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MARKETING LIBRARY SERVICES
What Library Marketing Is and Isn’t
by Kathy Dempsey
| At its most basic, library marketing is about helping people in your service population understand that the library has helpful things for them and driving them to use all of that goodness. |
As a CIL reader, do you think much about marketing? Do you feel you have a good handle on the topic? Marketing has never been a pillar of the library field, so lots of library folks don’t really understand it. To help change that, I’m going to expound on what marketing really is, why it matters, and what effect it can have when it’s done right.
Definitions That Might Surprise You
“Marketing” itself has numerous business definitions, many of which refer to the ultimate goal of making a profit. Of course, in our nonprofit world, that doesn’t work. So, there are other definitions that apply for us.
Email vendor Constant Contact explains, “To market a nonprofit organization, you will need to communicate about the work you do to get people’s attention and to get them interested, with the goal of moving them to take a particular action as well as strengthening their relationship with your organization” (constantcontact .com/blog/what-is-nonprofit-marketing). A writer at MarketingProfs.com favors a six-word definition: “Marketing means solving customers’ problems profitably.” Shortly thereafter, the article adds, “For non-profits, ‘profitability’ might need to be replaced by ‘efficiently and effectively’ or ‘purposively’ to indicate the goal-seeking nature of marketing” (marketingprofs.com/3/chapman1.asp).
The American Marketing Association avoids using the word “profit” and defines the term this way: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” (ama.org/the-definition-of-marketing-what-is-marketing).
It’s important to note that none of these definitions include the word “sales,” because many of us mentally link those two terms. Some librarians bristle at the thought of marketing because they think it’s too close to sales, which they liken to coercing people into getting something they don’t want. I understand this notion makes library folks feel that they could tarnish the do-good reputations of their nonprofits by being seen as pushy. But marketing is absolutely not the same as sales. In the for-profit world, marketing is meant to lead to sales, but in the nonprofit world, it’s meant to lead to awareness, usage, relationships, and repeat customers. Library marketing is meant to connect people with items and services that will be helpful to them—not to coerce them into getting things they don’t need. Because of this, I think of nonprofit marketing as being more akin to service than it is to sales.
Related, But Not the Same
There are plenty of other words that we use interchangeably with marketing when we shouldn’t. Here are a few of the main offenders and their business meanings, as I’ve explained them for library marketers over the years:
- Promotion—Informing people about the benefits of a product or service to encourage them to take advantage of it
- Public relations—Managing and sharing information to influence perception; the overall plan to do so
- Outreach—Looking outside the library’s walls for service opportunities; taking services out of the buildings to meet people where they are
- Community engagement—Building relationships between the library’s staffers and its community members, often to make people aware of offerings and to encourage usage
- Advocacy—Speaking out to build support; traditionally done by outsiders, not staffers
- Advertising—Typically defined as paid promotion, although in-kind advertising refers to publicity that’s free or traded in return for something else
Once you know these disparate definitions, you can see that none of the terms above are the same as marketing. In fact, that M word is actually the umbrella term for all of the others—they merely represent some of the actions that are part of the wide-ranging work of marketing.
The Process of True Marketing
Now, hopefully, you realize that simply sending one-off messages via social media, posters, or emails isn’t really marketing at all (it’s promotion). Ideally, you’ll have an overall plan for promoting your various offerings—a strategy that drives and organizes all of your external communications. How do you get the right message to the right potential patron at the right time and place? There are numerous approaches, and the one I always point to is the Cycle of True Marketing, which I created while drafting my book, The Accidental Library Marketer.
 As you can see in the cycle on the right (bit.ly/CycleTrue Marketing), market research is the first big step in your journey, because there’s no way to get the right message to the right potential patron if you don’t know who they are, what they need, and how they communicate. And you can’t deliver that message at the right time and place unless you know when and where the patrons in question get their information. In light of all that, you can follow the overarching steps of the cycle:
- Choose and study a particular segment of your potential users (target audience).
- Once you know what they need, decide which of your offerings to promote to the audience.
- Using your data, decide which promotional activities, messages, and spaces fit the situation.
- Set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goals, and plan ways to measure how close you come to achieving those goals.
- Carry out the promotional campaign you’ve designed.
- Get and evaluate feedback during and after the campaign to decide what could be improved for the next time you’re reaching out to that audience.
In the midst of all of that, your data about the audience, plus your goals and the messaging you write to fit, can be assembled into a workable marketing plan.
And still, we haven’t used the dreaded word “sales.” This cycle makes clear what marketing is really all about: identifying people who need your services, learning how best to reach them with your messages, telling them what you’ve got, and measuring the success of the campaign to make the next one more effective. At its most basic, library marketing is about helping people in your service population understand that the library has helpful things for them and driving them to use all of that goodness. Marketing is about serving people—just like libraries are.
But Does True Marketing Really Work?
Hopefully by now, I’ve convinced you not to be skittish about the idea of marketing your library. And now you probably want to know if it’s really worth your time. What proof is there that marketing is effective? Actually, the world is full of library marketing case studies. Many of them have been in the past pages of Marketing Library Services (MLS).
An example from the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) is one of my favorites, because the concept was so simple yet so obviously effective. In the November/December 2021 MLS cover story, author Deborah Hakes (the marketing and communications director at GPLS) explained how the program was set up: “Library staffers write proposals for marketing projects they want to implement. GPLS chooses the winners and offers them money and guidance. All recipients must agree to work hand in hand with me to plan project details. In this way, I transfer knowledge so Georgia librarians can better market themselves in the future.”
As a condition of the grant, the library staffers had to report the results they measured. One small organization, Laurens County Library, got a grant for just $500 and used it wisely to promote Library Card Sign-Up Month. The results were impressive. “Staffers updated nearly twice as many patron accounts compared to the previous year (846 accounts compared to 427). The number of sign-ups that September was the highest monthly total from the previous 5 years. By setting a goal and being able to compare numbers in this way, they clearly showed that the marketing investment was effective,” Hakes wrote.
Coincidence? I think not. So many of the stories published in MLS over the years have stuck with me, not just because they were library success stories, but because they were also human success stories.
Here’s one that employs the Cycle of True Marketing for a completely different reason. This cover story illustrates how an academic library team conducted an internal marketing campaign with a core goal of increasing interdepartmental communications. In the January/February 2020 issue of MLS (www.infotoday.com/mls/jan20/Ward-Sammartino--Devising-Internal-Marketing-Plans-to-Harness-the-Power-of-Staff-Opinions.shtml), the authors from West Chester University explained their tasks: “Our process includes choosing a target audience, listing outcomes for it, and filling in details on how to reach each outcome. Those details cover communication channels, activities for staffers to participate in, calls to action, and ways for staffers to provide feedback.” The West Chester team planned for three outcomes and held an all-staff activity to support each one. In the end, the authors had qualitative data and stories to prove that the 18-month campaign worked: “Ultimately, internal marketing has become a continuous process about authentically discovering the talents of the people we work with and empowering them to use those skills to constantly transform their library.”
Of course, larger, more-rigorous studies have appeared in many other publications. So, if you ever need to convince a skeptic to give marketing (or at least promotion) a chance, you can find plenty of evidence of marketing success (and lessons learned) in the library literature.
Where to Seek More Proof
In the world of online-only, peer-reviewed publications, you should know about Marketing Libraries Journal (MLJ; journal.marketinglibraries.org). Started in 2017, MLJ is an international OA publication that covers all types of libraries and “is devoted to advancing research in library marketing and its components (public relations, publicity, outreach, advocacy, and marketing communications).” A newer entry to the field is the Journal of Library Outreach & Engagement (JLOE; iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/jloe), begun in 2020. JLOE calls itself “the premier peer-reviewed, open access interdisciplinary journal to advance library outreach and engagement.” Of course, there are also traditional publications, some of which publish marketing articles from time to time. Plus, there’s a boatload of books on many aspects of the topic: using social media, measuring ROI, choosing tactics, etc.
More Marketing Awards Have Emerged
I believe another indicator of the adoption of strategic marketing and promotion is how often it’s tied to major awards. The annual feature celebrating the Gale/Library Journal (LJ) Library of the Year Award always highlighted the winners’ promotion, outreach, and community engagement activities as essential aspects of their success. (The last award feature is from 2021; see libraryjournal.com/story/libraryoftheyear/Anaheim-Public-Library-Is-Here-for-You-Gale-LJ-Library-of-the-Year-2021.)
It’s the same with the people who earn LJ’s Librarian of the Year Award, sponsored by Baker & Taylor. The write-ups include a section on success with communications, a promotional campaign, or relationship-building, advocacy, or the like. The most recent winner was just named in January (libraryjournal.com/story/city-librarian-john-szabo-is-ljs-2025-librarian-of-the-year). This part of the write-up caught my eye, as it extolls John Szabo’s penchant for learning about his target audience: “[Szabo was collecting] thousands of pieces of community suggestions—up to and including thoughts from toddlers armed with crayons and construction paper. ‘When you’re genuine in wanting that input, and when you’re genuine in listening, it makes talking about the library, selling it, promoting it, and seeking approval for it from boards, councils, and elected officials, easy, because it’s only saying what the community is saying,’ he explains.” In fact, as marketing has become more accepted in our field across the last decade or so, new awards have emerged to recognize this essential work, and LJ has had a hand in organizing all of these:
- 2013: The LibraryAware Community Award was presented by LJ and funded by LibraryAware, a product of EBSCO Publishing’s NoveList division that helps design fliers, emails, and other promo materials. It only ran through 2017, but bestowed a $10,000 prize.
- 2016: The Library Marketer of the Year was first recognized in a partnership with sponsor Library Ideas, LLC. Launching this new award was a major indicator that my favorite part of the field was finally being recognized as vital. The features LJ publishes about the winners show how teams took the time to work the marketing process—choosing targets, designing campaigns and collateral material, reaching outside library walls, and measuring the impact and success. (Read about the most recent recipient at libraryjournal.com/story/all-rise-at-wilmington-public-library-lj-marketer-of-the-year-award-2024.) Nominations for the next prize are due July 19, 2025.
- 2019: The Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize is awarded to an organization that can clearly prove, via the in-depth data requirements of the nomination form, that it affected its community for the better. This honor was developed in partnership with the Gerald M. Kline Family Foundation “to recognize the public library as a vital community asset.” The foundation provides $250,000 in prize money.
You’ll find the full list of all of LJ’s award winners at library journal.com/page/Past-Winners#library.
Marketing Is a Vital Part of Library Success
Clearly, employing varying marketing activities and measuring their success with quantitative and qualitative data are part of a library’s overall recipe for success. And, as the earlier story from Georgia proves, you don’t have to be in a national powerhouse library to reap the benefits of organized promotion and communication. Marketing efforts can be scaled to whatever size fits your library. If you’ve been a naysayer about marketing in our field, I hope I’ve begun to change your mind about doing it. |
