How To Write an Marketing RFP (That Actually Gets Results)

When enterprise companies want to work with marketing agencies, they typically issue an RFP. This request for proposal standardizes their requirements and allows them to compare different agencies based on an a pre-agreed set of criteria. Now, the design of this RFP and the process that is run can massively impact the quality of the proposals that come back from different agencies. Well, we are a marketing agency and some of our team have worked with RFPs [music] for decades. So, in this video, we're going to give you our suggestions on how to get the most from agencies in an RFP. So, whether you've run loads of RFP processes or you're just thinking about putting together your first RFP, hopefully this provides you some useful insight from across the fence or across the trenches, depending on how you see it. And throughout today's video, we're going to be including some insights and suggestions from Rich, our sales director. He's reviewed hundreds of RFPs from enterprises in his 20-plus years in sales. And the great thing about Rich is he's northern, so he doesn't hold back. We asked him what number one problem was with RFPs that he's seen in his time. And his answer was actually quite surprising. He said, "The biggest mistake companies can make in their marketing RFPs is not being open to suggestions. People seek out experts to solve their problems, but they often don't fully understand what needs to be done. They may issue an RFP for something very specific that in reality doesn't address the root problem that they're having. When you engage experts, you should allow them to diagnose what you actually need instead of dictating what the solution needs to be." So, we're going to go through seven steps to creating your RFP and some advice on how to run the RFP process. Of course, all of this is from an agency's perspective, but it's all designed to help you get the most out of an agency like Exposure Ninja when you're sending us an RFP. First up then, what does a good RFP look like? Well, the best RFPs include a few different things. Firstly, a brief overview of your business and the decision makers involved. Usually, some clear commercial goals and what success looks like. Information about your current performance and how close you are or far away to your goals. A bit of background on what you've already tried that's worked and hasn't worked. The time frame for achieving your objectives and the budget that you've got in mind. We'll come back to this and talk about this quite a lot later on. Your key competitors and some market context. The RFP timeline including submission, short list, and decision dates. A bit about your internal sign-off process and how proposals will be evaluated and what you expect to see. If that all sounds like a lot, it is. That's why we're going to break this process down into seven steps to make it easy. So, how do we start? Well, step one is really simple. Company context and decision makers. This is all about explaining where you're at and who is involved in the decision. Some useful stuff to include here is your company's revenue bracket and your growth trajectory. The key products and services that you sell and which ones, if any, that you want to specifically focus on in the RFP. The geographies that you operate in. Your marketing team and their capabilities. And the decision makers involved and their priorities. And this last one's really important. If your CFO is involved in the decision-making process, they are probably going to be more calibrated towards the commercial efficiency of the propositions, whereas a CMO might be more focused on brand visibility. The agencies that are submitting proposals need to know that their proposals have to take into account both of these objectives and need to balance those. So, we've got our context, what next? Well, now it's time to get really clear on your goals. What do you actually want the agencies to achieve? And this is where it can help to get specific. If you give your agencies a vague goal like increase brand awareness or increase leads, you're going to get vague proposals back. There's some quote, isn't there, Alice in Wonderland when she's asking someone, "Which way do I turn?" And they say, "Where are you going?" And she says, "I don't know." And then they say, "Well, it doesn't matter which way you go then." And it can be a similar thing with RFPs. A clear goal like generate 100 qualified leads per week with a maximum cost per acquisition of £300 is something really tangible that agencies can work back from when they're designing their proposal. Now, our advice here is actually to give two levels of goal. Firstly, the business goal, so like the underlying thing that you're trying to achieve, and then the marketing objective that you think is going to result in that goal. So, let me give you an example. Let's say that a business wants proposals from an agency on how to reduce their cost per acquisition because they're using some paid channels and they're really capping out on the performance of these, so they're having to spend increasingly to get more leads. Well, their business goal might be something like reduce customer acquisition cost by 25% whilst maintaining lead volume. So, the marketing implication that they give in the RFP as well might be that paid channels are showing diminishing returns, therefore we want to build out organic channels underneath them to take some of the pressure off and lower our cost per acquisition. Now, including this framing in both of these levels allows the agencies to evaluate whether actually this marketing implication is the right problem to solve to get to that goal of lower cost per acquisition. Sometimes, of course, it absolutely will be, but there might be other times where we could get that reduced the cost per acquisition goal by another more effective route. Whereas, if you just give the goal of we want to build out organic channels without that additional context of and why are we doing this, you're just going to get proposals on building out the organic channels. Okay, step three is