A content marketing proposal I sent to Popicorn, an angel investing platform in Singapore, in November 2023.
Almost nobody publishes their proposals. The useful part of one is not the deliverables list. It is watching how a scope gets built and which pieces carry the weight.
Three options, and why three
I sent Popicorn three, which is one more than I usually would. The reason was that I did not know their appetite, and giving a range lets the client tell you where they actually are instead of saying no to a single number.
Option one, everything. Three long-form blog posts a month on industry insight and investment strategy. Weekly LinkedIn content covering platform features, customer stories and positioning in the angel investing space. Then a content calendar, scheduling and monthly analytics reporting on engagement, reach and conversion.
Option two, drop the reporting. Same blog posts, same LinkedIn cadence, no calendar and no analytics layer.
Option three, a fixed series. A ten-part blog run, one post a week for ten weeks, with two LinkedIn posts a week riding alongside each piece.
What the options are actually saying
Look at option one against option two. What disappears is the calendar, the scheduling and the reporting.
That layer is the only part of the engagement that tells anyone whether the rest of it worked. Cutting it is the most common thing a client does and the most expensive thing they can cut, because you end up twelve weeks in with a pile of content and no view on whether any of it moved anything.
I scoped it as a separate line rather than baking it in, which in hindsight made it too easy to remove. If I wrote this today the measurement would be inside the base scope and the volume would flex instead.
The third option exists for a different reason. A ten-week series with a defined end is easier to approve than an open-ended monthly commitment, particularly at a company where nobody has bought content before and the person signing has to defend the line item. Sometimes the obstacle is not the amount, it is the word "ongoing".
The onboarding month
Month one produced nothing publishable. Immersion into the platform, understanding how angel investing actually works for their users, and building the first content calendar.
Clients occasionally push back on a month with no output. I keep it anyway. Content written by someone who does not understand the product reads exactly like content written by someone who does not understand the product, and in a financial category the readers notice faster than anywhere else.
Regular publishing started in month two. Analytics reporting only from month four, because before that the sample is too small to say anything and reporting on noise trains everyone to ignore reports.