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Marketing analysis & proposal template for agencies

An agency’s greatest sales asset is the initial marketing analysis and proposal. For the business and their stakeholders, they’re starting to build their trust with your company, evaluating your capabilities and seeing what data you (compared to other providers) can deliver. For your sales and marketing team, you’re gaining a better understanding of the company’s marketing needs and getting an inside look into their competitive landscape. The question is, though, are you offering a marketing analysis that showcases their current efforts? Dives deep into what their competitors are doing right–or wrong? Delivering a data-backed action plan to fix the issues of their site and elevate traffic and conversions?

If you’re not offering a proposal that includes all of the above, you’re losing out on potential opportunities. There are other agencies out there that have invested in their marketing analysis and proposal strategy, even hiring an individual to solely manage RFPs and online requests. The advantage is clear—so why isn’t your agency delivering?

In most agency environments, the team lacks the bandwidth or the capital to invest in customized analysis and proposals. If you haven’t found the funds or the time to deliver, it’s unlikely that you’ll start ramping up proposal production within the same quarter. Those potential sales, leads, and partnerships can be lost. Are you okay with losing clients based on your lack of a winning marketing analysis and proposal?

Hopefully your answer is no. Don’t get us wrong—the lack of these assets isn’t anyone’s fault. In fact, it’s a common issue found between agencies and marketing groups. Thankfully, there’s a solution that you can start implementing within the next week: marketing analysis and proposal content provided by your white-label partner, Data Driven Marketers.

Our service offering

Data Driven Marketers offers a simple, customizable solution for agencies, creatives, and other marketers that need sales support: white-label marketing analysis and proposals. Lean on our team to do the research, deliver the insights, and provide a clear, results-driven action plan for potential customers. The content we provide for this analysis and marketing proposal can be customized to fit your brand templates or delivered as a word document so you can fill in the blanks.

As your partner, we’ll take on the content and research tasks. We’ll work together to collect these insights and formulate an action plan, then you can utilize your existing sales team and account managers to do the rest. If you need a stand-in expert, we can jump on the call and introduce ourselves as members of your team. Once we win and onboard the client, we’ll support your team with strategy direction, fulfillment work, or a little of both.

Designed for stakeholders & executives

Our years of experience working with agencies have helped us understand what stakeholders need to see, what executives want to see, and what the client (whether a marketing director or the business owner) is looking for. The marketing analysis and proposal we deliver have two main components: an executive summary and a detailed 15–28 page expansion that answers the what, why, how, and when. What do we see wrong with their current site and marketing plan? Why is this important? How will we help them achieve their marketing goals? And, lastly, when will they see results? When do we plan to make these optimizations and execute on our marketing proposal?

Download and preview our executive summary for a glimpse into our process or contact us directly to start working on a formal marketing analysis and proposal.

Built to win business quickly

When a client reaches out to an agency, or if they’ve published and shared an RFP (Request for Proposal), they typically outline specific goals and objectives. The final marketing analysis and proposal your team delivers should address these points at the beginning and end of your document. Our team takes it a step further, tying back nearly every section to their original goals, objections, requests, challenges, and concerns. Presenting this information up front eliminates after-the-fact questions, sharing exact information as to what we’ll do to meet this client’s KPIs. For the client, stakeholders, and executives, this is a sure-fire way to win business. In most cases, delivering our expanded report, we see signed contracts within several weeks of delivery.

Marketing analysis & proposal breakdown

Our expanded marketing analysis and proposal can be lengthy, but we cover each of the below topics. For clients who are simply looking for direction—they may be paying you for insights and exact fixes—we offer expanded reports that outline precisely what needs to be changed, what needs to be optimized, and steps to achieve their results. Contact our team for more information.

