Marketing

I understand marketing is not advertising or promoting your library, but something different.  No more posters giving details on what the library has to offer.  Marketing is much more sophisticated.  It is getting out and interacting with your users.  What do they want, what do you offer, how do you keep users informed.  Looking at what some libraries do it is easy to become discouraged because they seem to offer so much, especially if you think you have nothing to offer.  But we all do.

I read all the further reading and found some very useful advice.  Planning what to do with objectives and investigating the necessary tools made sense; and I have a list of the points made like Identifying a need, developing a plan, finding the right tools.  My inital reaction was what do my users want and what do I want to tell them?  Are they the same thing? Thus before going any further  a survey would need to be undertaken to discover this.  It could also be used to see how best to reach them, Twitter, Facebook, or something totally different.  Then we can start to inform users what we offer and, if possible, what they would like us to offer. It might be renewing books online or what databases we offer.  Libraries have activities and services which users might be interested in.  The social networking tools offer great potential and apparently they do not cost very much.  By marketing the library you may interact with that group of users who do not use the library.

But to work effectively they require a great deal of time.  Planning, evaluating and just informing users.  I thought Orkney libraries had a really good outreach programme, connecting with their users.  But they used both Twittter and Facebook and found there was little overlap between those who use one and those who used the other.  They also admitted it took quite a bit of staff time both informing users and replying.  The other thing is that it has to be kept up-to-date or users loose interest.  This is good if you have things going on that you can tell users about. 

My reaction is I can see that marketing can produce excellent results in keeping readers informed and that feedback about the library service would be really useful.  In library systems where things are going on it is a good way to reach readers.  In my small library I suspect much of what we have to say, at present, can be said via the library web pages. But I will be putting a survey, using survey monkey, on my list of things to do.  I will review how we are connecting, or not, with our uses and offering the services they expect or would like.