Every day we have more and more data with valuable information about our customers, but our ability to understand all this information and make it ours has not progressed at the same speed.

Email marketing company Yesmail, in collaboration with Infogroup Targeting Solutions, interviewed 700 senior marketing executives during the annual DMA2012 conference and Forrester Research’s eBusiness Forum last year in the US.

Their study found that 68% of marketing departments expected an increase in spending on data-related areas by 2013, with 48% expecting a slight increase and 20% acknowledging that they would devote much more resources. Only 23% acknowledged that they had no plans for change, and only 1% recognized a large decline, along with 2% who spoke of a slight decline.

In terms of plans to hire new employees, 56% of the companies interviewed foresee hiring to cover specific positions on data, compared to 44% that does not foresee any type of possible incorporation. But that 56% is divided among several types of possible resources: Data analyst (20%), programmer / developer (11%), data collection (7%), data manager (7%), data engineer And data executive (5%).

Likewise, 45% of the interviewees acknowledged that the analysis (25%) or the implementation of the data obtained (20%) would be their main challenge for the year 2013. Having reliable and clean data was recognized as a challenge for 13%, while protection of that information was slightly less worrying, with only 11%.

Among these challenges, 83% of the companies participating in the study recognized that they are starting to consider the option of using more data in real time in their campaigns. 53% said they intended to make more use of this data, while 19% said they would begin to consider its use. 11% were going to use them for the first time. 11% have no plans to use them, 4% do not know how, and 2% say they can not afford it.

On whether companies expected to make use of social media data from customers to boost their marketing campaigns in other channels, 78% acknowledged that they did plan to increase it, while 22% did not consider integrating those Social data.

Safety is also a concern for businesses. Sixty per cent acknowledged that it was a top priority to take additional measures to protect customer data and their security, while for 40% or the priority was low or not at all.

Twenty-six percent of the respondents said they could not remember the last time they did some kind of quality control of the customer data they had. Twenty-four per cent were cleaned weekly and 23% at least once a month.