Library marketing… it’s sometimes a balancing act.
There are things that your library wants to promote. And there are things that your community wants from your library. Sometimes, those two things conflict with one another!
In this episode, you’ll get some tips for finding the balance between building things that your cardholders and community need versus working on your library’s overall vision. Plus, a library gets kudos for a patron as hero story!
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here. And thanks for watching!
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There is a very easy way to promote your library — even when nobody is in the building! And in fact, marketing when you’re library is closed for any reason is effective, and important, especially for one target group of library users.
I’ll explain in this episode of The Library Marketing Show.
Plus, we’ll give away kudos to a library for creating a video to explain the impact of their winning grant entry.
Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here. And thanks for watching!
Thanks for watching!
Special note: The next Super Library Marketing post will arrive in your inbox on Tuesday, Dec. 26.
Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email whenever I post. To do that, enter your email address and click on the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page. You can also follow me on the following social media platforms:
I sometimes daydream about taking a nap in the middle of the workday.
It would be easy enough. My office is in a shed in our backyard and ya’ll, there’s a pullout bed in here. I could totally take a power nap any time I wanted to.
But I never do.
Why NOT?? Seriously, what is wrong with me?
For many of you, a midday work nap is something you could never consider. You simply don’t have time. Marketing your library is not the only work task you are expected to do. You are answering phones. You’re filling holds. You’re making sock puppets for story time. You’re cleaning the restroom.
Your work is demanding. And for many of you, it’s leading to staff burnout.
Burnout is a big problem in library marketing. A quarter of all public libraries in the United States lost staff positions after the pandemic, according to the Public Library Association. And in more than half of those libraries, those positions were not replaced.
So, we’re doing more with less. And the burden is even heavier for those of you working to promote your library.
According to a survey by Blind, the burnout rate for anyone working in marketing and communications was already high pre-pandemic, at 74.8 percent. After the pandemic, that rate shot up to 83.3 percent.
We have a problem. But I’m certain my readers already knew that.
What do we do about it?
For the next two weeks, I want to address this issue. I’ll share some strategies I’ve learned in my own work and research.
I decided to write this series now because:
Summer is stressful and busy for library promotions.
You’ll do better promotional work when you aren’t stressed, and that’s good for your library.
I like you. A lot.
What the heck is burnout?
The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies burnout as a “syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
There are three main symptoms:
Feelings of fatigue, lethargy, or exhaustion
Feelings negative or apathetic about your library marketing work
Reduced productivity
Why are library marketers experiencing burnout?
This is, by no means, a comprehensive list. But I talk with libraries every day as part of my day job. And here are the main causes of burnout I’ve noticed.
Outside threats, like book challenges, hostile library boards, and antagonistic community members.
I put this first because, to be honest, I think it’s the biggest threat to libraries right now.
The constant, never-ending, soul-sucking, scary, demeaning, and demoralizing effects of book challenges are doing more than impacting our freedom to read. It’s threatening the very existence of libraries by making working conditions impossible.
This month, during Pride, I have held my breath every time I see a library post on social media. I tentatively check the comments, looking for anyone who might say something derogatory.
I hear stories from fellow library marketers who tell me they receive replies to their regular library emails from people threatening and demeaning them.
And I’ve listened as library staff break down in tears, describing hostile community members who threaten them, dox them, and call them all kinds of names, for doing their jobs–providing inclusive books and services.
Lack of support or recognition from leadership
You, my readers, are smart. You think strategically about your promotions and measure your results. And when you take those results to your boss and they ask you to keep doing the thing that isn’t working anyway… that leads to burnout.
If you are a manager reading this, here is a call to action: your job is to support your staff. Your job is to remove hurdles so your team members can do their best library marketing work.
That doesn’t mean you have to agree with every idea your team members bring. But if you disagree, provide context. And allow your team members to conduct library promotional experiments, even if you personally think they’re going to fail. You could be wrong. And the goodwill and trust you build with your team members are valuable.
Unrealistic deadlines and results expectations
How many times have you been asked to create an email, a social media post, or an ENTIRE campaign… right now, like yesterday.
