Screen Shot 2015-04-30 at 5.44.25 PM

One of the most important developments in marketing in the past few years has been the rise of Big Data. Though the term has really become somewhat of a buzz word, and many are confused as to what the term is referring to in different contexts, the subject of Big Data is still worth exploring.

Collecting data about consumers has become much easier with advanced data collection methods, especially when it comes to the digital realm. Marketers can track just about every interaction a customer has with the brand, build up a history of actions for each customer, and combine that with demographic information about the customer to learn about the brand’s performance in different markets.

However, having the data and understanding the data are two very different things. Access to a powerful and useful data visualization tool is critical to being able to interpret customer data and understand the story it is telling. In this article, we will review four solutions for data visualization that will help marketers make sense of data. These tools are easy to use for marketers and sales managers to use with a minimum of background about data visualization itself.

1. Nuvi

nuvi-screenshot_434845
Nuvi is a useful tool for real time analysis of social media interactions. Social media is an important method of customer interaction, because it is easy for a brand to propagate its message if it reaches a particularly influential person.

Nuvi is a good way to see how your brand is moving through social networks. It displays every interaction that a social media entity has with your brand as a bubble, and it makes the bubbles larger if the social media entity has more influence. It also color-codes if the interaction was positive, negative, or neutral. The result is a stream of bubbles that flow across the screen and display the brand’s movement on social media in an intuitive way.

2. Data Hero                      Datahero                                                                                                                                                          

DataHero is like a simpler and more powerful version of Excel that is especially customized for marketing dashboards. It can connect to many different data storage apps and pull the data to create tables and graphs much faster and more efficiently that Excel can.

DataHero’s interface is easy to use; the program’s creators believe that business analytics should be accessible to all, rather than requiring a degree in data science to interpret them. DataHero is easy to use: there is no need to use complex Excel functions like VLookup to create useful tables based on a wide range of data. One of the main advantages of DataHero is that it works so easily with other apps like Shopify or Zendesk.

3. Kartograph                                                                                                                                                                         

Kartograph is a tool oriented towards making maps. There is no need to plug into any kind of exterior mapping app to create charts with maps. It can quickly and easily build maps using local data and create charts that are easy to read for a wide variety of different data, allowing marketers to track interest, sales, and other metrics across the country. This gives the marketing team literally a bird’s eye view of how the brand is performing in different geographic locations.

kartograph (1)

4. Visual.ly 

Visual.ly is a data visualization tool that prides itself on versatility and a community approach. It is the brainchild of former employees of the budgeting software Mint. Visual.ly asks users to create accounts, then publish their visualizations to the larger community using that account, where all visualizations are stored in the cloud.

It is easy to use this online account to share visualizations through social media platforms to push them to a wider audience. On top of its role as a set of tools to visualize data and publish the results, Visual.ly also functions as a marketplace for designers and marketers to show off their skills, so it facilitates communication and collaboration and even encourages job-seeking.

visually_data_art1

Visualizing business data is crucial to marketing success, primarily because it is the most useful way to gauge how the brand is performing. No one can sift through pages and pages of data in spreadsheets and know how to interpret them without help, and data visualization tools  make it easy to show what the data says.

However, it is also important that the tools themselves are easy to use. It should not take a data scientist to make the five or ten most important graphs for a business’s strategy. These four tools are especially useful for marketing professionals who do not necessarily have any special background in data science.

Brigg Patten writes in the business and tech spaces. He’s a fan of podcasts, bokeh and smooth jazz. His time is mostly spent learning the piano and watching his Golden Retriever Julian chase a stick.