Early in July 1982, Larry Walters tied more than 40 weather balloons to his lawn chair and rose 16,000 feet above the smog over Los Angeles. Spotted by various aircraft, he descended by shooting the balloons with a BB gun, eventually drifting some 20 miles. He ended up hanging from some power lines. FAA officials fined him $4,000 while shaking their collective heads. No one knows what happened to the lawn chair.
Occasionally, one hears of library marketing campaigns launched with about as much forethought as Larry’s jaunt above L.A. In the bad old days, interested librarians would huddle around cauldrons muttering various and sundry spells, hoping to catch a glimpse of a marketing idea that would concoct greater visibility or better public relations. Those cauldrons have long since bubbled away their last vision—and that is just as well since some of them were far less than the sum of their parts. Today, libraries must test their steel with legions of entertainment and information-gathering competitors, and unfortunately many show up on the battle line with marketing strategies borrowed from George Armstrong Custer’s playbook at Little Big Horn.
Marketing takes more than cauldrons or brainstorming: Marketing needs a plan. Texas Tech University has that plan and truckloads of evidence that it works.
The challenge we all face is that the diverse and divergent audiences we must address also have diverse and divergent communication venues. It is not just that one size does not fit all; some have no sizes. Each audience must be approached by multiple venues over time—it’s a complicated and creative opportunity that is both fun and organizationally rewarding. For example, when the Texas Tech University Libraries launched its first-ever awareness campaign in August 2008, it consisted of pushing integrated messages about library services through multiple communication venues based on a strategic marketing plan. By the end of the academic year in May 2009, with a grand total of 1,956 distributed marketing pieces, the libraries saw database searches double, a 25% increase in full-text journal usage, and growth in use of our social-networking sites.
Other, similar marketing efforts have yielded significant double- or triple-digit increases. The carefully crafted plan employed and involved every communication tool available to reach our audiences. That may sound broad and generic enough, and in a sense the creation and distribution could be seen as pretty cookie-cutter, but what it boiled down to was the use of a cookie-cutter recipe that could be applied to a bunch of different molds to reach the intended audience(s). In a nutshell, we picked six services that key stakeholders within different areas of the libraries saw as undermarketed that could have the greatest impact on students’ academic endeavors:
- Wireless internet access increase
- Digital collections
- Lynda.com subscription
- KIC scanners, personal librarians, and electronic resources
- Digital media studio (DMS)
- 3-D animation lab
Next, we plugged each of these six promotions into the academic calendar so that each would have two weeks in the marketing spotlight. From there, we considered the audiences–both campuswide and segmented–for each promotion, and selected which pieces to create and distribute from a list of all possible venues both financially and physically available to us.
For example, let’s compare the increased wireless internet promotion–which had a very broad campuswide audience–to the DMS promotion, which also had segmented audiences. The communication opportunities looked like this:
| Wireless | DMS | |
| Parent Relations monthly e-mail | X | x |
| Liaisons HTML e-mail for faculty | X | X |
| Graduate School HTML e-mail | X | |
| Faculty/staff e-mail signature | X | X |
| TechAnnounce | X | X |
| Mobile Digital Unit slide | X | X |
| Public computer wallpaper | X | X |
| Website news story | X | X |
| Podcast (website & iTunes Uhosts, DMS iPods) | X | X |
| YouTube video | X | |
| Facebook post | X | X |
| MySpace post | X | |
| The Daily Toreador ad series | X | |
| Flyer | X | X |
| Poster (campus & CitiBus included) | X | X |
| Door/elevator sleeve | X | |
| Postcard | X | |
| Bookmark | X | X |
| Window cling | X | X |
| Table tent | X | X |
| News release | X | |
| Classroom/student organization presentation | ||
| KOHM radio spot | X |
As you can see, for the DMS promotion we tacked on specific central communication opportunities to home in on segmented audiences whose need for the technology and services offered through the DMS were already hard-wired. These opportunities included:
- Graduate school HTML e-mail—we designed it, the graduate school sent it to their distribution list
- Ad series in campus newspaper—technologies and services highlighted in multiple ads per week
