Note: A newly updated version of this blog post is now published. Read it here.
Note: A newly updated version of this blog post is now published. Read it here.
I hold a controversial opinion. Newsletters are an ineffective tool for library marketing.
I totally understand why libraries create them. Our customers are a wide and diverse audience and our budget is limited. Newsletters are an easy and efficient way to get information to our audience.
But many libraries are frustrated by the lack of demonstrable results from their newsletters, both the print and email versions. And there’s a reason you can’t get good results from a newsletter.
The mistake is: You’re sending the same message to all of your cardholders.
It’s understandable. It feels like the natural thing to do. Your library has great stuff and you want everyone to know about everything.
The problem with that approach is that your cardholders are individuals. One message never fits them all. The needs and interests of your cardholders vary greatly.
I’m not suggesting you ditch your newsletter. By transforming the way you approach your current print and e-newsletter, you can make it actually work! The trick is to make changes that increase your newsletter’s value by refining the message.
Tips that work for both print and e-newsletters
Give your cardholders LOTS more of what THEY want. I know you’ve been keeping track of attendance at events and holds or checkouts of books you promoted in your previous newsletters. If you notice that your newsletter audience turns out for a particular type of event or that they like a particular genre of books or collection items, put MORE of those in your newsletters.
Library marketers are often pressured to promote what their co-workers or bosses think is interesting. Or worse, what their co-workers think the audience NEEDS to hear.
I’ve actually had to gently explain to my colleagues that, while reading classic authors like Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen are good for the brain, most people are not looking for an intellectual challenge when they reach for a book. It’s like getting kids to eat their vegetables. Veggies are healthy, but if your child doesn’t like them, they’ll clamp their mouth shut and refuse to take a bite.
The newsletter audience is the same. You can’t make people attend events or read books because they’re healthy or intellectual. Library marketers sometimes have to be an advocate for their audience; you have to be persistent in your defense of what your cardholders want.
At my library, we pivoted our newsletter to focus more on our the parts of our collection that our cardholders like. We had the data to back it up. We know that our cardholders really love content about coding and coding classes. We know they love mystery books. We know they love workshops about writing and publishing their own books. We learned all of these nuanced preferences by carefully measuring our audience’s response to marketing in all areas. Patterns emerge. And now, we do a lot of promotion around these areas because we know, for a fact, that our cardholders love this kind of content.
Make your content helpful, not promotional. Your cardholders are regularly bombarded with offers, sales, and promotions, both in their inbox and in your mailbox. To get people to read your newsletter, the content needs to be interesting, useful, or helpful.
Hundreds of studies and surveys about consumer behavior show us that content that is educational or entertaining gets better results that content that is promotional. So how can you promote something while being entertaining or informative? Content marketing in the answer.
Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience–ultimately, to drive profitable consumer action.
Content marketing breaks through the noise and the clutter by providing compelling, useful information for your cardholder–any type of information. It addresses whatever pain points your cardholders have. It positions your library as the go-to place for information. It builds trust.
And through content marketing, your library gets a better and deeper understanding of your cardholders. You can use that understanding to do a better job of addressing your cardholders’ needs. It’s a constant circle of giving and it carries more weight for a longer period than a traditional newsletter promotion.
Stop thinking of your publication as a newsletter. Start creating news magazines. Most library newsletters that come to my inbox or mailbox are long and contain a ton of text and images. There isn’t much white space and scanning them is difficult, because there is so much to scan.
At my library, we increased the effectiveness of our print newsletter by transforming it into a magazine. We trimmed it from 16 to 12 pages. My graphic artists started to give the publication a magazine feel in layout, using bolder visuals and shorter, more engaging articles. We left some white space. We changed the balance of the articles from 100 percent promotional to 50 percent informational and 50 percent promotional (even I have to fight the battle with my library to be less overtly promotional!).
What happened when we made these changes? Our news magazine became a must-read. People started asking when the next issue would be out. We had to order more copies. Library staff and outside partners vie for space in the publication. The news magazine is popular!
