For years, I have heard library professionals lament how much libraries “suck at marketing.” And I can’t disagree with that. We need to do a much better job in this area, which is, of course, much easier said than done.
It occurs to me, though, that one of the major obstacles that we may be facing is a widespread confusion among library professionals about the difference between marketing and advertising. Whenever I have a conversation about marketing with a librarian, it always ends up being a discussion of advertising.
Here’s the thing, though. Advertising is a component of marketing, but it is far from the whole enchilada. To quote a concise summary of the topic,
“The best way to distinguish between advertising and marketing is to think of marketing as a pie, inside that pie you have slices of advertising, market research, media planning, public relations, product pricing, distribution, customer support, sales strategy, and community involvement. Advertising only equals one piece of the pie in the strategy.”
Library marketing is not solely about advertising. It is also is not only about branding. Or PR. Or “Outreach.” Or social networking. Those are only parts of what should be an overall strategy for communicating with our customers and using that communication cycle to reach our ultimate organizational goals.
If we’re really going to get serious about library marketing, we need to forget advertising for a minute and think of the bigger picture.
What is your library’s marketing strategy?
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