A Marketer’s Guide to RFP Success
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Your Guide to Building a Better RFP
Selecting a partner for your social marketing needs can be a daunting task. As the industry moves at
warp-speed and mobile platforms all begin to look alike, it’s more important than ever to cut through the
clutter and identify what truly differentiates one vendor from another in their ability to deliver long-term
digital marketing success.
The questions in this guide cover important social topics that a company should consider when selecting
a social provider, including:
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Reliability
Multi-channel Capabilities
Capabilities within Listening, Engagement and Publishing
Tracking / Reporting tools
Scalable structure
In addition to the enclosed RFP questions, below is a checklist to help you select the vendor that’s right
for your business.
Look for a Digital Marketing Solution
Gone are the days of running mobile campaigns independently of other marketing campaigns. Mobile is
known for driving traffic from one marketing channel such as email, social media, or web, to another.
Pursuing a digital marketing solution provider will help you achieve one view of the customer across
multiple messaging channels.
Look for a Social Marketing Expert
Your social vendor should be dedicated to the social channel and have a solid understanding of:
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Industry best practices and trends
The most popular, current, social networks; like Twitter and Facebook
Up to date changes and fluctuations with key capabilities on key social networks like Twitter and
Facebook
The five keys of social media management: Listening, Engagement, Publishing, Measurement
and Scale
Have a good reputation with a solid list of clients
Look for a Product and Services Mix
Companies that offer a combination of products and services will truly adapt to your needs using their
expertise in both areas. The mix should include capabilities such as:
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Strategy and implementation services
Tracking and reporting functionality
Secure platform and Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Look for Social Marketing Best Practices
Social marketing campaigns, though easy to create, have many moving parts and it’s critical to select a
vendor that has in-house social marketing expertise and knowledge of industry best practices.
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The Right Questions for Your Request for Proposal
Company Overview
1. Tell us about your company’s background and history. For instance, what is your ownership
structure?
2. Present your company’s financials.
3. Provide biographies of your company’s executive team.
4. Describe your global presence. How do your products and services enable digital marketing for a
global organization with multiple brands, geographic areas, and/or lines of business?
5. Describe your approach to thought leadership and global research. What types of research did
you publish in the past year? How is it distributed? What additional offerings do you share that
are above and beyond typical information-sharing?
Collaboration on Strategy
1. What current trends do you see in social media marketing around the world?
2. Does your company offer strategic services for global organizations? If so, describe them.
3. What process or methodology do you employ to grow an organization’s program over time?
4. How can you help us ensure that our social program is within industry best practices? Are there
any specific engagement best practices that you have found to be most important in maintaining
relationships with social customers?
5. What can your strategic services team do for our organization?
a. Provide an example of how you have accomplished this for a global organization and
what results they achieved.
b. Provide an example of how you quantifiably improved a client’s digital marketing
program.
Social Media
1. Explain the technology solutions you provide across each of the following areas: social listening,
presences, customer engagement and conversations, ads, measurement and insights, and CRM
integration.
Social Listening
1. Provide a brief overview of your social listening solution.
2. What social media sources do you cover?
3. How often are new social media sources added?
4. Detail your level of partnership with Twitter, Facebook and any third-party providers.
5. Explain how the platform filters social media content.
6. How much historical data is included? Does your solution archive data indefinitely?
7. Which languages can we track using the solution?
8. Describe your solution for identifying and tracking influencers.
9. Describe your solution’s sentiment analysis capabilities.
10. Describe how data can be sorted, tagged, categorized, and routed by users.
11. How can the platform help us track and compare our brands? What types of data can you capture
for competitors?
12. Explain how your solution provides insight and actionable data beyond the standard metrics.
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13.
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Describe your reporting and alert capabilities.
Does your platform have an open API?
Do you offer integration with third-party providers?
How does your solution connect customers’ social data with traditional CRM data?
Explain your enhanced analytics and consultative capabilities beyond what is included in your
standard analytics package.
Conversation Management and Engagement
1. Outline your conversation management technology.
2. Explain how your conversation management solution allows multiple community managers to
moderate and react in real-time. Outline how your streams can be customized to each user.
3. Give details on your ability to publish and schedule content to social applications such as Twitter,
YouTube and Facebook.
4. Outline the controls that exist for publishing, authoring and moderation.
5. Outline your process for approval and in-suite notification functions in regard to internal
communications, prioritization and post classification.
6. What types of tools do you provide to produce and manage content in your application?
7. Describe how non-suite users can approve or review content.
8. Do you offer link shortening capabilities?
9. Do you provide a repository for frequently-used content?
Tracking and Reporting
1. What type of tracking and reporting capabilities do you offer? What type of data can you help us
track? Can you give us examples of these reports?
2. Outline details on the types of social actions that your technology tracks as it relates to
conversions.
3. Describe your analytics reporting capabilities.
Augmentation with Current Technology
1. What type of social programs do marketers typically run using your social platform?
a. Customer Service (SE)
b. Outbound marketing (SE)
c. Contests / Sweepstakes (SP)
d. Sign-up (SP)
2. Does your technology platform rely on a third party to operate its social solutions?
Integration
1. Describe your partner ecosystem. What types of partnerships do you offer? Who are they?
2. Describe the ability to get data in and out of your system via the API.
3. How does your solution connect customers’ social data with traditional CRM data?
4. Explain the value of having a process automation engine.
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Digital Marketing Capabilities
1. Can your company independently provide social, SMS, and email services? Can they be
integrated?
2. How can we maintain multiple conversations with one customer through different channels? What
tools do you offer to support this?
Services & Training
1. Describe the process for implementing a new client and the training you provide to onboard
global organizations with multiple brands, geographic areas, and/or lines of business.
2. How do you support the service needs with your solution?
3. Explain how you provide global clients with access to training, documentation, and client support.
4. Do you offer complementary client educational opportunities on market trends and best
practices?
5. Do you offer a mobile application?
6. Explain how you keep users informed of new platform enhancements and training.
Overall Pricing
1. Describe your pricing structure and provide complete pricing information, including setup costs,
any one-time costs, any alternative pricing, and any recurring/annual costs for a client.
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