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

Are you putting real time and effort into your marketing RFP process, only to get proposals back that miss the mark entirely?

You’re not alone.

The frustrating reality is that most marketing RFPs don’t fail because the wrong agencies were invited. They fail because the brief itself creates the wrong conditions for great thinking. Agencies are clever, experienced, and motivated — but they can only work with what they’re given. Give them the wrong brief, and even the best agencies in the world will come back with proposals that feel generic, misaligned, or wildly off-budget.

Richard Gray, Exposure Ninja’s Sales Director, has reviewed hundreds of enterprise marketing RFPs over a 20-year career. His view is direct: the biggest mistake companies make in their marketing RFPs is not being open to suggestions. They seek out experts to solve their problems, but then issue an RFP for something very specific that, in reality, doesn’t address the root cause of what’s holding the business back.

This podcast and article draw on that experience — and Tim Cameron-Kitchen’s eight-step framework — to show you how to create a marketing agency RFP that generates proposals worth getting excited about.

Executive Summary

A well-structured marketing RFP isn’t just a formality — it’s a strategic document that shapes everything from the quality of proposals you receive to the speed of your decision-making process. The businesses that consistently get the best work from agencies are the ones that invest properly in the brief.

The eight-step framework covered in this article guides marketing leaders through every element of a strong RFP: company context, goal-setting, current performance, budget, competitive landscape, brand positioning, process timeline, and evaluation criteria.

Alongside the structure, there are two equally important process points — internal alignment before you send the RFP, and making space for discovery calls after. Get all of this right, and the difference in proposal quality is significant.

• The single biggest mistake in marketing RFPs is prescribing a solution before allowing agencies to diagnose the problem
• Vague goals produce vague proposals — a two-level goal structure gives agencies something to work back from
• Withholding your budget range doesn’t protect you from inflated proposals; it just makes good proposals impossible to write
• Internal misalignment before the RFP goes out is one of the most common and costly mistakes marketing leaders make
• Discovery calls after the RFP is sent are not optional extras — they are essential to getting proposals that genuinely fit

Why Do Most Marketing RFPs Produce Disappointing Proposals

The answer, more often than not, comes down to a single structural problem: the RFP tells agencies what to do rather than what to achieve.

When a business issues an RFP for a specific channel, a defined scope, or a predetermined set of tactics, it’s making an assumption — that the solution has already been identified and just needs to be executed. But if that assumption is wrong, no amount of excellent agency work will produce the outcome the business is actually looking for.

As Rich Gray puts it: “People seek out experts to solve their problems, but they often don’t fully understand what needs to be done.” Telling an expert what to prescribe before they’ve examined the patient isn’t a brief — it’s a constraint.

The second reason proposals disappoint is lack of context.

Agencies are working with limited information about your business, your history, your internal politics, and your decision-making criteria. The more context they have, the more precisely they can target their thinking. A vague RFP doesn’t just produce vague proposals — it produces proposals that are basically educated guesses dressed up as strategy.

The third, and perhaps most avoidable, reason is internal misalignment.

It’s surprisingly common for an RFP to go out, proposals to come back, and then for it to become clear that the internal team was never actually agreed on the problem, the scale of the budget, or even whether the problem exists at all.

That’s an expensive way to discover a planning gap.

What Does a Good Marketing RFP Actually Include

Before getting into the step-by-step breakdown, it’s worth understanding what the finished document should contain.

A strong RFP gives agencies everything they need to design a proposal that’s genuinely tailored — not templated.

That means a brief overview of your business and the decision makers involved. Clear commercial goals and a shared definition of what success looks like. Honest information about your current performance, including what’s working and what isn’t. Some background on what you’ve already tried. A timeline and budget range for the work. Context on your key competitors and where you sit relative to them. And an explanation of your RFP process itself — submission dates, shortlist notification, pitch format, and decision timeline.

That’s a lot to cover. Which is why breaking it into eight defined steps makes the process significantly more manageable.

Step 1: Company Context and Decision Makers

Start with who you are and who is involved in the decision.

This sounds obvious, but it’s frequently undercooked. Agencies need to know your revenue bracket and growth trajectory, the products and services you want to focus on, the geographies you operate in, your internal marketing team’s capabilities, and — critically — who the decision makers are and what each of them actually prioritises.

That last point matters more than most marketing leaders realise.

If your CFO is involved in the decision, they’ll be calibrated towards commercial efficiency. Your CMO will likely be more focused on brand visibility and long-term positioning. An agency submitting a proposal needs to know that it has to address both objectives and strike the right balance between them. If that context is missing, proposals will default to what they assume you want — and they’ll probably assume wrong.

Step 2: Goals That Agencies Can Actually Work With

If you give agencies a vague goal — “increase brand awareness” or “generate more leads” — you’ll get vague proposals back.

The clearer and more specific the goal, the more precisely agencies can engineer their approach around it.

Tim Cameron-Kitchen recommends giving two levels of goal in every RFP.

First, the business goal — the underlying commercial outcome you’re trying to drive.

