A simple, effective strategy for libraries.

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain

Marketing is the management process by which goods and services move from concept to the customer. It includes the coordination of four elements called the 4 Ps of marketing:
• identifying and developing a PRODUCT
• determining its PRICE (the value of anything exchanged)
• getting the product to the customer’s PLACE
• developing and implementing a PROMOTION strategy
(often called marketing communications)

Product Concept
Place
Price
Promotion
Channel
Cost
Communication
The Four Ps are variables controlled by the organization.
Regardless of the forces at play in the market, these Four
Ps are under your control. Together, they are referred to as the MARKETING MIX.
You’ll apply the marketing mix to every goal you set.

• State of the economy
• Legislative Actions (budgeting)
• Changes in the competitive landscape
• Unemployment
• Technology Changes
• Operational Costs
• List is practically endless

Inputs
• materials acquisition
• mineral extracting
Outputs
Products ready to be delivered to customers and stores
Everything but manufacturing.

– Information sources that do not circulate
– Products that circulate: books, CDs, DVDs, magazines, pamphlets
– Services and programs you offer
– Room rentals
– Community events
– Any others?

• Fees for service (copying, printing, etc.)
• Fines for late returns
Is the concept of price important to you? Do you talk about it in meetings? How often do you talk about income or revenue? Are you focused on making money? Likely to be a tiny percentage of your operating budget.

• One location or main with branches?
• Do you do community outreach?
• Bookmobile?
• Speakers bureau?
• Inter-library loan?
• Kiosks?

How you promote your products and services will be the guts of your marketing plan.
Promotion is likely to be the most important variable of your marketing mix because it is the most easily controlled.

Each of the following is a sub-set of promotion.
• Advertising
• Public Relations
• Personal Selling
• Sales Promotion
• Print Collateral
• Direct Marketing
• Event Marketing
• Online Advertising
These elements constitute “traditional marketing.”
Today, more and more organizations are adopting “inbound marketing” strategies.

• A strategy developed in response to changes in buyer behavior – how people shop and buy products and services
• Leverages the power of Google search
• Is focused on getting found online and maximizing the ROI of your website
• Positions your website as your marketing hub
(More on Inbound Marketing later.)

“ Great idea! How will we market that?”
“Great idea! How will we advertise that?”
“Great idea! How will we promote that?”

Why do you need a marketing plan now?
What has changed in the last 20 years or so?
Why are all nonprofits suddenly buying into marketing as a necessary business function?

• Marketing has its roots in economics
• The first marketing classes had to do with distribution problems of dairy farmers
• Economics is the mother science of marketing

• Social science that analyzes and describes the consequences of choices made concerning scarce productive resources. Economics is the study of how individuals and societies choose to employ those resources: what goods and services will be produced, how they will be produced, and how they will be distributed among the members of society.

The VALUE producers and marketers add to raw materials when they make them into a product and offer them for sale to the public.
There are five types of utility. Organizations are paid according the the extent of the economic utility their products or services provide.

Involves changing RAW MATERIALS or
PUTTING PARTS TOGETHER to make them more useful.
RAW MATERIALS:
When you cut down a tree and use the lumber to create pencils, paper, furniture, etc., the tree now becomes more valuable to the customer.

Time utility is having a product available at a certain time of the year or at a convenient time of the day. Value is added when marketers make them available at the right time.
What are some products that sell better during certain hours of the day? Days or months of the year?

This involves placing a product where a customer can purchase it. Businesses study consumer shopping habits to determine the most convenient and efficient locations to sell products.

The exchange of a product for some monetary value is possession utility.
Purchasing the product has given it added value.
What are some ways you can purchase a product?

This involves communication with the customer.
Sales people, displays, packaging and labeling, advertising, sales brochures…
Anything used to encourage sales gives the product added value.

If you provide economic utility, you have something to market!

