Signature Service Inbound Marketing Proposal Template Made Easy

Signature service inbound marketing proposal template

alright let me just get this out of the way your proposal for social media management services is different than your social media strategy I feel like that's important to share because I've worked with a lot of different social media managers and many of them make the mistake of spending way too much time and effort and energy and giving way to much strategy away in their proposal only to have that potential client ghost on them and I would assume they just take the strategy and run hand it off to someone else hire someone who's a little less expensive give it to an intern there's a million possibilities of what could happen but what I don't want you to do is to give away all of your secrets and all of that magic before someone has paid you to work with you so if someone is getting a completed social media strategy from you then they should be at the very least paying you for a consultation or a strategy session that should be a paid situation a discovery call and a proposal for ongoing monthly social media services is not a strategy you don't reveal the complete strategy you reveal deliverables and what they're paying for on a monthly basis what they can expect for you to do and the strategy comes after that once they've paid an invoice once they've agreed on your proposal and selected a package we're signed a contract that's when the strategy happens they're clearly a lot of different ways that you can organize that but what I want you to be careful of is giving away your strategic what we're going to do inside of the proposal so your proposal should really look like I said a list of deliverables so it's more like in this package every month I'm going to be posting this many times per day or per week or per month like this is how many times will be pushing content out to this in this channel maybe it includes you know we're going to be posting three Instagram stories per week for this based on a couple of different content buckets that we select after they okay cool three Instagram stories per week in this package that sounds great sign off on it the strategy would include okay within the Instagram stories these are the content buckets these are the different themes that we're going to be looking at here some templates here some ideas here's how I'm going to track and measure these results inside of the stories here's what the objective of this story is we want people to be engaging this way we want people to be sharing this way one other thing to be careful for is that your discovery calls don't go SuperDuper long I've known people to do like 1 hour long discovery calls and for social media services I just feel like that becomes a consultation because because what are you really talking about for more than you know 20 20 minutes 2025 minutes I don't think I've ever had a discovery call go longer than 20 minutes that's usually a great amount of time to say okay I've got this list of questions I'd love to know like where you are what you've currently been doing what are your expectations what are your goals for social media what's your business who are you trying to reach what channels are you interested in like all of those sort of like checklist questions that can happen during a discovery call once you have that you can put together to the proposal like based on what the information that they've given you but if it starts to become sort of a brain picking session where they're like well what would you do in this case or let me ask you this what would you do who would you reach out to what influencers are you really like looking to like who would we be working with how would you do Instagram stories when it starts to become it's a fine line in a gray area you don't want to like kind of wander into because at the end of the day you can charge for a consultation of some things like 3045 minutes to an hour and you're actually giving away your ideas or giving away that knowledge I think a lot of people who do this for a living forget or average person who's not studying and and looking at this all day who's not seeing that behind the scenes of different clients accounts who's not reading the news every day to find out what the latest and greatest thing is happening with Instagram or Facebook Ads when they're not as clued in you can sometimes forget that the information you possess is very valuable and that other people don't think the way that you do and so you can get taken advantage of quite a bit if you don't protect and hold that information no I'm not saying don't give them a little nugget to show that you're an expert and that you know what it is that you're talking about throw that in it's like a free sample but just don't let your discovery cult become a consultation and don't let your proposal become a social media strategy so you can just think of it like the proposal is the what and the strategy is the hell so if you're telling them all of the how inside of your proposal then you're probably giving away a little bit too much because now you've given them the roadmap you've shown them well this is the what and the how and then they can just take it and run what you want to do is like this is the what you will do for you will handle all of these things as a deliverable every single month and then once we jump in and you decide that you want to do this with us we're gonna tell you exactly how we get there and we're gonna measure it every single step along the way and we're gonna report those results back to you so does that make sense if you're giving away too much of your strategy in your proposal you run the risk of someone taking that you make it sound really easy now you've written down the exact steps for them and although we know that there is still strategy involved whenever we're managing an account and there's a lot of other behind-the-scenes stuff that we're probably not putting into the strategy you can make it sound too easy for someone and they might just bypass you altogether and go hmm this was simpler than I thought thanks for all the great ideas or I'm gonna have a little Suzie intern do this for me of course we know in the long term it is way more expensive to hire an amateur than it is to hire an expert but don't let yourself get burned don't let yourself get passed over if you're the right person for the job by giving away too much of your secrets and your information and all of your strategic ideas inside of that initial proposal of course I would love to hear from you if you have any questions about the difference between proposals and strategies definitely leave a comment below and let me know