Tips specific to e-newsletters
Keep the text short and scannable. Your e-newsletter is a touch point, not the end of a conversation. Readers should get enough to be left with the feeling of wanting to know more about a particular subject. Drive your recipients to your website or another platform where they can get more information with compelling text and enticing calls to action.
Make it easy to share your e-newsletter. Include social share buttons that link directly to your library’s social pages.
Segment your e-newsletters. You can segment your e-newsletter in a number of ways… by age, by interest, and by location. This means you’ll need to create more than one e-newsletter. But each one will be targeted to a specific audience, which increases effectiveness. This step will be more work for you but it’s worth it for better results.
By targeting your message, you are more likely to say something that matters significantly to your cardholders. That individualized message makes them more likely to take an action, which makes it more likely that your newsletter will be successful.
More help for library marketers
How the Best Newsletters Get-and Keep-Reader’s Attention from Content Marketing Institute
NoveList’s Guide to Best Practices for Library Newsletters
7 Tips for Creating Engaging Newsletters from Mailjet
Great examples of targeted library newsletters
Dallas Public Library’s Young Black Readers Newsletter
Indian Prairie Public Library’s DVD Preview
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.
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What We Talked About
Library News: A civil California Grand Jury decides that the Santa Cruz Public Library’s potential use of a data analytics tool would threaten patron privacy. The library ended up not using the tool, but it’s an interesting conversation about how much data we can use to market to our cardholders without threatening the sacred privacy of a cardholders’ data. I feel very conflicted about it. Read the article and let me know what you think!
Reader Question: Lori from the Nicolet Federated Library System in Green Bay, Wisconsin asked us to discuss web accessibility basics for library websites. Thank you for this very important question, Lori! We know web accessibility is important. Some of our cardholders may not have full use of their hands. Others have a vision disability. There is a tool you can use to audit your website so you can see where accessibility is an issue and correct it. The tool is free and was developed by the ADA. You can get it as a Chrome extension here. You could also hire a web accessibility expert. They can do a hands-on audit of your site, identify problems, help you to fix them, and keep an eye on your site to make sure you stay in compliance in the future. This company has good reviews. I hope this helps!
Kudos: To the Pima County Public Library. They got media coverage of an overdue postcard notice sent back to them after 40+ years. The story had all the things our cardholders love–mystery, nostalgia, and it reminded the community of the length of service and commitment of the library in the community. It’s hard to get media coverage so kudos to them for finding this unique pitch! Watch it here.
Stay in Touch
I’m speaking at two conferences this fall and you can register for both on the Upcoming Events page. If you come to OLC, you’ll be able to tour the Downtown Main Library where I work! I’m getting ready to add new events soon so check back.
Have an idea for the next Library Marketing Live Show? Submit it now.
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.
The Library Marketing Show Episode 8: Fighting Back Against the Endless Poster-Flyer-Bookmark Cycle!
Alright my friends, you asked for it and I’ve delivered. The Library Marketing Show is now pre-recorded and posted on YouTube! This week’s episode comes to you from the vintage newspaper stacks of my library.
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Please subscribe, comment, and share the video. I’d love to be able to grow my channel from nothing to something. This is a great exercise for me. I’m going to learn a ton about YouTube! And there are lots of features I can add if I get a certain amount of views and watch time, as you likely know. Thank you in advance!
What We Talked About
Library news: I discussed the recent decision by four publishing companies to change the lending models for eBook and eAudiobook leases to public libraries. It’s going to affect the way libraries market their collection and cause customer service complaints at libraries to rise. And that makes me angry.
Reader question: Babette from the Licking County Library wrote in to ask me to discuss this: “How to help your ‘traditional’ staff understand and EMBRACE new ways to market. They are so disappointed that we are not doing tons of paper flyers, promoting every program on FB, press releases not being in the newspaper, etc. Staff struggling with the change. Sigh….”
Great question, and thanks Babette! I tried to share how I’ve handled this ongoing issue by explaining (over and over again) to staff that embracing new marketing tactics, particularly digital tactics, is not doing “less” marketing but actually doing more. It’s more efficient, it reaches customers where they are, and it allows us to get our message in front of new customers. I also love to share the marketing statistic that says we have to “touch” our customers 4-7 times with a marketing message before they will “convert” or take an action on any marketing message. If a person doesn’t come into your physical branch, they’ll never see your print marketing materials! I also tried to explain why I’m not ever super worried about press coverage of my library, particularly by newspapers. There are better ways to communicate your message, like a customer-facing blog. And when you’re doing the messaging, you get to control the narrative. For more on that subject, read How to Get Media Coverage Without a Press Release.
