A Marketing RFP Template for Experts & Everyone Else

Marketing is vital for any organization. When your team is too busy, or you’re in need of an expert, use this marketing RFP template to find the right partner.

In the absence of a brand, you will be branded. While this probably applied to cattle at some point, it’s also true for companies, nonprofits, and other organizations today.

Whether or not you create a brand and knowingly market yourself, the people you interact with will form an opinion based on you and your brand. That is why it is essential to have a marketing and brand strategy that accomplishes your goals.

Even though marketing is often its own department, it touches many different parts of an organization, from sales and fundraising to events, leadership, and even human resources! Marketing has recently joined with communications in some departments to improve MarComms.

Like any other team, you need outside help to get the job done. It can be a bit of capacity building or a dedicated team to run something entirely different. Complete the form below to get started on your marketing requests for proposals!

Like any other RFPs, marketing RFPs contain indispensable elements that make them effective. Our marketing RFP template includes all of these elements, plus a few optional ones that can make your RFP more effective in finding the right partner.

RFP Introduction

You might recognize the first two pages from our original website RFP template. This is not a mistake. Some of the essential parts of the project your prospective partners want to know upfront are relatively common throughout all outsourcing and RFP tasks:

• Who are you as an organization?
• What problem do you want to solve?
• What is your ideal solution?
• How much money do you have to work with?
• When is the last day to submit a proposal?

Throughout our templates, you’ll see most of these questions answered in the first few pages of an RFP. If you look closely at our Prosal RFP landing pages, you’ll notice that these are the questions we answer immediately at the top of the page.

Technical Specifications

While not necessarily all technical language, these are the questions that are very specific to your RFP:

• What are your goals?
• Who are you aiming to communicate with or target?
• What channels of communication have you already established?

The part that stands out most in this RFP template is the level of detail when listing the scope of work for potential bidders. Not only is each lettered item described in detailed actionable expectation, but each category of the scope of work also has a breakdown of how much service time is dedicated for each. This helps paint a realistic picture of what undertaking the project is like for potential partners.

Optional Fields

We also include optional fields for more information that can be useful to agencies in crafting their proposals. We start with content ideas you like, which is usually one of the most fun parts of this process: You get to see who else has done a good job of tackling this problem and thinking how you want to be like them or better.

Further down, we also include submission requirements, which can also double for qualifications. This can be a great section to break down that you’re expecting whoever gets the job to jump right into your CRM or social media platform with little to no training. The other information is to make your life easier by reading the suitable proposals.

We’ve written a few other tips on maximizing responses to any RFP, like allowing up to a month for proposals and creating the space for 15-20 minute introductory calls. Read more about that here.