How to Write a Marketing Agency RFP That Exposes the Fluff

Most companies pick a marketing agency the same way they pick a restaurant on vacation: whoever has the best photos and the friendliest host wins. I have been the operator cleaning up after the agency that won the pitch more than once. The deck was great. The work was not.

A good marketing agency RFP fixes that. Not a 40-page procurement document, but a short request for proposal that makes every agency answer the same hard questions in writing, in the same format, so you can compare them side by side. Below is the marketing agency RFP template I would hand to any business owner or marketing leader, plus a scoring table, a process for running it, and the red flags that should end a conversation early.

Why most agency selection is decided on decks and chemistry

Agency pitches are built to win meetings, not to predict results. The senior people show up, the case studies are curated, and the strategy slides are written in a way that sounds specific but commits to nothing. Then you sign, and a junior account manager inherits your business along with a pile of others.

Chemistry matters, but it is the tiebreaker, not the criteria. When the only input you have is "we liked them," you evaluated the sales team, not the people who will run your accounts.

The fix is not more meetings. It is making the agencies do the work before you do. If you ask every agency the same questions about account ownership, cost per result, staffing, media markups, tracking, reporting, and exit terms, the fluff becomes obvious. Vague answers look vague next to specific ones.

If you already have an agency and you are wondering whether it has gone quiet on you, read the marketing agency autopilot problem first.

What a marketing agency RFP should actually do

A digital marketing RFP has three jobs:

• Force comparable answers. Same questions, same order, same format. No "see attached capabilities deck."
• Surface the business model. How the agency makes money tells you more about its incentives than any case study.
• Test for honesty. Some questions have uncomfortable answers. The agencies that answer them straight are the ones worth a second call.

Keep it short: one page of context, then the questions. If an agency cannot answer them in writing, they will not answer them better once they have your money.

The marketing agency RFP template: copy-ready questions

Paste this into a doc, add a one-page summary of your business (what you sell, who buys it, current channels, rough monthly budget, what is working and what is not), and send the same version to every agency on your shortlist. Ask for written answers, numbered to match.

Section 1: Account ownership and access

1. Will all ad accounts, analytics properties, tag manager containers, CRM, and email platforms be created in our name, with us as the owner or primary admin?
2. If we already have accounts, will you work inside ours, or do you require moving us into accounts you control?
3. If we end the engagement, what exactly do we keep? List accounts, creative files, audiences, landing pages, and reporting dashboards.
4. Have you ever held a client's account or data until a final invoice was paid? Describe your policy.

Section 2: Cost per result and how you define success

5. What primary metric would you hold yourself to for our business (cost per lead, cost per qualified lead, cost per acquisition, revenue), and why that one?
6. How do you separate platform-reported conversions from conversions we can verify in our CRM or order system?
7. Based on what we shared, what would a realistic cost per result look like in the first 90 days, and what assumptions is that based on? If you cannot estimate yet, tell us what you need to see first.
8. Describe a client where cost per result got worse under your management. What happened and what did you do?

Section 3: Who actually runs the work

9. Name the people who will work on our account day to day, with their role and years of hands-on experience in each channel.
10. Who from the pitch team will still be involved after month one, and for how many hours per month?
11. How many other accounts does each named person manage right now?
12. What work, if any, is outsourced or white-labeled to contractors or offshore teams?
13. If our day-to-day lead leaves your agency, what happens to our account?

Section 4: Fees and media markups

14. Break down your fee structure: flat retainer, percentage of spend, performance fee, or a mix. Show the math at our budget.
15. Do you mark up media, take rebates or commissions from platforms or vendors, or resell any tools? Disclose all of it.
16. Will ad spend be billed directly to our card or invoice from the platform, or routed through you?
17. What is not included in the fee (creative, landing pages, tracking work, software), and what does each cost?

Section 5: Tracking setup

18. Before spending money, how will you audit our current tracking? What do you check?
19. How do you set up conversion tracking across our ad platforms, analytics, and CRM so the numbers reconcile?
20. How do you handle server-side tracking, consent, and offline conversion imports where relevant?
21. Who owns and documents the tracking setup, and will we get a written map of every tag and event?

Section 6: Reporting

22. Send a real, anonymized example of a monthly report you sent a client.
23. What will you report on weekly versus monthly, and which numbers come from our systems rather than the ad platforms?
24. How will you tell us when something is not working? Give an example of bad news you delivered to a client.
25. Will we have live access to the dashboards and raw data, or only to reports you prepare?

