Elements of a Marketing Request Form

How do potential clients get in touch with you when they want marketing services? This is an essential question for your business to answer. No matter how much marketing experience you bring to the table, you’ll struggle to attract customers unless you make yourself easy to find and contact.

When businesses are searching for potential marketing partners, they won’t struggle through complex or hard-to-find forms. They want to get in touch with someone right away. To this end, you should make sure your marketing form is easy to find and use, located in the most intuitive possible place and incorporating all the details to get the marketer-client relationship off to a great start.

Remember: The Marketing Request Form Sets the Tone

Making your marketing request form comprehensive can be just as important as making it highly visible. When you give your potential clients a clear, streamlined way to fill in all the relevant useful information — and nothing irrelevant to distract them — you’re setting yourself up for success.

This level of request form, allowing prospective clients to explain their problems and goals right up front, allows you to hit the ground running. Before you’ve even spoken one-on-one with your potential customer, you have access to pertinent information that can help you pitch highly relevant marketing services, ones that will address their very real motives for contacting you.

With a beginning like that, it’s simple to build the foundation of a great partnership.

7 Top Elements of a Good Marketing Request Form

Before listing the elements that make an ideal marketing request form, it’s important to define the whole purpose of this digital form: It’s a contact form that allows potential customers to list what they’re looking for from a marketing partner, while requesting to speak with your team.

This initial form of communication serves as the digital handshake at the beginning of an interaction. The client can explain everything from their target audience and preferred channels to their overall objectives and competitive situation. With this information in hand, all parties are on the same page and ready to get started drawing up a plan.

A good marketing request form isn’t just a checklist of simple information for your clients to fill out. It’s a blueprint for a successful project to come. Seven useful elements to include on your form include:

1. Contact details

What they are: These are the simplest elements on the marketing request form. The person filling out the document simply tells you where you can reach them, typically by leaving a phone number, a professional email or both. Other forms of contact, such as through messaging platforms or social media are also acceptable.
Why they matter: Unless your marketing contact form has a clear, correctly formatted place for prospective clients to enter their contact information, you could miss out on potential business through simple missed connections. Therefore, you should make this a required field: Every user of the form must enter at least one valid form of contact information before they’re allowed to submit.

2. Project goals

What they are: After the simple introductory contact details, this is where the client gets the chance to explain their reason for contacting you. These are the immediate goals of the marketing project the client is envisioning, the one that your firm can help them complete. You can give an example of what you mean by “project goals” based on some of your existing projects to help potential customers give your team useful reference points.
Why they matter: When you know the goals of a client project, you can apply your marketing expertise to draw up strategic and tactical ideas that will help achieve those objectives. Every solution starts with a well-articulated problem, and every sensible marketing strategy begins with a goal to accomplish.

3. Budget and timeline

What they are: Your form should ask prospects how much they intend to spend on a marketing project, along with their vision for its timeline. It can be worthwhile to enable users to enter a range rather than a specific number — demanding too many details might drive away potential clients who haven’t solidified their plans yet.
Why they matter: Knowing a client’s budgetary goals for a project as well as its intended timeline allows you to create a more precise pitch for the marketing support campaign. Your project scope suggestions can be realistic and suit the company’s circumstances when you know how much money and time you’ll have to work with.

4. Target audience

What it is: This field gives prospects a chance to describe their target market — these descriptions can be general, such as B2C vs. B2B vs. internal marketing or more specific, including regions and demographics. This is another part of the form where it can pay to accept a variety of responses because some customers will have put more thought into this than others.
Why it matters: Knowing the client’s target audience lets you create more precise messaging concepts when sketching out your proposed marketing campaign. If the customer is unsure about some of the details around their target market, your team can make suggestions.

5. Preferred channels

What they are: These are the mediums through which your customer wants to reach an audience. In today’s media landscape, there are countless options to choose from. Legacy methods like TV commercials sit alongside the latest search engine optimization tactics and optimized posts on an ever-expanding galaxy of social media platforms.
Why they matter: As with budget, timeline and target audience, preferred channels allow you to add more specifics to your pitch in terms of project scope and focus. You can show examples of how you’ve produced high-quality content for the channels in question in the past, or suggest likely channels if your prospect is unsure.

6. Competitor info

What it is: Giving applicants an optional area to name or describe their competitors allows them to describe their market in more detail. They can use this part of the form to describe high-performing competitors they may want to emulate.
Why it matters: Not every prospect will want to leave a detailed list of competitors. Those that do, however, save work for your internal marketing team. Researching a brand’s competition is an important step in building an on-point marketing support proposal for a client, one that can help it stand out in its field.

7. Other special requests

What they are: If you end your marketing request form with an open field, you can gather other useful information from prospects, like their preferred tone or any specific concepts they’ve already developed for their campaign. Some examples of these kinds of details can help applicants decide what to write.
Why they matter: These extra details, which might not fit neatly into the more standardized, required field categories, allow you to create a pitch that is directly in line with your prospect’s expectations, helping you make a great first impression.

Once you’ve collected this information, it’s important for the right stakeholders to receive it as quickly as possible to assemble it into a compelling pitch. Carefully managed internal communication processes are essential here.

Finding the Right Place for Your Form

Having a detailed and well-designed form is half the battle when it comes to getting great responses. The other half is visibility. Your marketing request form should be easy to find and simple to fill out. You can and should post this form on several channels to make sure it’s always there when prospective customers may want to use it.

Great places to post your form include:

On your website under a Contact or Work With Us page: This is the most essential place to post marketing request forms. Visitors to your website are the perfect audience to turn into customers.
In social media bios: By posting a link to your marketing request form in your brand’s social media bios — and potentially in your expectives’ individual bios, too — you can capture curious visitors who are performing research on prospective marketing partners.
At the end of blog posts or case studies: Right after a prospect has read a blog post or case study describing your brand’s approach to marketing, they may want to reach out immediately about working together. You should make that process as easy as possible.
In email signatures: When official email communications from your executives close with a link to your marketing request form, you can turn informative email exchanges into opportunities to capture new business.
QR codes on print materials: How can you use a physical hand-out at a trade show or other event to attract business to your purely digital marketing request form? A URL may suffice if it’s a simple one, but a QR code, enabling quick scanning via phone, is even more direct.

Communication Is Key: How To Communicate After Submission

So, you’ve assembled a great marketing request form and posted it in all the right places. Client requests have started pouring in. How do you respond? It’s important to keep the momentum going to ensure you seal the deal and start the relationship on a good foot.

Effective next steps when prospects fill out marketing request forms include:

Sending an automated email response as soon as you receive a form submission, so senders know they’re not sending their information into the void.
Having a real person (not a bot) follow up within 24-48 hours to set the timeline and manage expectations for next steps.
Staying in contact with updates, especially if there’s a delay in the timeline. Your team should be very open with prospects as they follow the path to becoming customers.

And that’s how a marketing request form transforms curious prospects into a reliable customer base. Good luck using these simple tools to build a pipeline of marketing customers for your firm, from form submission to prosperous partnership.