- Flyer for select Mass Communications and Art professors—which they distributed to their electronic media, photography, advertising, graphic design, and other classes
- Postcard—mailed to Mass Communications and Art student organizations
- Bookmark—left out for pickup at the DMS Service Desk
- Classroom/student organization presentations within the Mass Communications realm
- YouTube video
The obvious principle underlying these marketing efforts is simple: Libraries have to be proactive–seeking new ways to make themselves known to the patron wherever the patron might be—although a patron’s actual physical location does not, and should not, really matter. Sure, you might try newer, trendy communication tools, coupled with traditional methods, but in doing so you have to be ready to continuously flex and adapt to whichever new trendy tool/environment takes off. One of the lessons learned is that what has worked in the past may not deliver in the future. The landscape changes with tsunami-like rapidity. The means employed must be flexible, intuitive, and cheap. Aggressively taking a marketing beachhead means more than the ability to create deliverables that have to provide a positive return on the investment. Assessment tells us whether that happened. Thoughtful assessment suggests how to improve the process and the deliverables.
If you launch a new service, how do your patrons know it’s available? From that sign you posted at the circ desk? Not quite–remember a patron’s physical location does not, and should not, matter. From your website post, then? No—in fact, almost never! Websites are passive—a patron has to already be there for a web posting to do any good. Marketing is active, not passive—by definition, putting something on a library website is not good marketing practice. While websites are informative, they do not grab the attention of anyone who is not already there, and many (most?) websites do not even seize the retinas of those who are there. While websites can be useful information sources, frequent users bookmark the parts of the site they most often visit—and your news section or the home page is probably not the one that is bookmarked. Effective marketing requires that the message head-butt the user multiple times before it actually enters the frontal lobes. Only those who are looking for your message need to hear it only one time; everyone else needs to hear it repeatedly before the message makes an impression. For that reason, multiple venues and variations for the same message are the only ticket to success—and even then, our plan is dicey if we have not created a compelling message.
“Compelling message? Gee, how do I do that?” Well, that is a whole different article—but it is tied up in hiring and retaining out-of-the-box creative thinkers and utilizing multiple media to deliver the same message. Scan the previous suggestions for the two examples and it is obvious that we used video, music, text, images, art, graphics, and more, all zeroed in on our simple message. In fact, a student at Texas Tech had to work hard not to get our message in at least one form. We sent so many missiles downrange, at least one of them had to connect.
In all of today’s drama, the underlying instigator is change, with the result that change is the new way of doing business. Libraries are changing so fast that change is actually becoming the norm. So, with change you face the conundrum of constantly creating more efficient and effective communications–both internally and externally. Communications must go beyond a web page or an e-mail. Assessment tells you whether you are having an impact. Assessment tools can be simple or they can be elaborate.
The bottom line: Assessment is a tool, not an end. Use it to hone and refine the message and the medium(s). The toolkit also must include a big bottle of self-confidence pills. Some ideas that sounded sure-fire in the heat of a brainstorm, fizzle. Learn from it and move on. Trial and error works—at least initially.
One don’t-leave-home-without-it way to ensure your communications strategies reach your patrons wherever they are is to make marketing mission-focused. When an organization’s mission statement includes marketing and promotion of its services, library faculty and staff are armed and ready to soar because, after all, they’ve already bought into that bigger picture–and it doesn’t get much bigger, more strategic, better-tested or higher-priority-driven than when it’s mission-focused. Just remember to change your communication opportunities, too. The more, the merrier—and the less likely your new service will be left hanging.
DONALD H. DYAL is dean of libraries and KALEY DANIEL is director of communications and marketing for Texas Tech University Libraries in Lubbock (library.ttu.edu).
