powered by

Tag: media relations tenders

Media Monitoring Tenders

Posted on by John Hudson

Media Monitoring Tenders

 

What are Media Monitoring Tenders?

Do you wish to grow and develop your media monitoring business? Because tenders offer you a potent means of gaining new contracts and connections with organisations. Many use tendering as a means of growing their business for this reason.

Different industries will usually have their own specifics when tendering, but the basic idea is always the same. Tendering is a formal process where an organisation (the ‘buyer’) posts a contract that other companies (the ‘suppliers’) can bid for. Many public and private sector organisations recognise the value tendering brings as a fair and transparent procurement method. Buyers aim to acquire the most economically advantageous tender, which you may have heard referred to as ‘MEAT’.

Tendering presents many opportunities for contracts to bid for. However, this means that others seeking the same opportunities will give you intense competition. If a contract stands out to you, it will stand out to rival businesses! This is why producing an excellent bid is vital, as you need to show why your media monitoring business deserves the contract!

 

The Tendering Process 

If you’re new to tendering the process might seem long and overly complicated. For now, we’ll provide an overview of the basic facts you should know. Media monitoring is grouped with creative tenders, so most of the time they are Requests for Proposals (RFPs). RFPs involve the buyer providing the supplier with a specification to produce a creative project from. For these tenders the proposal format is typically free-form, imposing very few restrictions or limitations.

Remember: creative industries want to see the level of quality behind content you produce! Regardless of the exact service they are seeking, if a buyer sees an excellent quality bid they will be assured of your outstanding media monitoring services. In other words, this is a good opportunity to display your skills!

Of course, not all tenders are RFPs and media monitoring may involve different approaches to the majority. Because of this, we can also look at the generally important steps of bid production:

  • Opportunity – The tendering opportunity listed by the buyer.
  • Pre-Qualification Questionnaire, or PQQ – If it’s a closed tender, a PQQ is given for suppliers to complete. If you pass this stage, you move onto the…
  • Invitation to Tender, or ITT – Suppliers will begin the process here if it’s an open tender.
  • Evaluation – After receiving all the tender submissions they begin marking them against their specific criteria. Buyers consider which tender best meets their needs, and generally which is the MEAT.
  • Contract – After evaluating all submissions and determining the MEAT, the buyer awards them the contract. Now the successful supplier can begin work!

 

Is Tendering the correct choice for a Media Monitoring Business?

For any business, finding the perfect contract is vital in efficiently growing. With media monitoring, this is especially true. Media monitoring businesses fall into the creative sector, which makes up a significant amount of the UK workforce. Jobs in this sector are posted much more frequently compared to other sectors. Do consider though, even if there are countless jobs available not all will be for you. Perhaps more importantly, even relevant jobs might not be the best move for enhancing your business!

Tendering is exactly what you need. Through searching tendering portals you can narrow down your options to find the exact contracts that your business wants to work on. Opportunities to work with even well-known companies and organisations will present themselves too. This is especially notable for suppliers that are smaller businesses (SMEs), as ordinarily you may be looked over in favour of a larger, more reputable business. Tendering keeps the competition even! Your success will be determined by the quality of your bid compared to others, so rather than being ignored you get the chance to show off!

Do remember: Tendering is not just a way to quickly gain a single new contract. By winning media monitoring tenders you will massively expand your professional portfolio. Then, you will continue to be exposed to amazing new opportunities that you are more likely to secure thanks to your expanded experiences.

 

How to find Media Monitoring Tenders

We mentioned above that tender portals are where you will usually find opportunities. At Hudson Outsourcing we endeavour to help all who wish to tender. To this end, we have developed tender portals for a variety of sectors. Hudson’s team of Opportunity Trackers search through thousands of sources every day to ensure every opportunity is tagged correctly — we can offer the most streamlined experience for suppliers when searching. Instead of wasting time filtering through irrelevant postings, you can directly find the best, most relevant tenders for your business.

For media monitoring tenders, our Creative Tenders Portal is where you’ll want to look.

