Marketing your BI Program
By 
Since most of us are recovering IT professionals the idea of marketing anything is less than palatable. But, the fact of the matter is BI programs need to be marketed in order to stay top of mind for both executives and end users alike. Good marketing helps ensure financial support as well as user adoption.
So, what’s an IT person to do? Follow a standard marketing plan. The primary function of a marketing plan is to organize your thoughts and help create the next steps. Most marketing plans have a couple things in common. They tell you what, when, how & where the program is going to launch. They often include general information about the company, the objective of the program and some information about competitors. This is important because it puts things into perspective. The most salient (in my opinion) part of the marketing plan is the communication plan. I use these as separate documents for other projects, or as a sub-set. For example, we have a communication plan that is specific to our Enterprise Reporting application; we also have one for our Data Stewardship program. Anything where we will be consistently sending messages out to our customer base we create a communication plan for it. Most of the time they are incorporated into the marketing plan, sometimes they aren’t.
Corporate Mission
You want to ensure that your program aligns with the corporate mission. If it doesn’t then you are probably set up to be challenged. As you release content into your data warehouse they should be framed as business capabilities and should align directly to a corporate mission. For example, if you are releasing a new product to the market and much of your corporate attention, strategy and finances back the release—so should your content. When you communicate about the release make sure that the connection between the corporate strategy and your release is called out. Such as “in support of our corporate strategy the BI team has….”
Program Objective
Much like the mission statement the program objective is an important communication tool. It should tell the reader the who, what, and why. For the broader team working on your project it’s good to know the overall objective. For the marketing plan it helps put the specific details in context. If your marketing activity doesn’t meet one of these objectives then you shouldn’t do it.
Program Audience
Know your audience. This is true regardless to the content you are communicating about. I have seen very smart people communicate to an audience in a way that completely loses the message. It’s always a good idea to have your copy edited by someone in your corporate communications group or your marketing team. It’s also very helpful to spend some time defining your audience in a more detailed way. Use personas to detail out your program audience. In the web world they use personas to help inform their development. Personas are created based on observation, customer surveys, focus groups, etc. They are often referred to as ‘use cases’ or ‘role-based design’.
Communication Plan
If you do nothing else, create the communication plan. While there is value in thinking through the other sections of the plan (to ensure alignment) the communication plan is the primary deliverable. This section helps ensure that your communications are consistent and have an appropriate frequency.
Consider using the communication plan as a separate deliverable for our smaller projects. Your marketing plan can and should have multiple communication plans for all of the separate deliverables.
The Competitive Landscape
You may ask, if we aren’t building our BI project to best the competition why would I add this section? That is a question only you can answer. But, consider this; if you aren’t aligning your project with the competitive landscape then what are you doing it for? If you are not helping your company compete, what are you doing? There are some industries that perhaps this doesn’t apply, such as the non-profits. But in any case you should be considering the internal competition for a finite set of funds.
Marketing Objectives
These activities are the heart of your plan. In order to ‘get the word out’ you need to create some interesting activities that people want to participate in. The most important aspect of these activities are relevance back to the program objective. For example, if you have an objective of educating your users about the BI program a newsletter or lunch and learn are great ways to do that. A bake sale might be fun, but not relevant to the objective.
The proof is in the pudding
Don’t get me wrong, just marketing your program isn’t enough. You have to do the hard work of actually delivering value. The important thing is that people may not always know what you’re doing or how great it is because they are too heads down. If you are making reporting more easy, you should be able to articulate what and how and how much. It’s your job to tell them.
Check out our collaboration site for the marketing plan template. Just email me to participate at lmadsen@lancetsoftware.com
