A hospital digital marketing agency RFP should state your background and priority service lines, scope by channel, KPIs tied to booked and honoured appointments rather than leads, DPDP data processing duties, NMC and ASCI compliance workflow, reporting, named team, a fixed commercial format, published evaluation weights and a timeline. It should also require that the hospital owns every ad account, analytics property and Business Profile.

Most hospitals and clinics in India hire a digital marketing agency the same way: a few recommendations, three pitch meetings, a deck full of case studies, and a decision made on the monthly retainer. Six months later the hospital has a lot of leads, very few extra patients, ad accounts it does not own, and no clean way to leave. A written request for proposal (RFP) fixes most of this before it starts, because it forces you to decide what you are buying and forces the agency to answer the same questions as everyone else.

This guide explains how to write an RFP for a hospital or clinic digital marketing agency, section by section. It covers the KPIs to put in writing, the data protection and advertising compliance obligations to pass on to the agency, the questions that separate capable agencies from weak ones, a scoring matrix with weights, red flags, how to run the pitch, and the contract clauses that protect you when the relationship ends. A free, editable Word RFP template is included.

What is in the free hospital marketing agency RFP template?

The template is a Word document you can edit, brand with your logo and send to agencies. Download the hospital marketing agency RFP template (Word). It contains:

• Instructions to the issuer: a one-page guide for you (the hospital) on what to fill in, what to delete and what never to remove.
• Instructions to bidders: submission format, deadlines, contact person, confidentiality and the rule that all questions are answered to all bidders.
• Sixteen RFP sections: organisation background, objectives, scope by channel, KPIs, data and DPDP obligations, advertising compliance, reporting, team, tools and access, commercials, evaluation, timeline and contract terms.
• Thirty-two bidder questions grouped by theme, written to expose vague or inflated answers.
• A commercial response table so every agency prices the same scope in the same format.
• A weighted scoring matrix with a 1 to 5 scale and descriptions of what each score means.
• A declarations page covering conflicts of interest, subcontracting and data handling.

Fill in the yellow-highlighted fields, delete channels you are not buying, and keep the KPI, data, compliance and ownership sections even if you shorten everything else. Those four sections are where most hospital agency relationships go wrong.

Why should a hospital use an RFP to hire a marketing agency?

An RFP is not bureaucracy for its own sake. For a hospital, it does three useful things.

First, it makes you define scope before you see a price. Many hospitals discover halfway through the pitch process that one agency quoted for SEO, Google Ads and social media, while another quoted only for social media with “performance marketing” as an add-on. Without a common scope, you are comparing different products. If you have not yet written down what the agency should and should not own, start with this guide to defining a hospital digital agency’s scope.

Second, it puts the commercial outcome in writing. A hospital does not need leads. It needs patients who book, turn up and get treated. An RFP lets you state upfront that the agency will be measured on appointments and honoured appointments, not on form fills, and that you will share CRM or HIS data to make that measurement possible.

Third, it protects the hospital’s assets. Ad accounts, Google Business Profile listings, the website, analytics properties and patient enquiry data are the hospital’s property. An RFP that states this as a condition of bidding avoids awkward conversations later.

Before issuing an RFP, it is also worth asking whether an agency is the right model at all. Some hospitals are better served by a small in-house team with specialist freelancers. This comparison of an in-house team versus an agency for hospital digital covers the trade-offs.

What should a hospital digital marketing agency RFP include?

A good RFP is long enough to be specific and short enough that agencies read all of it. Fifteen to twenty pages, including the response templates, is usually right. These are the sections that matter.

1. Organisation background

Describe the hospital or clinic in plain facts: number of beds or chairs, specialties, locations, catchment, patient mix (cash, insurance, corporate, government schemes), and what digital channels exist today. Agencies cannot propose sensible work if they do not know whether you are a 40-bed multispecialty hospital in a Tier 2 city or a three-unit dental chain in a metro. Share your current website, social handles and the names of your Google Business Profile listings so they can audit before pitching.

2. Business objectives

Write objectives as business outcomes, then translate them into marketing outcomes. For example: “increase elective orthopaedic surgeries at the main campus” becomes “increase honoured OPD appointments for knee and hip consultations from digital channels”. Name the priority service lines in order. An agency that tries to grow everything equally will spread budget too thinly.

3. Scope of work by channel

List each channel and state whether it is in scope, out of scope, or optional (priced separately). Typical channels for a hospital are:

• Search engine optimisation (technical, content, local and doctor pages)
• Google Business Profile management for each location and, where relevant, each doctor
• Google Ads (Search, Performance Max, YouTube) and Meta Ads (Facebook, Instagram)
• Organic social media (content calendar, design, video editing, community management)
• Website maintenance, landing pages and conversion rate work
• Online reputation and review response
• WhatsApp and email nurture, if the agency is expected to build flows
• Reporting, analytics and dashboard setup

For each channel, state the expected volume where you can. “Twelve social posts and four short videos per month” is easier to price and audit than “social media management”.