Library marketing work takes time and it’s difficult to get others to understand that. And when they don’t, that leads to stress and burnout.
It’s also stressful when you’re receiving pressure from fellow staff who expect you to drive hundreds of people into their programs.
Remote work and mobile devices
There is a downside to remote work—one I personally struggle with.
Before the pandemic, most of us had to commute. And that driving time, as stressful as traffic can be, did create a barrier that helped us disconnect from our work.
Now, it’s so dang easy to open your laptop after dinner and finish that email newsletter you didn’t quite get through today. Or to check your email. We also carry these little computers around in our hand/purse/pocket that keep us constantly connected to the office.
For a while, my home office was in my bedroom. HUGE MISTAKE. I would wake up in the middle of the night, glance over at my to-do list for the next day which was laying on the desk right next to me, and suddenly, the gears in my brain would start churning.
Don’t get me wrong: working at home is FANTASTIC. But remote workers do have to consciously create a barrier between their workday and their home life.
The never-ending promotional content cycle
The work that sets library promotions aside from every other bit of work in the library is the constant need for online content.
Update the website. Write a blog post. Record a podcast episode. Post to social media.
The content beast is always hungry. And that constant need to feed the beast leads to burnout.
Are you experiencing burnout?
If you are feeling like one more social media post or newsletter is going to put you over the edge, you are not alone. Next week, I’ll share 10 tips for avoiding burnout for anyone working in library promotions.
Meanwhile, if you feel comfortable, share your burnout experience here. This form allows you to remain anonymous. I’m not a therapist, but hopefully, the act of writing about your feelings will help ease the burden a bit. I care about you.
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Photo courtesy Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
The house I grew up in was surrounded by cornfields.
The nearest town was four miles away. It featured a grain elevator, a tiny country store, a barber shop, and a post office. A traffic light was installed after a tractor damaged the bridge from the town to the surrounding area.
Photo of the old bridge, courtesy BridgeHunter
I’m a product of small-town America. So small towns fascinate me. So do small libraries.
According to the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ annual Public Library Survey, 57 percent of libraries in the United States have five or fewer staff members. 27 percent have one or fewer full-time employees!
If you are working in a small library, you are doing everything, from working with readers to cleaning the bathrooms. Promoting your library is likely just one more thing on your to-do list, something you’ll get to if you get time.
But of course, we want people in our community to use our library. We need them to use it. So how do you market your library when you are pressed for time or staff resources?
Marketing is really not a job for one person. But that’s the reality for so many of my readers.
So here are the very focused, strategic steps you should take to consistently and effectively promote your library if you are working alone or with a tiny staff.
Set one, SMART goal.
You will need to be hyper-focused in your promotional efforts. Pick one thing you want to work on. Then set a Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound goal for that work.
The village of Wayne, Ohio has a population of about 900 people. It is very much like the small town I grew up in, with one notable exception: it has a library!
Driving through town a few weeks ago, I noticed the library has purchased an outdoor locker so patrons can pick up holds when the library isn’t open. They want people to use the locker, of course. So, they’ll want to promote it.
I don’t know anyone on the 7-person staff of the Wayne Library. But, if I were working with them, I would encourage them to set a SMART goal like this:
We will get 30 people a month to request their holds pickup via the outdoor locker. We’ll do this by promoting the locker on our website and by specifically asking patrons if they’d prefer to pick up their holds via the locker when we place holds for them. This goal is important because it will prove the value of this investment and will increase circulation. We’ll track and record the total the number of locker users at the end of each month.
You can see this goal contains specific numbers. It sets the context for why this promotion is important. And it lays out how the staff will measure success.
A SMART goal will help you organize your promotions and keep you accountable. It will give you a sense of direction for your work.
Focus on tactics that work best to reachsmall communities.
Make a list of all the ways you can promote your library: your website, email lists, social media, in-person interactions, print, partners, signs… etc. Then take a highlighter and pick the 2-3 things that work best for your community. Those are the tactics you should use to reach your SMART goal.
