25 Jun Tips & Tricks – Creating a Marketing Proposal

by: Samuel Burkett

Let us imagine you have an important client asking you for some marketing advice. They run a small coffee shop that averages 50 customers per day, but they are looking to expand. They may say something along the lines of, “we need you to help us increase our customer base by 50%, what are some strategies you can suggest that will help us achieve this goal?’

As a marketing specialist we can really use this opportunity to flex our creative muscles and begin formulating some ideas around their business model.

So, where do we start?

The answer, with a marketing proposal.

A marketing proposal, or pitch, is an outline of what you as a marketing specialist can bring to the negotiation table. In other words, it is the bones of what will eventually become your marketing plan. However, there is no point in building a marketing plan until you secure the job with the client. So, with the coffee shop example, our challenge is to come up with some ideas that will increase their average of 50 customers served per day, to 100 per day.

This means that you need to research the market and build some strategies into your proposal that will impress your client. Remember, a pitch is just a concept of what you can offer. Think of it like a resume, it is the first impression you are giving about who you are, and what you can do.

Here is an example of some key points to include in your marketing proposal:

Executive Summary – here we give a snapshot of what the client can expect to find within the remainder of the document.

Situation Analysis – What is trending, and who are our client’s direct competitors.

Target Market – Who is the target audience we have identified, and how can we encourage them to use our client’s services?

USI – What is our client’s Unique selling Points (USI) or what makes them different from the crowd. Here we can even make our own recommendations on what to improve.

Offers – What offers can we propose the coffee shop includes in their day-to-day operations, and how will they help achieve the client’s needs.

Promotional Strategies – What are some promotional strategies they might use, and how are we marketing them? Will they be online, print or both?

Implementation – How will we implement these promotions, and when.

Conditions – What are the conditions of working together, our client to business agreement.

Acceptance – This is where your client will sign their agreement of your proposal.

Keep in mind that this is just an example of what a marketing proposal looks like, and different companies have their own versions of this. At the end of the day, the objective is to convince the client to work with us and provide a vision for what our marketing plan needs to look like.

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