With the average company now devoting around $75,000 a year to digital marketing alone, executives and account managers want to track every dollar.
If you’re putting together marketing proposals in the digital era, you need to include lots of elements that you didn’t have to a decade ago. If you want to ensure that you pitch the perfect proposal to your bosses or supervisors, you need to know what they’re looking for.
Here are four tips to ensure that you pitch marketing proposals that land every time.

1. Set a Budget
Before you launch your marketing campaign, you need to know how much you want to spend and how much you need to make. Any time you work on a project, you need to have a way to measure success. This allows you to know if the tactics you’re focused on are giving you the results that you’re looking for and how you can adjust your tactics in the future.
Your budget is going to be unique to every new campaign that you work on. You’ll have competitive activity that changes how well you do when branching out into a new field or trying to reach a new section of the market. If you’re launching a new product line or a new service, you need an isolated budget.
There will be a time frame where this budget is relevant and where you’ll measure competitive activity from. If you’re on a tight budget, you’ll have to form your strategies in a way that helps you to start small and test things out. When every dollar counts, you need to make an effort to ensure that you’re not wasting any of your efforts.
Check out this example of marketing proposal to see what other people are doing.

2. Do Some Research
Whenever you’re working on a new marketing proposal, it has to include some research. Throwing around numbers is all well and good but if you don’t have anything to back up your claims, your C-level executives will call you out. Make sure you’ve identified your audience and that you have reasons why this particular tactic is going to work.
You need quantifiable and concrete data to show that the people you’re reaching out to have a profile that matches your products. You need to map their attitudes, buying patterns, and a lot of psychological characteristics.
You need to know what they want, what they aspire to, and which major figures they want to be like. Do they want to live a life like the president, like a model, or like an award-winning athlete? Each one of these elements is going to make a difference in how you profile your potential clients.
You need to know where they live and how they get their information. This is going to inform how you shape your campaign. If they live in the country and rarely use social media, you need some data to back this up so that executives can understand.

3. SEO Matters
In most cases, you’ll have to think about how your proposal and your marketing efforts fare in the world of search engines. Before making a purchase, most people read reviews and a high number of them trust what they read online as much as a recommendation from a friend.
When people turn to a search engine, they’re either looking for the answer to a specific question or for a specific product or service. Search engine rankings, whether valid or not, end up influencing the veracity of what the average consumer thinks about a product or service. When you’re ranked higher, people automatically assume that your products or services are more valuable or legitimate.
When people are checking prices, they can come across your products or services for the first time. If you’re not a well-known brand, you can use the opportunity afforded by search engines to introduce yourself and talk about the benefits of your products.
Get your company to invest in a blog and other forms of online content creation. The more content there is online about your products and services, the more likely people are to buy them. They need to have information to draw from before they invest.

4. Use Social Media To Your Advantage
Your marketing proposal needs to include a plan for social media. No matter what kinds of products and services you offer, every brand under the sun now needs to have an online social media presence. There is a different style for each social media channel, so make sure you’re using each one appropriately.
You need a profile on every social media application that your customers rely on. However, you need to avoid posting duplicate content.
Instagram is a great opportunity for you to show off images and short videos about what you do and who you are. When you take up space on Twitter, you need to say things that matter and use it to offer timely promotions and short term sales.
Facebook has a broader demographic and allows for both photos and longer posts. As it’s become more of a repository for sharing articles and news items in recent years, you should use it to share your blog posts and expand your reach.
Include a steady stream of unique content into your plan and your budget to ensure that you make the most of the medium.

Marketing Proposals Must Be Comprehensive
If you want your marketing proposals to be a hit with your team, you need them to include elements they can identify with. If you’re not able to excite and entice your team, you’ll have an even harder time trying to win people over in the real world.
If you want your marketing to generate leads, make sure you check out our guide to what it takes to put together great leads.