Every library community is different. And small libraries often find promotional success in places that are different from their larger counterparts.
For example, if your library is located by a major road, use outdoor signage to attract the attention of passing motorists. If your school is a significant community hub, ask teachers to send home promotional bookmarks and fliers in kids’ backpacks. If your town has a little restaurant where residents come for breakfast every Saturday, ask the restaurant owners to give out a promotional print piece like a bookmark or flier with the check.
Wayne Public Library uses its website to promote its lockers.
Live and die by an editorial calendar.
An editorial calendar will help you decide what, where, and when to publish. After those decisions are made, the editorial calendar will help you assign tasks and keep up to date on deadlines.
First, you’ll create your calendar. Then you’ll decide how to populate it with content that will ensure you reach your promotional goals.
Repurpose content.
When your staff is small, you’ll need to work smarter, not harder. A smart way to maximize your time and efforts is by repurposing content.
Repurposing content is the act of finding new ways to recycle your existing content. It’s basically taking one piece of content, say an email newsletter, and re-formatting it for different mediums like social media, a blog post, and an email
You can do this with any piece of content, from your website graphics to your annual report. Break the content down into pieces and spread them across all your available platforms. In this way, you can make sure everyone in your community sees your message. You also can make sure the work you are doing right now will have maximum impact.
Technology can be your best friend if you are working on promotion all by yourself. Schedule your emails, blog posts, and social media posts as far in advance as possible.
There are several great social media schedulers that have free plans. This post is an excellent list of each of those options.
For blogs, I recommend WordPress. You can get a free account and you can schedule posts to go out whenever you like. Plus, patrons who follow your blog will get an automatic email every time you post. That means you don’t have to create an email to let them know you’ve published new content.
You will have to invest in an email platform. But once you do, you can create and schedule emails to go out to your patrons as far in advance as you like.
Learn from larger libraries but don’t compare your success.
The success or failure of a library’s marketing has nothing to do with the size of its staff. In fact, I would argue it might be easier for a small library to create successful library promotions.
Small libraries have more freedom to experiment. Their staff tends to be personally connected with patrons. They have a deeper understanding of what their community wants and needs from their library.
So, follow those large library systems on social media. Sign up for their emails. Look at their websites. Visit large libraries when you travel. Make a list of ideas that you want to try at your smaller library.
But remember, the key to success is a library’s ability to connect with its own community. Any library can do that, no matter how large or small the staff.
I was recently the guest on a new podcast called Library Marketing for Library Marketers. Listen to that episode here.
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During quarantine, my 20-year-old daughter asked me to watch a reality series with her. It features her favorite Korean boy band, Stray Kids.
I was touched that she wanted to spend time together. I couldn’t say no, especially when I know she’ll be moving out of our house soon.
So during those dreary days of lockdown, I had something to look forward to: the point in the evening when she and I would make tea and snacks, and crawl into her bed to watch the members of Stray Kids compete to see who could sled down a hill holding a pitcher of water without spilling it or who could catch the most fish.
I became a fan of their music. And because I work in marketing, I started taking note of the way the promotion for Stray Kids, and other Korean musical groups, is coordinated.
Right now, six big K-pop groups are competing in a music variety reality show called Kingdom. It’s a master class in promotion. The marketing team builds excitement in the fan base by staggering promotional content over a specific period of time before each episode airs. Fans are seeing content at different times and days as they move across various platforms.
Libraries can learn something from K-pop.
Creating a compelling message, picking images, and deciding which tactics you will use to promote your library is important. But, deciding when you’ll release those promotions is just as critical.
When I started work in library marketing, I would create a marketing campaign and intentionally release all the promotions on all channels in the same day.
On the appointed day, my team sent an email and a press release. We added a homepage graphic and posted on all our social media platforms. We changed out the digital signage in our branches and put up posters.
And it was never very effective.
Then I heard marketing expert named Andrew Davis talk about staggered distribution. The approach takes advantage of the consumer cycle of excitement to expand your reach.
When you use staggered distribution, you release one or two promotional tactics at the beginning of your promotional cycle. Maybe you put up posters and send an email to your community.
