Marketing- a nice
thing to do?
Emma Walton
Loughborough University Library
An essential part of service
Introduction - what
• Delivering value to satisfy needs
• The ways an organisation communicates and engages its audience
• Meeting the needs of the customer
• Connections
• Branding
• Telling a story
• Customer focussed
• Identifying needs and providing services to meet those needs.
• Promotion is used to gain participation by encouraging people to take advantage of library offerings.
• Branding involves establishing a link between the library and a logo/slogan/phrase and developing a profile that can be used to build loyalty.
• Public relations involves building long-term positive relationships between users and libraries.
• Publicity is a way of communicating messages to the public/user community.
• Advertising calls attend to the products and services available through announcements.
• Advocacy generates support for specific proposals or issues associated with libraries such as funding and privacy rights through getting people who have good opinions about the library to speak on its behalf about the value of the organisation and its services
Marketing activities
• A changed HE landscape
• Competitive market
• Students as “customers”
• Providing value for money
• Rise of social media and other technologies
• Pace of change
• Metric based
An academic Library context - why
Loughborough University Library -how
• Library values and a corresponding brand
• A systematic approach to gaining user
information and subsequent service
improvement
• An established marketing group
Survey, focus groups, grab and go, analysis, review, evaluation, campaigns
Library refurbishment project
Improved space, improved facilities,
Improved technology but…
Library would close at the end of June
and re-open for the start of the new
academic year
Learning from experience
• Asking for opinions/feedback
• Developing relationship with central marketing
• Maintaining and improving the relationship
with our users
• Looking for new communication mechanisms
• Embedding principles in everyone’s practice
Moving forward • New campaigns (e.g Academic
Librarians)
• More engagement
• New publicity methods
• Trying new things
• Embracing the things that just happen
• Continuing to use and analyse feedback
• Continuing to embed principles
Marketing a nice thing to do…
Marketing – a nice thing - yes it
can be nice and it can be fun but
It is essential and critical for
Success.
Questions
References
http://eduscapes.com/marketing/1.htm - American blog
Accessed 14th and 15th November 2016
http://heidicohen.com/marketing-definition 72 Marketing definitions