Marketing and communications teams can’t rely anymore on simple demographics—age, gender, location, etc.—to develop their communication strategies. Forward-thinking companies now know they need to dive further into the data before making decisions on how to best invest their marcomms budgets. This deeper level of audience intelligence is key to companies’ success today.
This is especially true in the B2B world, which can be composed of very niche segments of industry-specific professionals who don’t tend to divulge a lot of information online. Audience intelligence is hard to gather in sectors like private equity, finance and insurance, for example. It’s a challenge, but one that can be overcome with the right tools, methodology, and a skilled team of communications professionals.
When I look at corporate marketing and communications teams who are at the top of their game, I see those who are totally focused on performance and ROI. They realise already that audience intelligence is a crucial asset for their team-foundational, really.
Tied to this is the need to stay up to date and remain relevant within their industry. They want to know what they should be talking about, how their sector is evolving, and what the competitive landscape looks like. But they don’t have time to build their strategic editorial roadmap. They don’t have time to run the editorial committee meetings or check what their competitors’ CEOs, sales force, investors and other experts are saying.
They need support in understanding their audience in detail, getting to know it at a granular level, and communicating that effectively—before everyone else in their industry is doing so.
Digging deep
This is why I launched The Editorialist over a decade ago. Having spent much of my career in private equity, I was obsessed with finding ways to create real value for businesses by helping them better engage their strategic niche audiences.
I saw how audience intelligence is a key growth driver in terms of branding, marketing and sales. Beyond these top-line functions, it supports an organisation’s HR and internal communications departments, boosts its sustainability efforts, and can increase its financial strength through improved investor relationships and a heightened standing within its sector.
Through our global newsroom of sector-specific journalists, we bring value to often understaffed communications, marketing and investor relations teams. Our network of journalists has the knowledge and experience to ask the right questions, as well as the established credentials that enable us to engage on the same level with important, high-level players within a targeted industry.
We’ve found that one of the best ways to get that valuable information for our clients is by delivering detailed, bespoke surveys crafted by our experts. Our surveys combine quantitative and qualitative insights, collected from a qualified audience segment. These include significant data points such as how an audience perceives our client, and factors like market data, priorities, and an audience’s preferred way of staying informed.
This is the type of survey we recently put together for a big 4 accounting firm, where we surveyed CFOs of large corporations across France. The aim was to have conversations with the right people, so we could in turn engage directly with that audience, report back our findings, and generate more business.
Another important success factor is real interaction between agency experts, a client’s key team members, and select people brought in from the audience being targeted. Forming a sort of editorial committee, this group can discuss and detect trends before competitors even take notice of them. Our experts can also provide a digital competitive watch as well as benchmarks of competitors. Internal corporate teams rarely have time to accomplish this by themselves.
Data is just the beginning
So, once we’ve collected all this audience intelligence, what do we do with it? First, it involves building an efficient editorial roadmap that will get results, whether you’re looking to generate leads, build credibility through thought leadership communications, raise more capital, position your company across new markets, or broaden your offer.
I recommend a combination of experienced, knowledgeable sector experts and a measured and experienced use of AI. Journalists who understand the sector, who have lived it for years, know the right questions to ask in surveys, in small committees, or one on one with an industry insider.
We need these skilled professionals to then create the content —be it an in-depth article, a podcast, a presentation deck, or an explainer video— that will resonate with a client’s target audience.
AI can facilitate that content creation, helping us to organise the data we’ve collected, so we can then develop the most impactful content across different media. Another value AI brings is in the way we can use it to expand, for example, a survey into multiple use cases. Teams working in varied departments such as sales, content marketing, events, lead nurturing, and more can all use audience intelligence by prompting AI to target their specific points of contact.
One last part of a successful audience intelligence strategy: distribution. How can an insurance company, for example, amplify the reach of a new, detailed study, to make sure it hits its specific audience segment? Without a solid database and proven methodology in place, that study might never be read by the most important audience stakeholders. The Editorialist accompanies our clients, advising on which media, social ads or paid media they should use. In this way, we’re helping them make important budget decisions with an audience-centric approach.
Accelerating the conversation
We recently launched a study analysing investment trends for a client’s investor relations team. My contact at the company told me she needs a map laying out who to talk with—which journalist would be most interested in the company’s story, and which investors are going to be moved by that story. She wanted to know how, when putting together a survey, we access those people. And she asked, “Why do they talk to you?”
I’ll give a clear answer to a blunt question: because we are a trusted third-party authority. As an agency, we’ve built up a certain amount of brand recognition over the last decade, which helps to identify us as a trustworthy third party. Our journalists are well connected and are themselves experts in their fields. And we guarantee the anonymity of our respondents’ answers.
Built from a standpoint of credibility, authority and expertise, we then provide that last key factor in audience intelligence: we tell a good story. We’ve got the facts, we’ve got the strategy, and we carry this through to our clients’ target audiences thanks to excellent storytelling. Because in the end, the story is what makes your company come alive in the eyes of your customers. And once we’ve got that story, we can tailor its message for each different audience segment—making sure to emphasize the specific details of a brand’s story that will connect with a particular audience. That’s the formula for success for today’s companies.
Read more about how we do this in our article, Your main stories for 2027 — and how to make them resonate with every audience.
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