Ever seen agencies nailing client after client while you’re still struggling to get at least a new one each month? It’s the fight of every small agency, especially with that much competition and  “Social Media Experts” youngsters popping up every day, right?

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You’re already facing many challenges like providing ROI for your client, creating great content for your clients, and maintaining a good relationship and communication with them. All the while having to hustle for new clients – every single day. It’s a problem we all have.

Winning a client requires a lot of dedication and work. And you’re looking for a specific type of client, someone you’ll consider one day a partner and friend, collaborate with them on all the steps and move the brand together. Digital marketing freelancers and marketing agencies have to provide a proposal for each of their clients before starting this relationship.

In the following piece, I’ll explain the most important components of it, such as:

• What’s a social media proposal?

• Why do you need one?

• How to draft up the perfect one?

A good template and structure is always handy and should be easily customizable for the different needs of any potential client. You never know when you’ll meet a prospect, and they may ask for a follow up in the next 24h. It won’t be easy to write a proposal from scratch, that’s why you should use templates, like the one below.

What is a Social Media Proposal?

I bet you have lots of ideas that you want to implement for your client, from design to actual content calendar implementation, what emojis you wanna use, what kind of colors, images and directions of your digital marketing strategy. That’s awesome!

But flying thoughts don’t make a good pitch. Which is why you need a proposal doc – to formalize all of it into a single piece and send it to your potential client. It’s more of an informal document with all the ideas for your client, not a contract (even tho you can include it). It’s the next logical step after meeting your potential client for the first time and doing some research on the industry, company, and brand.

Ok, Why Do I Even Need A Social Media Proposal Then?

Nowadays, agencies must be prepared to demonstrate that they understand each client and their needs. It’s important to discuss goals and maintain transparency in multiple steps because many traditional agencies fail at it. Digital has changed the way we communicate, but unfortunately, plenty of agencies do it in the same old way. That’s why a proposal is important as it helps save time and keep your focus on getting new clients.

When using a social media marketing template – you’ll be able to easily modify it in a few hours with specific recommendations and plans after a quick review of the industry and company. In just a bit you’ll send it over to your potential client. It will come in very handy.

Experience has taught us that it won’t be approved in one go. It will have to go through multiple approval layers and you’ll have to answer several additional questions. Normally, I’d say this is the workflow:

• Prepare a proposal

• Send it to your client

• Enter an infinite feedback loop

• Getting tired

• Get the client’s approval on the terms

• Send the contract

• Get a few more questions

• Get contract signed

• Celebrate

How To Draft Up The Perfect Social Media Marketing Proposal?

You have to put yourself in the shoes of your clients in order to understand how you can get the best results for them and achieve all the goals you’re mentioning in the Social Media Proposal document. It’s basically the strategy you’re creating for them. You need to know their target audience, where they are in the digital world and find out more about the product/service they have.

Once you gain that full picture, you can consider you’re on to a great start.

Then, you also need to understand more about their brand messaging, voice and what kind of comms should we use: is it cute, funny, strong, inspiration, motivational? You’ll have to do a lot of research to understand what may work on their social media pages and what direction you should take. Check a few other pages in the same industry and ask yourself

• What kind of content are they publishing?

• What platforms are their competitors using?

• How engaged is the audience?

• Would this work for your client?

It’s important to put yourself in the shoes of your own client. Now, let’s create a social media proposal pdf document and see what it contains.

Why You?

I’d start with a personal message so your client has an understanding of who they’d be working with, previous clients and services you’re offering. Think about the most powerful projects that your agency had in the past few months or years – it’s the perfect moment to tell a bit about how you started, story, values, and team members.

The client has to get a glimpse of you are and understand if you fit. So focus and answer 3 basic questions.

• Why you? What makes you so special and why you’re the best fit.

• What are your core values as an agency? For example: transparency, relationship-building, streamlined approval process, collaborative communication.

• What experience recommends you?Who were your clients, people you worked with, achievements?

I’ve added a short description template of an agency that you can add in your own proposal.

Hey, Jamie!

I’m Vlad and I’m here to help superpower your social media efforts. 

At [X Agency] 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, copywriters, designers, comedians and fun people.

Curious where this is going?

Keep scrolling and let’s rock together

Use it shamelessly, and drop me a tweet if you have a better one @vladcalus.

Team

Clients don’t pay for ideas, they pay for the implementation. All of this is coming from the people you’re working with, including designers, social media marketers, business development, email marketers and account managers. It’s important to invest in a relationship between your client and the team to create a space for collaboration of these stakeholders. It’s good to know for the client who is the designer they’re working with, at least see their face, not only the name in the email. 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.