• Executive Summary
• A Competitive Analysis
• Mission, Vision, Values and Goals
• A Finance Plan
• A Marketing Plan
• A Production Plan
• A Facilities Plan
• A Human Resources Plan

• Is that portion of the business plan that lays out the direction for the organization’s marketing strategy.
• A written statement of marketing objectives and strategies to support broader goals.
• Explains who is responsible for managing activities and provides a timeline for their completion.

• Start with your business plan or a recent strategic plan. Your marketing plan must support the goals established with the strategic plan.
• Develop a marketing plan in the context of the larger, more encompassing strategic plan or business plan.
• Develop a strategy for each marketing mix variable that comes into play for each objective.

Eight Steps to Making a Meaningful
Marketing Plan

• Outlines the who, what, where, when, how and why of the marketing plan.
• Appears first but is written last.
• No need to be longer than a page.
• Describe how the plan was created. Name committee members or contributors and describe that process for strategy development.
• Involve others – the plan should not be the product of one person working along.

• The section should describe the library’s role in the community, its history, emerging trends, products and services offered and its strategic objectives.
• Keep this simple. Can be done in a few paragraphs or one page unless you’re in crisis management mode.
• Creates a context for the plan for those who may not be familiar with your library.

• Mission, Vision and Values can be lifted from the strategic plan.
• Using SMART goals, describe what the library’s objectives are for the coming year.
• We will develop marketing mix strategies and tactics to achieve each goal.

• What do we do exceptionally well?
• What makes us better than our competition?
• What kind of relationships do we foster with our service?
• What word or phrase do we own?

• It is helpful (but not required) to do a SWOT analysis of your library’s marketing capabilities to better understand your situation.
• Some nonprofits pull together a marketing committee consisting of non-staff members with specific marketing expertise.
• Determine market research needs if you have them.

• Identify your target market: Who are we trying to reach? Be as specific as possible.
• Message development: What do we want our target market to know? Get your best writer to craft an effective message.
• Media selection: How do we get our message out?
• Budget allocation: How much can I spend?
(Your marketing budget reflects your library’s commitment to marketing. What does your budget say?)

1. Write out a statement of your first goal.
2. Write down how each element of the marketing mix can be used to achieve the goal.
– Do we need to make changes to our PRODUCT offerings to achieve this goal?
– Do we need to develop a new PRICE strategy?
– Is achieving this goal dependent upon changes in how or where we deliver our service? (PLACE)
– What PROMOTION strategy can we devise to achieve this goal?

• Identify tactics
• Assign tasks
• Establish a timeline
• Execute the plan
• Set progress points
• Measure progress
• Make needed changes
• Quantify results

• Did you accomplish your objective?
– If not, why not?
• Were there any unintended consequences?
• What did we do that worked?
• What would we do differently next time?
• What did we learn?

Goal: We will increase the number of library card holders by 6% by Oct. 1, 2014
Strategy: We will develop a “Get a Card Today” promotion campaign and fully implement it in Q2,
2014.
Tactic #1: Create posters for display in library for display by February 1.

Tactic #2: Launch campaign with press releases to local newspaper, chamber groups and other civic organizations by Feb. 15.
Tactic #3: Create newspaper ads for placement as remnant space by March 1.
Tactic #4: Write a PSA and meet with local radio station for airing by March 20.

The marketing industry is going through a rapid change from traditional methods to inbound marketing methods.

• Radio
• Television
• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Direct Mail
• Trade Shows
• Telemarketing
• Billboards, etc.
The traditional marketing playbook is broken.
It’s increasingly difficult to get a good ROI
Using these methods. Why are they less effective than they used to be?

• Consumers are using technology to thwart unwanted marketing messages that are an interruption to their day
• “Interruption marketing” is unwelcome in today’s busy world.
• Average person exposed to thousands of branding messages a day
• Look at the ways consumers are blocking out our messages:

In a country of 310 million people, we have 200 million phone numbers on the ‘do not call’ list.
Caller ID
Abandonment of land lines

We no longer sit through commercials.
Whoever has the remote is in charge!
The incredible growth in the number of channels available has resulted in audience fragmentation and lends itself to channel surfing during commercials.

