFP should explain the criteria and any scoring systems you will use to select an agency partner.
Responding to digital RFPs can require lots of work from multiple people in the agency. So, including this information can prevent unsuitable agencies from applying, saving both parties time.
It is beneficial to enlist an agency that has experience working with clients in a similar sector to you. This is because the agency will probably already know what does (and what doesn’t) work in a particular industry, as well as having strong relationships with key individuals too.
An agency may specialise in just one industry, such as travel, or they may work across multiple. But the agency can still have specialist knowledge of your sector by having several clients in one industry.
All digital agencies can talk the talk, but a truly successful digital marketing agency will have compelling case studies and industry awards to confirm whether they deliver genuinely successful results for their clients.
All businesses have values and beliefs that influence their brand’s culture, so it’s essential to discover a marketing agency whose culture and beliefs complement yours. Finding an agency with a similar culture and values, ensures they can act as an extension of your brand, as the work they are required to do is a natural fit for the work they believe in.
Digital marketing agencies tend to have a budget in mind that they like to work with. Finding an agency that looks after similar-sized businesses and budgets means you are more likely to work with specialists who are capable of delivering your marketing campaigns.
We have created a free digital marketing RFP template that includes example questions across all digital services. The template is completely customisable, so you can add or remove questions and details, tailoring it to the specific work requirements you have.
By using our digital marketing RFP template and the above tips, you should have no trouble creating an ideal RFP document that will help find the right digital agencies to invite to pitch.