 

Here are some examples of previous Media Monitoring Tenders sourced by Hudson:

 

  • EU Media Monitoring

Buyer: Office of Rail and Road

Location: London

Budget: £45,000

 

  • Election-Related Media and Social Media Monitoring in the Philippines

Buyer: Westminster Foundation for Democracy Ltd

Location: London

Budget: £45,000

 

  • Media and Social Media Monitoring

Buyer: Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament

Location: Wales

Budget: Undisclosed

 

If you would like to see even more media monitoring bids we worked on, feel free to visit our Creative Tenders Portal. You can also find previous bids from other branches of the marketing field, and various other creative tenders to provide a broad view of our work.

 

How can we help?

A subscription to Creative Tenders provides you with:

  • Access to all new public and private sector digital marketing contracts across the UK.
  • A daily email bulletin is sent straight to your inbox when new marketing opportunities are uploaded.
  • Discounted support from Hudson Succeed (our bid writing division).
  • 20 minutes of free consultancy with one of our Bid Management Consultants each month.

Also, we source opportunities for sectors including:

 

Book a free live demo with Creative Tenders to see how we can help your business grow.

 

Need additional support?

You don’t always have the time or resources to write a winning response in-house. Outsourcing to bid writing experts can help. Our sister company, Hudson Succeed, offers four levels of bid writing support.

They boast an 87% success rate and have over 60 years of bid writing experience.

The services on offer include:

 

How to get contract-winning bids

You can absolutely complete all your bid submissions from within your agency. However, this can pose an issue if the buyer requires an especially long or complicated bid, and that’s before considering how you might fit this into a schedule already filled by your normal contracted work.

We also offer free consultations if you would like to discuss what is the best approach for your PR agency. On top of offering our bid writing services, we can also advise you on your existing tender strategies and provide guidance if you wish to produce a bid independently still! You can call us on 0203 051 2217 or email us at hi@tenderconsultants.co.uk.

Questions to ask before responding to a tender

Posted on by John Hudson

Jill’s top seven questions to ask before responding to a tender

We all know the term ‘busy fools’!  The term definitely comes into play when tendering for new business.  Seeing all those tenders coming through, is like candy in a sweet shop.  But, knowing that you could deliver the work well is one thing, on paper you have to sound great too.

The best tip we can give you is to create a Tender Checklist.  This Tender Checklist will keep you on track when bidding for new work and should include a set of questions which are essential to knowing what to tender for, and what to walk away from.

Here are some sample questions that our Growth Director, Jill asks before submitting tenders on behalf of her clients.

1. Do you have 3 strong case studies from the industry you want to work in?

Most tenders require sector specific experience, and usually require a minimum of three case studies.  Think carefully before submitting a response if you’re struggling to get the right level of experience from your bank of case studies.

2. Do you have a solid foundation of experience, developing systems or creating visuals that are similar to those in the Invitation to Tender?

Look at the work you’ve done in the last three years and ask yourself, ‘is it relevant to the business project?’  If it isn’t it’s unlikely you’ll be successful, as another bidding organisation will specialise in this area and will be able to produce a winning submission.

3. Is the tender more than half of your annual turnover?

It’s hard to know the cut off point for organisations when bid writing for work, but the general rule of thumb is that you are unlikely to win any projects as an SME that are more than 50% of your turnover.

4. Do you meet the terms of the tender i.e. three years required accounts?

If you’ve only been trading for 2 years but it is an essential requirement of the tender to have a minimum of 3 years.  Disregard the tender and don’t give it another thought.

5.How strong is your teams experience against what they’re asking for?

Think of your current and previous experience, if the management team are strong, with a proven track record, you could have a strong chance of winning the work.

6. Can you meet the deadlines required for the project?

Think about the size of your team and the number of man hours needed to complete the work.  If it looks like 100% of your team will be working on the project 100% of the time, you’re unlikely to win it, it’s too risky for the client to give you the work.

7. Is it possible to make a profit, based on the budget allocated?

Many organisations bid for work not thinking of the profit margins should they win the work.  Look at the man hours needed for the project, and add 20%.  If you’re still making a decent profit, go ahead and submit the response.

