The Start-to-Finish Guide to Writing a Social Media Proposal

Regardless of whether you offer social media management, marketing, or consulting services, the key step to winning customers is sending out a business proposal.

A Business proposal can help you prove to customers that you are best suited to their needs, and you can stand out from the competition.

If you are particularly interested in providing social media services, you need to make a social media proposal.

Here, best practices for creating a social media proposal are explained that can help you exceed customer expectations and expand your portfolio.

But first let’s zoom out and take a closer look at the social media sales process. There are a few phases that you have to successfully complete – and the things that you have to do right – before you even start your proposal.

Now let’s go into that.

A brief overview of the social media sales process

There is no single sales workflow that you should follow to win a social media job. In most cases, however, you will go through the following stages before making a sale:

• Prospection
• discovery
• suggestion

To ensure that all your prospecting efforts are not in vain, it is very important to get as much information as possible from a Discovery phase as possible. One thing to keep in mind: a business proposal is just a presentation of the things you discovered. If you skip this step, you have nothing to write in your proposal.

The discovery session can be a video call or an actual meeting in a hotel lobby, as long as you chat with the prospect and understand what they really need.

This task may sound simple at first, but you may find that customers don’t understand why they need social media services or which platforms they need to distribute these services to. Here I suggest becoming an psychologist for an hour and asking the following “why” questions:

• Why did you choose Facebook over Twitter for your social media activities?
• Why did you stop running Facebook ads?
• Why did you change your LinkedIn publishing plan two months ago?

Of course, you need to do your homework before a discovery session, review and Analysis of the customer’s social media profiles (as well as their top competitors) and what they’ve done on their social channels so far.

If you can’t get to the bottom of the problem, you can use that 5 Why analysis That includes even more “why” questions. Finally, once you understand your customers and know how they think, you can write a suggestion that speaks the language of your customers, addresses their needs, and provides the exact solution to their problem. The is the proposal that is very likely to win a customer.

The anatomy of an effective social media proposal

Next, let’s move on to the actual structure of an effective social media business proposal. You can create a proposal from scratch or simplify your life considerably by using a free offer Template for social media suggestions that already has the previously written texts and is divided into sections.

In one way or another, it wouldn’t hurt to familiarize yourself with the must-have sections for social media suggestions:

1 Introduction. Nailing the introduction of the proposal is half the battle. Do you remember the discovery session where you should find out the real meaning of what you are looking for? Introduction is the place where you repeat the exact words your customer uses to describe their problem. No matter how tempting it may be, you cannot talk about your company and its history or mission here. The introduction is not about you, but about the needs of your customers, which are described in their language.

2. Scope of work. A well-written detailed scope of work leaves very little room for future misunderstandings. Here you provide the exact list of activities to solve the customer’s problem. Explain how your service will help solve the problem and explain the amount of work required. Talk about the social media goals you want your service to achieve and list the social media activities you will be working on. Depending on the social media services you provide, you may want to mention the following:

• Content creation. Specify what type of written and visual content you want to create, how often, and how you want the customer to approve it.
• Release schedule. Let your customer know when, where and when the pre-approved posts will be published on various social media platforms.
• Introduction of special social media offers. Let the customer know the type of special offer you want to launch, whether it’s a competition, a special discount, a giveaway, or something else. Include the time, frequency, resources, and media budget required.
• Monthly strategy meetings and weekly calls. Schedule one-on-one meetings to review last month’s activities and plan for the coming month. Let the customer know if you sync every week to make sure you’re on the right track.
• Monthly KPIs and reporting. Depending on the customer’s goals, indicate how you measure social media progress and what metrics you use as indicators.

Also, don’t forget to talk about the benefits your customer should expect.

As Kinga Odziemek, CEO of the social media marketing agency BrainyBees, says: “Your customers need to understand not only what you deliver, but what’s inside for them.”

