The Ultimate Guide To Audience Intelligence

“Knowing your audience” used to mean following a gut feeling. Today, it means knowing how they think, what they respond to, and how to reach them — all with data to back it up. This is the value of high-quality audience intelligence.

When you know your audience, and you know what makes them tick, you serve them better. Simple as that.

Our latest ultimate guide walks you through everything you need to know about audience intelligence. This includes what it is, why it matters, and how to build your own strategy.

Check it out below.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PDF VERSION OF THIS GUIDE

• What Is Audience Intelligence?
• Why Audience Intelligence Matters
• The Core Elements Of Audience Intelligence
• How To Gather Audience Intelligence
• What To Do Once You Have Your Audience Intelligence
• 3 Examples You Can Learn From
• Tools And Resources
• Conclusion

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What Is Audience Intelligence?

Before we dive deeper into audience intelligence, we need to know what it actually is. While audience intelligence can mean many things, here is how we define it:

The practice of collecting and analyzing information about your target audience. This includes who they are, what they care about, where they spend their time online and offline, and the actions they take.

It is important to note here that audience intelligence is relevant to just about any organization. Because of that, the rest of our ultimate guide will take into account both for-profit companies and nonprofit corporations.

Audience intelligence usually includes a ton of different data points. We go deeper into everything it entails in our section “The Core Elements of Audience Intelligence.”

For now, here are a few pieces of information that you will usually collect:

• Demographic data like location and age
• Psychographic data, including beliefs and deeper motivations
• Behavioral data based on social media habits or donation patterns

Audience intelligence is not surveillance. Instead, it’s about listening to your audience (intentionally and respectfully) so that you can meet them where they are with messages that resonate.

Why Audience Intelligence Matters

Audience intelligence is all about understanding your people so that you can more effectively communicate with them. It also gives you insight into how you can best serve them.

Considering everything that goes into effective audience intelligence, there a number of key benefits to taking it seriously:

• Create content that people care about. Quality content marketing should be a priority for most organizations. Understand who your audience is and what they struggle with, and it becomes much easier to create content they care about.
• Choose the right platforms to deliver this content. Just because you create good content doesn’t guarantee your people will ever see it. Get the platform wrong, and there’s a chance that it never actually reaches them.
• Offer products and services that people want. There’s nothing worse than spending months creating something that you assume people are going to love, only to hear crickets when you launch. Good audience intelligence gives you proof of demand.
• Segment your outreach. This results in better messaging, and higher customer satisfaction down the line.
• Make better, faster decisions. The more you understand your audience, the more nuanced your understanding of them becomes. The result? Faster decision making without any risk of decision paralysis.

The alternative to all of this?

Guesswork. Or even worse: incorrectly assuming you know exactly what your audience looks like. Make this mistake, and almost every action you take at your organization will miss the mark.

The Core Elements Of Audience Intelligence

You don’t need to know everything about your audience. You just need the right mix of insights to guide your decisions.

Below you will find five main categories of audience intelligence. We also include some of the main data points that fall under each category. Treat this as your “80/20” of effective audience research.

Who They Are

• Demographics: age, geographic location, job role, household income, education
• Relationship to your organization: past donor, current client, volunteer, newsletter subscriber

What They Care About

• Their “key issues”, main pain points, hopes and fears
• Mission alignment (why they support you)

How They Behave

• Donation history or transaction patterns
• Email open rates / clickthrough behavior
• Website usage, traffic patterns

Where They Spend Time

• Their preferred channels: email, SMS, social media, website blog
• Social media of choice: Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, X, LinkedIn
• Devices used (usually mobile vs. desktop)

What They Most Engage With

• Your most popular blog posts or video content
• Type of content: video, long-form, data-driven, stories
• Emails with highest engagement rates

Getting clarity on these details will give you the most important information about your audience. And once you do know these five things? You can begin creating segmented, data-informed strategies that speak directly to the right people in the right way.

As for how you actually gather this data?

How To Gather Audience Intelligence

Audience intelligence is all about understanding the people that you serve. To get this understanding, there are a couple of ways to gather important information.

Here are three things you might consider:

Use Your Existing Data

If you want actionable audience intelligence, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You likely already have a ton of valuable data to work with. Here are some data sources you should look into for further insight:

• Overall email engagement stats
• Your CRM or donor database reports
• Site performance data
• Insights from any of the social media platforms you use

Ask Them

Simply asking your audience questions in order to understand them is something many organizations tend to forget. This is a missed opportunity. Not only does reaching out to your audience show them that you care, but it’s one of the best ways to spur new ideas for how you can better serve them.

Here are a few ways you can get audience intelligence straight from the source:

• Run simple surveys via email or website pop-ups
• Ask one-question polls on social media
• Conduct short interviews with supporters, clients, or volunteers

These are all great ways to get to know your audience. And an added bonus? You are almost certainly going to come away with interesting insights.

Watch Behavior In Real Time

Often, your most valuable data is the most current. No need to go through years of historical data. Just look at what people are doing right now.

This is where real time behavior comes in. Here are a few questions to keep on top of:

• What are people clicking on?
• What emails get replies or forwards?
• Where do people drop off in your donation form?
• Which of your campaigns get people the most excited?
• Which posts have gotten the most comments?
• Which of your videos have the longest average watch time?

Your audience is made of real people. They have hobbies, dreams, and specific goals. Understand this, and you are better able to meet your audience with things they actually care about.

What To Do Once You Have Your Audience Intelligence

Gathering audience intelligence is just one half of the system. For true success, you also need to act on it.