Second, the marketing implication — your working hypothesis about what needs to happen in order to achieve it.

For example: the business goal might be to reduce customer acquisition costs by 25% whilst maintaining lead volume. The marketing implication might be that paid channels are showing diminishing returns, so the business wants to build organic channels beneath them to take pressure off and bring the overall cost per acquisition down.

Including both levels gives agencies the freedom to evaluate whether the proposed marketing approach is actually the right lever — and to suggest an alternative if they believe there’s a more effective route to the business goal. Without that context, you’ll just get proposals that execute the brief as written, even if the brief is pointing in the wrong direction.

Step 3: Current Performance and What You’ve Already Tried

This section is about being genuinely honest rather than presenting a polished picture. Agencies need to know what’s working and why, what hasn’t worked and why you think that is, and what areas you’ve already invested in — so they don’t waste their proposal on ground you’ve already covered.

The more data you can provide here, the better. Website traffic, conversion rates, channel performance, campaign results, cost per acquisition by source — all of it is useful. Your team’s capability and any resource constraints are worth including too. Agencies designing proposals around the wrong assumptions about your internal capacity will end up recommending things you can’t realistically deliver without their help.

Step 4: Timeline and Budget

This is where a lot of RFPs go wrong — and where the consequences are most visible.

Withholding your budget feels like a protective move. The concern is understandable: if agencies know your ceiling, every proposal will conveniently land right at the top of it. But in practice, the opposite problem is far more damaging. Without a budget range, agencies are working blind.

In this podcast’s accompanying video, Tim describes the experience of reviewing an RFP that covered ten to twelve different marketing channels with no budget indication at all. A credible proposal could have landed anywhere between £20,000 a month for everything, and £20,000 per channel — a £200,000 monthly difference. Neither number is useful when no anchor exists.

Good agencies don’t reverse-engineer their pricing to hit a budget cap. They use the budget to determine how much resource to allocate — more budget means more senior team, more dedicated time, and more capability directed at hitting your targets. As Rich Gray notes, providing a range is enough: it helps agencies determine whether it’s worth responding at all, and ensures they pitch at the right level of ambition rather than guessing in the dark.

The timeline here refers to the campaign timeline — how long you expect the engagement to run and when you need results — not the timeline of the RFP process itself, which comes later in step seven.

Step 5: Your Competitive Landscape

Which competitors are you watching most closely?

What are they doing well?

Where do you feel the gap most acutely?

Your internal analysis of the competitive landscape is genuinely valuable to agencies — it tells them what you’ve already observed, so they can build on it rather than starting from scratch.

But the competitive context also communicates ambition. An RFP that identifies a dominant competitor — one that’s owning search, showing up across AI recommendations, and outperforming on paid — signals to agencies that they’ll need to go hard to move the needle. An RFP from a business that’s already in a strong position signals a different kind of brief: one focused on extending a lead rather than closing a gap. Both are valid. Agencies need to know which scenario they’re walking into.

One thing Tim has noticed appearing in RFPs with increasing frequency is a specific ask around AI Search Optimisation.

More businesses are seeing branded and direct traffic grow — and when they ask customers how they found them, the answer is increasingly some version of “ChatGPT recommended you.”

Forward-thinking marketing leaders are including this in their briefs because they can see the direction of travel clearly. Including your thinking on AI search, whether or not you’ve already started acting on it, gives agencies an important signal about how strategically ambitious this brief needs to be.

Step 6: What Makes Your Brand Different

This is the section that companies often find the hardest to write — not because they don’t have a strong position, but because they haven’t pinned it down internally.

Getting genuine internal agreement on what a brand stands for and why it wins can be surprisingly difficult, even for established businesses.

It matters more now than it used to.

When your customers are asking ChatGPT about the best solution in your category, the AI’s answer will be shaped by how clearly and consistently your positioning comes through across everything it’s trained on. If that positioning is vague, generic, or inconsistent, the AI’s description of your brand will be too. Sharp, specific positioning isn’t just a marketing asset — it’s increasingly a visibility asset.

If your website doesn’t currently reflect your true competitive advantage — because it was built before the positioning was nailed down, or because it’s been updated piecemeal over the years — make sure your RFP gives agencies that additional context. Without it, they’ll design proposals around what your website says you are, not what you actually are.

Step 7: Your RFP Process Timeline

Set out exactly what’s going to happen and when.

The typical sequence runs as follows: the RFP is issued; there’s a Q&A window and a period for discovery calls; proposals are submitted by a fixed deadline; a shortlist is notified; shortlisted agencies pitch in more detail; a final decision is made; and the engagement begins.

Be realistic about the timeline you set.

A detailed, data-driven proposal involving senior strategic thinking isn’t something that can be produced well in a week. Three to four weeks is generally the right ballpark for a substantive brief. And once the timeline is set, respect it — granting extensions, even to everyone, inadvertently penalises the agencies that managed their time to meet the original deadline.

