In the social media realm, it’s easy to overlook data’s importance. But without data, we have nothing to help us improve our content.

A new survey of marketing professionals shows that we should expect a spending and hiring spree in 2013 to keep up with all this data.

Targeting Solutions and Yesmail Interactive surveyed 700 marketers from around the world at the DMA2012 and Forrester eBusiness Forum. The results suggest that many companies will be focusing a larger portion of their 2013 budgets toward analyzing and applying their data.

Nearly 70 percent of companies plan to spend more on data-related marketing initiatives in 2013. More than 50 percent of respondents said they plan to hire analysts and executives for their metrics departments.

Here are a few key findings from the report on data-related spending and hiring:

• 68 percent of marketers said they expect their data-related expenditures to increase greatly or slightly in 2013; only 3 percent said they expect data-related expenditures to decrease.

• 56 percent plan on hiring new employees to handle data collection or analysis, with the most common position being a data analyst (20 percent).

• 5 percent said they plan on hiring an executive to oversee data initiatives.

A major trend in marketing and PR of late is this concept of Big Data, which is the practice of collecting the information scattered across the Web to better target consumers.

According to the survey from Targeting Solutions and Yesmail Interactive, more than half of respondents have already implemented real-time data and plan to make greater use of it in 2013; 30 percent either plan to use it for the first time or they are considering adopting the technique.

RELATED: Taming PR’s latest trend: Big Data

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