Problem

It’s time to get serious now – speak about the concerns your client has. What’s the biggest issue they have? It can be multiple domains in their company, such as website, brand, social media presence, engagement with the audience, customer acquisition strategies or it may 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 will include

• No sustainable growth of customer

• Low traffic on the website

• No visibility on social media

• Huge bounce rate

• Increasing profits

• Hiring new employees

• Retain customer

• Lead generation

• Brand awareness

• Building email list

All of them can be a very specific pain point your potential client has or something general. Our workflow for the social media proposal will focus on solving this issues of our potential client and sharing the best ideas about it.

• Identify the challenge

• Present your solution

• Establish goals

• Time & effort implied

• Measure & track results

Solution

Now, it’s time to focus on the actions, this part is for all the responsibilities your company will take on with all the team members. You can mention all of the fields you’ll operate in, such as

• Create a weekly social media calendar

• Design social media posts

• Create short engaging videos

• Brand activation campaigns on social

• Develop a landing page

• Outreach to influencers for partnerships

• Engage better with customers

• Paid Ads on Facebook and Twitter

• Share industry relevant articles

Additionally, you can be more specific on each of it, and mention how much you want to do, for example

• One LinkedIn article every week

• Six posts on Facebook every week

• Two guest posts per month

• 40 engaging Twitter posts per week

• 1 Youtube Video a month

• 5 Instagram Stories a day

• 6 Instagram posts every day

• 1 IGTV video published a week

It depends a lot on your client and goals how specific you want to be here.

Goals and Benefits

Applying the right data will help you know if you’re moving in the right direction and show it to your client. You’ll set up some real numbers and expectations you think can be achieved with this campaign, such as the following ones.

• Traffic, 70% increase in sessions WoW

• Followers, we’ll increase the number of followers up to 50k, by end of July

• Engagement, at least 1000 interactions by the end of the month

• Reach, we’ll reach organically up to 200k people in the next 3 months

• Conversion, minimum 500 clicks from social to the website

In order to maintain a good relationship with your client, send them a monthly evaluation of your marketing campaigns and understand what’s working or not. 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 and there is a team who’s working on it – you’re ready to get started on growing these numbers!

Channels

Each social media channels is different and audiences react in a different way. It’s natural for one platform to encourage short communicate, while others, like LinkedIn, to applaud expressing opinions and comments on what’s happening at the moment. If the client is 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.

Timeline

“I’ll get you 10,000 followers in 2 days”

“We’ll increase your page to 15,000 likes in 24h”

“Your website will reach 100% more visitors next day”

“We’ll add 50k Youtube subscribers and 100,000 videos in 5 days”

Well… it sounds like BS, right?  It is, don’t believe anyone who’ll tell you things like these. As a client requires a specific timeline with all the actions and how you’ll measure the progress of each of them. When will be campaigns and materials 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, but a time range would really help the client understand you’re serious. As an agency, it can be a very simple Gantt Chart with all the social media campaigns, which week you’ll be working on task X and what’s the next activity on your roadmap.

Cha-chiiiing

Business wise, it’s time to set up the prices – I can’t recommend anything since it depends a lot on the industry your client is in, location, country, services, past experience and type of agency. Even tho, I’d recommend that you list all the services and their costs, with no hidden fees – keep transparency as one of the core values in your agency.

Most agency proposals are very generic and simple. They get ignored by great clients or make a bad impression of the agency and make them look unprofessional. If you can’t market yourself in the proposal, how will they believe that you’re able to market their brand?

Call to Action + Testimonials

First impressions matter, so keep that in mind. With a bit of focus to pricing, ideas you want to implement and a beautiful presentation – you can get clients attention in one click. Agencies lose their clients for a few reasons, such as

• lack of adequate tools for managing work

• bad communications

• no system of collaboration for approval processes

That’s why hustling and preparing a good social media marketing proposal is the key to winning each client. At the end, put in the presentation a powerful message such as

• Let’s rock together!

• Ready to superpower your social media presence?

• Let’s make X brand famous and loved

Then, add a few testimonials from your existing clients – it helps build trust and confidence in you.

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!

Vlad Caluș is Chief Marketing Officer at Planable and a Marketing Hustler. Dropped out of college, moved to another country with 2 of his friends and built Planable at 19 y. o. Have any questions? Ping anytime at @vladcalus on Twitter or [email protected]