Marketing Plan Guide for Public Libraries

The Institute of Museum and Library Services, in partnership with Reinvestment Fund, have just released a new study entitled “Understanding the Social Wellbeing Impacts of the Nation’s Libraries and Museums.” This study examines the roles of museums and libraries in promoting social wellbeing in communities across the US. The study found what many of us in the public library field have known for years – that the mere presence of libraries and museums have created a positive impact on their communities. Both are trusted institutions that promote social wellbeing and provide critical resources to the communities that they serve, which greatly contributes to creating a more equitable country. These statistics show that libraries are vital to community wellbeing and now it’s the task of library staff to create a marketing plan to amplify these services, showing that it goes beyond presence. Developing a marketing plan can seem like a daunting task because there are so many pieces to it, but if you break it down step by step, it becomes more manageable.

Identify Your Library

Taking the time to really look at what your library offers and what the mission statement will be is the first step in creating a marketing plan. What is the role of your library? What services does your library provide? Who are you serving? What makes your library stand out from other libraries? These are all brainstorming techniques to get to the bottom of what message you’re looking to send and who will be receiving that message. Ultimately, you’ll want to show the surrounding community why your library is necessary and how it benefits patrons.

Audience Personas

Don’t make any assumptions about what your patrons already think or know about your services, and if you feel so compelled, try surveying patrons to get their honest feedback on their knowledge of what your library does and what resources are offered. Finding out directly how people are getting their information, and if it’s the correct information, is a good springboard for creating the best marketing plan. All of this information will help you to create audience personas to give a full profile of the type of person that you’re marketing to. Understand what each of your audiences needs to know about your library. For example, boomers are looking for classes to learn new skills. Parents are interested in reading groups. Local government officials need to understand the financial benefit to the community.

Research Competitors

Gather your staff and collaborate on a SWOT Analysis to analyze the competition. This is when you each identify examples of  your organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, and discuss it thoroughly. Bringing in different perspectives from staff members and patrons is always a great way to understand how the library is viewed and what makes it unique. Then you can compare to what other libraries are doing. 

Key Baselines

Before you can begin to set goals and objectives in your marketing plan, you’ll need to see the metrics of where you stand currently. It’s hard to build on something when you don’t know what type of foundation you’re building on. Finding and setting your baselines will allow you to more accurately track your progress. Once you see how many visitors you get per month on your website, how many followers you have on social media and what your engagement looks like, you’ll be able to clearly define your goals and strategy moving forward. Data can seem overwhelming or intimidating but there are plenty of no cost tools that can aggregate the statistics from your social media for you. Using charts or infographics will best display this data so anyone reading your marketing plan can clearly see where you’re heading.

Marketing Objectives & Strategies

After you’ve researched and gathered all the data, then you can dive into the marketing plan itself. A marketing plan is a report that outlines your marketing strategy for the coming year, quarter, or month. Typically, a marketing plan includes:

• An overview of your marketing goals.
• A description of your current marketing objectives.
• A timeline of when tasks will be completed.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) you will be tracking.
• A description of your target market and customer needs.

Click here to see an example of what a marketing plan looks like. The plan can either be an overview of every aspect of marketing, or it could focus on just social media or content marketing. Either way, you’ll want to set specific goals that can be measured. For example, rather than saying, get more Twitter followers, you would set a goal to increase Twitter followers by 8%. If you want to increase library cardholders, set a percentage increase you’d like to reach within 6 months or a year. Same with website visitors, or any aspect of your library that can be measured, so that your goals are results-driven. Set a metric and a timeline for each goal, even if it’s an internal goal. For example: write one blog post per week, and/or, post twice on Facebook per week. The more specific the goal is, the better you will set yourself up for growth achievement. Lay out these strategies specifically through a timeline, mind map, or chart. This helps to visualize your priorities, taking into consideration your goals, challenges, budget, and resources.  

Budget

This comes down to money and people. How much is your budget? How many staff members can support marketing activities? How can volunteers help? What tools will you need? Consider whether you might need to bring in outside expertise. Web development, search engine optimization, and social media might require insight from marketing professionals in the field. On the other hand, students or marketing interns can provide invaluable insight into best practices, and can do so for school credit and at no cost to your library. It is entirely possible to create and execute a marketing plan on a low budget with a number of free resources that are available for web analytics, design, social media content, and scheduling tools. However, if your focus is more specific to certain metrics, having a budget for professional assistance can only enhance the marketing plan.

Results Tracking Guidelines

The strategy is set and you know how much money you’ll be allocating to execute it. The final piece of the marketing plan is setting guidelines on how you’ll be keeping track of your progress. This section can be brief and you can choose how in-depth you want to go. At the very least, you should specify what you’ll be tracking, how you plan to track it, and how often you’ll be measuring. Setting these parameters will hold you to following through on this results-driven plan. Checking in on how blog posts perform on your website or how the public is engaging with a tweet will keep you on track and will allow you to reassess at a certain point if you need to change gears with your strategy to create better results.

A marketing plan can take many different shapes and sizes and ultimately will be catered specifically your organization’s needs and resources, but the core idea remains the same. Marketing plans can force your staff to take a look internally at the greatest assets of your library and then make a detailed plan to make those assets known and available to the public. Everyone in the community should know how vital your library is to its wellbeing and a great marketing plan is the best way to do so!