On one of my recent flights home I had the fortune to sit next to an interesting woman who happened to be in marketing. We got to talking about libraries a bit, and she sympathized that if people only knew the breadth and depth of the services their libraries offered, they would want to move in. Given her field, it’s no surprise that her advice was, “You guys need to get in touch with us.” It’s true. In my experience, libraries like to market themselves, and it probably works to some extent. Marketing is not our specialty, though, and our efforts at marketing are probably akin to the results we might get if we gave a marketing expert a book and asked them to catalog it (sure, it sounds easy until I ask you what the 245 MARC field is for, and then you’re baffled). Maybe it’s time libraries went to the experts for their marketing.
Wyoming Libraries are there already, and their campaign is awesome. It’s intelligent, sassy, and multi-modal. They have a library mud flap girl, a library Eiffel Tower billboard, and two radio spots. From the site:
Wyoming’s libraries are as expansive as the state, and as close as down the street.
Libraries offer more than many people realize, and we want to reach out beyond our regular users to let people know this. The new statewide marketing campaign is designed to increase understanding, use and support of Wyoming libraries.
I don’t know about you, but their campaign makes me want to move to Wyoming and use a library. I’d love to know how effective the campaign has been so far in bringing new users into the library, but that’s always a dodgey statistic at best, and I imagine it will take some time before any valid results can be analyzed.
In the meantime, I need to find myself some of those mud flaps …