Kudos: Finally, I gave a shout-out to my friends at the Jefferson County Public Library for this hilarious and clever response to my stress-related tweet on Tuesday! I laughed all night!
Stay in Touch
I’m speaking at two conferences this fall and you can register for both on the Upcoming Events page. If you come to OLC, you’ll be able to tour the Downtown Main Library where I work! I’m getting ready to add new events soon so check back.
Have an idea for the next Library Marketing Live Show? Submit it now.
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.
I dread Wednesdays.
On that day of the week, I usually have between five and seven meetings. I basically spend the day hopping from one conference room to another.
Not so long ago, most of those meetings would last beyond 60 minutes. Tangents were pursued. Ideas were dissected in great detail. My team and I were often blind-sided by requests to come up with an entire marketing campaign for an idea we’d only learned of moments before. It was unproductive.
As a marketing manager responsible for proving the bottom-line benefits of your marketing, it can be tempting to rely on recurring team meetings and regular check-ins to make sure you know exactly what’s going on with your team. But when long meetings evolve into habit, their value tends to plummet.
No meeting should ever last beyond 60 minutes. There are a couple of reasons for this. After 60 minutes of intense discussion, participants begin to lose interest. Their creativity and energy wanes. And the more time you spend in meetings, the less time you and your team have to do ACTUAL work.
Obviously you can’t control every meeting. But when you’re running the agenda, you can create an atmosphere of productivity and creativity while setting an example of efficiency for the rest of the library staff.
I don’t remember how it started but someone in my library’s senior leadership team took the initiative to institute a more efficient meeting structure. Suddenly, everyone was following this person’s lead. It was amazing and liberating.
I started instituting the 60-minute or less meeting rule about a year ago in my department and it’s worked so well that I recently introduced it in another setting.
I’m the chair of my school district’s bond issue campaign and our core committee meetings are 60 minutes or less. It was funny how many people from that group have commented about my 60-minute meeting pledge! It had never occurred to them that meetings, even ones where important decisions are made, could last less than an hour.
If you want to increase productivity in your library, here’s how to execute a 60-minute meeting.
Super prioritize your agenda. For my library team, I divide action items into categories: the weekly schedule, immediate concerns, future concerns, and individual tasks. These four categories appear on the agenda every single week. Under each category, I list the items that need to be discussed in order of their priority. Next to each item, I list the name of the person in charge of that item or project. For the bond issue committee meetings, I simply list items in order of their priority without categories.
Time it out ahead of time. Try to estimate how much time you’ll need to discuss each item. If your total discussion time is more than 60 minutes, do some more prioritizing with your agenda. Once your agenda is set, make sure everyone attending the meeting has a copy so they can follow along and stay focused.
Set expectations at the beginning of the meeting. As the leader, set the example and start on time. Remind the team that the meeting will last 60 minutes and that you’ll be working to keep discussions on track. Assure them that if further discussions are needed on a particular item, you will schedule a side meeting. Off-topic discussions will be tackled outside of the formal meeting time.
The first time I made this announcement at the bond issue meeting, everyone looked shocked. I was worried that people would start watching the clock and timing me, thus cutting the productivity. But because I set firm expectations, the group trusts me to stick to them. They end up focusing more on the items we need to discuss. It’s funny how that works!
Watch your agenda word choices. Use words like “update” rather than “discussion” to help frame the conversation and give mental cues to attendees that work for the meeting will need to be done before the meeting actually happens. If a key decision needs to be made in the meeting, use the word “decision” in your action item to cue the attendees that you plan to come to a consensus at this meeting.
Take notes. Make note of who is assigned to each project. Give clear deadlines and expectations for each action item and include those in the notes. After the meeting, send out a copy of the meeting notes so everyone is clear about what they’re responsible for and when it’s due.