to describe the current state of affairs and what you've tried. It's important to be honest throughout your RFP, of course, but in this section in particular, really useful for agencies to know what you've tried that worked and why you think it worked and what you've tried that hasn't worked and why you think that. What you don't want to do is go to your agencies with an RFP and get a whole bunch of proposals that come back and say, "Oh yeah, you need to do this." And you're like, "We've already done that and we knew that that didn't work." That makes the whole process a complete waste of everyone's time. So, if you explain what you've tried that hasn't worked, the agencies will know to either diagnose that and see if they can show you why that might not worked or to just to avoid that thing altogether if they can see, "Oh yeah, no, this looks like they've done a really good job and it still hasn't worked, therefore this avenue is a dud, let's ignore it." The more data you can provide, the better. So, things like website traffic, conversion rates, performance of different channels, performance of different campaigns, the value of conversions from different channels if you have that. Your team capabilities also really good to know here as well. As well as any other resource constraint from your side. Step four is to outline the timeline and budget. Now, not the timeline of the RFP process, the timeline of the campaign or the work that you're going to have done as a result of this. Sometimes from an agency's perspective, an RFP can feel a little bit like pin the tail on the donkey. You may have seen this game, we played it a lot when we were kids and there was nothing else to do because the internet hadn't been invented. So, pin the tail on the donkey, you have a picture of a donkey attached to a door, you have a tail with a pin or piece of Blu Tack, your mommy or daddy blindfolds you, spins you round, and you've got to try and stick that tail on the donkey. But of course, you can't see and you've been spun round, so you've got no idea which area you're facing. Hilarity ensues. Loads of people will stick the tail on the door, some people will stick the tail on the donkey's head, very infrequently someone actually finds the right place to stick the tail. And an RFP with either no timeline and budget stated or very broad timeline and budget can often feel like pin the tail on donkey. An RFP that we were working on a few months ago felt like exactly this. This business had maybe 10 to 12 different marketing channels that they were interested in exploring. There was no indication of budget whatsoever. So, we could have proposed a solution that was $20,000 per month for the whole lot. Or quite frankly, because the RFP was so broad, we could have proposed solution that was $20,000 per month per channel, i.e. $240,000 per month. We had no indication from the brand what level of firepower they wanted us to bring to this party. And honestly, it felt like we were wandering around the streets with our tail in our hand trying to work out which building the donkey's even in. Of course, I understand that some brands are a little bit cagey about showing their budget because what they're worried about, of course, is that a bunch of agencies are going to turn up and guess what? All of their proposals are going to be exactly at the top end of that budget. How convenient. But the reality is that any good agency isn't just going to inflate their prices to hit the budget cap. Instead, they're going to expand the amount of work that they'll do in order to smash past the targets that they've been given. An agency like us, for example, we don't reverse engineer what our price needs to be based on the target budget. We work out our fees using calculators based on how much of the team is allocated to this project. So, if you allocate a larger budget, you're going to get a lot more time and energy from the team and typically more senior team in order to generate those results. And some advice from northern Rich, "The budget doesn't need to be exact, but providing a range helps vendors determine whether it's worth responding and ensures their proposal is at the pitch at the right level." It's no use you running an RFP process, getting all your C-suite in the room to sit back and watch these proposals, and everyone who comes in just blows your budget out the water and you think, "Oh, we can't do any of this stuff." And yes, that happens. Okay, step five is to explain your competitive landscape. Who are those competitors that you've got in the crosshairs? What do you think their strengths are? What have you observed they're doing really well? How do you sit when you're positioning against them? The more information and detail that you can give from your internal analysis in your RFP, the more your agencies who are pitching in the RFP process can build that into their analysis. We can take a look at those brands and the specific things that they're doing which you've identified. Of course, any agency worth their salt is also going to do a bit of their own competitive analysis here as well. But rather than doing it completely siloed, if we can take what you've already done and what you've observed, that allows us to build something that's much more detailed and nuanced. But this competitor analysis piece can also show agencies how ambitious you are. Let's say for example, you're languishing on the back pages of Google, your PPC campaigns aren't going too well, but you're identifying that your primary competitor is dominating search, dominating AI mentions, and smashing it with PPC. Well, that tells the agencies that they're really going to need to go hard if they're going to unseat this competitor. Whereas if you're already dominant and you want to maintain your dominance, those agencies are going to spend less time looking at what the competitor is doing and more time thinking about, "Okay, how do we just take this to the next level? Are there other industries that we can learn from, other tactics and strategies that we can build into this plan to help you establish that dominance and keep all of your