4. KPIs tied to appointments, not leads

This is the most important section. Define a funnel and the KPIs at each stage, and say which ones the agency is accountable for. A typical hospital funnel runs from impressions to clicks, to enquiries (calls, forms, WhatsApp), to booked appointments, to honoured appointments (the patient turned up), to treated patients, to revenue.

Agencies will naturally want to be judged on cost per lead, because they control it. You want them judged further down the funnel, because that is where the money is. A fair compromise is to make the agency accountable for cost per qualified enquiry and enquiry quality, with shared accountability for the enquiry-to-appointment rate and cost per honoured appointment, because those depend partly on your call centre. State that you will share appointment outcomes back with the agency every week or month, and that their reports must include these numbers.

5. Data and DPDP obligations

An agency running your ads, landing pages and lead forms is handling personal data on your behalf. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, the hospital is the data fiduciary and the agency is a data processor. The DPDP Rules, 2025 were notified in November 2025 with an 18-month phase-in for most obligations, and they expect fiduciaries to put reasonable security safeguards in their contracts with processors. Your RFP should require bidders to describe how they store lead data, who can access it, whether any of it leaves India, how quickly they will notify you of a breach, and how they delete data at the end of the contract. It should also state that the agency may not reuse your patient or enquiry data for any other client or purpose. For the marketing side of consent, see this explainer on the DPDP Act and hospital marketing, and use the free DPDP consent notice template for your lead forms. This is general guidance, not legal advice; have your counsel review the final clauses.

6. Advertising compliance (NMC, ASCI and platform policies)

Medical advertising in India is restricted. For doctors, the Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002 continue to apply after the NMC put its 2023 professional conduct regulations in abeyance. Advertising more broadly is governed by the ASCI Code and guidelines, the Drugs and Magic Remedies Act, and Google and Meta healthcare ad policies. Your RFP should require the agency to name who on their team reviews healthcare creatives, describe their approval workflow, and confirm that no creative goes live without written sign-off from your nominated medical reviewer. A summary of the rules is in this guide to NMC and ASCI rules for hospital advertising. Again, this is not legal advice.

7. Reporting and governance

Specify the reporting rhythm you want: a weekly operational report (spend, enquiries, cost per enquiry, response issues), a monthly performance review (funnel, channel mix, what changed, what is next) and a quarterly business review with leadership. Ask for reports built on live dashboards rather than screenshots in slides, and state that the dashboard must sit in a Google account the hospital owns.

8. Team and account management

Ask for named people, not job titles. You want to know who will run your Google Ads account day to day, how many other accounts that person handles, and who will write your medical content. Ask whether any work is subcontracted or offshored, and require the agency to tell you before any change to the named team.

9. Tools, access and ownership

State that all ad accounts, analytics properties, tag manager containers, Google Business Profiles, social pages, domains and hosting will be created in or transferred to accounts owned by the hospital, with the agency given user access. Google supports this directly through access levels in Google Ads and owners and managers on Business Profile. The agency should never be the primary owner of anything.

10. Commercial format

Give a fixed format for prices so you can compare like with like. Separate: one-time setup fees, monthly retainer by channel, media spend (paid directly by the hospital where possible), production costs (shoots, video editing), and any performance fee. Ask agencies to state whether they take any commission, rebate or incentive from platforms or vendors on your spend. If you are still setting the overall budget, the hospital marketing budget calculator helps you size media spend by service line before you go out to tender.

11. Evaluation criteria and weights

Publish the weights in the RFP. Agencies write better proposals when they know what matters, and publishing weights makes your own internal decision harder to hijack by whoever liked the slickest deck. A suggested weighting is given in the scoring matrix below.

12. Timeline

A realistic timeline is three to five weeks from issue to award: one week for questions, two weeks for proposals, one week for shortlisting and pitches, and a few days for reference checks and negotiation. Add a 90-day onboarding plan as a required part of the response.

What questions expose weak hospital marketing agencies?

Agencies are good at answering generic questions. The questions below are written to be hard to answer with a template. The full list of 32 is in the download; these are the ones that most often separate capable agencies from the rest.

Measurement and outcomes

1. For one current healthcare client, show the funnel from ad spend to honoured appointments for the last six months. Mask the client name if needed. If you cannot, explain why.
2. How do you track phone calls from ads and Google Business Profile, and how do you match them to appointments booked?
3. Have you set up offline conversion import for any client? Describe what was uploaded and how often. (For background, see this guide to call tracking and offline conversion import for hospitals.)
4. What would you do in the first 30 days if cost per enquiry is acceptable but fewer than a third of enquiries become appointments?

Healthcare competence

5. Name three healthcare ad disapprovals you have dealt with in the past year and how you resolved them.
6. Who on your team reviews medical claims in ad copy, and what is their background?
7. Show a doctor profile page you built and explain how it was structured for search and for booking.
8. What are you not allowed to say in an ad for an IVF, cosmetic or bariatric service, and why?

Team and process

9. How many accounts does the proposed Google Ads lead currently manage?
10. Which parts of this scope will be subcontracted, freelanced or done outside India?
11. What happens to our account if the named lead leaves your agency?

