Stop Promoting Randomly: 5 Questions That Improve Library Marketing

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?

Rethinking Your Library Email Strategy: The Surprising Truth About First of the Month Sends!

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March 16, 2026 1

How To Create a Marketing Plan for an Entire Year Even if Your Library’s Strategic Plan Sucks or Is Non-Existent!

This week, I’ll be able to see the world’s largest bottle of catsup. (Ketchup? Catsup? Is there a difference?)

When I learned that I’d be speaking at Reaching Forward South in Collinsville, Illinois, I Googled the area. That’s how I discovered the city is home to a 170-foot water tower shaped like a catsup bottle that just happens to be on the National Registry of Historic Places. It’s even got its own website and fan club.

If you’re like me, you do some strategic planning when you go on a trip. You decide to rent a vehicle or research public transportation. You purchase airline or train tickets and book a hotel. You pick restaurants to sample and decide which tourist attractions you’ll visit.

Some people just land in a city and let fates carry them where they may. (No shade from me. You do you!) I prefer planning because I don’t want to risk seeing or experiencing the best the area has to offer.

A plan, on vacation or in the library, sets clear goals and outcomes. It ensures your time, money, and energy are spent on the most valuable things. It gives you direction and purpose.

Marketing for a library works best when the promotions are tied to a library’s overall strategic plan. But that’s not always as easy as it sounds.

What is the difference between a strategic plan and a marketing plan?

A strategic plan defines targets and objectives for the entire library organization, including facilities, human resources, reader services, youth services, outreach, and more.

A marketing plan outlines your initiatives to support your library’s strategic plan. It clearly defines the collection items, programs, and services you’ll promote, who you’ll target, and how you’ll target them to reach your library’s overall goals.

In a perfect world, every library would have a strategic plan with clearly defined objectives and goals that are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timely (SMART).

But…

If your library lacks a strategic plan, has a strategic plan that’s very vague without clear goals, or is in the middle of creating one (that can be a lengthy process), you may feel stuck and directionless. How do you know what you should be promoting?

What to do when you have very little direction

You can ask your library director or board of directors what they want to accomplish. Without a strategic plan as a guide, you must understand the director’s and the board’s goals.

Even basic statements like “We want to increase program attendance by 25 percent” or “We want to make sure every child has a library card” will guide your marketing.

If you don’t feel comfortable approaching senior leadership, ask your supervisor to step in. Stress the importance of a cohesive plan for moving forward in all areas of your library. This really is the cornerstone of your work.

Once you know the goals of your library, it’s time to create your marketing plan.

Step 1: Define your marketing goals.

Lay out exactly how you’ll help those overall library goals be reached.

For example, let’s say your library has a goal to partner with schools to ensure all third graders in your town are reading at grade level. Your marketing goal might be:

Increase the participation in our library’s 3rd-grade reading program by 25 percent within the next 12 months, as measured by the number of 3rd-grade students enrolled and actively engaging with the program materials and resources.

Step 2: Write down what you know about the community you serve.

Marketers call this a “situation analysis.” This will give you a starting point for your strategy. Ask yourself:

What does your typical cardholder do with their card?
Where do they live?
How do they view your competitors?
How does your library currently fulfill a unique position in your community?

Step 3: Create a list of all your tactics and assets.

Write down all the channels you use to promote your library. This list should include every social media platform you use, every website your library owns, and every print publication you send out, plus emails, print collateral, influencers, in-person events, press releases, podcasts, and videos.

Step 4: Set goals for each tactic and asset.

Let’s say one of your goals is to make sure job seekers in your community use career resources at the library. And let’s say you have a print newsletter that you send every quarter to all the residents of your community.

Look at the specific marketing goal you created in step one. Underneath that, you might write:

“In each issue of our newsletter, we will feature a cardholder who used our library’s services to advance their own career, such as by taking our GED course or using our online job resume builder. We’ll do at least one story on library work as a career. Every quarter, we’ll highlight a service or program that will help our cardholders reach their career goals.”

Step 5: Populate an editorial calendar for the next 12 months.

Now it’s time to plan content topics and themes for each month that will work to reach your goals. Planning a calendar for a full year makes it easy to coordinate promotions across channels. And it will help your supervisor and coworkers to understand what you’ll be doing, when, and why.

You may end up moving things around as you go through the year. That’s okay!

Step 6: Measure success and failure.

Accurately document the results of every promotion you do. This will help you to adjust your strategy next year.

Sometimes you won’t have a clear understanding of what’s working and what’s not working until you see the actual results in numbers on a paper in front of your nose.

One final note of encouragement

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t reach all of your goals. Marketing is an experiment. Sometimes the stuff you do will work, sometimes it won’t. Don’t repeat the things that don’t work! Spend more energy on the things that do work.

P.S. You might also find this helpful

Branding for Your Library: Stand Out From the Crowd With Smart, Strategic Placement of Your Brand

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April 15, 2024 0

🎉🥳The New Year is Here! Here are Five Things for Your Library to Promote in 2021.

Watch Now

The Library Marketing Show, Episode 75

In this episode, I’ll go over five library strategies for 2021.

Kudos in this episode go to the Elsmere Library for a Facebook post and their fun cookie recipe exchange!

