About
Why Audience Audit exists
To help expert-led businesses see what they’re missing — and earn trust on purpose.
Expert-led businesses rarely struggle because they lack expertise. They struggle because assumptions about audiences go unexamined — and trust is harder to earn than it used to be.
Audience Audit exists to close that gap through research that reveals how people actually think, decide, and evaluate credibility.
Expertise doesn’t speak for itself
In businesses powered by expertise, success depends on being understood, believed, and trusted. Yet many organizations rely on intuition, industry language, or inherited positioning to explain their value.
When assumptions replace evidence, differentiation blurs. Messaging weakens. And pipelines become less predictable.
We believe better understanding — not louder marketing — is the solution.
Research as perspective
We don’t use research to defend decisions after they’re made. We use it to inform better decisions before they’re locked in.
Our work focuses on how audiences evaluate expertise, form trust, and decide who feels credible enough to engage. That perspective helps leaders challenge assumptions, sharpen positioning, and communicate with greater confidence.
Research isn’t the answer.
It’s the lens that makes answers clearer.
Relentlessly Helpful®
Relentless Helpfulness® is our guiding philosophy.
It means prioritizing usefulness over attention, clarity over cleverness, and long-term credibility over short-term tactics. Our role isn’t to impress your audience or tell you what to think — it’s to help you understand your audience more clearly, and help your insight keep working even when we’re not in the room.
Who this work is for
We work with expert-led businesses where credibility matters — agencies, consultancies, professional services firms, speakers, authors, and founders whose insight drives their business.
If your success depends on being understood, believed, and trusted, this work is designed for you.
A note from Susan
I’ve spent most of my career helping organizations understand the people they’re trying to reach — not just what those people do, but how they think.
Over time, I’ve seen how often trust breaks down not because of poor execution, but because leaders are working from incomplete or incorrect assumptions. Research, when done well, slows things down just enough to surface what really matters.
Audience Audit exists to make that kind of understanding practical, accessible, and genuinely useful — not to create certainty, but to create clarity.
Small disclosure: I’ve loved em dashes since the late ’70s — long before AI hijacked them. Any you see here are intentional, and entirely mine.
If this resonates
If our point of view aligns with how you think — and you’re navigating questions of trust, differentiation, or growth — we’d be happy to explore whether research could help bring clarity.
DELETE EVERYTHING BELOW????
Our Team
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Susan Baier
Founder and CEO
Susan Baier – Founder and CEO
Nobody you know gets passionate about audience research like Susan does. It’s a little weird.
Susan developed her expertise in audience-based marketing strategy over more than 30 years in marketing strategy, product and brand management, market research, and strategic planning, both agency-side and client-side. She has an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Marketing and has held senior positions at Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 firms as well as marketing agencies.
In 2009, after many years working for other people, she went rogue and started Audience Audit — a little research company with big ideas. Her superpower is her combination of strategic marketing and research expertise, allowing each to inform the other on behalf of our clients.
Susan’s based in Chandler, Arizona. In her spare time (ha ha) she enjoys knitting, camping, and a good bourbon (not necessarily in that order).
Ron Baier
COO
Ron Baier – COO
Our resident Jarhead, Ron uses his experience as a Marine, Program Manager, Helicopter Pilot and Flight Instructor to keep our little agency working like a well-oiled machine.
His superpower is seeing the big picture and keeping us all in line while also being a big softy. He’s also managed the care and feeding of Susan during more than 30 years of marriage, making sure she remembers to eat and get some sunshine every day.
You’ll often see him with Susan at our workshops, meetings, and conferences. He’ll usually be at the bar with an open tab and loves talking shop, the outdoors, fishing, camping, hunting, helicopters, sports, or whatever else anyone wants to go on and on about.
Ron’s a scotch guy (blech) and also digs martinis.
Sarah McKenzie
Senior Statician
Sarah McKenzie – Senior Statistician
Our favorite doctor, Sarah’s got a Ph.D. in Statistics and uses her powers for good by discovering mind-blowing insights and making it look easy. Her superpower is helping regular folks see the truth inside their data. Also, she’s the queen of helpful metaphors when it comes to research.
Susan refers to her as “Sarah the Great and Statistical.” She developed our segmentation approach and is the person behind the curtain giving our research its unique revelations and reliable quality.
Her side hustle is serving as Executive Director of the Office of Education Policy for the state of Arkansas.
Sarah can beat anyone you know in Cribbage, all while drinking wine and cracking jokes. Also, she’s Susan’s little sister. So there’s that.
Josh Wilson
Data Visualization Lead
Josh Wilson – Data Visualization Lead
Josh is the big brain behind our interactive data visualizations that help you see and understand your research results. He comes to us from Deloitte, where he advised projects on leading practices for data visualization and used Tableau to enable insights across projects.
Josh’s superpower is telling stories with data in ways that anyone can understand and enjoy, and using Agile and design thinking to ensure that our clients not only get beautiful visualizations but get them sooner than they would have before he came along.
Josh lives in Chicago, is a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Certified Facilitator, and has completed an improv class at Second City. So high on the fun scale for sure — especially for a data nerd.
Caitlin Knudsen
Senior Writer
Caitlin Knudsen – Senior Writer
Caitlin is the wordsmith behind the survey questions, executive summaries, and blogs we craft to understand audiences and develop our clients’ thought leadership. After spending years working as a registered nurse, she thought she’d do a complete 180 and enter the marketing world. From social ads to case studies to brand voice and tone development, she’s done it all (and usually with time to spare).
Her superpower is her one-two punch of attention to detail and innate curiosity. It’s how she can conceptualize an audience in one kickoff meeting and ask the right questions to yield the insights clients need.
Caitlin hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she spends her time landscaping the heck out of her small yard, usually with native plants to attract the local bees. She’s a witch in the kitchen, where you can find her developing her own recipes and honing her food photography skills. And in case anyone’s wondering, yes, she loves cheese.
Jack Patick
Creative Director
Isa Bekli
Creative Director
Serge Horovits
General Manager | Head of Accounts
Nickol Moma
Vice President of New Business
Jesica Babik
Vice President of Strategy
Bob Slimm
Creative Director
Testimonials
Working With Us
We have a very specific approach to building you something unique and transformative.
Appearances
Speaking
- Build a Better Agency Summit – 2021, 2022
- Content Marketing World – 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022
- INBOUND – 2016, 2017, 2018
- Marketing United 2018
- Duct Tape Marketing Summit 2018
- BOLO Agency Conference – 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015
- Agency Management Institute sales funnel workshop 2020
- Create Live 2013: How to Spot Your Competition on the Internet
Book Mentions
- Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word of Mouth – Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin
- Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype – Jay Baer
- The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Socia – Jay Baer and Amber Naslund
- The Widest Net: Unlock Untapped Markets and Discover New Customers Right in Front of You – Pamela Slim
Our Clients















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How We Can Help You
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We won the Best Agency Award for our Strategy.
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We Create Products
Marketing
Ready to Grow Your Business?
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