Beware of These 5 Marketing Mistakes

In the ever-changing landscape of social media and marketing, sometimes it’s good to have a refresher on the tactics to avoid. Being creative, branching out and trying new things in marketing is encouraged and a great way to find new ways to connect with your community. However, here’s a list of mistakes to steer clear of so that you can focus your marketing efforts on a path to engagement with your patrons and success for your library.

1. Inconsistency

Consistency is key when it comes to social media and marketing for any organization. In order to stay consistent with communications, it usually works best to plan ahead. Plot out time on a weekly or monthly basis to look at the overview of events, programs, or messaging that you’d like to share with your community and create a schedule of content. If you’re aiming to post twice a week on social media and send out a monthly newsletter, having a calendar planned out will help you stay ahead and stay consistent. One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is forgetting about their social media and not keeping their pages up to date. You’ll lose engagement and followers if you post every few months when you remember to or have something going on. This doesn’t mean you need to post fluff material every day to stay active, just that there needs to be a realistic consistency to your social media content.

2. Posting Just to Post

It may seem like a contradiction to my last point, telling you to post consistently, but it’s important to understand that if something isn’t newsworthy or won’t resonate with your patrons, don’t post it. Social media is a great way to get to know your target audience better. You’ll notice what content they like the most by what they engage with, and then you can cater future content to those interests. Most patrons won’t care about self-serving content, they’ll want to know about things that affect them. Always strive to deliver quality content in fresh and creative ways so it’s not static, which users will ignore.

3. Post and Run

If you’re taking the time to plan out content and utilize social media, the biggest piece of that is engaging with your followers. Respond or react to comments, and interact with fellow library accounts by reposting their content or engaging with posts that you’re tagged in. Social media is really about the community, and not interacting with that community will make you seem impersonal. To take it a step further, try to create a weekly or monthly post that asks for engagement by posing a question or looking for suggestions on a topic. This is a great way to mobilize your followers and invite them to get involved.

4. Same Content for Every Platform

It’s tempting (and easy) to plot out the same content for each social media platform that you utilize. Chances are if a patron follows you on one platform, they’ll follow you on the others as well and now they’re seeing a carbon copy post three times on the same day. It looks sloppy. Each platform has its own benefits and unique audience, so posting the same copy and graphic to each one is lazy. Instead, optimize your post for the best platform. Photos and videos that don’t need much response are great for Instagram, but you’ll want something that entices more comments and engagement on Facebook. If you don’t have the time or resources to focus on multiple platforms with unique content, that’s ok! Find the platform your audience interacts on the most and focus on delivering your best content there.

5. Too Many Emails

We’ve mostly covered common social media mistakes here, but email marketing has its mishaps as well. If you have a curated newsletter or email subscription list, naturally you’ll want to alert that list to everything exciting or new happening at your library. Inundating an inbox with unnecessary emails will annoy subscribers and might even cause them to block or unsubscribe. Choose a consistent schedule for sending out email communications and cover the information that will pertain to this recipient list. Keep your emails clear and concise and as brief as they can possibly be while still getting the information across. Assessing what is newsworthy and following email marketing best practices will keep you on track to avoid overloading patron inboxes.