Your promotion gets some play, and excitement builds in your community. People start talking about it. They might even share your promotion with their family and friends.
When the excitement dies out, you release your promotion on a second channel. The cycle of excitement and sharing begins again.
When that ends, you release your promotion on a third channel. You cycle through your promotion like this until you’ve used all the tactics planned.
When you use the staggered approach, you get a longer promotional thread. Your promotions will be more successful because the excitement around them builds over time, not in one big burst. Everyone in your audience sees the promotions. And more people take the action you want them to take!
For decades, my library used a traditional, all-at-once promotional approach to our Summer Reading program, which ran from June 1 through July 31. We released promotions using all our available tactics on May 1. And our registration numbers and check-in numbers were never as high as we wanted.
By the time we got to June 1, our audience was already tired of hearing about Summer Adventure. We used up all their excitement before we even got to the event!
So, we switched to a staggered approach.
We released promotions on our website on May 1 and installed yard signs. On May 15, we sent an email. On May 20, we put up all the signs around the inside of the library and started promotions on social media. From May 21 until June 1, we’d post once a day on one of our social media platforms. We started our ads on May 25. We sent a second email on June 1.
Throughout the course of our summer reading program, we would stagger promotions around all channels, so the message reached everyone in our audience, wherever they were consuming our content. We kept our audience excited, engaged, and interested.
And most importantly, it was effective. The first year we tried this staggered approach to distribution, we saw an 18 percent increase in registrations and a 67 percent increase in weekly check-ins.
This approach will work for your audience for any large-scale promotion. Stagger the elements of your promotion across various channels over time. More people will see your marketing and your efforts will be more effective.
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In just a few weeks, the annual summer reading program will kick off at libraries in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. And for the second year in a row, libraries are struggling to create a program that engages the community without risking their safety.
Last year’s pandemic Summer Reading program was a challenge (boy, that’s the understatement of the decade). Many libraries were physically closed. We were still learning about how the virus spread and trying to figure out how to mitigate the risk with physical materials. Staff members were doing virtual programming for the first time. We counted any participation as a success.
I think 2021 is going to be the first rebuilding year for summer reading. Attendance and participation numbers are not going to return to pre-pandemic levels this year. Many libraries are still dealing with limited service. Zoom fatigue is real. Vaccines are not widely available. It’s going to take us a couple years to get back to “normal.”
It’s okay. Do the best you can. Celebrate any growth you see this year. And use these ten tips to make your summer reading program as successful as possible.
Drop the library card requirement.
Let anyone in your community participate in summer reading, not just library cardholders.
Dropping the requirement to get a library card sounds counterintuitive. But it opens your program up to a whole population of people who don’t regularly use the library, particularly those in under-served communities. It makes your program more inclusive. It’s a goodwill gesture.
Of course, at registration and check-in, your front-line library staff should still suggest participants get a card. Doing so will grow your cardholder numbers. But don’t make it a requirement to register or get prizes.
Make participation super easy.
Don’t ask your participants to jump through complicated steps to earn a prize. Summer reading should be three-step maximum– read, log your reading, claim a prize.
If you want to push participation in programs, I suggest making that a bonus: let people earn extra prizes or points toward prizes by attending virtual programs or in-person events, if that can be done safely in your area. You can also reward people for watching a streaming video or listening to free streaming music.
Let adults participate.
It still surprises me when I see a library that limits their summer reading program to only teens and kids. Children who see the adults in their lives reading are more likely to read themselves. So why not entice parents to participate?
This year is an opportunity to get more adults engaged with your library. Plus, the adults in your community deserve to have some fun! If you can provide that for them, they will be grateful and supportive of your library.
Add experiences to your participation elements.
Create themes for each week of your summer program, like DIY, arts, nature, and sports. Make suggestions for activities people can complete to earn participation credit, like cooking a recipe from a cookbook they got at the library, going on a nature walk, visiting the zoo or a park, painting a picture or making sidewalk art, building something with LEGOs, writing a story… the possibilities are endless.