What else do we do in the car or at work instead of listen to the radio?
• CDs
• Sirius XM
• iTunes
• Public Broadcasting
• Streaming Internet
• Spotify
• Phone calls
• Texting

• No longer a good source of B2B leads
• Mainly attended by vendors and sales people
• Travel expenses have eroded their effectiveness

• Spam filters
• Legal issues
• Poor open and click through rates (CTRs)
• Inbox clutter

• Driven by changes in consumer behavior, not by marketers
• Average knowledge worker does 20-25
Google searches each day
• The blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook,
LinkedIn and YouTube are replacing traditional media

• Inbound marketing strategies have to be part of your toolkit when promoting your library
• Inbound Marketing is centered around the concept of attracting visitors to your website, converting some of them into leads, and turning leads into patrons or library users.
• Extremely cost-effective form of marketing!
• Everything on the Internet is trackable! This is a huge advantage over traditional marketing.

• Search Engine
Optimization
• Keyword Research
• Link-building
• Analytics
(These are important but cannot be covered today. We’ll focus our attention on the next column.)
• Content creation
• Blogging
• Social Media integration
• Promotion via
Twitter
• Email marketing

• >2,000,000,000 searches a month
• A quarter of the searches are unique
• People are searching for YOUR programs and services right in your own back yard

• Think like a publisher
• The Internet is the largest publishing platform in human history – use it!
• Create remarkable content!
• Push it out into the Internet using your blog,
Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
• Tweet the heck out of it to improve your
PageRank

• Adds a page to your website forever
• Tweet your blog post to your followers
• Some will re-Tweet to their followers, creating links to your website
• Google interprets inbound links as authority
• Your website rises in SERPs
• Post should be 400 to 600 words
• Add a photo and be sure you include ALT tags

• End every blog post with a CTA
• Provide a link to additional content
• Offer a free download of premium content
• Encourage some type of action
– See us today for a library card application.
– Call today to register for the seminar.

• More web pages means more authority
• Blogging 3x a week adds 156 pages of content to your site, bulking it up
• Don’t forget deep linking within your site
• Your content will spread throughout the Internet as people share the link to your blog post
• Each page pays dividends for months and years
• Think of it like compounding interest

• Create an inbound marketing campaign to support your strategy
– Write several blog posts with different angles
– Tweet the heck out of each one
– Push your content out through other channels
– Get guest bloggers to write for you

(Going back to our original goal, here is how you would add the elements of inbound marketing.)
Goal: We will increase the number of library card holders by 6% by Oct. 1, 2014
Strategy #1: We will develop a “Get a Card Today” promotion campaign and fully implement it in Q2,
2014.
Tactic #1: Create posters for display in library for display by February 1.

Tactic #2: Launch campaign with press releases to local newspaper, chamber groups and other civic organizations by Feb. 15.
Tactic #3: Create newspaper ads for placement as remnant space by March 1.
Tactic #4: Write a PSA and meet with local radio station for airing by March 20.

Goal: We will increase the number of library card holders by 6% by Oct. 1, 2014
Strategy #2: Develop an Inbound Marketing Plan to achieve this goal.
Tactic #1: Write a series of blog posts using the blogging editorial calendar
Tactic #2: Push this content onto multiple platforms
Tactic #3: Schedule Tweets throughout each week

Example of a blog post on the website.

(The same blog post put on a Facebook page.)

(Sample tweet promoting a blog post using bit.ly URL shortener.)

This is a data visualization of the
Internet. The brightest lights are the biggest websites at the hub of many links. You want your site to linked to many others, rather than just being off by itself.
Google puts a premium on websites with
LOTS of content and frequent updates.

