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Nov 1, 2024
Whether you’re an agency-side or freelance social media marketer looking to land new clients, a social media proposal is the first step towards gaining new customers. This important business document shows your prospects what social media-related services you offer and how you can help them achieve their goals.
Creating and presenting a proposal might seem time-consuming at first but it’s essential for increasing your business. We made it easy for you to turn prospects into customers with a winning social media proposal free template.
This guide teaches you all about what to include in your proposal to be convincing and assertive without being salesy. Showcase your social media marketing qualifications, expertise, and goals by downloading our free template (includes a power point presentation). Get ready to impress your new accounts!
Here’s what we’ll cover:
1. What even is a social media proposal?
2. How to write the perfect social media proposal
A social media proposal formalizes your strategic suggestions into a single piece to send to your potential client. A proposal isn’t a legal document, just a summary of what you’ll make happen for your prospect if they become your client.
While it isn’t a social media contract, your social media marketing proposal should include the timeline and your social media marketing services pricing. The proposal document is the next logical step after meeting your potential client for the first time and doing some research on the industry, company, and brand.
I bet you have lots of ideas you want to pitch to your client, from design to actual content calendar ideas. You know what emojis you want to use, and you’re already imagining your digital marketing strategy. That’s awesome! But scattered thoughts don’t make a good social media management pitch. This is where a business proposal document comes in.
Yes! If you’re looking to gain more clients and scale your business, a social media marketing proposal is a must.
If you’re a marketing agency, you must be prepared to demonstrate that you understand each prospective clients and their needs. It’s important to discuss business goals and maintain transparency at all stages because many traditional agencies fail at it. Digital has transformed the way we communicate. And since plenty of marketing agencies still do it the same old way, this gives you the opportunity to stand out of the crowd and shine.
You never know when you’ll meet a prospect, and need to follow up with a social media proposal within 24 hours. Having a social media proposal template at the ready is a game-changer. It helps you save time and keeps your focus on getting new clients. Since it’s easily customizable, a proposal template gives you the much-needed structure and enough flexibility to fly through this process.
Ready to land more social media management contracts?
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Winning a client requires a lot of dedication and work. You should have a very good understanding of your potential client before you roll up your sleeves and start writing your social media management proposal.
Ask about their business goals, main focus, and brand messaging. Then align their goals with the industry benchmark to make sure you manage their expectations. Assess their services, products, and target audience to be able to outline the best social media strategy for them and get the best results.
Here’s a short list of FAQs to answer about your client before you start creating your social media proposal:
With all of these considerations in mind, here’s how to write an effective social media proposal:
Start with a personal message to show what sets your social media marketing services apart from your competitors. Outline previous clients and services you’re offering and feel free to include some social media mockups if you want to go the extra mile. Think back to your most successful projects from past years — it’s the perfect moment to share the story about how you started your social media marketing agency, your core values, and introduce your team members.
The potential client has to get a glimpse of who you are and understand if you fit. So focus on answering these 3 basic questions:
Here’s a social media proposal introduction example you can steal and make your own:
Hey, Jamie!
I’m Vlad and I’m here to help superpower your social media efforts.
At [social media marketing agency name] we partner with brands and experts across the world to create a full digital experience. An agency built for today. We live and breath social media.
We’re writers, entrepreneurs, photographers, designers, strategists, data geeks, and comics.
Curious where this is going?
Keep scrolling and let’s build something amazing together.
Clients don’t pay for ideas or pretty words. They pay for implementation, which comes from the whole social media team. This includes designers, social media marketers, business development, email marketers and account managers. The account manager will send all the details of their work, but it helps to establish a personal touch by adding a short description for each person, role, picture and past work/clients.
Address your client’s social media goals and concerns head-on. What’s the biggest business challenge they have? It can be multi-faceted: website, brand, social media presence, engagement with the audience, customer acquisition strategies. It could also be related to a specific campaign, product launch, announcement they’re preparing for the next year or month.
Some of the concerns your client can have:
Your prospect’s challenge can be as specific or as broad as possible. Our workflow for the social media proposal will focus on suggesting the best solutions to solving these issues.
It’d be easier to just outline the issues and call it a day. But you should really go the extra mile with your social media proposal if you truly want to win over new accounts regularly.
Focus on the plan of action and the responsibilities your team will take on. You can mention the different social media-related tasks you’ll set for yourself, such as:
Additionally, you can be more specific with each item, and mention the quantity of the deliverables, for example
How specific you want to be here depends a lot on your client and their goals.
