The length tell
A forty-page proposal for a small local business is a template with your name inserted. Nobody wrote forty bespoke pages about a five-person plumbing company.
The pages that are not about you — market overviews, methodology diagrams, a history of search engines — are there to justify the price by weight.
A good proposal for a business this size is a few pages: what gets built, when, what it costs, what happens after, and what you own.
What should be in it
Specific deliverables. Named pages, named fixes, named systems. "Content strategy development" is not a deliverable; "six service pages and four area pages" is.
A timeline with your obligations in it. Most delays are content and approvals, not build time.
What is measured. Enquiries and booked jobs. If it says traffic and rankings, they are measuring the wrong thing.
What happens after the initial build.
Ownership. Domain, hosting, profile, ad account, analytics, content.
Notice period and what leaving involves.
The padding to look for
Activities dressed as outcomes. "Ongoing optimisation", "brand alignment", "holistic digital presence". Ask what would be different if it were done well versus badly.
Volume commitments with no purpose. Twenty blog posts, three hundred citations, forty optimisations. Quantity is easy to produce and easy to bill, and one good service page beats twenty posts nobody finds.
Channels you do not need. Social media management for a business whose customers find them by searching for an emergency plumber.
Discovery phases that produce a document before any work starts.
Tiered packages where the differences are quantities rather than capabilities.
The questions that deflate padding
"Which line items do you expect to produce enquiries, and roughly when?"
"What happens if we remove this item?" If nothing measurable changes, it was padding.
"What will exist at the end of month three that does not exist now?"
A good provider answers all three comfortably.
The thing padding hides
Usually that the provider has not thought specifically about your business, because thinking specifically is the expensive part and a template is not.
A proposal that names your services, your areas and your actual competitors took someone an hour of genuine attention. That hour is a reasonable proxy for what the engagement will be like.
What BayouEdge does instead
Published rates — $2,500 to $12,500 setup, $750 to $3,500 a month — with the scope of each stated on the pricing page rather than assembled into a bespoke document.
Getting one read
If you have a proposal in hand, call James on 832-338-2926 for a second opinion from someone not selling you that particular thing.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a marketing proposal be?
A few pages for a small local business. A forty-page document is a template with your name inserted — the pages that are not about you exist to justify the price by weight.
What counts as padding?
Activities dressed as outcomes, volume commitments with no purpose, channels you do not need, discovery phases producing documents before work starts, and tiers differing only in quantity.
What questions deflate padding?
Which line items do you expect to produce enquiries and when, what happens if we remove this item, and what will exist at the end of month three that does not exist now.
What does padding usually hide?
That the provider has not thought specifically about your business, because thinking specifically is the expensive part and a template is not.