Continue to give time updates throughout the meeting. It’s OK to say, “We have 15 minutes left so we’re going to discuss one more item that is a priority to us. The rest of the items on this agenda will be discussed at a later meeting.” This will help keep discussions on track.
The LIVE LIBRARY MARKETING TALK ON INSTAGRAM is changing format. I have decided to pre-record my segments and post them to YouTube! I still want your email questions and topic suggestions ahead of time. Just fill out this form. If I pick your topic, I’ll send you a personal link to the video after it’s posted. I’m going to start posting my video segments on Thursdays so watch your email for that. Thank you to everyone who weighed in on the video decision!
And check out these upcoming events and webinars where we can connect and discuss library marketing. Registration links included.
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.
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What We Talked About
Shandi from the Illinios Heartland Library System sent me this question: I just read your blog article “How to Launch a Library Blog.” I would love to hear more about this! Specific question: Our new website won’t be ready for maybe 8 months (at our current rate). I want to add a blog with the introduction of our new site. When do you suggest beginning to curate articles? I’m thinking I could start now with evergreen pieces, right? Thanks!
So I talked through my answer to that question and gave some advice for creating evergreen content for a library marketing blog. I’m excited to see what Shandi’s blog looks like and to read the content she curates.
If you’ve got a library blog that you really love, please let me know in the comments. I’m curating a list of great library blogs to share in a future post so get your nominations in! Thanks for the question, Shandi.
Stay in Touch
Thanks to everyone who attended the webinar with Library Journal and Recorded Books on July 25. I am going to answer all the questions either on the live show, on my blog, or via email so be watching for that!
I’m speaking at two conferences this fall and you can register for both on the Upcoming Events page. The OLC released their full agenda this week and it looks like a great conference. Plus, you’ll be able to tour my library!
Have an idea for the next Library Marketing Live Show? Submit it now.
We’ll chat on Instagram on Tuesday at noon EST for about 15 minutes. My handle is @Webmastergirl so follow me to see the show live!
A few weeks ago, I had an incredibly disappointing interaction with a man I’ve looked up to for ages. I’m not going to name him or his website in this post. But I’ve been listening to his podcasts for more than five years. I’ve sent staff to his conference. I’ve recommended his website and his materials here on the blog. I’ve met him in person. He was lovely to me.
But about a year ago, he started doing something that really upset me. He got into the habit of interrupting guests on his podcast. All. The. Time.
I’m a manager. I’ve been trying to foster better listening skills in myself and my staff.
It irked me that this person never let anyone finish a thought. It got so bad that he started cutting people off as they were explaining concepts and giving specific instructions on marketing tactics.
I decided to email him to ask him to stop interrupting his guests. I was as polite. I told him I loved his show and website. I said that I wished he would just let people finish their thoughts.
Here was his response:
Thanks for the feedback Angela. I pre-discuss with all of my guests that I often have questions and will likely stop people who are fast talkers and dig deeper. They all know I will do it. Indeed many of my listeners love that I do this. For example: ” I have to say that you have a special gift for asking great questions and making sure the audience can actually visualize the process & pin down your guest to clarify so we fully understand the material presented. It’s like you have a second sense for what we are thinking. I think of a question, and BAM!…you come in with the perfect question that was on my mind. (I don’t even know if I’m saying this right but I bet you know what I mean). I listen every day and look forward to the incredible, valuable and TIMELY nature of what you share. I’ve been a long-term fan of your blog for years and if anyone is seeking to stay current in what’s going on with everything related to social media marketing, you’d be crazy not to take advantage of this invaluable podcast. Thank you, for your gift of putting yourself in your audiences shoes and knowing how to get clarity from your guests. It’s truly an awareness most podcasters lack. Truly inspiring!”
So yes I understand that sometimes I interrupt guests but it really is by design to help make the show better AND the guests are fully in agreement that it’s okay for me to do it.
I NEVER intend for it to be rude EVER. I am actually friends with most of the guests that get on my show so I will reach out to them and see what they say. Thanks again for your perspective.