Data and ownership

12. Where is lead data stored, for how long, and who in your agency can see it?
13. Do you use our audience or lead data to build lookalike or custom audiences, and how do you handle healthcare personalised advertising restrictions?
14. Confirm that every account will be owned by us and that you will hand over all assets, creatives and source files within 15 working days of termination.

Pay attention to which agencies answer with specifics and which answer with adjectives. Answers like “we use a data-driven approach” or “we have deep healthcare expertise” without a number, a screenshot or a named process should score low.

How should you score agency proposals?

Use a weighted matrix. Each evaluator scores independently on a 1 to 5 scale, then the panel compares notes. Independent scoring first stops one strong voice from setting the result.

Commercials are deliberately not the largest weight. A cheaper agency that cannot measure appointments will usually cost more in wasted media than you save on the retainer. If you use a broader scorecard for other vendors, the health tech vendor evaluation scorecard follows the same logic.

What are the red flags in a hospital agency proposal?

• Guaranteed leads or rankings. No agency controls Google’s rankings, and a guaranteed lead number usually means low-quality leads from broad targeting.
• Media spend routed through the agency with a mark-up. Paying media through the agency is sometimes fine, but undisclosed margins on top of a retainer are not.
• Ad accounts created under the agency’s ownership. This is the most common way hospitals lose years of account history when they switch.
• Case studies that only show leads and cost per lead. Ask what happened after the lead. If they do not know, they were not measuring it.
• Before-and-after photos, patient testimonials or “best doctor” claims in their sample creatives. This shows they have not understood medical advertising rules.
• A senior team at the pitch and a junior team on the account. Ask who will attend your weekly call.
• Long lock-in periods with heavy exit penalties. Six to twelve months is reasonable for SEO; a 24-month lock-in for paid media is not.
• No questions for you. A good agency asks about your call centre, your HIS, your doctors’ availability and your capacity before promising growth.

Spend traps are common enough in hospital performance marketing that they deserve their own review. This guide to the spend traps in hospital performance marketing lists the patterns to check in any proposal.

How do you run the agency pitch?

Shortlist three or four agencies from written proposals. More than four wastes everyone’s time; fewer than three gives you little to compare.

Before the pitch

• Send shortlisted agencies a simple brief for a live exercise, for example: “Here is last quarter’s anonymised Google Ads data for our cardiology OPD. What would you change in the first 30 days?”
• Ask them to bring the people who will actually run your account.
• Share your scoring matrix with your internal panel and agree who scores which criteria.

During the pitch

• Give the agency 30 minutes to present and 30 minutes for questions. The questions are more revealing than the presentation.
• Ask the day-to-day account lead, not the founder, to walk through the live exercise.
• Ask each agency the same five follow-up questions so answers are comparable.

After the pitch

• Score independently within 24 hours, then meet to compare.
• Call two references for the top two agencies, ideally healthcare clients. Ask what went wrong and how the agency handled it.
• Negotiate scope and commercials only after you have chosen on quality.

Which contract clauses protect the hospital?

The RFP should state that the winning bidder will sign a contract that includes these clauses. Putting them in the RFP means nobody can claim surprise at the contract stage.

Have your legal team adapt these to your standard contract. This is a marketing checklist, not legal advice.

Mistakes to avoid when writing a hospital agency RFP

• Copying a generic marketing RFP. Generic templates ignore medical advertising rules, DPDP obligations and the appointment funnel, which are the things that matter most in healthcare.
• Not sharing budget ranges. Agencies then propose either too little or too much. Share an indicative media budget range and let them recommend the split.
• Asking for free strategy work. A live exercise on a narrow problem is fair. Asking for a full annual plan before award is not, and the best agencies will decline.
• Letting one department write it alone. Involve the contact centre, IT, finance and a clinician. The contact centre will tell you what enquiry volume you can actually handle.
• Ignoring capacity. If your doctors have no free OPD slots, more marketing creates more unhappy callers, not more patients. Check capacity by service line first.
• Splitting work across too many agencies without a lead. If you have several units or several agencies, decide who owns the overall funnel. See this guide on managing an agency roster across hospital units.
• Choosing on price alone. The retainer is usually the smaller number. Media efficiency and conversion to appointments decide the real cost.

What good looks like after you hire

An RFP succeeds if the first six months of the relationship look different from the usual pattern. Here is what to check.

• By day 30: all accounts are owned by the hospital, tracking is audited and fixed, call tracking is live, and the first weekly report shows enquiries by service line.
• By day 60: the CRM or HIS feedback loop is working, so the monthly report shows enquiry-to-appointment rate and cost per honoured appointment by channel.
• By day 90: the agency has stopped or reduced at least one activity that was producing enquiries but not appointments, and moved that budget somewhere better. This is the clearest sign that they are working on the right number.
• By month six: you can calculate cost per treated patient for your priority service lines, and the quarterly review discusses revenue, not just leads.

If the agency is still reporting only impressions, clicks and leads at month three, revisit the KPI section of your contract and ask why.

Before you send it out

An agency RFP takes a few days to write and saves months of misaligned work. Download the template, fill in your background and objectives, keep the KPI, data, compliance and ownership sections intact, and publish your scoring weights. The agencies that welcome those sections are usually the ones worth hiring.

Frequently asked questions