competitors snapping at your heels?" One thing that we're seeing being included in RFPs more and more is AI search optimization. A lot of brands are seeing traffic from AI tools like Chat GPT increase significantly to their website. They're also seeing a lot of branded traffic and direct traffic coming to their website. Branded [music] traffic from search and direct traffic from people obviously just typing it into their browser. When they talk to those customers and ask, "How did you hear about us?" sometimes it's word of mouth, but increasingly it's, "Oh, I was talking to Chat GPT about this and this and it recommended you." So, the more forward-thinking brands are saying, "Okay, we need to be doing this. This is clearly the future. We can clearly see the direction of travel here. More people talking to Chat GPT, Google Gemini, AI overviews, Claude on a daily basis. What do we do to make sure that these tools are recommending us?" And they're including that in their RFPs. And by the way, this would be a good time to mention, if you're looking for a digital agency that works across AI search optimization, organic search, paid search, web development, conversion rate optimization, and email marketing, the team at Exposure Ninja are freaking amazing. We'd be more than happy to review your RFP. You can submit it via our contact page at exposureninja.com. Or if you're not quite ready for an RFP and you're just curious to see what we would do for your business if we were working together, you can request a free digital marketing review from the team at exposureninja.com/review. This service is completely free. We'll take a look at what you're doing at the moment, what your competitors are doing, and what your opportunities are for growth. We'll then send you a video usually within two to three working days. Often we'll like to have a call with you beforehand to make sure that we're focusing in the right areas. But this service is completely free of charge and it is phenomenal. If there is a catch, is that not everybody is eligible for this. So, you do need to apply for it and you can do that at exposureninja.com/review. Step six in your RFP is to explain what makes your brand different. This is one that companies can really struggle with and they can struggle to get internal buy-in and agreement on exactly what those messages are. In fact, a lot of the time at Exposure Ninja, this is one of the things that we end up helping brands with is working out exactly where they are positioned in the market and what the key messages they need to take to the market are. This is becoming increasingly important with AI search because when your customers are talking to Chat GPT and Chat GPT is recommending you, what is Chat GPT saying? What are those key messages that Chat GPT is communicating about your brand? Well, that's where your positioning comes in and it's really important that you have a very clear position and some key messages decided up front. Having a clear message and clear positioning can influence all sorts of elements of the RFP. So, an agency might choose particular channels if, for example, you know that your competitive advantage is price, there might be different marketing channels that are going to be more effective than if your competitive advantage is the range of services that you offer or the level of personalized bespoke service that you offer, right? So, including these key messages is really important, particularly if it's not immediately obvious on your website. We often have RFPs from brands where on their website they look completely generic, but when you talk to the team, actually there are some very specific things that they want to be known for. We would never have guessed that if we just looked at the website. So, it's really important to get that additional context if you can in your RFP. Step seven is to set out your RFP process timeline. I.e., what's going to happen and when. So, usually the process goes something like this. The first stage is the RFP is produced and then issued. That's when you send it out to Exposure Ninja via exposureninja.com. The second stage is that there's usually some Q&A window allowing the agencies that you've sent an RFP to come back with some questions, maybe have some discovery calls as well with you. There's a proposal submission deadline and it's a good idea to stick to these, otherwise you risk inadvertently penalizing agencies that can meet a deadline. Then there'll be some shortlist notification where you go out to ones who have been shortlisted to let them know. There'll usually be some sort of [music] more detailed pitch process then. This be online, via Teams, it might be in person at the agency's office or at your office, whatever, doesn't really matter. Then a final decision date when you'll let everyone know if they've been successful, who's won, and then there'll be a project start date. Like I said, it's a good idea to respect the timelines that you've set out, even if one agency asks for an extension, is that really fair? Because the other agencies might have pulled more resource to getting the work done to that deadline. If you grant an extension to one agency, even if you then give that to everyone else, it kind of inadvertently penalizes those who can actually stick to a deadline. But I'd also say avoid unrealistic expectations. It can be a vast amount of work for the agency to put together a proposal involving senior team, like bringing them all in, working on all the research, doing all the data analysis to put together one of these proposals. If you're expecting really detailed data-driven proposals with senior-level insight, expecting that in a week is just not realistic. Any agency that can do that probably doesn't have enough work and you don't really want to be working with them. At the same time, just giving a massive open sort of two-month window also isn't often ideal. So, usually three to four weeks is a good realistic time frame for a proposal. Step eight is to explain your evaluation criteria. Don't be afraid about being explicit about how proposals will be assessed. Agencies need to understand