Focusing on the right data will help you know if you’re moving in the right direction and showcase the progress you’re making along the way. You’ll set up some real numbers and expectations you think can be achieved with this campaign, such as:
In order to maintain a good relationship with your client, send them a monthly evaluation of your marketing campaigns and a list of insights. With so much data available today, it really matters to determine which KPIs you want to keep track of and what’s your most important metric. It’s closely related to the business objectives. Once you’ve identified them, make sure all the analytics tools are working and configured right.
Each social media channel is different and audiences have specific reactions. It’s natural for one platform to encourage short communication, while others, like LinkedIn, to applaud expressing opinions and comments on what’s happening at the moment.
If the client is in eCommerce for example, then Instagram is definitely where your agency should focus on. If they’re a B2B brand, then ask your agency to focus all the efforts on Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s important to know how each channel is related to the goal you establish.
“I’ll get you 10,000 followers in 2 days”
“We’ll increase your engagement to 15,000 likes in 24h”
“Your website will reach 100% more visitors the next day”
Beware of overpromising and underdelivering. A client doesn’t need empty promises but does require a specific timeline for all the actions you’ll take and how you’ll measure progress for each of them. Explain when the social media campaigns and materials will be delivered, how often you’ll publish content, and how long it will take you to shoot videos.
It doesn’t have to be a specific date set in stone. But an estimated time range shows the client understands you’re reliable. As an agency, it can be a very simple Gantt Chart with all the social media campaigns or a roadmap with individual tasks.
Most agency social media proposals are very generic and simple. They get ignored by great clients or make the agency look unprofessional. If you can’t market yourself in the proposal, how will they believe that you’re able to market their brand? Even small details, like including QR codes in PowerPoint presentations to showcase your website, can make a big difference in showcasing your attention to detail and innovation.
It’s time to set up the prices. This is directly connected to your client’s industry, location, services and products. I strongly recommend you list all your services and costs, with no hidden fees — keep transparency as one of the core values in your agency.
There are two important aspects to your social media cost proposal:
Yes, each company is unique and we should price however much we think our work deserves. But, if you want to grow your agency, you have to be in the broad range of your industry. You can’t ask for $50K/ month when most agencies in your town ask for a quarter of the price.
Try to always stay connected to the industry and up to date on what your competition is doing. Are they pricing a lot more than you? Can you close contracts as big as they are? If not, what is the added value they promise and you don’t? Pricing in the service business is really a matter of price-quality ratio. That’s how clients think. Of course, they have a budget and they have to stick to it. But sometimes they adapt to context. If a newbie prices too much, they might say no out of principle.
This is equally important. You can’t base your social media marketing quotation only on the competition. There are several reasons why your competition might be wrong. I’m sure we can all think of examples where markets went way too high or way too low due to the players in the market and collapsed.
You might have competitors who price way too low, you might not be able to match that. Truthfully, they probably can’t sustain those prices either. So make sure you really nail down all your costs and the profit you need to keep thriving. Always keep tomorrow in mind and think about each scenario.
Putting a price on your services isn’t only a matter of what your costs are. It’s also a matter of the value that you bring. And it’s important your prospects understand how you reach your price. No, I’m not suggesting you bore them with a full excel, but rather show a breakdown of costs. Add a message at the end to remind your customers about the value they’re getting in return.
Not sure about your social media services prices? Use our social media calculator to check if you’re pricing your services accordingly.
This part is a bit of a technicality. We’re creatives, marketers, we’re not great fans of contracts. I definitely don’t want to dive deep into contract terms, but it is important to mention your main points in your pitch. Think about what matters to you and your client. What happens if you don’t deliver? What happens if your client fails to pay you on time?
If you’re doing a social media pitch, you already know the art of negotiation. Consider that your social media management agreement falls into the negotiation part. You have to know how to take care of your company without risking losing your prospect.
Here are a few parts you have to include in the social media management contract:
With a quick Google search for social media contracts examples, you’ll find that they can vary from one-pagers to 50-page long contracts. It’s your choice on how thorough you want to be. Of course, I’ll advise you to get a legal advisor for this part, but from my experience, the above 8 points should definitely be included.
First impressions matter. By focusing on pricing, implementation ideas, and beautiful design — you can get clients’ attention with one click. Pay attention to logistics as well. It’s not all about the what. The how matters too. Agencies lose prospects for reasons such as:
That’s why hustling and preparing a great social media proposal is the key to winning one client at a time. Close your proposal with your motto to show your excitement:
Then add a few testimonials from your existing clients — it helps build trust and confidence. You can even add QR codes in your social media presentation and use them to link to your website or a case study. Fairly easy to use, you can create them using any of the best QR code generators.
These are my thoughts on how to write a good social media proposal. Don’t forget to get your free social media proposal template and let me know if I missed anything!
Dropped out of college, moved to another country with 2 of my friends and built Planable (Techstars London ’17), social media collaboration platform, at 19 y. o. Forbes 30 under 30
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