Angela Hursh leads an outstanding team of marketing and training professionals at NoveList, a company dedicated to helping libraries reach readers. A 2023 Library Journal Mover & Shaker, she has also created courses on LearnwithNoveList.com designed to help library staff learn how to create effective marketing. Before her job at NoveList, Angela led the content marketing team for the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. She also has more than 20 years of experience as an Emmy-award-winning broadcast TV journalist.
In this episode, we’ll talk through some tips for coming up with a name for your library program or event that will help you with promotion. Yes, this has marketing and promotional benefits! I’ll explain.
Kudos go to the Chesapeake Public Library for telling patron stories on Facebook for Library Card Signup Month.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know in the comments.
And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week. Thanks for watching!
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In 1960, Kelly Johnson was the lead engineer at a division of Lockheed that made spy plans.
One day, he handed a team of design engineers a handful of tools. Then he told the engineers that they must design a jet aircraft that would be repairable by the average mechanic in the field under combat conditions using only those tools.
At that moment, the popular design phrase “Keep it Simple, Stupid” or KISS was born. It describes the idea that most systems will work better if they are designed simply.
I first heard this phrase in journalism school. Reporters, marketers, ad agents, and public relations employees are all taught the power of simplified language in copy.
Simplified copy is easy to read and understand. It sounds authentic. Conversational copy subconsciously signals to your audience that you are a person, and people like communicating with other people.
Librarians are intelligent and sophisticated people. They have a deep understanding and appreciation of complex concepts. They’re driven by accuracy and information. It’s challenging to write clearly when you’re an expert in your field!
But our cardholders may have a difficult time understanding library brochures, posters, blogs, and websites with convoluted and confusing language. They may be tune out if the wording of your promotions isn’t conversational.
Your job as a library marketer is to translate complex thoughts and concepts into a concise and clear language your audience can understand and appreciate. You must present information in a way that the cardholder can understand.
It’s easier said than done, but here is some guidance you can put into practice any time you’re asked to write a piece of library marketing.
Identify your target audience and the action you want them to take.
Before you even write the first draft of any promotion, pinpoint your audience as precisely as possible.
Are you writing for teens ages 13-15? Are you writing for women, ages 25-54, who love to read cozy mysteries? Are you aiming your message at parents of preschoolers who need help finding books to read to their children?
When you’ve settled on your target audience, write a sentence about them at the top of the page. Be as descriptive as possible.
Underneath that, write a sentence that describes the point of your marketing material. Are you trying to persuade someone to try a new service? Do you want to increase participation in a preschool storytime? Are you trying to get teens to enter an art contest?
Once you know precisely who your audience is and what you want them to do after they’re read your marketing material, you’ll have an easier job of writing clearly.
Define unfamiliar or difficult words, titles, or services.
Go through the draft of your material and highlight words or terms that may confuse your audience. Then, find a better way to say or explain those words.
Never take it for granted that your reader has been a lifelong user or follower of the library. Words used by librarians to describe services, programs, catalogs, and databases, which may seem common and every day to you and your staff, may not be so to your reader.
Shorten your sentences and paragraphs.
You may have noticed that, about 18 months ago, I started writing shorter sentences and paragraphs here on the blog. Views rose by 118 percent!
That’s because shorter sentences and paragraphs make it easier for your reader to understand and absorb what you are saying. Long paragraphs look thick and off-putting. Multiple studies show readers will skip lengthy paragraphs. And the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack Study shows people are more likely to read an entire webpage when the paragraphs are short.
There are two rules you can remember to help you get into the habit of shortening sentences and paragraphs.
Ziomek’s 1-2-3-4-5 rule: Created by Jon Ziomek, a professor at the Medill School of Journalism. The rule says each paragraph must contain: 1 idea, expressed in 2 to 3 short sentences, taking 4 to 5 lines.
Nityesh Agarwal‘s 80-20 rule: You can convey 80 percent of the information in any piece of writing using 20 percent of the words.
Get into the habit of hitting your return key more often. You can also break your writing up using bullet points or lists.
Use online writing tools.
There are lots of free tools that can help you craft sentences that are clear and concise, even when the subject matter is not! They can help you figure out a headline that will draw readers in. They can help you discover just the right word to make your meaning clear.
I often ask my family members to read my writing. If they find anything to be confusing or convoluted, I know I need to change it.
Bonus Tip: Read or listen to the book Everybody Writes by Ann Handley. It’s life-changing. Check your library collection first. If you have Overdrive, you’ll have the audiobook version. You MUST read this. It will make you a better writer.
Do you have tips for writing more clearly or examples where you have taken a complex library concept and simplified it for an audience? Share your experience or questions in the comments.
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This video is for anyone who works in a library with a long holds list and frustrated readers. I’ll share some ideas for keeping people engaged with your collection even as they wait for that one book they are dying to read.