  • Cover page: Our cover page is simple, stating what the document is and who it’s intended for. This page can be customized to fit your brand or excluded so you can add your own design.
  • Executive summary: The executive summary section is short and sweet, providing readers with a broad overview of what’s wrong, what could be improved, how we’ll improve it, and how we’ll help them reach their marketing goals.
  • Recommended strategy: Our recommended strategy is similar to the executive summary, providing readers with a broad overview of our data-based approach—what’s wrong, how we plan to fix it, and how these items relate to their marketing goals. While these sections are similar, the recommended strategy is created for the client who reached out for support—how will we support them?
  • Client website analysis: The in-depth website analysis in our marketing analysis and proposal analyzes the current state of the client’s website. Using SEMrush, Deepcrawl, and ScreamingFrog, we list technical errors on the website, crawl depth findings, indexing and accessibility errors, and, finally, non-200 pages errors. Ensuring that the website is functioning properly and the right pages are getting indexed is a vital step in elevating the customer’s online visibility, traffic, and sales.
  • Client keyword analysis: Knowing what keywords the client is ranking for, where they’re ranking, and their distribution of branded and discovery keywords is vital to any SEO/SEM strategy. Our organic and paid keyword analysis highlights all of the above and provides recommendations for targeted keywords and high-value keywords that have been lost.
  • Client backlink analysis: As we begin to formulate your client’s marketing plan, we look at all aspects of website growth, including backlinks and missed backlink opportunities. Our backlink analysis report showcases link acquisition history, link type and attribute, referring domain score, top anchor tags, and more.
  • Client paid search analysis: With the client’s spend and return on investment (ROI) in mind, we take a close look at the current SEM strategy and ad copy. We provide recommendations to improve everything from ad structure to keyword targets within the marketing analysis. We can provide additional recommendations around audience targeting and building upon request or with the inclusion of an audience research report.
  • Client social media analysis: Whether your client is looking for a social media-focused strategy or not, we’ll provide insight and recommendations based on their current social efforts.
  • Competitor landscape organic keyword gap: Understanding the competitive landscape is the first step to achieving our organic KPIs. In our competitor landscape organic keyword gap report (or market analysis), we outline what opportunities your client is missing out on, where they’re succeeding, and, lastly, what keywords are essential to target first. We can provide additional recommendations around keyword targeting upon request.
  • Competitor landscape content analysis: Content typically takes the lead in all of our client marketing proposals and strategy. With content spearheading the strategy, we want to understand what pages are performing, what pages are underperforming, and what pages we need to create to compete with top competitors. Our competitor landscape content analysis highlights all of the above as well as additional insights related to trending content.
  • Competitor landscape search and display advertising analysis: In all SEM marketing analyses and proposals, we deliver a detailed look into competitive search and display advertising campaigns. Some of the metrics we’ll highlight in this market analysis include impression share, average cost per click, top-performing keywords, and more.
  • Competitor landscape social media analysis: To improve our suggested strategy and rise above competitors, we outline a competitive social media landscape analysis in all SEO/SEM and social media proposals. The insights we deliver are centered around trending and top posts, amount of posts across all channels, the best time for posting, and competitive fan/subscriber metrics.
  • 12-month action plan: With all this information and data readily available for your team and your client, we create and add a recommended 12-month action plan to the end of each proposal. We can adjust our 12-month action plan’s pricing and deliverables based on your agency’s needs and requests.
  • * Forecast of KPIs and the general market: For clients who plan to invest $4,000–$10,000 per month in digital marketing, we provide a general forecast of traffic, engagement, impression share, and timeline to achieve our KPIs within this proposal.
  • * Team overview: For some agencies and creative marketing teams, transparency with their clients is key. If we’re introduced as the SEO/SEM branch of your company, we’ll provide a detailed team overview in this marketing analysis and proposal. Our team overview highlights our roles, responsibilities, and experience.
  • * Wholesale proposal pricing document: All recurring projects, or long-term projects that require monthly payments, will include a wholesale proposal pricing sheet. This wholesale pricing sheet will have varying levels of service and spend per month to support your sales team in closing the deal. One-time projects (like web development or Google Analytics and Tag Manager configuration) will not have a readily available wholesale proposal pricing document. Before formulating and presenting the analysis, we’ll work with your team to decide on pricing.

* Specific to Data Driven Marketers’ analysis & proposal offering. 

Download our sample analysis & proposal

Supercharge your sales and marketing team by downloading our sample analysis and proposal. When you’re ready, we’ll work together to create these resources for your client and prepare a plan of action.

Final notes & tips

An agency’s greatest sales asset is the initial marketing analysis and proposal. If you’re not offering a proposal that includes all the above information or a cohesive marketing plan, you’re losing out on potential opportunities. Instead of losing clients based on your lack of a winning marketing proposal, partner with our data-driven team to create these assets, and close more deals.

  • Whether you’re using your own template, our template, or our team, you should have content and data points that speak to the client’s primary goals.
  • Adding an executive summary to the beginning of your proposal will help stakeholders and executives digest and understand all shared information.
  • Understanding the competitive landscape, by conducting a thorough market analysis across each channel, is essential.

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