The Big Data buzz will certainly hit home for many marketing execs this holiday season. Unfortunately, it’s not a buzz from that hefty Christmas bonus, but more like a buzz that creeps in after your fifth trip to the punch bowl at the annual holiday party. This year more than ever, EVPs and CMOs will be hunting for that illustrious “golden printout” with a dashboard of charts and numbers about marketing campaign performance to showcase at the year’s final board of directors meeting in less than a month. For some, this is their time to shine. For others, this is a time fraught with questions like “Will I have the right data to help me answer the board members’ many questions?”

Big Data can be very powerful – just ask any high frequency trader on Wall Street. These people make millions from crunching terabytes of information in an effort to glean a few findings that will give them that extra millisecond edge. However, in the marketing world, data scientists are just beginning to be hired beyond a 1099 status and are playing an integral role in many brands’ strategic planning and performance analysis.

But for the 99% of companies that can’t hire a full-time data scientist to pour through loads of data and develop findings that will inform performance and insights, the solution is often a data analytics provider’s platform. Great! You’re a smart marketer and know how to analyze data to uncover insights about your marketing efforts and do it all in a day, right? Have platform, will analyze. Not so fast. Before you make the leap, know that data analytics providers and their platforms often come their own set of challenges in harnessing the right data in the right way.

I’ve been there. At a previous company I founded, I was hunted by data analytics product vendors. Most vendors wanted a piece of our P&L and had social media analytics littered throughout their fire hose of marketing data, sometimes pulled through a “proprietary dashboard”. In the end, their offerings were largely all the same -- data that’s general, strategic and nothing conclusive other than more research is needed. Sounds like PhD research!

Our research into the hundreds of social media listening/analytics/monitoring platforms yielded nothing viable for evaluating our online content beyond the ubiquitous informatics of likes, dislikes, views etc. While these were certainly informative, they weren’t deductive. In the end, we decided to build our own platform that could be used by everyone from the data scientist to marketing leaders to the intern, and with results that display data visually, interactively and comprehensively.

As a once subscriber who is now on the provider side, I’ve learned a lot along the way. What follows below is my list of five things every marketing executive should know about Big Data analytics before you search for a data provider:

1) Not all data is alike.

Data can come to you in all shapes and sizes: .csv, .xlsx, .swf, .mdb are just a few. In fact, with a growing number of database options and programming schemas, data structure and uniformity is a premium that not many can afford. Ensure you know the structure of your data, how it will be used in your industry and whether it’s easy to integrate with your current system of analysis.

2) Too much data can be intoxicating.

It’s 7:00 p.m. and your CMO sends a torching email to you that the CEO wants ALL the information on campaign X’s performance. You call the account lead at your advertising agency and they send you 58 files with everything from mentions and likes to CPC rates. Surely, your CMO’s MBA from Harvard will help her make sense of the data deluge you sent, but more than likely, she will be overwhelmed. Before sending impressive reams of data, make sure you FIRST understand the problem, and WHAT data is actually needed. Make sure your analytics platform simplifies this process and has the functionality to help you pull the data you need in an easily digestible and visual, easy-to-present manner.

3) Interpretation shouldn’t be easy.

Beware of analytics platforms that tout “black boxes” which automatically figure the conclusions out for you. Unless there’s a living, breathing data analyst on the other end magically inputting the answers, it’s too good to be true. Seek platforms that display data in a manner that’s visual, easy-to-understand and easy-to-obtain. You want it to simplify the front-end process so you, the expert, can have time to analyze and interpret the data.

4) Focus on the facts.

When trying to answer your boss’s questions about campaign performance, focus on the facts around the data. Trying to apply your own theory as a reason for the number of social media mentions declining by 900% will likely result in more questions. To the point above, having the right data provider on the front-end gives you more time to focus on interpreting the data to identify the critical insights and findings without needing to apply personal theories in a pinch.

5) Be open to a more democratized way of doing data analysis. 

Try to find a platform that can integrate with and complement other tools in your arsenal while knowing that there is never one tool that’s a solution for all data needs, especially in a world where social media exists and marketing is more complex than ever before. The winners in the game of leveraging Big Data to get ahead will be the ones that can holistically combine multiple sources of data to identify a single finding—a trait that any CEO would love to pullout at H-Hour during the last annual meeting. The key to doing this – and not killing yourself in the process - is to be smart about planning your data game now.

Hopefully, these five tips provide everyone from the CMO to the junior analyst with a good primer on what’s important to know about Big Data analytics before they do what so many marketing teams must to stay ahead -- bring on a data provider and platform. It’s critical that marketers have the right bench of data providers so they can make informed decisions in less time with fewer headaches.

To learn more about how VizSense helps marketers harness the power of Big Data and helps content owners accelerate the activation of social advocates to improve revenue and profit, visit us here.