Asia-Pacific Library and Information Conference 2018, 30 July - 2 August 2018 Gold Coast: Roar Leap Dare
This conference presentation (PowerPoint slides) accompanied the talk which discussed the development of a public library marketing plan.
During early 2016 the Bayside Library underwent a service review, part of the process for the review was to engage with the community, both users and non-users, to seek their views on libraries. One of the responses that stood out in the survey was the answer, from non-users, to the question “why don’t you use the library?” which was “I don’t know what you do”.
The Council communications team was approached with a request to undertake promotion of library services. Of course, the first question they asked was “To whom are you promoting” and the response from us, “well everyone, obviously”. This was not a very helpful answer so the survey data was interrogated and it was established that the bulk of non-user who didn’t know what we did were men aged 55+. We needed to find out from this group what would attract them to visit the library so a consultant was engaged to run focus groups with men aged 55+, the user, the lapsed user (had not borrowed from the library for over a year) and the non-user. From these focus groups recommendations were presented that would provide guidance on developing promotions to attract these customers, a group that could clearly benefit from the services on offer.
But this was only a small piece of the puzzle and the consultants were engaged for a further three-stage process. The first was to undertake a review of our current marketing efforts and provide a report. The report surmised that we were doing reasonably well with what we had to work with but there was a lot more we could be doing. Stages two and three will include the development of an overarching two-page Strategic Marketing Development Plan and the development of a comprehensive Marketing Action Plan which will detail each area of the high level marketing strategy to be implemented. This will include objectives, KPIs, proposed timeframes and deliverables and, resources required and costs where possible.