If a participant doesn’t read 20 minutes a day but still completes an experience activity, they should get credit. This is another way to make your program more inclusive and enticing to people.
Offer both print and digital tracking options.
Many libraries have an app or an online software platform that participants use to track their reading. But your under-served community members don’t have access to a computer or Wi-Fi at home. They can’t log in to track their reading and they can’t download or use an app.
In addition, many of your connected participants may find the process of downloading the app, putting in their information, and then using it to log their reading to be cumbersome. Add a paper tracking option to ensure everyone can participate.
Print copies of your tracking log and add them to your curbside pickup bags or slip them into holds. Let participants bring it back to your drive-thru or curbside window for credit.
Ask partner organizations to help you promote summer reading.
Now is the time to “call in favors” with your partner organizations. Ask them to show support and help rebuild your summer reading program.
If you don’t have partners, you can use summer reading to build partnerships! Ask local realtors and rental agencies if they can hand out a summer reading promotional piece to prospective homeowners or new renters. Give information and promotional pieces to day care providers, teachers, summer camps, recreational centers, your local zoo, your local park board, and other civic organizations. You can even ask restaurants to include a summer reading promotional piece in their takeout bags!
Use your email list to its full potential.
If your summer goal is to increase the number of readers and the amount of materials they read, then keep suggesting things for them to read! This is a great time to promote parts of your collection that don’t get a lot of use, like online graphic novels, as well as your backlist titles.
Build a template with whatever email service you use and fill in the blanks. Send two to three suggestions to your cardholders every two weeks during your summer program. It’s a great way to re-engage cardholders. You can also use email to remind your cardholders to participate in summer reading and boost your circulation numbers for the year.
Spend money on targeted social media ads.
This is the most efficient and cost-effective way to reach people and summer is the perfect time to buy social media ads. You barely need a budget to get started. $25 is all you need to get started.
Summer reading is also a great opportunity to buy ads on several platforms and compare results. The platforms will guide you through the process of picking your target audience. If you see success on one platform, you can use that data to create other small budget campaigns for your library during the year.
Incentivize user-generated content.
Hold contests to encourage people to post photos and videos of themselves using your library and participating in summer reading. Offer a chance to win a prize drawing for submitting reviews and testimonials about your library. You can use that content to further promote summer reading.
You may discover someone who is a super-fan of your library. That person could be an “influencer” for a future library promotional campaign!
Put good customer service on display.
Even with the pandemic, you’ll likely see a boost in visits to your library for curbside or holds pickup during the summer. You’ll definitely get more visitors to your website. Make sure everything is in tip-top shape, attractive, and easy-to-use.
Stress the importance of good customer service to staff, including those who work on responding to comments and questions via email, chat, and social media. Give them talking points to help them promote a few year-round services and challenge them to pick one to mention during every customer interaction.
Put your expertise on display front and center on the website. Is your staff great at readers’ advisory? Do you have an amazing e-newsletter? Are your virtual programs fun and innovative? Use summer reading to promote the best of your year-round services and collection items.
Is your library doing anything innovative this year for summer reading? What concerns do you have about the program this year? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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Not long ago, I read the results of a new survey. It kind of blew my mind.
Orbitz Media asked content creators about the amount of time they spend blogging. They found the average blog post now takes 3 hours and 57 minutes to write. That’s up 65 percent from 2014! The same survey shows 52 percent of bloggers report that it’s getting harder to get readers to engage with their content. WOW.
We live in a world dominated by a relentless and never-ceasing stream of content. But libraries can’t just turn off our content communications streams. Our very existence depends on our ability to educate the public about what we offer. We use our content to convince people to use the library.
So, what’s the solution, when your library staff is overworked, and your audience is oversaturated? Be more efficient.
There is a way to make your work stretch further and get your communication into the world. You can do this by republishing your content.
What is republishing content?
When you republish, you take an old press release, blog post, infographic, or video, and update it to include new and relevant information.
If your library has been publishing content for a while, you probably have quite a catalog. Most of it is still useful and relevant! Good content will never go out of style. These “evergreen” pieces of content are opportunities for you to republish.