Section 7: Exit terms

26. What is your minimum contract length? We will not sign an initial term longer than 90 days.
27. Will you accept a 30-day opt-out notice at any point in the engagement?
28. Are there termination fees, setup fees that become payable on exit, or auto-renewal clauses?
29. Describe your offboarding process: what you hand over, in what format, and how fast.

Twenty-nine questions. An agency that pushes back on most of them has told you something important.

How to evaluate a marketing agency: the scoring table

Score each response before you get on a call, so the pitch cannot reset your opinion. Use a 1 to 5 score per row, multiply by the weight, and add it up. Set the weights before the answers come in, not after.

Cost per result and staffing carry the most weight because they decide whether the engagement works. Ownership and tracking decide whether you can measure it, or leave.

How to run the process

Step 1: Build a short shortlist

Three to five agencies. More than that and you will not read the answers carefully. Pick agencies that actually work in your channels and at your budget level. A shop built for much bigger budgets will not give you its A team.

Step 2: Send the RFP and set a deadline

Give them one to two weeks. Allow one round of written questions and share the answers with all bidders. Score the written responses before any calls.

Step 3: Talk to the people who would do the work

Take your top two or three to a call, and ask specifically for the day-to-day people named in Section 3. Ask them to walk through how they would approach your first 30 days.

Step 4: Check references the right way

Ask for a current client and a former client. The former client is the useful one. Ask them why they left, how the handover went, and whether they got everything back. Ask the current client who actually works on their account.

Step 5: Run the account access check

Before you sign, confirm the agency will work in accounts you own. If you have existing accounts, add them as users yourself and keep admin rights. If they push back on this step, stop there. This is the single fastest test of whether an agency is building your asset or theirs.

Step 6: Start with a paid test or a 30-day trial

Do not sign a long contract to find out if someone is good. Pay for a defined first project, like a tracking audit and fix, or run a 30-day trial with a clear scope and a clear "what we expect to see" list. If tracking is shaky, start there; there is no point scaling spend you cannot measure. I wrote about that in fix tracking before scaling ad spend.

Red flags in agency responses

These are the answers that should drop a bidder to the bottom of the pile, or out of it entirely:

• Answering a different question. You asked who runs the work and got a paragraph about company culture.
• "Proprietary" as an answer. Proprietary methodology, proprietary dashboard, proprietary tracking. Fine, but what do you keep when you leave?
• Guaranteed results before seeing data. Nobody honest can promise a cost per lead without looking at your accounts, offer, and funnel.
• Silence on markups. If you asked about media markups and rebates and they did not answer, assume yes.
• Long minimums framed as commitment. "We need 12 months to see results" usually means "we need 12 months of fees before you can leave." See marketing agency contract red flags for the full breakdown of lock-in terms.
• No example of failure. Every agency has accounts that went badly. Ones that cannot name one are not being straight.

Where Impaxium stands on these questions

Since I am asking you to hold agencies to this, here is the one I will answer up front: Impaxium has no minimum contract length. That is the term I would push every bidder on first, because an agency that has to re-earn the business keeps paying attention. For everything else in this RFP, hold us to the same written answers you ask of anyone else.

Once you have picked an agency, do not stop evaluating. The same criteria in this RFP make a good ongoing review. If you work in private equity or manage several vendors, the quarterly marketing vendor scorecard turns this into a recurring 90-minute check.

FAQ

What should a marketing agency RFP include?

A marketing agency RFP should include a short business summary and a numbered list of questions every agency must answer in writing. Cover account ownership, cost per result, who runs the work, fees and media markups, tracking setup, reporting, and exit terms, and ask for a real sample report.

How many agencies should receive the RFP?

Three to five agencies is the right number for most businesses. Fewer and you have nothing to compare; more and you will skim the answers instead of scoring them properly.

What questions should I ask a marketing agency before hiring them?

Ask who will actually do the work, whether you will own every account, how they define and measure cost per result, whether they mark up media, how they set up tracking, and what their exit terms are. Those six questions expose most of the fluff on their own.

How do I evaluate a marketing agency fairly?

Score written answers against weighted criteria you set before the responses arrive. Then use calls, references, and an account access check to confirm what they wrote, and start with a paid test or 30-day trial instead of a long contract.

Is a digital marketing RFP worth it for a small business?

Yes, a short digital marketing RFP is worth it for a small business because the cost of a bad agency is months of wasted spend. You do not need a formal procurement process, just the same questions sent to every bidder and a simple scoring sheet.

Should I pay for a test project before signing with an agency?

Yes, a paid test or 30-day trial is the most reliable way to see how an agency actually works. Pick a defined scope, like a tracking audit or one campaign build, and judge them on the quality, speed, and honesty of what they deliver.