How to Create a Killer Marketing Proposal

While the most exciting part of any influencer marketing campaign might be seeing the results roll in, a lot of work needs to be done beforehand if you want to achieve success. 

Before you even start to find influencers, you have to define the various aspects of your campaign, such as its target audience and the incentive you plan to offer. And all that information has to be neatly summarized in one key document: the marketing proposal.

The proposal plays a crucial role in your campaign’s lifecycle, so we’ll walk you through how to create and what to include in a killer marketing proposal.

What Is A Proposal? What Goes In The Proposal?

A proposal is the document that marketing agencies prepare for their clients to summarize a campaign and its goals. It could also be prepared in-house by the brand, for example by the marketing department for approval from upper management.

Before drafting the proposal, you’ll need to have sat down with your team and considered what you want from your campaign and how you plan to achieve that. Identify some KPIs that can help you track your success. Further, you should talk about how you want the campaign to look and feel, as aesthetics is a big part of social media.

In the past, proposals may have been standard text documents. But nowadays, most are submitted as visual presentations. Presenting your information this way allows you to more easily share multimedia resources that can better help illustrate how you’ve imagined your campaign. Powerpoint and Google Slides are good tools, and there are tons of downloadable templates that can help you express your unique ideas. Proposals are basically summaries of the campaign you have in mind. We can break its contents down into several sections.

What Goes In The Proposal?

Proposals are basically summaries of the campaign you have in mind. We can break its contents down into several sections. 

Campaign Briefing

Start your proposal with the most basic details of the campaign:

• Objectives - State your goals. Do you want to raise brand awareness, or drive traffic to your website? Or perhaps you want to increase sales of a certain product. 
  
• Target Audience - Who is this campaign designed to reach? Are you targeting a specific age group or gender? Are you trying to penetrate a niche market, or perhaps a new geographical area?
  
• Brand Message - What do you want to say about your brand or product? Choose the elements you want to emphasize. This will help out the influencers later on.

Whatever you include here should ripple throughout the rest of your proposal. Make sure to keep your objectives clear and your message consistent.

Campaign Strategy

Next, you want to briefly explain how you plan to take your campaign from good idea to success story. This section also includes some information related to the campaign budget.

• Influencer roster - At this point you don’t need to know the specific influencers you plan to contract, but you should know how many you want to hire, where they should come from, and what topics they’re interested in. For example, you might want 10 influencers from London who post about beauty.
  
  
• Follower count - Do you plan to contract influencers with 1M followers, or with 10K followers? This makes a big difference in your budget, and has effects on the results of the campaign. Remember, micro influencers can be extremely powerful allies in influencer campaigns, as they have high engagement and their audiences trust them as experts in their fields.
  
  
• Type of Media - What do you want the influencers to share on social media? Do you want posts, videos, stories? Decide what you plan to ask of each. Content that remains on an influencer’s feed is generally more expensive than content that disappears after a certain amount of time, like Instagram stories for example.
  
  
• Incentive - What will you offer influencers in exchange for their collaboration? Incentive can be monetary, or non-monetary, like free products or experiences. Calculate what you plan to pay, whether in money or product value, including any shipping costs. Micro influencers shine in this area as well, as they usually accept collaborations based on product alone or for small fees.
  
  
• Publishing & Aesthetic Guidelines - It’s always best to give influencers the creative freedom to tell your brand’s story with their own voices. But, you might want to stipulate some guidelines for their publications. Perhaps you want them to mention your brand’s social media account, or to use a certain branded hashtag. Also note any aesthetic requirements. For example, maybe you want the influencers to take photos in a specific setting or performing a specific action.
  
  
• Timeline - Outline the important dates in your campaign, making sure to give yourself ample time to complete each stage and leaving a bit of leeway in case you run into hurdles down the road.

If you’re a marketing agency, you’ll also want to include the proposed fee for your services. Once you outline your strategy, it’s time to come up with some ballpark figures for what you expect to get out of the campaign.

Estimated Results

At this point it’s impossible to know exactly what results you’ll get, but you can estimate them taking into consideration prior campaign results and information from analytics programs.

• Impressions - How many times will your campaign media be displayed on screen? Look at how many followers you plan to reach and estimate the percentage of those that will actually see your content. Remember not all media types are created equal. For instance, on Instagram, posts have a better chance at landing impressions than stories. Posts appear directly in the feed, while stories need to be clicked in order to be seen.
  
  
• Interactions - These are likes, comments, and any other way the audience interacts with your content. These vary depending on the social network you choose, and also on the engagement rates of the types of influencers you select. For instance, expect fewer interactions from influencers with millions of followers, as their engagement rates are usually lower.
  
  
• Clicks - If your campaign includes links, here you can estimate how many times you think those will be clicked. Remember there are some restrictions for links on social media. For example, on Instagram, to add a link to a story, you need to have a professional account and at least 10K followers.
  

You could also choose to briefly explain how you plan to monitor the campaign and gather results once they actually start to come in. 

Campaign Lifecycle & Contact

At the end of your proposal it’s a good idea to briefly note the different stages in your campaign’s lifecycle. This keeps everyone on the same page with regards to the process.

An example of a campaign lifecycle could be:

• Define the campaign and submit the proposal
• Find influencers and get them approved
• Activate the selected influencers
• Track and monitor the content and its metrics
• Report on the campaign’s results

Finally, include the contact information of everyone involved. This way, all the information you need is stored in one handy document.

Conclusion

Proposals serve not only to get the approval you need to launch your campaigns, but also to create a type of manual that will serve you throughout the process. When in doubt, you can always consult your proposal to remind yourself what the campaign is all about. 

Likewise, if you’re working in big teams, or if you’re perhaps working remotely due to the pandemic, having all this information compiled in one place makes collaboration easier. And like anything in life, hard work yields better results. If you take the time to create a killer proposal, your influencer campaigns will show for it.