who is evaluating the proposals and what the decision-makers are looking for in order to design a proposal that meets those criteria. For example, are you evaluating proposals based on the cost-efficiency? Are you evaluating proposals based on agencies that have worked with similar brands before? And a good idea here is to choose criteria that only actually means something. Don't just include more criteria than you need. So, for example, we might see an RFP that says, "We want um agencies that have worked specifically with uh vegan skincare brands that sell direct-to-consumer only and have worked across these territories." Well, luckily we've done that, so we might submit a proposal for that. But if we hadn't, we might look at that and go, "Okay, that's the evaluation criteria that we can't meet, so we can't really justify submitting a proposal." So, you might miss out on some amazing agencies because you've been too tight about certain criteria. Now, if that genuinely is a really important decision criteria, then that's absolutely fine, use it. What I mean here is make sure that you're really tied to the criteria that you're analyzing these on because the more criteria that you add, the more you'll reduce the number of proposals that you actually get. Okay, so how to actually run the RFP process. A few suggestions in this section from the team on what to do before you run the RFP process and also after you've sent out the RFP. So, before you send the RFP, it's a good idea to run it past your sales team. A couple of reasons for this. Firstly, if your sales team is going to be dealing with the leads generated by the agency submitting the proposal, it's a good idea to check that they'd be excited and that they think the RFP is actually focusing in the right areas. But secondly, your sales team will also be able to give you feedback as if they were responding to that RFP. So, are there questions or criteria that are a bit vague that they don't understand? We often find that sales people are pretty good at putting themselves in different situations and even if they're not working agency side or they don't know anything about marketing at all, if you're saying, "What would you do with this RFP?" and the salesperson's like, "Honestly, this whole thing looks like a cat has sicked on your keyboard. I don't understand any of it." Well, that might be really useful feedback. Agencies also might struggle with some of that stuff. Another area that they might pick up on is requirements that contradict each other, which isn't uncommon to see in an RFP. Now, of course, the marketers putting together the RFP are so close to it, they understand what's meant here. And sometimes the sales people are valuable because they're detached from the process and they can give a bit of a an educated outsider's perspective on the RFP. Another suggestion is to make sure that there is full internal alignment on the RFP before you send it out. It's so common for us to get an RFP and start talking to the team from the brand and discover that actually they're not aligned at all. They might think that there are a few different problems, none of which are covered in the RFP. They might disagree on the scale of the problem. They might disagree on the problem even existing at all. And worst of all, there might be no internal agreement on the budget that can be allocated to this work. The last thing that you want to do as a marketing leader is bring your CFO, your CEO into a room to see all these presentations only for all of the agencies to come in, blow past the budget, and the CFO goes, "We never had the budget for any of this stuff anyway." It's a complete waste of their time. It's a complete waste of your time and it's a complete waste of the agency's time. So, really good idea to send the RFP out to all of the stakeholders who might have an objection to it or might have feedback and suggestions ahead of time. That way when you go out to the market and send this RFP out, you know you're going to be getting proposals that everyone in the organization is really excited about. A tip for after you've sent the RFP is to allow a period and allow some time to have discovery calls with the agencies. It's very rare that an RFP is so clear that agencies can just put together proposals based on no additional information. Usually, we will have a discovery call with the brand that lasts between 1 and 2 and 1/2 hours, and sometimes multiple discovery calls to make sure that we truly understand what the internal team is thinking, what their decision criteria are, and to address anything that's maybe not 100% clear in the RFP. This makes sure that we can design something which is really exciting, interesting to you, and achieves your goals. So, allow for that time and allow a period of time for those calls to happen. In fact, Northern Ridge actually says, "I won't engage with an RFP unless the groundwork in a discovery call has been done." Sales should be about being the doctor, not the waiter. A waiter simply takes an order and brings the customer what they ask for without question. A doctor asks questions to understand what's really wrong before prescribing a solution. So, what Rich is saying there is a doctor is very different to a shop assistant. A shop assistant says, "I want that one." The shop assistant grabs it for you and gives it to you. The doctor talks to you about your situation. They want to make sure they're really clear on what your situation is so that they can check the diagnosis and give you the absolute best prescription so that you get completely sorted. The worst outcome of an RFP process is that you engage with an agency that works for a year or 2 years, does brilliant work, but actually doesn't achieve any of the goals that you or the organization had. And spending a bit of time up front in the discovery call process massively minimizes the chance of that happening. So, there you have it, and agency suggestions on RFPs. If you're going through the process of hiring a marketing agency, you might find this video interesting. Watch this before hiring a marketing agency. Until next time, see you soon.