• You don’t need no stinking rules!
• Let staffers Tweet away
• Ask for guest bloggers from time to time
• Be spontaneous!
• You can schedule Tweets in advance
• Try to Tweet at least 10x a day

1. Set up a Twitter account
– The name of the account should match your domain name
– Link to Twitter from your main page and from your Twitter account to your home page

2. Set up a simple Facebook business page
– This is known as a fan page
– You’ll need to administer this off your personal page
– Add a description of your library, a photo and link back to your website
– This is easy to do. Just follow directions.

3. Kick off a blog and start blogging
– Add Blog to your navigation menu
– You can use a free hosting tool like Wordpress but
DO NOT use their domain name
– create a subdomain if necessary to make sure you get the SEO authority (Example: blog.yourlibrary.org)
– ask several staffers to create one blog post a week

4. Write your first blog article and post it
– Shorten the URL using bit.ly
– Tweet to your follower(s) throughout the day
– Post link to the blog on your Facebook page
– Post link to the blog on LinkedIn

5. Set up Google Alerts for your library
– Set an alert up for your library
– Set one up for industry alerts
– Anyone can do this, but the marketing person should monitor this. Why? Because marketing is always responsible for brand management.

6. Find three competitors to track
– Read their blogs
– Follow them through Google Alerts
– Follow them on Twitter
– You will learn from these competitors!

7. Find relevant Twitter users
– Search by topic, location, or subject using hashtags (#) and start following people
– Do not mass follow numbers of people
– Follow back followers you think make sense

8. Find bloggers who write about your topic area
– Subscribe to their feed and read them regularly
– Leave valuable comments
NO spam
NO fluff or self promotion!
Remember, you’re building relationships here, not selling!

9. Start re-tweeting good articles
– Helps people expand their Internet presence
– Behavior is noticed
– Attracts followers
Social media is social, so be social.
(Can you handle these deep thoughts?)

10. Make a list of the top people in your industry
– Convert into a blog post: “14 library rock stars I’d like to have coffee with”
– List them, write a couple sentences about why, link to their profile pages or website
– This helps others and increases the chances that they will visit your blog
– A similar post can talk about books, music, speakers, etc. – just about anything!

Traits you want your marketing staff person to have in today’s changing marketing environment.

• Hire Digital Citizens
• With Analytical Skills
• Who have some web Reach
• And can Create Content

• Digital Citizens were born web savvy or got very familiar with the web. They speak web fluently.
• Digital Tourists were born analog and not too familiar with the web. They speak web with an accent.
• NEVER assume recent college grads are digital citizens. They aren’t.

Ask your applicants to bring their laptop to the interview. Sit side by side rather than across the desk. Most applicants will claim to be web savvy. Test them with these questions and ask them to show you .
• What RSS reader do you use? Can I see it?
• What blogs do you read? Can you show me?
• Do you have a blog?
• How many Twitter followers do you have?
• When did you last update your Facebook or
LinkedIn profile?

A
• Should be very familiar with Excel or a statistical software package
• Should know Google Analytics and how to use the tool
• Should understand keyword strategies involving long-tail keyword research

R
• How many LinkedIn connections do you have?
• How many Twitter followers do you have? Do you talk about our industry on your Twitter account?
• How often do you post to Facebook?
• Do you have a blog?
(True digital citizens will be part of online communities. Look at their bookmarks and how organized their desktop is. Don’t be afraid of gamers, unless they exhibit psychopathic behaviors. )

• Your candidate should have GREAT writing skills
• Be great if they could shoot and post a video on
YouTube
• Have they ever done a podcast or screencast?
• They should be comfortable with blogging on a fixed schedule. (2x a week minimum)

• You probably won’t find someone with all of these traits, but look for them anyway. Make sure your candidate has either the coursework or experience to swim in the waters of online marketing.
• Being able to take a selfie and post it on Instagram doesn’t qualify you as a digital citizen.

John Murphy
The Murphy Agency, Inc.
10 W. Streetsboro St., Suite 205
Hudson, OH 44236
330-342-1255 www.themurphyagency.com