It can be easy with this second part to suffer from analysis paralysis. And often enough, organizations do. The more data you gather, the more overwhelming it can feel to take action.

We don’t want that. The fact is, if your audience intelligence isn’t shaping how you interact with your audience and what you offer them, it’s just noise. This is when it becomes a waste of time.

Instead, try to establish some kind of feedback loop that keeps you learning and improving. Here are three general actions we recommend:

Segment Your Audience

Once you have the right intel, it’s time to organize your audience into smaller, more specific lists or groups. This allows you to tailor your message accordingly.

Here are a few ways you can segment your audience for maximum effect:

• By behavior: frequent donors vs. one-time givers; email openers vs. non-openers
• By interest: advocacy, education, events, fundraising
• By identity: first-time visitor vs. long-term supporter
• By geography: useful for events, localized programs, or community-specific work

By segmenting your list based on your audience research, every interaction you have with them is more likely to engage. This doesn’t have to be complicated. Even just a few basic segments can drastically improve the overall quality of your audience interactions.

Shape Your Content And Campaigns Accordingly

Your audience has told you who they are and what they want. Now it’s time to deliver.

Here are a few tips for creating content that your audience will respond to, and crafting campaigns that they will love:

Content

• Create blog posts and videos that answer real audience questions. This will instantly set you apart from your competition. Be helpful, and your audience will notice.
• Incorporate the language your audience uses into your content. This will connect with them like nothing else.
• Tailor subject lines and social copy to match audience tone and interests. This is especially important if you are using any kind of email marketing.
• Create mobile-first experiences if your data shows most traffic is mobile. This will appeal to the majority of your audience.

Campaigns

• Time launches or fundraisers for when your audience is most active. You should consider both the time of the day and part of the year when running campaigns.
• Launch products that your audience wants. The people you serve have specific pain points. Learn what these are, and you will make products that they are eager to buy.
• Use tested messaging that aligns with your supporters’ values. Copywriting is everywhere in your organization. From your fundraisers to your website itself, everything will be more effective if you speak in the language of your audience.

Review And Adapt

Change is the only thing that’s guaranteed. Just because you have a good understanding of your audience now, doesn’t mean your audience won’t change.

If you want to truly use audience intelligence to your advantage, it’s something you should be continuously monitoring. Here are a few ways you can ensure that happens:

• Set a monthly or quarterly meeting. Review what’s working and what isn’t. What were the results of your actions? Is your audience responding more positively, or are they ignoring your new messaging?
• Repeat what works. Take the action that is getting results and double down on it. Remember: you are here to serve. If your audience resonates with something you did, you owe it to them to repeat it.
• Continually test new things. This could be anything from a segmented email, to a different CTA, to a new format for your videos.

Just remember this: business is always changing. Always have an understanding of who you are serving, and you set yourself up for long-term success.

3 Examples You Can Learn From

To a certain extent, most organizations already gather audience intelligence. Unless you are completely oblivious to your audience, you will get to know them over time. This is inevitable.

Still, it helps to see how other organizations approach it. Here are three examples you can learn from:

Starbucks

Over 30 million people use Starbucks’ “Rewards” app. By examining the data that the app provides, Starbucks gets important insights like real-time purchase patterns and time-of-day preferences.

These insights inform their decisions on everything from where they place new stores to their “new beverage” launches. They also power hyper-localized promotions. For example, specific Starbucks locations rolled out an iced Frappuccino during a Memphis heatwave. The result of all of this? Higher visit frequency and stronger retention across their customer base.

UNICEF Sudan

During the COVID epidemic, UNICEF noticed a large disparity in overall vaccination rates. After four months of vaccine rollouts, women accounted for only 40% of total vaccinations. This was a problem. UNICEF decided to gather audience intelligence to address the issue.

To collect the right information, UNICEF partnered with Sudan’s Ministry of Health. By tracking “social chatter” through the Talkwalker platform, they discovered that Sudanese women were afraid of taking the vaccine due to fertility concerns. A rapid messaging campaign directed at only women was able to boost overall vaccination rates, saving lives in the process.

Duolingo

Extensive A/B testing on TikTok gave the language company Duolingo one powerful takeaway: users respond well to high-drama storylines around the brand’s owl mascot. This is where their “Death of Duo” stunt came in. As an experiment, they decided to kill off their mascot.

This social media campaign quickly racked up over 1.7 billion impression across platforms in just two weeks. This was double the buzz generated by 2025’s top-performing Super Bowl commercials, and resulted in a spike of “re-activated” learners. Even though the company is currently struggling with recent “AI first” statements, their audience intelligence strategy is something we can all learn from.

Tools And Resources

Lastly, we want to give you a list of tools you can use to effectively gather audience intelligence. Like we said above, this is an ever-changing process. As your organization evolves, so too will the tools you use.

But here are a few to get you started:

Brandwatch

Understand your customers based on data from over 100 million sources.

Talkwalker

A leading (and AI-enabled) social listening tool to understand exactly what your people are saying on social media.

Typeform

Understand your audience through forms that are actually fun to fill out.

Google Analytics

Cross-device event tracking so you know who exactly is landing on your website.

Segment

Build detailed customer profiles so you can make better business decisions.

Conclusion

Audience intelligence isn’t about spying on the people that follow you — it’s about understanding the people you serve.

When you know your audience, you can stop guessing. Every action you take is backed by data, and you are better able to build and grow your organization as a result. Audience intelligence isn’t some vague “future goal”. In today’s world, it’s a necessity.

Good luck, and let us know if you ever need help!

CLICK HERE FOR THE PDF VERSION OF THIS GUIDE

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