Building Doer.Maker

A brand new company on the Burlington scene, Doer.Maker doesn’t let their age define their drive. 

“The team at Doer.Maker has worked together for the past ten years inside other agencies, and we felt like there was a better way to do things,” explains Ashley. “A way that was fast and nimble, focused on results and excellent work, but without a lot of the structure and process that you get at bigger agencies.”

Doer. Maker has four main verticals: energy, cannabis, venture capital, and passion projects. 

“What we’re here for is to solve impossible problems.”

Whether that’s addressing questions that keep falling to the bottom of the to-do list, developing solutions to questions that organizations might not have the resources or the bandwidth to figure out, or even just finding a starting point to a new strategy, Doer.Maker loves a challenge.

“The way that businesses come to us is with some problem that they need solved,” says Ashley. With a team composed of a strategist, a creative director, and a data analyst, Doer.Maker helps businesses identify the questions they need answered, and the best places to find those answers.

“We come in agnostic of the provider,” says Ashley of Doer.Maker’s role as a data and marketing agency. “Having a data scientist at the table who understands advanced analytics, it ends up being a very different conversation than having media folks who are out looking for the good news story. We’re not doing that, and I think that’s a breath of fresh air for a lot of clients.”

Data Speaks, Doer.Maker Listens

Ashley has noticed a pattern in the reasons that drive her clients to seek out Doer.Maker.

“Clients have come in and said, ‘Help us make sense of this data, let’s turn it into something meaningful, and then use it to drive a marketing engine.’”

With energy as one of their primary industries, Doer.Maker often works with utility companies to help their own consumers find ways to conserve energy, saving both on their bills and their carbon footprint.

“What do those consumers need, and how can we make it easier for them to opt into an energy efficiency program?” asks Ashley. “All of the answers to that are in the utilities data.”

Across industries, sales and usage data contains information that clients can use to move their business forward, but they might not know how to parse through the sheer volume of data to find those answers. And oftentimes, less is more when it comes to data reports.

“You can have a report with very few numbers in it, but if they’re the right numbers and they’re meaningful, with insight coming out of them that [the client] can act upon, that’s a very useful report.” 

And to Ashley, when faced with this much data, agencies need to know how to ask the right questions of their clients to find the right solutions.

Asking All the Right Questions

“Knowing what is the right question to ask, and actually saying to the client, ‘What is the problem you’re trying to solve? Why do you think that’s the most important problem?’ It’s amazing how much you uncover.”

A lot of times, the reason clients aim for these metrics turn out to be more surface-level. A boss may have requested the metric in question, or an article recommended it, or even because it’s always been done.

Ashley encourages clients to dive deeper until they reach the core of their question.

Will chasing this data drive more sales?

Will tracking this metric improve the customer’s experience of your brand?

Do you really want more website traffic, or do you want your site traffic to lead to more sales?

Ashley especially notices the need for deeper conversations around the “Why?” of video. Often, businesses will use a video strategy as their entire solution to a multi-faceted challenge. 

“I can’t think of any communication challenge that a company could have that couldn’t be improved by having video as part of the solution, but it’s not the solution.”

What Will Alexa Say Next?

We then turned our attention to the future, and asked Ashley what she thinks will be the next big thing in digital marketing: voice.

Right away, Ashley tells us of her friend, who correctly predicted this trend a few years ago.

“It was just a little zygote in the world, and all of a sudden the conversation around voice just started to explode. Brands began to utilize these voice assistants to have a more robust conversation with their consumers. All of a sudden, people started paying attention to all the places that voice was about to go.”

We talked about the evolution of voice, even from one generation to the next. 

“I had a mentor in marketing who said that if you want to see what’s next and you want to track innovation, just pay attention to what the kids are doing,” Ashley points out. “Watching my kids use the voice assistant, they use it in a completely different way than grown-ups do.”

And now, it’s not just the kids, but everyone from grandparents to branding professionals who are realizing the incredible potential of voice automation. But with this potential comes a whole new frontier of marketing limitations.

“It’s almost like we’re building a new internet,” explains Ashley. “A lot of people think Alexa pulls from web results. She doesn’t. She pulls from Wikipedia and press releases, so if you have a website built with all the content you want your consumers to know, the voice assistant isn’t gonna repeat any of it. You have to take the content you want the voice assistant to say and build it on their platform.”

And, as Ashley points out, voice assistant platforms are not compatible. So content made for Alexa will not work for Siri, will not work for Google Home, and will not work for any other voice assistant with their own individual platform. However, innovation advances at the speed of light, and a software exists that translates the content to every voice assistant platform.

“If you can get past the defensive play of wanting to control the experience that a consumer has when they ask about your brand, it’s a blue ocean. All that needs to happen is that you just need to build the content. And if you’re the first to market with a response, you will be the first response that the voice assistant reads out.”

A World of Possibility

“There is so much opportunity,” says Ashley. “Anything with a screen obviously has video capabilities. There’s a lot of possibilities to marry your voice response with video creation and provide a much richer experience for those consumers.”

Creating a multichannel brand experience can help propel your business to the next level as the world of communication evolves and becomes more immersive. Imagine the possibilities for a brand to not only provide information to their consumers, answer their questions and concerns, but also create an entire experience—complete with compelling visuals and instant voice communication—to welcome new and existing customers into your brand.

To Ashley, it’s a no-brainer for the future of digital marketing.

“Combining voice plus video is probably one of the strongest experiences you could give to a consumer.”