Library Marketing Basics


Book Description

Here is an accessible, step-by-step, easy to understand, and hands-on resource for any librarian who is interested in learning basic marketing tips to raise the profile of their library. While other books on library marketing are dense and assume that the library has a full-time marketing staff person, a publicist, a graphic designer, and a big fat budget., this book offers tips and tricks (often free) that any librarian can do to market the library. It will focus on the small changes to the services a library provides to raise its profile. Library Marketing Basics is designed for beginners who are new to library marketing. Any librarian can market their library, but they must understand what true marketing is all about, and how to do it right. In this guide, you'll: Learn what true library marketing is, and what it’s not Plan a large scale marketing campaign / awareness campaign on a shoestring budget Learn how to market yourselves as librarians! Develop your own professional identity and brand Learn tips and tricks on obtaining buy-in from your colleagues and the entire organization, even if they are resistant! Learn how to develop relationships with stakeholders in order to raise the profile of your library You'll also find practical examples from the non-library /corporate sector on how to use currently existing marketing tools and apply them to your library. The book focuses on developing a “library” brand, in addition to creating an effective marketing plan, social media guidelines, identifying assessment tools, and providing best practices when developing signage, writing website vocabulary, and designing promotional materials. Library Marketing Basics will show that you don’t need a big budget to market the library. You just need a small team of like-minded colleagues to brainstorm creative ways to raise awareness with your audience. Marketing is all about the valuable intangible and tangible aspects (of your library) and how you connect them with your users.




Marketing Your Library


Book Description

Concise, how-to case studies from practicing public, school, academic, and special librarians provide proven strategies to improve brand management, campaign organization, community outreach, media interaction, social media, and event planning and implementation. Intended for the novice and the old hand, individuals and large staffs, this valuable guide provides librarians with the effective marketing tools necessary to help their libraries thrive in these challenging times.




Blueprint for Your Library Marketing Plan


Book Description

In these challenging times, libraries face fierce competition for customers and funding. Creating and implementing a marketing plan can help libraries make a compelling case and address both issues—attracting funding and customers by focusing on specific needs. But where and how do you start?




Marketing Your Library's Electronic Resources


Book Description

It’s often hard to juggle promoting a library’s e-resources effectively at the same time as building basic visibility within the community it serves. Useful for librarians at any type of institution, this How-To-Do-It Manual guides readers through every step of developing, implementing, and evaluating plans to market e-resources in an approachable and user-friendly way. Kennedy and LaGuardia show how front line librarians can improve awareness of under-utilized resources and increase demand for more of the same, thereby encouraging increased funding. Their book includes Four complete programs from both public and academic libraries A step-by-step organization guide, with a variety of feedback and assessment forms which can be used as models Numerous examples of well-executed plans and outcomes




Look, It's Books!


Book Description

For the elementary or middle school librarian (or the classroom teacher) looking to encourage literacy, this volume provides detailed ideas for promoting reading and encouraging students to learn about and use the library. The work begins with practical ideas to market library services, including curriculum suggestions such as lessons to teach the Dewey Decimal System. A second section focuses on economical ideas for decorating library spaces and various themes for reading programs as well as instructions for carrying these themes school-wide. Numerous patterns for use in the various displays and suggested surveys to fine-tune library programs to the needs of a specific student body are also included.




Practical Marketing for the Academic Library


Book Description

This down-to-earth book offers practical marketing solutions for reaching students, faculty, and administration in community college and university libraries, based on real-world examples of team-based communication and practice. In an age in which federal funding for libraries is being cut, libraries of every size and type must prove their value. Practical Marketing for the Academic Library offers academic librarians approachable methods for marketing to students, faculty, and administration, and it also inspires them to attempt new structures for marketing initiatives, including encouraging existing staff to form teams with wide ranges of skills. Librarians from all academic libraries, including at community colleges, can incorporate these ideas even when budgets are tight and staff is limited. While there are many books on library marketing, few specifically cover the diversity within academic institutions and the student body as well as how to target marketing to faculty and administrations. Villamor and Shotick approach library marketing from diverse perspectives and teach readers how to increase student engagement, assess library programs, and connect library marketing to the goals of the overall institution.




Library Marketing and Communications


Book Description

Effectively marketing libraries by persuasively communicating their relevance is key to ensuring their future. Speaking directly to those in senior leadership positions, Anderson lays out the structural and organizational changes needed to help libraries answer the relevance question and maximize their marketing and communications efforts. Focusing on big-picture strategies, she shares lessons learned from her 20+ year career in library marketing and communications. No matter what type or size of library you help to lead, by reading this book you will - gain insight into why libraries need to tell their stories more effectively than they are today; - be able to craft a strategic roadmap for marketing your library and communicating its value in a variety of ways that resonate with key audiences; - see why improvements to the structure of your marketing and communications team can lead to better results; - learn practical methods for incorporating audience research into your planning; - know how to remove customer barriers and discontinue practices that are thwarting your marketing efforts; - receive guidance on preparing for potential crises; - understand how to be more community-focused by forming and sustaining partnerships; and - feel confident in engaging with stakeholders so that they become your library's best ambassadors. This book will shake up your marketing and communications approach, helping you implement real changes for lasting results.




Marketing Your Library's Electronic Resources


Book Description

When front line librarians improve awareness of under-utilized resources, thereby increasing demand for more of the same, it can also encourage increased funding for the library. This book's flexible, step-by-step layout makes it an ideal resource for a wide range of learning styles, institutional environments, and levels of marketing experience.




How to Launch an Author Awards Program at Your Library


Book Description

Establishing an awards program for self-published authors offers libraries new ways to bolster their relevance and expand upon their roles as curators and "keepers of story." This guide shows you how. For many reasons, up until now librarians have ignored the nearly half-million self-published books available for purchase. This book details how to find and promote librarian-curated, self-published books, covering every step in the process—from assembling a committee and recruiting judges to soliciting submissions, handling the nominated authors, judging the entries, and promoting the contest and contest winner. Written by the founding members of the Soon-to-be-Famous Illinois Author Project, the first librarian-curated award for self-published works, this book shows you how to use the process outlined by these library marketing professionals to run a successful author awards program. You can also apply their proven methods and tools to evaluate self-published books written by local authors that you are considering adding to your collections.




Raising the Tech Bar at Your Library


Book Description

This book explains how librarians can capitalize on the growing interest and need of patrons for help with technology by expanding their library's tech services to build community engagement and support. Keeping up with technology is more critical and difficult than ever. This challenge exists not only for library staff but for their patrons as well. Today's librarians are often barraged with increasingly complex questions from their patrons about technology—from loading eBooks onto their readers to helping resurrect dead laptops. Why not capitalize on this opportunity and transform your library into a first-stop, go-to resource for your community's tech needs? Raising the Tech Bar at Your Library: Improving Services to Meet User Needs demonstrates a variety of ways to expand library services to better serve your community, including how to establish tech bars and tech centers, provide tech training and one-on-one tech help, host drop-in demos, and create a coding "dojo." The book covers after-school programs, makerspaces, and embedded librarianship as well. The authors draw on their personal experience to offer a practical blueprint for launching your tech initiative, starting with the preliminary steps of evaluating community needs and getting administrative and public buy-in to obtaining funding, training non-tech staff, setting up and launching your program, and evaluating the services you've established. The book ends with a look to the future that supplies provocative and exciting ideas of how libraries with innovative, tech-focused leadership can push the edge even further. This book serves a wide audience—all public librarians as well as library administrators, those who work in IT departments as well as adult or youth services, and reference librarians who are interested in expanding into this important and exciting area.