Vero’s Data & Insights Team Showcase their Skills with a Mini-Case Study on the Forever Alone Community

Why do brands need Market and Consumer Data Intelligence Services?

According to Thach – Data & Insight Team Lead at Vero Meets #5, brand consultation is like a health check, where clients call out their problems and express their needs to the consultant. The future of big data continues shifting and evolving, volume is growing exponentially, and quality is also being improved. More data doesn’t automatically mean more success though. What brands need to do is translate raw data into a meaningful story, which understands target consumers or audience.

This is exactly where Vero’s Data & Insights Team come in.

What is Data & Insight at Vero?

Our Data & Insights team launched last year as a response to our growing need for in-house data intelligence. We believe that a data-driven approach in terms of storytelling allows communicators to unearth truths within communities, and this information helps team Vero to better advise brands in all aspects of communications.

Thach refers to his process as “connecting the dots to find a bigger picture.” Using insights from data tools, our Data & Insights team can begin to outline pieces of our audience puzzle.

To find out more about the language of data and insights, we invited Thach to a Vero Session, where he explored the always interesting Forever Alone (FA) Community via a mini-case study.  Thach showed us how social conversation tracking, search trends and demographics can reveal information about subcultures, helping us to understand target audiences better.

Turning data into action

Thach advises steering away from the urge to analyze mass data. He says: “Large pools of data can make it hard to understand the story that data tells. Data in general is overloading. The sheer amount of data that can be discovered is staggering. The most important thing now is to generate valuable data. “

Starting out with a research methodology, Thach showed us how we can use data insights tools to ask questions that can help us to understand our audience and respond to client briefs.

“After writing your initial hypothesis, you want to go on to define your WH questions. What is FA? Who are the people behind the FA community? When is the topic being discussed? How does the FA community feel about their definition?” says Thach. “This is where things start getting really interesting. As you learn about your audience, more questions arise that will help you to understand their story.”

These questions will help us to find the truth of this community. Our initial perceptions may be that this community is sad, depressed, desperate for love. But is this actually true or just a misconception?

What tools do we use for marketing and consumer data intelligence?

There are many different listening and analytics tools that can help us to derive valuable insights from social, online, and conversational data.

Thach tells us that capabilities in this field are constantly increasing and that it is important to keep up with changes as they happen fast. Vero is partnered with Talkwalker, and uses their analytics to track:

• Mention volume
• Share of voice
• Social sentiment
• Social engagement
• Social reach
• Social audiences

The findings were interesting. “At the outset, we had an idea that single millennial women would suffer the most in terms of social pressure, especially compared to men. So, we hypothesized that they would talk more about the FA topics than male audiences. But it turns out that FA conversation is actually a completely neutral gender topic of discussion.”

We also wanted to learn other details about the FA community. Such as – if their priorities in life were not searching for a significant other, what were they?

From the data, we see that individuals who search for or identify with being ‘Forever Alone’ like to spend time focusing on themselves, their pets, or their friends. We are beginning to build a picture of who these people are, and it challenges initial perceptions of the FA community. 

We can also see that people who identify as ‘Forever Alone’ are not searching for practical advice. They are not looking for dating tips or advice about how to change their Forever Alone status.

Our listening tools show us that the term ‘Forever Alone’ is searched for most frequently when looking for fun/flirty captions or status, helping us to understand the story – that those who are Forever Alone are not depressed or desperate for love, as we might have initially thought. Instead, those who identify as Forever Alone use it as a humorous, flirtatious term.

Turning Data into Action

Data and insights can help to better inform every step of your campaign. “Once we fully understand our audience’s story, we can make recommendations for campaigns,” says Thach.

Thach notes that “social channel data analysis is the key to success,” when it comes to working with influencers or KOL’s.  If this is part of your campaign, we can use our social listening tools to understand which KOL’s resonate with the Forever Alone audience, or which topics of conversation KOL’s should be part of, to appeal to a Forever Alone audience.

“In terms of an influencer marketing campaign, we’d recommend working with young influencers, aged 20-30 who have a positive, cool, chill vibe. They should be single, and open to talking about love on their social channels. Keywords we would target would be modern, pro-active, confident, independent, self-love, lifestyle, and personality.”

Understanding audiences is key to creating effective, impactful, and relevant brand campaigns.

Learn how brands can access the right data pool by downloading our Forever Alone mini case-study here.