There’s a lot to unpack here. In a nutshell, this was a defensive response. I didn’t feel heard. I didn’t feel acknowledged. I didn’t feel that this person was willing to do anything to address my complaint. The unattributed customer testimonial is self-important.
I ended up unsubscribing from the podcast.
And because I always try to learn from my experiences, I decided to use this exchange as a catalyst to think about the best way to respond to negative comments from library customers.
Libraries have it pretty easy. Most of our cardholders love us and rave about everything we do. It’s good to be loved.
But we do have our critics. They may post their comments online or in email. They may express their complaints to you in person at the front desk or at events.
Like this podcaster, your immediate reaction may be to go to defensive mode. You may feel the need to defend your library, its services, and practices. That’s a totally natural response.
But I want you to take a step back (and a big, deep breath) and find the opportunity in that negative comment. There are ways to response to customer feedback, even negative feedback, that acknowledge the complaint without damaging the relationship between your customer and your library.
Your response to complaints can also build credibility for your organization. And, because emotions are involved, it’s best to have a process in place beforehand so you can handle complaints professionally and swiftly. Here are your new best practices.
Don’t censor online comments. Unless the comment violates your social media or website standards of behavior in some grave way, don’t hide the comment and don’t want to respond negatively.
Respond as quickly as possible. It’s important to address the issue as soon as you can. The basic rule of thumb for businesses now is to respond to complaints within 60 minutes. I know that’s difficult for a lot of libraries, who struggle to balance staff work time in a 24-hour a day world. Make your best effort to respond to complaints quickly. Never let a complaint sit without an answer for more than 24 hours, even if that means you have to answer it on your off time.
Acknowledge the customer’s words and apologize. By simply telling your user that you hear what they are saying, and that you are sorry for the situation, you can diffuse a good deal of the anger or hurt that can be associated with a bad library experience. An apology is not a sign of guilt. It doesn’t mean that the complainer is right. Just saying, “I’ve been in situations like this before and it’s frustrating. I’m sorry this happened to you” can help to smooth the road for resolving the issue. It increases the likelihood that your complainer will leave the interaction with a renewed love for the library.
A co-worker asked me what I had hoped to hear from the podcast host I emailed. This was all he would have had to say to keep me as a fan and listener: “I’m sorry. I’ve been interrupted while speaking and it is frustrating. I’ll work on that.”
If the problem cannot be solved easily, take it offline. Ask the cardholder for their email address so you can continue to resolve the complaint without doing so in front of an audience. “I’m sorry to hear you are having this problem. We want to make it right. Can I have your email so I can ask for more details about your experience? Then I can make sure your issue gets in front of the right person and is addressed.”
Realize that you cannot please everyone. Every once in a while, someone will complain about something and you will not be able to fix the problem. Apologize, explain your library’s side of the situation as best you can, and move on.
Don’t forget to join us for the LIVE LIBRARY MARKETING TALK ON INSTAGRAM every Tuesday at noon ET. We’ll talk about library marketing topics for about 15 minutes each week. My handle is Webmastergirl. You can email questions and topic suggestions ahead of time. Just fill out this form.
And check out these upcoming events and webinars where we can connect and discuss library marketing. Registration links included.
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.
We did a big, big thing at my library this year.
We launched a blog.
It’s been a long time coming. I first pitched the idea of a blog to senior leadership in 2015. I created a document that explained the reasons why our library needed a blog. It also laid out my bare bones ideas for how the content creation process would work.
Marketing Advantages to Having a Library Blog
- Easy, cheap, effective way to promote smaller, niche programs.
- We no longer have to rely on traditional media to get the word out about programs and services. We have our own publishing platform for reaching our audience. Traditional media outlets will follow the blog. The posts will be more engaging than a press release and will pitch themselves as bigger story ideas.
- The blog will give us something to link to for promotional posts on social media.
- A blog would be a place to show our thought leadership. We are the information experts! We can demonstrate why people should care about what we say in a long-form, insightful, and meaningful way.
- Easy way to keep our brand top of mind all the time.
- Easy way to show the Library’s human side and let our customers get to know one another.
- Partnership opportunity: We can invite partners to write posts for the library, creating great, shareable content for our users and in turn getting our posts shared by our partners.
So How Would This Work?