Step 8: Your Evaluation Criteria

Be explicit about how proposals will be assessed.

Agencies need to understand who is evaluating their work and what those people are looking for — and the only way to tell them is to say it directly. Are you prioritising commercial efficiency? Sector-specific experience? Strategic creativity? The ability to integrate across multiple channels?

One note of caution: be careful about over-specifying criteria. The more narrow and specific your requirements — particularly around prior experience in a very specific niche — the more agencies you’ll inadvertently screen out. If a criterion genuinely matters, use it. If it’s a proxy for something else, be honest with yourself about what you’re actually looking for and evaluate on that instead.

Who Should Review Your RFP Before It Goes Out

Two groups of people are worth running the draft past before it’s issued to the market.

The first is your sales team. If they’ll be handling the leads generated by whatever agency wins this brief, it’s worth checking they’re aligned with the direction it’s taking. But sales teams also make excellent outside readers — they’re good at spotting vague requirements, contradictory criteria, and anything that doesn’t make intuitive sense to someone coming at it fresh. A salesperson who reads your RFP and says “honestly, I can’t make head or tail of this” is giving you very useful feedback. Agencies might feel the same way and just be too polite to say so.

The second group is your internal stakeholders — everyone who might have an opinion or an objection once the proposals start coming in.

Getting CFO, CEO, and CMO alignment before the RFP goes out means you won’t be discovering disagreements about the problem, the budget, or the priority during the pitch presentations. That’s the worst possible moment to find out your C-suite wasn’t aligned. It wastes everyone’s time and often leads to a process that has to be restarted from scratch.

What Happens After You Send Your Marketing RFP

Sending the RFP is not the end of your involvement in the process — it’s the beginning of a more collaborative phase, and the quality of that phase has a direct impact on the quality of proposals you receive.

Build in time for discovery calls with each agency. It’s rare that an RFP is so complete that agencies can go from brief to proposal without any additional conversation. At Exposure Ninja, a typical discovery process involves one to two and a half hours of conversation with the client team — sometimes more — to make sure the proposal is genuinely responsive to what matters most internally. Those calls surface things the RFP didn’t capture: the internal dynamics, the unstated constraints, the ambitions that didn’t quite make it into the document.

Rich Gray won’t engage with an RFP unless that groundwork has been done first. His framing of the agency role is worth holding onto throughout this entire process: “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.” The discovery call is where that diagnostic conversation happens. Skip it, and you’re getting a waiter’s proposal — not a doctor’s diagnosis.

Next Steps

This week

• Pull together your most recent performance data across all active channels — traffic, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, and lead volume. This is the foundation of a credible RFP and it takes longer to compile than most marketing leaders expect.
• Schedule a working session with your key internal stakeholders to align on the business goal and the marketing implication before anything is written. The goal is to walk into the drafting process with genuine internal consensus, not assumptions.

Next 30 days

• Draft your RFP using the eight-step framework. Start with company context and goals, then layer in current performance, budget range, competitive landscape, brand positioning, process timeline, and evaluation criteria.
• Run the draft past your sales team before it goes anywhere near an agency. Ask them to read it as if they were an outsider being asked to respond. Their feedback will tell you a lot.
• Identify the agencies you plan to approach, confirm that your timeline is realistic, and build in a formal discovery call window of at least a week before the proposal submission deadline.

Next 90 days

• Run the full RFP process through to a decision, keeping to the timelines you’ve committed to and taking discovery calls seriously. The agency that wins should have had a genuine opportunity to diagnose your situation — not just respond to a document.
• Reflect on the process once it’s complete. What did the best proposals have in common? What context, if it had been in the RFP from the start, would have improved the quality of everything you received? Use that learning to sharpen the next brief you write.

If you’d like Exposure Ninja to review your current marketing performance and identify the highest-leverage opportunities before you go to market with an RFP, request a free digital marketing review here. The team will take a look at what you’re doing now, what your competitors are doing, and where the real opportunities for growth are — and they’ll send you a video summary within two to three working days.

In Conclusion

A marketing RFP is only as good as the conditions it creates for agencies to do their best thinking. That means giving them genuine context, clear goals at two levels, honest performance data, a realistic budget range, and enough room in the process to ask the questions that turn a generic proposal into a genuinely useful one.

The businesses that get the most from their RFP processes are the ones that treat the brief as a strategic document, not an administrative one. They align internally before they go to market. They build in discovery calls as a non-negotiable part of the process. And they stay genuinely open to being told that the solution they had in mind isn’t the right one.

Rich Gray’s doctor versus waiter analogy is the right lens for all of it. You’re not looking for an agency that will execute what you’ve already decided. You’re looking for one that will ask the right questions, challenge the brief where it needs challenging, and prescribe a solution that actually addresses the underlying problem. An RFP built on the eight-step framework gives you the best possible chance of finding exactly that.

Watch This Next

Now you know how to write a brief that gets results, it’s important that you know what to look out for when choosing a brand-new agency partner for your business. Watch the video below to learn the positive (and negative) signs to look out for.