Modern marketing is a complicated business. Any marketing campaign needs a multi-faceted strategy, usually involving multiple channels and a host of interlinked tactics. Marketing teams need to be skilled in everything from data analysis to creative writing to livestreaming.
All in all, it’s a big job, with a lot of moving parts.
Such a complex job needs a lot of resources – and you can’t always predict what resources your team will need before they need them. It’s common for marketing coordinators to spend much of their job sourcing and providing tools as and when they’re needed.
Maybe the copywriter needs access to a paywalled blog, a manager needs to know the definition of affiliate marketing, or a campaign needs an extra budget. The requests frequently come thick and fast – and it can be hard to keep up.
How can marketing teams streamline their requests, ensure each request reaches the right person, and save a ton of time into the bargain? The solution is simple: marketing request forms.
What Is a Marketing Request Form?
A marketing request form is a form your marketing team can use to request tools, items, automations, systems, budgets, information, or anything else they need to do their jobs.
Request forms are often integral to ordering management software, but even a relatively informal system can bring great results.
Why Are Marketing Request Forms Useful?
Marketing request forms solve five main issues:
- They stop requests from getting lost.
- They stop requests from getting forgotten.
- They link each request with the person who made it – ensuring that the requested resource always reaches the right person.
- They put all the relevant information about the request in one, easily-accessible place.
- They ensure that each request gets to the right person or department.
Let’s quickly run through each of these and explore why they’re critical problems to solve:
Preventing requests from getting lost
A message request form system streamlines and centralizes things. When requests come in randomly, without a formalized system, it’s easy for them to get lost. In the case of requests for important things like an agreement contract template, this can be disastrous.
By implementing a form system, you funnel everything through one process and one location/person. It also standardizes its format – making a request instantly recognizable. All of this massively reduces the chances of a request getting lost.
Preventing requests from getting forgotten
Billions and billions of emails are sent every day.
Of these, the average worker receives 121 every single day. When you factor in things like team app notifications, phone calls, meetings, general chat, and – of course – the demands of your actual job, it’s easy for things to drop off the radar.
A lot of requests get forgotten. It’s understandable, but it does cause a lot of problems. By formalizing and centralizing the system of your request and using marketing request forms, you make sure that each request will be noticed, remembered, and dealt with at a good time. This will, in turn, boost your marketing performance.
Linking each request to the person who made it
When requests are made in passing chat, or even when they’re written on a post-it and stuck to a monitor, it can be hard to remember who asked for what.
Then, you have to waste time asking around to find out who needed the resource you’ve just sourced. A message request form clearly shows who makes each request. So, you can get each resource to the person who needs it quickly and efficiently.
Containing all the necessary information
Let’s say you’ve requested some agency agreement forms. Because you had to squeeze your request in quickly during a meeting, you couldn’t specify exactly the kind of forms you need – so you end up with some basic templates printed off the internet.
What you actually wanted was a set of specific forms with your company letterhead. So, you have to return the ones you’ve got and ask again for the right ones. It takes time, and can get very frustrating!
Making sure each request reaches the correct destination
A marketing request form system streamlines everything, which in turn makes it a lot easier to send requests to the right person.
Ideally, your system will funnel message requests through a centralized location, dealt with by one person or team. This person or team then makes it their job to know where to send each request for quick and efficient fulfillment.
What Should a Marketing Request Form Include?
So, now you know why you need a marketing request form system. But what does a good marketing request form include?
The type of request
Ideally, you will have a variety of request forms, each slightly different depending on the request type.
So, the first part of your marketing request system needs to identify the type of request.
Each of these forms will have slightly different specifications. For example, a staff request form will detail the person or qualifications required, while a creative brief request form would list the project, writer/artist, and so on.
More generally, each request form should also include the following:
The person or department making the request
This one is fairly self-explanatory! It’s vital to identify the person requesting so that the resource gets to the right place.
Ideally, a named individual will take responsibility for the request rather than an entire department or team. This prevents things from getting lost in the general churn of a department.
Along with this person’s name, include their:
- Department/team
- Job title
- Contact details (i.e., email address and/or phone number)
- Location
All details of the request
As much detail as possible will help each request to be fulfilled accurately and quickly, so leave as much space as possible here.
Depending on the type of request form, you may want to break this part down into sections. For example, for a creative brief request, your ‘details’ section may include things that the artist needs to know, like:
- Intended audience
- Tone of voice
- Keywords
- Intended channel
Similarly, a request for a marketing agency proposal would need details of:
- The agency
- Staff needed to oversee things
- Proposed budget
And so on.
The reason for the request
Why is this needed? What project or task will it help with, and how?
Information to help fulfill the request
Not every requester will be able to provide this, but it’s worth including a space just in case!
Information to help fulfill the request could include things like:
- The location of a resource
- The level of access required (for an access request)
- The person or department to contact about this
- Viable alternatives if the exact request can’t be fulfilled
Information that helps fulfill a request can be less tangible than this. For example, if your writer has been asked to write about phone systems for small businesses and puts in a creative brief request, they might include information about the angle they want to take, keywords they’re using, and other things that can help the recipient to provide a full and productive brief.
The urgency of the request
How quickly is this resource needed? Providing this information will help to prioritize requests and get urgently-needed resources to the relevant teams on time.
How to Create a Marketing Request Form?
Before you create your forms, you need to figure out how your system will work. For example, where are you going to store your form data? Are you going to use a spreadsheet? A simple database? A Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDD) system? Further, who is going to deal with requests, and how?
This isn’t as complicated as it sounds.
Depending on the needs of your marketing team and your company, you should be able to create a system that works quite quickly.
Then, it’s time to create your forms. Creating a form isn’t difficult with modern technology. For example, Google Forms has plenty of free templates that can help you to mock up a form within minutes.
Make sure that you clarify the purpose of each form – what it is, how it should be used, who should use it, and who will handle completed forms. Once you’ve got your forms, it’s important to tell your marketing teams things like:
- Where the forms are
- Who can use them
- How they should be used
- How the new requests system works
A trial period might be a good idea when you first start. Give yourself a couple of weeks to see how things go and iron out any teething problems.
Use Marketing Request Forms to Speed and Streamline Your Requests Process
Marketing request forms ensure that people get what they need when they need it. This, in turn, makes your entire marketing operation run a lot more efficiently. So, by using marketing request forms, you can make your whole marketing process faster, more productive, and more efficient.
| Page Title | How Marketing Request Forms Will Help Boost Your Business |
| Meta Description | Marketing request forms can make your business more efficient and successful. Here’s how. |
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yauhen Zaremba, Director of Demand Generation, PandaDoc
Yauhen is the Director of Demand Generation at PandaDoc, the best legal contract management software. He’s been a marketer for 10+ years, and for the last five years, he’s been entirely focused on the electronic signature, proposal, and document management markets. Yauhen has experience speaking at niche conferences where he enjoys sharing his expertise with other curious marketers. And in his spare time, he is an avid fisherman and takes nearly 20 fishing trips every year.