Photo courtesy Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library.
Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library

Library marketing looks different everywhere.

At some libraries, it’s one person doing promotions part-time. At others, it’s a small communications team. Sometimes it’s staff at different branches or departments all creating their own flyers, emails, and social posts.

Many of you who are tasked with that work don’t have a marketing background. You may be librarians, programmers, or outreach staff who were asked to “help promote things.”

Library promotion often starts the same way: A program or service is planned, and then everyone rushes to create the promotional materials.

But effective marketing doesn’t start with tactics. It starts with a strategy.

Before you create the flyer, schedule social media posts, or draft the email, take a few minutes to answer five simple questions that will shape your promotional approach and set your library up for marketing success.

What are your library’s goals and priorities?

Start by writing down your library’s goals and priorities for the next 6-12 months. This step helps you define your promotional focus.

For example, let’s say your library wants to bridge the learning gap for children in kindergarten through third grade. To do that, the library plans to increase participation in early reader services by 5 percent and boost the circulation of children’s books by 10 percent. With this defined priority, a large percentage of your promotions should primarily target parents, caregivers, and teachers.

Goal setting and prioritization matter because library marketing is often very activity-driven. We promote every program, every service, every resource equally.

But success requires strategy, and strategy requires prioritization. When you know the library’s big goals, you can decide what deserves the most promotional attention and what might get lighter promotion.

Write those goals down and keep them visible. Every promotion should connect back to them in some way.

If this step is daunting, this video might help.

What is your library’s current situation?

Next, take a few minutes to write down what you know about your community and your current users. This might sound silly, but it is crucial. The more clearly you understand your audience, the easier it becomes to create promotions that speak to their needs and interests.

Ask yourself:

  • Who are your cardholders?
  • What do they typically use the library for?
  • Where do they live?
  • What groups of people in your community are not using the library yet?

You should also think about what competes for your audience’s attention. That might include bookstores, streaming services, after-school programs, and Google or AI.

Next, do some analysis of the data you have at hand, including:

  • Circulation trends
  • Foot traffic to your branches
  • Database usage
  • Program attendance
  • Email engagement
  • Social media engagement
  • Website traffic
  • Any survey data you may have from patrons or community members

You may think you know the current state of your library. But once you’ve done this analysis, you’ll likely make some interesting discoveries that will make it clear exactly what you need to do to be more successful in your library marketing.

What things can you use to promote your library?

Take inventory of your promotional tools. Write down every communication channel your library uses. This might include:

  • Your library website
  • E-newsletters
  • Social media platforms
  • Digital signage
  • Flyers and posters
  • Press releases and media outreach
  • In-library displays
  • Staff recommendations and readers’ advisory
  • Partnerships with schools or community groups

Many libraries discover during this exercise that they’re using more channels than they can realistically manage well. (Raise your hand if you suspect that’s you!)

That’s okay. The goal here isn’t to use everything. The goal is to understand what tools are available so you can choose the right ones for each promotion.

Ask yourself: How can you put your library’s promotional tools to work?

This is where strategy starts to take shape.

Consider your goals and your audience, then decide which promotional tools will work best to reach them.

For example, you may know from past experience that most people register for summer reading after clicking links in your e-newsletter. If that’s the case, the newsletter should be a major part of your summer reading promotion. Or, if you know that the majority of attendees at your author events are also members of a book club, you can partner with book clubs hosted by other organizations, like bookstores or community groups, to reach your target audience.

You don’t need to promote everything everywhere. Instead, focus your energy on the channels that are most likely to reach the people you want to serve. This step is really about matching the right message to the right audience in the right place.

If that sounds complicated, I created this guide to help you use AI to match audiences with channels.

How will you measure your success (or failure)? 

Too often, libraries judge marketing success based on vague feelings like “that seemed popular” or “we saw a lot of people talking about it.”

Feelings aren’t facts. You must measure the effectiveness of your promotions so you can replicate successes and stop doing the things that don’t work.

This part of library marketing success does not need to be complicated. Write down a few clear success measures. For example, with summer reading, you might track:

  • Clicks on the registration link in your e-newsletter
  • Weekly registration totals
  • Program attendance
  • Circulation of summer reading titles

Not every promotion will succeed. That’s okay! The important thing is learning from what happens.

When something works, try to understand why. When something doesn’t work, resist the temptation to repeat it out of habit.

Need help with metrics? I created a mini-metric toolkit. And here are 4 metrics that will evaluate your library marketing success in 30 minutes or less. Easy peasy!

Want more help?

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