10 Stages of Tendering

Posted on by John Hudson

10 Stages of Tendering

Our Growth Director Jill, has been writing bids for over a decade, and she is often asked what makes her so successful.  It’s important to understand that when she first started tendering, she also made the common mistakes made by all, but she soon realised she had to create a process and stick to it.  Creating consistency and building knowledge.

She developed her 10 stage process which she still uses to this day.  Here goes…

1. Develop a checklist

Don’t just assume that every project is right for your business.  If you are clutching at straws for suitable experience, it’s probably not for you.  Create a checklist with 5-10 questions to ask yourself when deciding if to bid for a project.  Mark these questions between 10-20% depending on the number of questions developed.

2. Searching for suitable tenders

Searching for suitable tenders takes time and commitment.  Did you know, we scrape over 1,000 websites every day to populate our portal with suitable public and private sector opportunities?  No agency has the resource or time in-house to do this.  Searching for tenders is critical for agency growth and a great source of new business, so make this process as streamlined as possible by signing up to Creative Tenders or another suitable portal.

3. Review against your checklist

Once you have sourced relevant tenders, score them against your checklist.  If you don’t score 80% or above, don’t tender for the work, put your sales efforts into other activities.

4. Roles and responsibilities

For those tenders that score 80% or above, agree roles, responsibilities and deadlines between the sales team, ensuring you’re not leaving things till the last minute.

5. Research

Research really is king when it comes to tendering.  You need to look into the tendering organisations business, look at what they’ve done in the past, read the tender document from front to back, and compile a thorough understanding of what they are trying to achieve, who their key buyers/audience are and who they are competing with.

6. Complete draft one of the tender

Draft one is critical as its about putting all of your thoughts down onto paper.  It’s important to see this as the first draft as you’re bound to think of additional/relevant knowledge and experience as you’re producing the response.  Make sure that during this stage you’re answering the information that is being asked of you, and make it 100% relevant to the company your bidding to.

7. Amend, edit, review

The review process should take a while, it’s not about proof reading at this stage, it’s about ensuring you’re answering the right questions, that the response has been correctly levelled against the scoring criteria of the tender and that you’re happy with the message the tender response gives about your business.

8. Sleep on it

Once you’ve edited the response, sleep on it.  We’ve all been there when we’ve submitted our tender response and instantly thought ‘I should have included XYZ’.  It’s important to plan your time ahead to give you this important down time before the response is due.

9. Proof read

Only then should you proof read your response for spelling and grammatical errors.  During this stage you should also ensure you’ve kept to any word count or font suggestions from the Invitation to Tender document.  After you’re happy with the response, ask someone else to read it, it’s hard to see mistakes with our own content when you’ve read it so many times before.

10. Submit

Submit your response, giving yourself plenty of time before the deadline is due.  Consider how long this might take when using online public sector tendering platforms, as they are not always as straightforward as they may first appear.

 

 

 

 

 

Can we have your feedback on how you currently tender for new business?

Posted on by John Hudson

Can we have your feedback on how you currently tender for new business?

Before we started developing our product we took a selection of creative agencies feedback on the systems they use and how they tender for work. This ranged quite a bit but a few usual culprits appeared. Usually the ones that people knew about were from their local authorities, but there are so many opportunities out there, you just need to be able to find them.

If we understand how people currently tender, we will be able to improve our tendering system. We believe Creative Tenders should be a constantly evolving product and we believe with more ideas up our sleeve that we can change the way business is done globally – a big statement to live up to, right?

So which tendering websites do you use? Do you pay for tendering access or do you only use the free websites that you have found by accident as and when they appear?

What do you like about these tendering sites? Do you find any of them particularly easy or hard to use? If so we need to know, we need to make sure that our system is the best on the market. As we only have sector relevant tenders and we are industry experts, we know with the right feedback from our clients we can create a system that will have huge impact on the sector, and a huge impact on each and every one of our clients businesses.

If you want to send us your feedback so that we can shape a system that is right for you and your business, email Jill on jill@creativetenders.co.uk.