- Marketing would be the centralized location for publication-we would manage the editorial calendar, recruit writers, copy edit, publish, and promote posts.
- We would set a cadence for posts—one post per week to start—and re-evaluate at a later date.
- We would recruit post writers from all branches and departments at the Library. We would also recruit Library customers, evangelists, and fellow bloggers and influencers to write guest posts. We would provide them with a simple template for writing their posts, which we would copy-edit and publish. We would ask all guest writers to share the content, once published, on their platforms, giving us instant exposure to their audience.
- Editorial standards will be high: content must be written in a conversational tone, AP style usage of punctuation and grammar must be adhered to, and posts must be engaging, shareable, and interesting to our core audience.
- We would also re-purpose content to use as posts, providing new/updated/additional information not seen in print from sources such as Library newsletters, and email.
- We would evaluate top performing posts once per month and adjust our editorial calendar as necessarily based on data.
I also created a mock editorial calendar listing various post ideas and who might be tapped to write them. After presenting these to my boss, I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
For four long years.
Finally, in the summer of 2018, there was major leadership change at our library. Our previous director resigned and a new person took the director’s role. And a few months after that, marketing got the green light for a blog.
To say that there was much rejoicing and celebrating among my staff would be an understatement. After the confetti was cleaned up and the champagne was gone (I’m kidding–there was no confetti or champagne and I regret this immensely), we realized we had to launch this thing as we had promised. And so, we did! Here’s our beautiful finished product.
Our first blog was published on March 4, 2019. So far, we’ve published 65 posts on the blog.
It has already fulfilled all of the advantages I listed in the proposal document. Traffic to our website is up. Media are now going to our blog for story ideas about the library. Our search ranking increased. We have lots of partner organizations asking for permission to write posts for us. Our staff members are writing posts and using the blog as a way to let the public know about the important work they’re doing in their branches and departments. We haven’t spent any money creating beyond staff time. And it helps us to stay top-of-mind with our cardholders and the community at large.
We did learn some big lessons during the process and I want to share them with you now.
Lessons Learned While Launching a Library Blog
Lesson #1: The hardest part is getting started. It took forever to get buy-in on the idea. Keep advocating. Don’t give up.
Lesson #2: Building something from scratch is exciting and frustrating. It was liberating to have the freedom to do whatever we wanted. It was also terrifying. Lean into it! Be open and honest about your fears and expectations. Keep your supervisors in the loop about your observations as you work through the process.
Lesson #3: Communication with staff is vital. Get a vision and guidelines set down on paper and approved as soon as possible, then tell staff so they can begin to build excitement among cardholders. Their enthusiasm is your best marketing tool.
Lesson #4: The first year will be about experimentation. Set a posting schedule that you can keep to without having a stroke. Write all kinds of posts to see what interests your audience. Experiment with posting on different days of the week to see which is best for capturing your audience’s attention.
Lesson #5: Promotion of your blog is just as important as your blog itself. Make sure you work out a plan for how you’ll promote the blog once it’s up and running.
My big piece of advice is to actually refrain from promoting the fact that you have a blog until you have a cache of articles. Promote individual posts but wait a couple of weeks to start talking about the blog as a whole service. Once you have a variety of posts up on the blog, then you can do your big promotional push and reveal. You’ll have to do this full push campaign at least once a year to remind the public that the blog exists, and to let new cardholders and community members know that it’s there.
Lesson #6: Your blog doesn’t have to be perfect on launch day. Pick a launch day and stick to it. It can be a work in progress. You can fix things as you go along. But if you wait for it to be exactly perfect, it’ll never get off the ground.
Lesson #7: Measure and report. Data is your friend. Evaluate what works and what doesn’t. look at the data but also gather feedback from staff and customers about what they want to see.
Don’t forget to join us for the LIVE LIBRARY MARKETING TALK ON INSTAGRAM every Tuesday at noon ET. We’ll talk about library marketing topics for about 15 minutes each week. My handle is Webmastergirl. You can email questions and topic suggestions ahead of time. Just fill out this form.
And check out these upcoming events and webinars where we can connect and discuss library marketing. Registration links included!
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 