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.

December 16, 2020 2

Call It What It Is: Toledo Public Library Explains Their New Brand Strategy

A couple of weeks ago, a Tweet from the deputy director of the Toledo Public Library caught my eye.

Our marketing manager here at the library is leading a charge to “call things what they are” to reduce confusion for customers. We should be doing more of this in libraries and resist the urge for cutesy branding.

— jason kucsma (@J450NK) August 2, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Jason went on to explain, “When I joined the library three plus years ago, we had just launched a kind of umbrella branding for all of our making activities at the library. We called it Make U. It was clever, had a nice logo, and generally served a purpose… for us. Three years later, it’s still a confusing ‘second brand’ for our library (one of many tertiary brands, actually). Terri Carroll (our marketing manager) is working really hard to make the library’s brand the key identifier for all things library. Every time we roll out a new program or service, we have the urge to give it cute or clever branding. It’s just more education we have to do with our customers. So rather than trying to constantly educate people about our new brands, services, and programs, we focus on the library’s brand: a welcoming and accessible space where anyone has access to resources they need to make their lives, their communities, and their futures better. Now we call Make U what it is…tech tools. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Terri in the short time she’s been with us about how we cut through a very noisy marketplace to reach people where they are when they need us.”

This is a major hurdle for my team and library marketer’s across the country! At my Library, I’ve counted no less than TEN branded services. And each one requires education for the staff and public. The names are cute but their meaning is obtuse.

Library marketers struggle with branding. We need to do a better job of defining who we are. We must create a consistent emotional connection with our cardholders if we’re going to compete with the likes of Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Netflix, and Google.

Jason’s co-worker, Toledo Public Library Marketing Manager Terri Carroll, graciously agreed to share her insights on the process.

So many libraries have a set of tertiary brands for their various programs and services. Why is that a problem? Each day, our current and potential customers are bombarded with media messages from well-funded and sophisticated retail, fast food, snack food, entertainment, sports, news, and service companies. While these organizations aren’t competing with us to provide library services, they are competing with libraries for people’s time and attention. If libraries hope to have people notice our message in a noisy marketplace, it is imperative we have one clear brand that makes it easy for people to know who we are and what value we provide. Tertiary brands dilute our message and make it more challenging to connect with customers.

Before the redesign, the Toledo Public Library struggled to bring a host of tertiary brands together to create one cohesive brand.

What prompted you to decide to focus less on giving everything a cutesy name and instead develop and nurture an umbrella brand? I started working at the Library in November and was struck by the fact that each program had its own look and message. The emphasis was on program names and unique graphics, rather than the Library as a whole. For example, a great deal of energy was spent on “logos” for programs such as Kindergarten Kickstart, Ready to Read, and Make U instead of thinking about messaging that clearly connects a valuable service (early literacy or access to technology) with the Library. This approach puts the burden of connecting the dots about the Library’s value and relevance on our customers. It also keeps the Marketing team from thinking strategically as they instead spend energy making everything look different. This is an unfortunate use of resources. Having things look similar within a brand compliance strategy makes it easier for customers to identify Library materials and messaging.

Terri laid out brand elements to create a clear and consistent message that can be understood by staff and library cardholders.

Have you seen positive results from this type of strategy yet? We’ve been working on implementing this strategy since December, so it is tough to extrapolate data yet. For now, positive anecdotal comments to Library staff and leadership such as, “The Library is doing so much,” (when in fact we are doing a similar amount of work) and increased earned media attention are indicators of success. Ultimately, we should realize increases in circulation, door count, and program attendance as well as community and regional stakeholder invitations to be at the table on important issues, speaking opportunities, organizational partnership creations, and election results.

How can other library marketers make the case to their stakeholders, like their board of trustees, the senior leaders, and their staff, that developing a strong brand sense is more productive than creating brands individually as services are unveiled? Stakeholders repeatedly express interest in making sure the community knows about everything the Library does. I have invested a lot of time meeting with all of our internal stakeholders to show them how strong brand management is necessary to meet that goal.

My staff and I also work to keep a focus on making sure all materials and messages are customer-focused. We ask ourselves and our colleagues if our materials and messaging are giving customers all the information they need to engage with the Library. Focusing on how customers understand our Marketing keeps everyone externally (brand) focused and not internally (tertiary brand) focused.

A clear, consistent look helps Toledo Public Library create a connection and makes it easier for their cardholders to recognize their messages.

Do you have any other advice for library marketers looking to strengthen their own brands? It is essential to have senior leadership support for strong brand management. If people are used to the tertiary brands and have enjoyed the creative process (either working with Marketing and/or doing their own design work at the department or branch level), moving to brand compliance can be painful. If those concerns/complaints are taken to senior leadership and exceptions are granted, then the entire brand strategy is compromised.

It is also important to expect some resistance and be willing to talk with people about their questions and concerns. In these conversations, something that seems to really resonate is when I say that we don’t want to re-educate people every time they see something from the Library. We want people to immediately identify a Library program or service. And while staff sees all the materials and, may in fact get a bit tired of the same colors and fonts, this easy identification and brand recognition is essential for customers who are wading through a marketplace of messages and materials.

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August 27, 2018 4

Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion

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library strategy