Odziemek adds, “What does it mean that you do A, B or C for them? How will this be reflected in your business? What are the benefits? Showing the benefits will encourage potential customers to take the next step faster than you might expect to do. “

For the sake of clarity, end the scope of work with the timeline in which you specify the exact steps you will take in the first month. In this way it becomes clear what a customer can expect from you and when.

3. Case studies. Interested parties want to see what you have achieved for other customers in the past. It is the social evidence that tells the customer that you are actually able to achieve the goals. If you haven’t had great social media results in the past, how can a customer know you’re successful this time? Try to include one or two case studies from a customer from a similar industry or with similar problems and goals.

It is important to note that your prospect treats social media as a lead acquisition channel. If you refer to case studies that show how you could increase the number of followers, this is not helpful for them. Keep it relevant. Another rule of thumb for case studies is to focus on the results rather than how hard you worked to achieve them.

4. The pricing. This is a very important part of the proposal. Some of your customers skip the entire offer and go straight to pricing. What we found after analyzing nearly 200,000 proposals submitted Better suggestions Adding the title “investment” to the price range (instead of “pricing”) increases your chance of making a deal. It works as a psychological trick – customers see the amount of money as an investment (which they get back in ROI) rather than a dollar to say goodbye to.

5. Next steps. This part of the proposal is often neglected. However, I strongly recommend including the next steps in your social media proposal so that your potential customers know what to do next. Of course, they can always email you what’s next, but why not make your life easier? Just say it in simple words, like in this example below.

6. General terms and conditions. Do not neglect the legal part of your proposal as this is your only protection if your relationship with the customer is compromised. Make sure you secure your agency by specifying what should happen when and who is responsible for what. If you don’t want to hire a lawyer, use at least one of the online tools to create the terms and conditions. I recommend keeping the contract and terms and conditions as part of your business proposal. This way they are connected and you will not be confused by your customer’s false expectations.

The how and when of the social media proposal

Now that you’re familiar with the main sections of the business proposal, we’ll focus on the best practices for submitting your proposal that will move you from “eh, maybe” to “heck yes!”

Quotation Format: The era of Word and PDF atrophied

It’s no secret that more and more people are consuming digital content on mobile devices these days. Business proposals are no exception. Actually, our analysis of more than 200,000 proposals showed that 34% of the suggestions are open on mobile phones.

Now think about it – if you had a Word suggestion open on your phone and you had to scroll endlessly left and right to read it, would you even read it to the end? I would not.

You want to give the impression that your social media team is full of tech-savvy people who are always up to date. This cannot be achieved with an unresponsive business proposal. If you want to create a pleasant response experience for your potential customer, submit a suggestion as part of your website (assuming your website responds, of course). The easiest way is to use a Suggestion software With that you can do this.

The best time to send a suggestion

not how Social media statistics If there are recommended times and days to publish on different platforms, we have not found a pattern for sending business proposals.

There is an easy one 0.9% increase in conversion for suggestions sent on Monday that are not meaningful enough to create best practices. However, sending suggestions within 24 hours compared to 3-4 days after the meeting increases yours Chances of hearing a 14% yes.

In addition, our analysis has shown that printing an offer reduces your chance of a conversion by a whopping 78%. So the best advice I can give is to avoid everything that is printed at all costs.

Fortunately, it’s 2020 and software tools for electronic signatures like DocuSign or DocuSign alternatives are on the rise, which saves everyone a lot of time to sign a proposal.

In addition, when integrating payment systems, getting your potential customers straight to the payment page is a breeze. The hassle-free offer experience of 2020 reduces the unnecessary steps of printing, scanning, emailing, calling, billing and leaves the essentials: sending an effective offer and winning new customers.

As with any other proposal, a social media proposal requires some effort on your part, starting with a thorough and well-prepared discovery session where the right questions are asked and to the root of the problem. Once you’ve set that up, the rest is pretty easy. Actually writing proposals consists of a number of best practices for suggestions, as well as technical hacks to make a good impression, to prove that you are the best for a job, and to prevent your customers from jumping the tire.