The five positioning things I’m looking for..

When I visit an agency website for the first time, I'm looking for five things:

- Does the agency clearly state what it does
- Does the agency clearly state its target market
- Does the agency clearly state the problem it solves
- How much does the agency talk about itself versus its target client
- How many hollow buzzwords does the agency use, especially in the absence of 1, 2 and 3

My view is that if these basics are right, that agency is more likely to be seen as an expert business rather than a vendor business. And when you're seen as the expert, you have so much more power in the sale. You can lead, take the client through your process, derail the selection process and command higher fees.

There are all sorts of opinions on what makes good agency positioning. This is the lens I use to make sense of how an agency shows up in the world, and it serves me and the agencies I work with well.

As many of you know, I built a tool to score your agency against these five categories. It's my ruthless agency analyser. Agencies have used it 1,500 times. Is yours one of the 80% that doesn't clearly define a target market?

Try it here: thehutch.co/agencyreality