Creative Library Marketing and Publicity

Best Practices

Edited by Robert J. Lackie, M. Sandra Wood

Hardback - £90.00

Publication date:

17 September 2015

Length of book:

204 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442254206



Creative Library Marketing and Publicity: Best Practices shares the success of libraries of various sizes and types—small to large public, academic, and school libraries, systems, and organizations. Each best-practice scenario describes a library’s successful experience with marketing, branding, and promoting a library service or program, providing information about planning, actual promotion techniques, and evaluating the success of the plan or promotion methods. Most importantly, each include tips and best practices for readers. Many of these ideas and techniques are applicable across the board, so they will help you implement similar methods to promote your library services and programs and spark different and unique uses for these techniques. Strategies covered include:

  1. Using constituents’ voices in outreach efforts
  2. Building a social media presence
  3. Crafting step-by-step marketing plans
  4. Planning and implementing branding campaigns
  5. Creating buzz with promotional videos
  6. Using e-mail marketing in outreach
  7. Marketing a new library space
  8. Marketing on a shoestring budget

Drawing on the best practices, experience, and expertise of library personnel from public, academic, and school libraries, this volume brings together a variety of marketing plans and creative methods for promoting libraries and their programs and services to a twenty-first-century audience. All library employees should be able to take away something from these creative, successful efforts and apply tips, techniques, and best practice suggestions to their own library marketing efforts.
No matter the community that a particular library serves—small town, large city, or school or college campus—all need to find ways to reach out and connect with their target markets. Discovering new approaches and gaining insights from a variety of institutions can help personnel to build and enhance their own marketing plans and increase the effectiveness of their library’s outreach. This is the strength of this collection of case studies gathered by Lackie and Wood. The 12 investigations come from libraries large and small, public and academic, with marketing budgets of all sizes. Many describe holistic approaches to organizing a library’s marketing strategy, while others detail very specific programs or activities individual libraries have found successful in reaching a particular audience. Verdict: Librarians, marketing directors, and administrators will take away ideas and enlightenment from these success stories of libraries that have hit the mark of connecting with their target audiences.