1. Library staff should together, define your marketing goals for the library.
2. Make an outline of your plan with specific tasks or outcomes.
2a. include specific goals you want to accomplish.
3. Decide how much time will be dedicated to your marketing plan each day
3a. Determine who in your organization will spend this time.Make this a part of their daily tasks.
3b. Decide specific strategies for that person to employ during the specific time period
4. Develop any specific policies, do you want to respond to friend requests - open comments or close them.
4a. what are you expecting to achieve/block with these policies? Determine the specific criteria.
5. Who are you specifically trying to attract and why? Are you trying to get students to use the databases regularly? Are you trying to focus on readers advisor tools. Are you trying to market to teachers to increase collaboration. What is the goal of your marketing plan and who is your audience?
6. Determine the budget for this project. Do you need to spend money on subscriptions to services? Do you need to reassign duties to someone in the department away from the person in charge of completing the daily marketing tasks? Will the finance people give your department extra money to accomplish your goals?
6a. Write a project proposal to submit to administration and board of trustees.
7. Develop a way to evaluate the program and its successes/problems.
8. Setting a meeting schedule to follow up on the success/failures/problems with the overall plan.
9. Create a reporting structure.
Why is a marketing plan important for a library? Simply because information is so ubiquitous on the Internet that libraries are being forced to prove/show that they are still the best place for people to access information through. Like it says in the Groundswell excerpt "on the
Internet, traffic equals money." While it doesn't mean direct money in the library - traffic is money in that traffic and use justify our existence and that justification leads to further budget - hopefully a larger budget if your doing a good job. While some view the fact that libraries must now justify our existence as a bad thing, I choose to look at it as a positive thing. it's more vital than ever for librarians to be out there learning new information and finding newer and better ways to have our patrons access that information. Being forced to be creative and think outside of the box is exciting not depressing in my view. There is no reason libraries should not be finding ways to market ourselves to consumers. Library use is job security! 73% of Americans are online - that probably means that at least 50% of your library patrons have an Internet connection at home. That means we need to show that 50% of people why their library is important and how we can help them find better information faster using the tools that they can access through our library and why we can help them do it better than they can on their own. Our customers are already on the Internet and they want to be on the Internet so it's become even more imperative that libraries show them why they also want to use their library. If we don't market ourselves and then provide a good product our patrons will stop using us. Why visit the library when you can just Google something. We have to be able to show them why! if we can successfully show them why using the library is easy and necessary then they in turn will show their friends who will in turn show their friends etc. etc. Our customer base can experience infinite growth if we can simply market and provide a good product to our library patrons. Once we've got our patrons on board we can begin analyzing how they are using our library's resources and then we can begin adding. removing, or adjusting the service we offer. Marketing and the process can begin a circular experience that will enhance our libraries and keep them important for years to com.
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