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Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion

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

Photo courtesy Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library

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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Watch Me Set 3 Library Marketing Goals for Real-Life Libraries in 60 Seconds or Less.🎯 And Hey, You Can Do This Too!

Watch this video now

#LibraryMarketing Show, episode 216

Setting goals for library marketing is incredibly important. A couple of weeks ago, I issued a challenge.

You all responded and I accepted. So here’s the payoff: we’re going to set some goals in 60 seconds in this episode. And you’re going to see just how easy it is.

Plus someone will receive kudos!

Do you have a suggestion for a topic for a future episode? Want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.

Thanks for watching!

Miss the last episode? No worries!

Will I see you soon?

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Your Library Promotions Are Probably Missing One Essential Step for Success. No Sweat! 😅 Here’s How To Fix It.

Photo courtesy Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library

This week I want you, my dear reader, to make me a promise.

Please, for the love of all that is wonderful and majestic about libraries, add one critical step to your library marketing and promotions.

I want you to start setting goals.

Now, I know this may make you sigh/scream/cry/get angry at me. I know you are incredibly busy. I know you are trying your best every day to create effective library promotions. And I want you to have ALL the success possible.

Which is why I am asking this tiny but incredibly important thing of you.

Goals are an absolute necessity for library marketing success. Full stop.

And they will make your work EASIER for you. I promise.

Why you should set goals for your library promotions

Goals will help you:

  • Focus your efforts, allowing you to measure your progress and determine whether your promotions are successful.
  • Establish priorities so you can show your supervisors, your co-workers, your community, your donors, and yourself where your energy is best spent.
  • Stay motivated. Goals will help you identify your successful promotions so you can repeat them and create more success!
  • Reach your library’s overall strategic goals more quickly.

Where to start with goal setting for library promotions

Your marketing goals should align with and support your library’s overall strategic goals.

For example, let’s say your library’s strategic plan includes an objective to improve the kindergarten readiness of children in your service area. A goal you could set for your library marketing is:

To increase the circulation of our library’s picture book collection.

But that goal isn’t quite good enough. To turn this from an okay goal to an effective, meaningful marketing goal, you have to add two things:

  • A number to reach for
  • A time frame for reaching your goal.

Here’s your new, more meaningful goal:

To increase circulation of our library’s picture book collection by at least 10 percent before June 30, 2024.

Here’s another example from a real library. The Buda Public Library’s strategic plan includes this objective: “Create and circulate Maker Kits, for wider accessibility of the library’s technological resources.”

Their library will likely do all sorts of things to promote the Maker Kits: emails, social media posts, bookmarks, and more.

A meaningful goal they can (and should!) set is:

To get 100 checkouts of our library’s Maker Kits in a 12-month period.

See how easy that is?

The most important thing to remember about goal setting for library marketing is to define what you want to do specifically.  

Do you want to increase circulation? By how much? And in what time frame?

Are you looking to boost the use of a certain part of your collection, like your digital materials?  By how much? And by when?

Are you trying to get more people to participate in your event? What percentage increase in attendance do you wish to achieve in what amount of time?

You can set both long-term and short-term goals for library marketing success. A long-term goal might be to get 500 downloads of your library’s new app by December 31st. A short-term goal might be to increase Kanopy streams by 25 percent before the end of the month.

One important question to ask yourself

A key element of library marketing goal setting is to make sure your goal is realistic. If your goal is too far-fetched, you and your coworkers may end up feeling demoralized when you fail to achieve it.

For example, if you try to double traffic to your library website in a month, you are likely setting yourself up for failure. Instead, ask yourself this question when you are setting goals: Is this goal ambitious AND achievable?

The final step

Once you’ve set a goal, write it down.  Why? Studies show the most successful people write their goals down on paper!  

More advice

Paid Partnership for the Win! How a Library System Turned a Holiday Tradition Into an Opportunity To Reach New Library Marketing Goals

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:

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