Do you know your agency’s digital fitness score? Survival of the fittest now applies to digital too

Digital fitness is no longer an option. Is your agency as digitally strong as it needs to be in order to succeed long-term in the face of ferocious competition? Prosper Group has the experience and process to answer that question.

Your agency's Digital Fitness Score will help drive more growth.

We will use our deep digital experience to calculate your Digital Fitness Score based upon our in-depth assessment of virtually everything related to your agency's digital awareness, capabilities and performance.

Our analysis includes in-depth interviews with your management team and other staffers, shorter interviews with selected clients, a review of internal documents and systems, samples of digital work and their media planning/placement as well as other sources of information.

You'll see more than 40 separate scores which are then combined to determine your overall Digital Fitness. We won't just tell you your scores. We'll also show you specifically how you can improve in each area which needs to be stronger.

Achieving digital fitness is the result of many factors.

We will evaluate:

1. Do you have a digital vision that your agency can easily, consistently and uniformly communicate to the market and your clients?

2. Is this vision clearly understood throughout the agency? Can your people articulate it? Do they act accordingly?

3. Are the agency’s leaders evangelists for digital? Are they leading the agency forward in the adoption of new digital technologies and methodologies?

4. Overall level of digital literacy and competence: Up-to-date awareness and understanding of basic digital disciplines and trends and also the ability to discuss and practice these at a high level:

  • Throughout the agency overall

  • Within each group or department (E.g. – Account management, creative/concept development, production, media planning & buying, research)

  • Effectiveness of intra-group/departmental integration of digital knowledge, activity and productivity

  • In working with clients

  • How does digital integration happen within the agency? Is it effective?

5. Digital message development:

  • Staffing and experience

  • Strategic thinking

  • Creativity

  • Production

6. Digital media planning:

  • Staffing and experience

  • Strategic thinking

  • Media research used

  • Ongoing innovation

7. Digital media placement:

  • Staffing and experience

  • Stewardship of client’s media investment (including safeguards vs. ad fraud)

  • Ongoing innovation

  • Measurement and results

8. Social media expertise:

  • Staffing and experience

  • Your agency’s strengths and weaknesses for each major social media platform

  • Stewardship of client’s media investment (including safeguards vs. ad fraud)

  • Measurement and results

9. Data and analytics:

  • Staffing and experience

  • Systems and tools

  • Consistency of application

  • Results

10. Resources and innovation:

  • Are there gaps in digital resources and knowledge that might prevent the growth of digital service offerings?

  • What is the role of innovation at the agency? Is it valued highly?

  • Do you regularly adopt new technologies and deliver new services to your clients?

  • Are you capable of developing technologies, methodologies and I.P. as an iterative process (starting with a minimum viable product)?

11. Ongoing training, learning and improvement — Are there training and personal development programs in place that will allow the agency to be a digital leader?

12. Any truly proprietary systems, software or other digital tools which are being used

13. Developing websites for clients

14. SEO for clients

15. SEM/CPC/CPO for clients

16. The agency’s own website:

  • Should be your most powerful new business tool – Is it?

  • Overall look and feel (Contemporary, visually engaging, instills credibility and trust, etc.)

  • Clarity and ease of navigation

  • Impact of site on convincing clients and prospects that you should build their sites and/or manage their digital messaging too

  • Being new business-friendly

  • SEO (Title tags/page titles, h1 tags, meta descriptions, headlines, subheads and more)

  • SEM

17. Within the context of the above:

  • Overall assessment of the agency’s internal digital resources and capabilities

  • Overall assessment of any external digital resources, capabilities or alliances which the agency employs on a regular basis

As you can see, achieving Digital Fitness… and then sustaining it... isn’t easy. We can help.

We were created to help you succeed.

Prosper Group exists to help the owners of independent marketing communications agencies to achieve their ambitions and maximize the value of their life's work. We’re here for the builders, innovators, visionaries and risk takers.

We provide expert guidance and proprietary processes for driving strategic growth, profitability, services, technology, recruiting talent, succession planning and M&A. We have also recently expanded into Europe.

Three of our Partners and Senior Counselors are deeply experienced in growing and managing advertising and digital agencies.

If your agency isn't already digitally fit, we can help you to make it that way.

Thank you for reading.

Developed by Mark Johnson, Senior Counselor

Agency PerformanceKnapsack