How To Write a Marketing RFP (That Actually Gets Results)

*Watch this before you hire a marketing agency* 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGMOwbVNiMs Try Semrush for FREE: https://thankyouninjas.com ==================== Your RFP might be the reason you're getting bad proposals. Not because you're asking the wrong agencies. Not because your brief is too short or your timeline too tight. According to Rich Gray, Exposure Ninja's Sales Director and someone who has reviewed hundreds of enterprise RFPs over a 20-year career, the biggest mistake is simpler and more fundamental than any of that. Businesses tell agencies what they want. They don't let agencies figure out what they actually need. That distinction matters more than most marketing leaders realise. An RFP that prescribes a specific channel, a fixed scope, or a predetermined strategy doesn't just limit the proposals you get back — it can lock you into solving the wrong problem entirely. In this video, Exposure Ninja's founder, Tim Cameron-Kitchen walks through an eight-step framework for writing a marketing RFP that generates genuinely useful proposals. The kind that your C-suite will actually want to act on. One of the most overlooked issues is budget transparency. Withholding your budget range feels like a smart negotiating move. In practice, it forces agencies to guess — and the range of possible guesses is enormous. An RFP Tim reviewed recently covered ten to twelve channels with no budget indication. A credible proposal could have landed anywhere between £20,000 a month and £240,000 a month. Neither answer is useful to anyone. Good agencies don't inflate proposals to hit a budget ceiling. They use the budget to determine how much resource, seniority, and strategic thinking they can bring. A range gives them something to calibrate against. Without it, you're running pin the tail on the donkey and hoping someone finds the right spot. Internal alignment is the other thing that quietly kills RFP processes before they've started. It's extremely common for proposals to come back and reveal that the internal team was never agreed on the problem, the priority, or the budget in the first place. That's an expensive way to find out. As Rich puts it: "Sales should be about being the doctor, not the waiter. A waiter takes an order and brings what's asked for, without question. A doctor asks questions to understand what's really wrong before prescribing a solution." That's what a good agency pitch process should look like. And it only works when the RFP creates the conditions for it. By the way, you can listen to this video as an audio podcast instead via our website: https://exposureninja.com/podcast/377/ ==================== Exposure Ninja is an award-winning search marketing agency specialising in AI Search, SEO, and PPC. We grow B2B and B2C brands into industry leaders in search. Proudly B Corp Certified. Request a review of your website and marketing 👉 https://exposureninja.com/review/ Follow Exposure Ninja https://linkedin.com/company/exposureninja https://instagram.com/exposureninja https://facebook.com/ExposureNinja https://tiktok.com/@exposureninja ==================== Recorded by: Tim Cameron-Kitchen Edited by: DirekVim Thumbnail by: Dale Davies Produced by: Dale Davies and Tim Cameron-Kitchen *Disclaimer: Exposure Ninja may get a commission through the marked links above, at no cost to you #ExposureNinja #SEO