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Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion

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Don’t Release All Your Library Promotions at the Same Time: Why a Staggered Approach Reaches More People!

Shelver in the 16mm film area of the stacks, May 26th, 1974. Photo courtesy Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

I am a new-ish fan of K-pop.

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.

I talked more about this idea in this episode of the Library Marketing Show. Try it and let me know if you see an increase in the effectiveness of your marketing work.

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How to Manage Your Marketing Without Losing Your Ever-Loving Mind

A library marketer is really a project manager.

That phrase is the best description of our job. We are all planning and managing projects. We are scheduling and executing campaigns. We’re delegating. We manage multiple people who contribute to blog and social media posts. And unless you’re a super organized genius, all that coordination can cause you to lose your sanity.

I sometimes walk into my office in the morning feeling fantastic, and by the time I open my email and see a 30-message thread between departments about a piece of content I need for marketing, I can feel the steam rolling out of my ears.

Project management is like waiting tables. You have multiple customers who all want different things from you. They order at different times and their food comes out at unpredictable intervals. In the meantime, you must keep checking back and making sure they have everything they need for the moment. You must also keep them informed about how their meal is progressing.

It’s the same when for library marketing. We are working on multiple campaigns and we have lots of different customers, internally and externally. So how do you make sure you get all your work done without losing track of projects, content, and posts? It’s not easy.

Many of you have said that project management causes you grief and stress. Many of you don’t have a staff. You are doing this job solo. You’re doing branch work in addition to marketing. Your job is hard.

I have a system, developed over five years of trial and error. I thought I’d share it with you. I hope my tips relieve you of some stress.

Train other library staff to plan. I make it a point to stop by once every month or two to talk to all the departments that contribute to my marketing schedule. I ask them to tell me what is coming up in the next one to three months. At the end of each of those meetings, I make it a point to tell them to let me know if they start planning anything at any point. These “touch-base meetings” sometimes only last 15 minutes but they are incredibly valuable.

To be honest, it took me about a year of doing this to get my coworkers trained to let me in on their plans early. I realized later that most of them thought it best to wait to tell me about an event until they had all the details worked out. Now, they’ll give me a heads-up even if they only know the general subject of the event and the date. That way, I can work it into my schedule ahead of time and plan.

Share your schedule. I noticed that when I shared my promotional schedule with my coworkers, they got a good sense of the kind of work involved in creating a campaign. They started sharing more info with me because they could see the work involved. Don’t be precious with your schedule. Share it… and let everyone see how much work and planning goes into each piece.

Set deadlines and enforce them. I do this for lots of my content, but especially when it comes time for our summer reading program. It’s a massive marketing campaign, the biggest we do all year. I create a schedule by the first week of February. In it, I share the deadlines for each piece of the marketing with everyone involved. This sets clear expectations. I also do this for those who contribute to our quarterly content marketing magazine. I send reminders one month and one week before the submission deadline so it’s clear what I need and when I need it.

Use your calendar. I  put appointment reminders in my Outlook calendar to check on the status of certain projects.  I can look at my calendar each day and remember that I need to check up on certain things. I even put calendar reminders in for things like changing signs or updating content.

Don’t respond immediately to requests. This habit was hard to form but it’s the best discipline I’ve set for myself. When someone comes to be to tell me they need marketing for an event or service, I generally do not drop everything to plan out the marketing. I will put it on my to-do list for the next day, or even the next week. That gives me time to think about the best way to market each request.

Set aside time each week for planning. I have a designated planning day. I set aside a couple of hours on that day to purposefully think through my marketing. I make lists and set deadlines. It makes me more focused and helps me to know I have that time to think about what’s coming down the road.

Say no sometimes. Listen, I know it’s an uncomfortable conversation. I know you want to help everyone. You may feel pressured to do it all. I hate saying no. But sometimes, it is necessary. If the request doesn’t align with the library’s overall strategy, I say no.

Your time is limited. If you try to do everything for everyone, you won’t do anything well. Sometimes, you must say no. It may not make your friends, but it will make you better at your job. You were hired to do what’s best for the library.

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