Republishing content has many advantages for libraries.
It saves you time.
It improves your library’s chances of being found in search. When you improve content in the republishing process, you optimize it to bring it up to today’s best practices for headlines, tags, keywords, and length. That leads to improved search results.
It helps you to fill your editorial calendar when ideas and staff are sparce.
Your audience has changed since your original publish date. You’ve gained new cardholders and fans.
Your audience needs a reminder that you offer certain services.
How do you decide what pieces of content to republish?
Here are some ground rules.
First, take inventory of what you have already. This is called a content audit. Use a spreadsheet or organizational software to write down the blog posts, videos, and other pieces of content you previously published (and start keeping track of the new additions).
In your audit, make note of the following:
The type of content (blog post, press release, video, brochure, etc.)
The original publish date
The original headline
The keywords or tags used in the original piece
The word count or length of the content
The number of views, likes, comments, and shares the content originally received
Now you’re ready to make some decisions. What are your marketing goals? Are you (or your supervisors) looking to drive more people to your library webpage? Are you trying to increase social media engagement? Once you establish your goals, look at your old posts and determine which ones will help you reach those goals.
For example, if you want to drive more people to your webpage, and you have a video about your genealogy databases that drove a lot of traffic to your website at the time it was published, mark the video to be updated. It will likely have the same effect today, particularly if it’s refreshed.
Here’s another example. Let’s say your library director really wants to see likes, shares, and comments increase on your library’s new Instagram account. In your list of old content, you notice a blog post from two years ago about a uniquely themed story time that drove a lot of engagement when you posted it on Facebook. Mark that post to be updated. Chances are, with some careful recrafting, it will create the same kind of audience reaction when the updated version is promoted on Instagram.
Now what?
Once you identify the pieces of content you wish to republish, it’s time to update those pieces. Here’s a checklist of options for updating your content.
Are the statistics still relevant?
Are the links and resources still available?
Are quotes still relevant?
Are there new keywords or tags to add?
Can you freshen up the headline?
Do you need to adjust the original length of the piece to make it longer or shorter, based on current best practices?
Can you add a poll, a survey, or a comment section to enhance the content experience?
If your original piece of content requires no changes, you can republish it in its original form. Make a note at the beginning to let your readers or viewers know that you’ve republished it without changing it. You might say, “Here’s a popular blog post you may have missed” or “Here’s something from our archives.” Include the original post date for full transparency.
Have you republished content? What were the results? Share your experience in the comments.
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When you’re trying to figure out how to get all the work you have to get done during this pandemic and you’re feeling overloaded, the one thing you SHOULD NOT sacrifice is communication with your community. In this episode, Angela shares tips to make room in your day for promotion and for celebrating what you can get done instead of being hard on yourself for what gets left on your “to-do” list.
Also Kudos to The Richland Library in South Carolina. Their marketing team recently won the 2020 American Advertising District three (North Carolina, South Carolina & Virginia) Award WIN for their Access Magazine.
What did you think of this episode? Are you struggling with marketing and promotion right now? Do you have tips for handling this crisis that you can share with other libraries? Do you have a nominee for the Kudos segment? Drop a comment below! And subscribe to this series on YouTube to get a new video tip for libraries each week!
This blog consists of my own personal opinions and may not represent those of my employer. Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, click on “Follow” button in the bottom left-hand corner of the page. Connect with me on Twitter,Instagram, and LinkedIn.
This is the second part in a series on creating an editorial calendar for your library marketing. Read part one here.
You’ve chosen a tool for your editorial calendar, and everyone on your team is using it. Now the fun part begins! At least, I think it’s the fun part. Deciding what kind of content to promote and how you’ll execute those promotions is arguably the most crucial part of library marketing. Here’s a simple guide to get you through the process.
The Library Marketer’s Definitive Guide to Creating an Editorial Calendar, Part One: How to Decide What Goes in the Calendar
Step #1: Do everything you can to focus your marketing efforts.