Kudos in this episode go to Indian Trails Public Library for this cute Library Card Signup month video, created by staff member Stephanie Diebel.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know in the comments. And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week.
Thanks for watching!
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, click on the “Follow” button in the bottom left-hand corner of the page.
This week, I learned a new term used to describe the way the world is transforming in the wake of the pandemic.
“The Next Normal” was coined by workplace consulting firm McKinsey & Company. It describes the changes which continue to emerge in every industry in the post-viral era.
A return to normal after an event like the pandemic is extremely challenging. It calls for libraries to reimagine and reform the work they do to meet their community’s needs in new ways.
Libraries seem to have the most angst about this change with regards to programming.
I have talked with many library staff members who truly enjoy creating and presenting programs. The process brings them fulfillment and purpose. And the idea that the pandemic may have permanently changed the way the public engages with library programming makes them sad and nervous.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
Change is scary and uncomfortable. But it also gives us an opportunity to approach library programs in a way that is more strategic. We have the chance to make sure our programming is creating deep relationships with our community.
Here are eight things to keep in mind as you begin to re-create your library programs in the age of The Next Normal.
Be realistic about the hurdles
Before the pandemic, libraries got a lot of program and event traffic from people who walked in to check out a book or browse the collection. They noticed an event or program happening in the library and joined in.
Because of the pandemic, libraries have implemented convenience services, like curbside pickup and book bundles. The community needs those services. But they also impact the number of physical visits to your library and in turn, the number of people who come across a program impulsively.
There is also a significant portion of the community who is not comfortable (yet) with going back to a public indoor space. Others discovered virtual programming during the lockdown and now prefer it.
We must acknowledge that the pandemic may have changed the way people interact with library programming. When you give yourself and your library permission to accept that premise, you can begin to rebuild and reimagine the way your library creates and promotes programs.
Plan fewer, but more quality programs
The Next Normal is a great time for libraries to re-evaluate the programs they offer.
I propose that libraries reduce the number of programs that they do. Instead, spend more money and more time planning quality programs that are unique to your community.
Set your promotional boundaries and stick to them
Library marketers are often expected to promote every program at a library, months in advance. The Next Normal is a great time to set down some ground rules for which programs get promoted and how those promotions will be carried out.
As you are determining the boundaries that will work best for your library, you may have to experiment with how far in advance you promote programs and on what channels.
Remember that your community’s schedule and expectations have changed in the wake of the pandemic. The promotions you did before the pandemic may not work in The Next Normal.
Track the results of your promotions so you can identify those changes and create new ground rules for your promotional work. Once you set those rules, stick to them.
You may be pressured to make exceptions. And there may be co-workers who don’t appreciate the effort you are making to do the best job of marketing for your library. That’s okay.
If you create a plan that puts the interest of your community and your library at its core, you will be successful.
Make promotions part of your program planning
As you begin to put your program together, make it a habit to think about the marketing piece. Ask yourself:
Who will be your target audience?
What is the best way to reach them?
How much time will it take you (or your co-workers who help with marketing) to create the pieces you’ll need to promote your event properly?
What will your event hashtag be?
If there are other library staff who will be involved in promotions, make sure you give them a heads up in plenty of time. For example, if your library has a social media manager, try meeting with them once a month to let them know about the programs you’re putting together.
Choose your promotional platforms carefully.
Community members may ignore promotions because they are overwhelmed by the sheer number of marketing messages they receive. Libraries tend to want to promote everything on all channels. Let’s be more intentional.
If your community actively engages with your Facebook posts, use that to your advantage. Create events on Facebook for your programs so that potential attendees get a reminder as the day of your program draws near. You can also buy Facebook ads or boost your posts to target specific demographics, even if you have a small budget.
If your community prefers interaction on another social media platform, like Instagram, spend your time and energy promoting your events there. Instagram Stories are a great way to build excitement.
Perhaps your library has a receptive and engaged email list. Add a program suggestion to your reading recommendation emails. Or send an email with a program announcement to a targeted audience.
Leverage your presenters
The Next Normal is the time to get as much promotion out of your speakers, presenters, and sponsors as possible. They likely have a ready-made audience that may like to attend your event. Ideally, this kind of collaborative promotion should be a part of your agreement with each participant.
You can make it easy on presenters by sending them a pre-written social media post or blurb for their email newsletter promoting their appearance. Supply them with copy, images, video, print assets, and anything else they need to help you spread the word.
Create some FOMO (fear of missing out)
FOMO is a powerful tool for getting more attendance at your programs. Your registered patrons and past program attendees can provide social proof that your event is going to be amazing. Let them help you build hype.
About a week before the event, send an email reminder or a social media message to everyone who has registered or shown interest in your program. Encourage them to brag that they’ll be attending. Include a pre-written social media message to make it easy to share.
Remember your real goal
At the end of the day, programs should help your library create a relationship with those cardholders. We want them to come to us for all their problems, and all their questions, and all their needs.
This is a more holistic approach than merely counting attendance numbers. Creating that engaged community will make your work worth all the effort.
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In this video, I’ll share four ways you can make sure the public knows about the many wonderful children’s books you have in your library’s collection.
Kudos in this episode go to the Bridges Library System, which has a wonderful and funny newsletter signup and confirmation process.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know in the comments.
And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week.
Thanks for watching!
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, click on the “Follow” button in the bottom left-hand corner of the page.
In this episode, I’ll share three easy design tips for your library’s social media graphics.
Kudos in this episode go to the Carmel Clay Public Library for turning a vacant supermarket into a super cool library space.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know in the comments.
And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week.
Thanks for watching!
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, click on the “Follow” button in the bottom left-hand corner of the page.
I have never been one for spontaneous excursions. When I travel (boy, do I miss travel!), I like to have a plan.
I research restaurants. I research tourist attractions. I check to see if there’s a library in the area. I might even jump onto Google Street View and “walk” the area myself to make sure I’ll know where I’m going.
I do all of this because I want to get the most value out of the time I’m spending in a new place. I don’t want to miss anything fun, interesting, or historic.
But occasionally, I’ll stumble upon something amazing that I didn’t find in my research. Those discoveries always end up being completely amazing.
On my first few hours in Edinburgh, Scotland, I had lunch in a tavern. As I left a tour of Holyrood Palace, I realized I hadn’t eaten in 12 hours. I was starving. I didn’t feel like walking another mile to one of the restaurants I had chosen in my pre-trip planning.
I found Tolbooth Tavern tucked into a tiny corner of an ancient-looking wall near Holyrood Palace. It looked quiet and unassuming. And everything on the menu posted outside sounded delicious.
It was the best meal I had in Edinburgh. The haggis was spectacular and beautiful. The beer was perfect. The atmosphere was exactly what I imagined I’d find in that city. It’s one of my favorite memories of the trips.
What in the world does this have to do with library marketing?
On most occasions, I believe in planning. A well-executed marketing plan that’s strategic and focused is the best recipe for library marketing success.
But sometimes, you can stumble upon an amazing promotional opportunity that you didn’t plan for. And those unexpected opportunities can be surprisingly successful.
If inspiration strikes or you see a chance to grab a new marketing or promotional opportunity, you should absolutely do it. A quick pivot can lead to engaging and successful promotions.
Planning for the unpredictable
Anyone can include some flexibility in their marketing schedule. The key lies in planning… which sounds contradictory. But the trick is simple.
When you’re laying out your regular marketing schedule, be sure to deliberately leave holes where you might be able to drop in promotions.
In general, most of your editorial calendar, around 75 percent, will consist of promotions that have hard deadlines. The rest, 25 percent, can be open spaces for those opportunities that you cannot plan for.
How does this work, exactly?
Be on the lookout for opportunities to do some flexible marketing. Great promotional stories sometimes appear unexpectedly. They may include:
User-generated content on social media
A connection to an event happening in pop culture
A suggestion from a customer or staff member
An idea you got from another library
A last-minute opportunity from a vendor or a partner organization.
A great event that’s been planned by a branch at the last minute.
If you purposefully leave 25 percent of your editorial calendar open, you can seize these opportunities for the space you’ve deliberately set aside.
Example: My library turned around a movie promotion sent to us by a vendor, who offered a free first-run movie streaming on their site on the same day that the movie was released into theaters.
We got word a week before the movie premiere. The movie had a great cast that we thought might be popular with our cardholders.
We swung into gear. We created graphics for our website, social media, and an email campaign to let users of our digital services know about the promotion. We managed to do all of this in two days.
And the promotion was a success! On a normal day, we stream about 25 movies to cardholders. After this promotion, we streamed 244 copies of this first-rate movie alone.
This happened because we left holes in our calendar for opportunities just like this.
You won’t have to turn a last-minute campaign around every week or even every month. But when you do… it will be worth it. Sometimes the gold nuggets of promotion are the ones you can’t plan of time!
The benefits of flexibility in your library promotions
Flexible marketing can be fun. You may do some of your best work when you are formulating promotions in a few days or a few hours. A deadline or a great idea with a time limit can push you and your staff to be creative in ways you’ve never imagined.
Flexibility allows you to adapt to unforeseen shifts in your community’s needs and wants.
And flexible marketing makes it easy to continuously improve the way you do library marketing. It gives you an excuse to experiment.
And when you do that, you will learn new things about your audience, what they like, and what they dislike. Your marketing overall will improve.
What happens if I don’t have anything to fill my calendar holes?
Nothing.
Give yourself a break. Take that day off from promoting your library.
I know this is a crazy concept coming from a blog that is all about library marketing. But we need to spend more time in reflection if we want our library marketing to be amazing.
True creativity, the kind that adds value to your workplace and your life, is something that needs to be treasured and cultivated. If you want your library to succeed, you need to take time to be creative.
An unfilled hole in your editorial calendar is the perfect opportunity for that.
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It’s time for social media updates for libraries! We’ll highlight three headlines and talk a bit about their impact on library social media.
Kudos in this episode go to the Columbus Library for their help with Operation Backpack.
Special note
I'm hosting a live Twitter chat next Tuesday, August 31 at 12 p.m. ET. It's on changing public perception through storytelling. To join, follow #CMWorld on Twitter. We'll ask five questions during the chat. You can answer using the hashtag. I want to make sure libraries are represented in this chat. See you there, friends!
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know in the comments. And subscribe to this series to get a new video tip for libraries each week.
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, enter your email address and click on the “Follow” button on the lower left-hand corner of the page.
I love to read anything in print. The texture and smell of the paper, the actual physical weight the words have in your hands, and the ability to re-read and annotate the pages give a sense of importance to the printed piece that you can’t get when you read something online.
Digital exhaustion is a real phenomenon, and the pandemic has only made it worse. According to Statista, the average daily time spent with digital media is expected to increase from seven hours and 50 minutes in 2020 to just under eight hours in 2022.
Even though people are spending more time online, that online space is crowded. It’s harder for the library’s message to break through all the content noise.
People want a more personal connection to their marketing. A printed promotional piece appeals to the senses. It’s tangible. It occupies physical space and creates the value of possession. Your audience must physically interact with it, and that makes it authentic and reliable.
And for members of our community who don’t have access to the internet, or who don’t have a connection strong enough to support streaming videos or high-resolution downloads, print is the key to marketing success.
Most libraries have a printed newsletter. I want to challenge your library to take that piece and transform it into a powerhouse marketing tool.
To do that, you’re going to trim down the number of events in the piece and add stories about your library and its patrons.
Here’s how you can transform your newsletter into a promotional masterpiece that people will want to read. There are examples of great library print pieces at the end of this post!
Make a plan and an outline.
Divide your publication into pages. Then, plot out what you are going to put on each page.
You’ll want to create a balance between the sections of your piece. Start by dividing your publication into thirds.
One third will be dedicated to promoting collection items, including booklists, streaming music and movies, your physical movie and music collection, and magazines.
One third will be dedicated to events and programs.
The final third will be stories about patrons and staff and the ways the library has impacted their lives.
Pick one big story to serve as your cover.
Some cover stories we used at my library included:
A father and son who visited all 41 branches of our library in one day.
Once you determine your cover story, place it in your outline about halfway through your publication. You want people to have to read several pages to get to it.
Here are some other ideas for stories to put in your publication.
Staff and patron reading recommendations, including quotes about why they love and recommend the books.
Stories behind the forming of a book club.
A profile of a teacher or a school librarian who takes advantage of services like teacher collections and support from the library.
How your library has helped someone find a job or earn a degree.
Profile of a small business that used your library to launch a successful company.
Behind the scenes of a certain department at your library. For example, I interviewed the manager of our Preservation Lab, which restores and preserves rare items in the library’s collection such as military uniforms, books written on palm leaves, and all kinds of historically valuable photographs. In another issue, we took people along for a ride with our Outreach Services and talked to the people whose lives were changed by the simple act of bringing books to their homes.
Make sure each page includes at least one call to action.
End each article with a call to action, like, “To learn more, email us.” Or “To join this book club, visit our website.”
The whole point of your print publication is promotion. Make sure that you give your readers a way to interact with your library and take the next step.
Give yourself time to edit and review.
Typically, it took me about a month from start to finish to write, edit, and review my 12-page print publication. Specifically, my timeline looked like this:
Four weeks before we went to print, articles written by other staff were due.
Three weeks before we went to print, I thoroughly read and edited each article. I used my own punctuation and grammar skills, plus Microsoft Word’s review editor, and a Grammarly extension on my browser to perfect each article.
Two weeks before we went to print, I made copies of the publication and passed them around to at least five staff members inside and outside of my department. I asked them to carefully read the articles and mark any mistakes they noticed.
One week before we went to print, I gave copies to senior leaders for final approval.
I also made a copy for myself and read it out loud. This is a trick I learned from journalism school that I still use today for this blog! Your brain may automatically correct errors when you read silently in your head but if you read each word out loud, as if you are doing it for an audience, you’ll find missing words or grammar errors that you never noticed before.
Some examples of great library print promotional pieces that incorporate promotions and stories about the library (that you can read online!)
Does your library have a print publication that you’re really proud of? I’d love to see it! Please let me know where I can read it by hitting the Feedback button on the bottom left-hand side of this page.
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Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion 