Barbie Keiser co-authored a Marketing Library Services workbook with Carol Galvin, who, along with Steve Arnold (Riverside Data, Inc.), launched the Marketing Library Services newsletter in 1987. Since that time, she’s been president of Barbie E. Keiser, Inc., a consultancy that serves libraries around the world. Barbie continued to contribute articles to MLS over many years.

The precursor to this MLS newsletter (initially published by Steve Arnold) was a workbook, Marketing Library Services: A Nuts-and-Bolts Approach, which I co-authored with Carol Galvin. Our editor, Sharon LaRosa, explained in the work’s introduction, “We created Marketing Library Services: A Nuts-and-Bolts Approach to help librarians understand and apply the major marketing principles in their environment. This manual is not a work of original scholarship; it is a synthesis of thoughts from some of the leading practitioners in both marketing and librarianship. This workbook is not comprehensive; it helps librarians think and work from a marketing perspective” (https://arnoldit.com/articles/PDF_Web/article1988/MLS_book.pdf). Chapter 1 stressed the necessity of libraries to market if they were to survive and thrive in “today’s” demanding environment. (Note: It’s still demanding.) We began by saying that everyone markets each day, though we may not call it “marketing.” For example, we dress differently when meeting with our funders than we do in our daily work when there are no external meetings. However, as Carol Galvin pointed out, librarians (like others) often confuse “promotion” with marketing. We preferred that libraries strategically market their libraries, the products and services they offer, the events held, and staff expertise.

Since the MLS newsletter’s inception in 1987, we’ve witnessed an evolution in the vehicles through which libraries can engage their users, including the advent of social media sites. Multiple tools slice and dice our target communities using demographics that enable precision marketing. This is aided by the plethora of tools now at our disposal that help us craft and hone our messages, making them specific to target market groups and effective through delivery channels. There are more modalities to deliver messages beyond text, such as graphic visualizations (e.g., infographics), audio (e.g., podcasts), and video (including short form). More recently, artificial intelligence tools have allowed us to outline what we want to say about our libraries and optimize our message, which is designed to engage targeted markets.

Still, we find libraries lacking an overall marketing strategy linked to what the staff wants to achieve in defined measures. Our communities expect us to deliver new products and services, so we need a pipeline of products and services in different stages of development, each with named individuals as project leads, a timeline for delivery, associated costs, a targeted market segment, and a way to measure whether we’ve achieved our goal with the specific product/service/event and how it helps to move our library toward a stated objective in our strategic plan.