In a perfect world, there are two basic rules for determining your promotions. The first would be: Does this promotion do anything to move our library’s overall strategic goals closer to reality? The second would be: Is this a service or item that cardholders want and need in their lives? Does it provide a tangible value to our cardholders? Anything that falls outside of those two benchmarks is cut. In this perfect scenario, you only promote the things that really matter to your cardholders and to your library’s mission.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. Everyone has to market services, collection items, and projects that have nothing to do with the library’s mission. Library marketers are treated like short order cooks. Promotional requests come in from various coworkers, and we fill them. It’s ineffective and it’s why so much of our marketing fails.
The only thing a library marketing professional can do is to battle back. It may be a slow process. It’ll take time and a lot of persuasion to get the rest of your library system to change its mindset about marketing. But you have to start somewhere!
Your first editorial calendar task is to set parameters for your marketing to the best of your ability. Figure out what you have the power to approve and what you can say “no” to. Then do it.
Change is slow in coming in the library world. This shift toward marketing with a purpose rather than marketing everything under the sun may be met with a lot of push back. I’ve been in my job six years and I’m still working on it. It’s a constant battle. But it’s one worth having because it’s better for my library and better for my cardholders.
Step #2: Choose the tactics that will work best for each promotion. Library marketers have a natural tendency to want to promote everything with every tool in the toolbox. You don’t have to use every tactic available to you. In fact, you don’t really want to! Thoughtfully selecting the method of promotion for each campaign is a smarter use of your time and energy.
For every promotion, I write down a short list of what I know about the promotion. Then I write down my best guess for the kind of library cardholder and non-cardholder who might be interested in the thing I want to promote. Finally, I look at all the tactics at my disposal and decide which ones would be the best for reaching my target audience.
Here’s an example: Earlier this year, my library put a collection of lantern slides on display as part of a specially curated exhibit. These slides were part of our collection. They’d been sitting in a dark storage area for ages.
We do a lot of exhibits at our library, and most feature interesting pieces of our collection. But this one felt special. The librarians who discovered and arranged the slides were psyched. Their managers were psyched. I ran the exhibit idea past some non-library friends to see how they’d react. They used words like “cool”, “unusual”, “interesting,” and “vintage” in describing why they’d want to see the collection.
I decided to promote the exhibit with just four tactics: a press release, posters, wayfaring signage, and social media posts shared with lovers of vintage stuff. I did not promote the exhibit with a slide on the library’s homepage. I did not send an eblast. I did not create digital signage. I did not create a video.
I made these decisions based on my imagined persona of an exhibit guest. They would be a reader of traditional news. They would be someone who like vintage collection items and photos online. They would be someone who might take the time to read printed sign as they walked into the front door of the library.
In the end, the four tactics we chose to use worked well because we spent our time and energy making them really, really good. They fit the target audience. We focused on the content, not the container. We got a ton of press coverage and our social media posts did better than I expected, particularly on Facebook.
Creating four really good pieces of promotion is more effective than creating ten crappy pieces. That’s why choosing the tactics to fit your promotion is important.
Step #3: Leave room in your calendar to remind your cardholders about the services and items they love but might not use daily.
Here’s a good example. My library has a reading recommendation service called Book Hookup. Our cardholders answer three simple questions and they get three reading recommendations back in whatever format they prefer–print, eBooks, or audiobooks. These recommendations are personally selected by a librarian.
I do two campaigns promoting this service every year. I must remind people that it exists because it’s not a service our cardholders use every day. But, those promotions are consistently so successful that, before the promotions begin, we have to assign extra staff to manage the recommendations. That’s because so many people will sign up for personalized reading recommendations through our promotions that we can’t keep up!
Your library has a lot of services that will help people in their everyday lives. Work those into your editorial calendar on a regular basis, even if no one is telling you directly to promote them, particularly if those services are tied to your library’s overall strategy. Your library will thank you.
Step #4: Be flexible. You will want to program blank spaces into your editorial calendar for last-minute promotions. Those holes give you space to make decisions that positively impact your library and your cardholders. And if you don’t end up having anything to fill those holes, they still have a benefit. Space in your calendar will give you and your team time to breathe!
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Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion 