Creating a Library Awareness Campaign
The Creative Process
By Kaley Daniel, director of TTU Libraries’ Communications & Marketing
Texas Tech University (TTU) Libraries’ Office of Communications and Marketing (OC&M)
followed a five-step creative process for our first-ever awareness campaign:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Preparation
Calendar planning
Concepting
Internal communication
Execution
Step One – Preparation
Before you can open the flood gates of your creative juices, you need to build the ark that will
help you navigate the clashing waves of your imagination and your library’s marketing needs. Building
the ark, AKA the preparation step, consists of two parts – understanding and planning. It’s important to
gain an understanding of what your library has to market and to whom you should market – the ark –
before you begin planning the communication of your library’s message(s) to your audience – your
awareness campaign.
Gaining an understanding of what your library’s marketing needs are should be broken down
into an understanding of your audience(s) and an understanding of your library’s marketable services. In
other words, who would benefit most from knowing about the resources, services and/or products
found through your library. Let’s consider the audience(s) first.
More than likely, you have heard the terms primary, secondary and tertiary audience. These are
good to follow; however, not all libraries’ audiences will fit into these molds easily and that’s alright. To
label your audience(s), you want to think about your library’s most frequent users/patrons and find
similar attributes and characteristics (i.e., age, behavior patterns, traits, trends, etc.) of these user sets.
As an example, TTU Libraries has the following audiences:
1. Primary
a. Students
b. Faculty/Teaching assistants
2. Secondary
a. Staff
3. Tertiary
a. Parents/Alumni
As you can see, TTU Libraries has two primary audiences. This is because these audience
members are the heaviest users of the Libraries’ resources and services. Once you have your audiences
labeled, you can further define them by researching their behavioral attributes and traits according to
their generational profiles (i.e., Boomers, Xers, Millennials). Knowing your audience’s age range,
behavior patterns, traits, trends, etc., is important because it will aid you in the concepting stage of the
creative process.
The second part of the preparation step involves gaining an understanding of your library’s
services that regularly touch your patrons or those with which your patrons directly interact (i.e., online
journals, databases, articles, etc.; items available for check out/circulation, technological resources,
librarians, etc.). If you are not new to your library, you probably already have a sound working
knowledge of the resources, services and product(s) available to your patrons. However, this shouldn’t
stop you from doing some interviewing of the “experts” within your library. Whether you are a new
employee or a seasoned veteran, schedule “getting re(acquainted)” meetings with leaders of the
different areas throughout your library to tell them about the awareness campaign and how you think
their area will have a large role within the campaign. Ask them questions such as:
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What new projects are you working on that will affect our patrons and how will the new
service work?
How do the services your area provides work and how do they benefit our patrons?
What service-related help questions does your area frequently receive from our
patrons?
Of the services you provide, which are used most frequently by our patrons? Which are
used the least? Why?
What services from your area do you think needs marketing? Why?
When it comes time to promote the services your area offers, who can be my main
contact for proofing marketing material?
Meeting with the area leaders (known as associate deans in TTU Libraries) is important because
you will want to know the vision and direction they have set for their respective areas and will benefit
from listening to what they believe their areas contribute to your library’s success. Plus, obtaining buy in
from the top will aid the fragile relationship between promoting a service and ensuring the service is
executed for the patron as marketed/advertised. Services in the library actually walking the marketed
talk will be critical to the on-going success of your marketing efforts. These area leaders can also help
ensure that consistent messaging is maintained from the words read from the promotional piece to the
words heard by the patron.
Learning the technical and behind-the-scenes aspects of your library’s different services will also
help to ensure that you have all the services available to patrons in the water so that they can be mixed
and tossed around with other ideas as you are brainstorming the concept of your campaign.
Furthermore, having the in-depth knowledge of how a particular service works will aid you in writing the
marketing messaging in a way that will be easy for your audience to understand.
OC&M’s director conducted “getting acquainted” meetings with the associate deans and
department heads of the following areas within the TTU Libraries:
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Scholarly Communication & Management Services
o Electronic Resources Management and Assessment
Library Technology and Management Services
o Technology Support Services
Information Services
Once you have all the services that regularly touch your patrons or those with which your
patrons directly interact, you will want to test the services for yourself. You could set up a “secret
patron” and use their feedback regarding timely response, effectiveness of resource, hiccups
encountered, customer service and more to determine if the service is ready to be marketed and what
should be highlighted in your marketing messaging. If you encounter more hiccups and poor customer
service than benefits, you will want to alert the area leader and retest once the service problem has
been remedied before marketing.
After you have removed any services that are not quite ready for the marketing spotlight, you
should consider the following of the remaining services on your list:
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Which are brand new?
Which are used most frequently?
Which are used least frequently?
Which services are similar?
Doing so will help you determine which services should be promoted first, which can be paired,
which can be promoted during your library’s slow time, etc. See Attachment A for the list of services
used by TTU Libraries’ OC&M.
Step Two – Calendar Planning
Now that we have the shell of the ark built, we can connect the turbine, rudder and helm for
proper steering through our creative seas. The turbine, rudder and helm make up the second step of the
creative process – calendar planning. This step is very basic as it is only a matter of mapping out the
services you will promote on a calendar. The calendar may vary from one library to the next (fiscal year
versus academic year) but the idea is the same. Your campaign calendar should span at least a full year.
OC&M worked from TTU’s academic calendar. Attachment B is OC&M’s fall 2008 awareness
campaign calendar. You will not that the calendar includes important academic and university dates
such as:
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the first day of class
home football games
student and university holidays
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midterms
the last day of class
finals
Once you have these critical dates filled in, you will need to decide how long you would like to
promote each service. OC&M decided to run each service’s promotion for two-weeks at a time
beginning the second week of classes (marketing and advertising during the first week of classes is not
recommended as students and faculty are much too preoccupied with getting into the swing of things).
Over the course of the academic year, each service will have the marketing spotlight for approximately
one month as the services will run again for two weeks during the spring semester. After you have
decided the length of your promotions, you can plug the services onto the calendar according to the
order you established from your weighted list of all marketable services.
Step Three – Concepting
The ark is ready to set sail – open the gates and let the creative juices flow! We have reached
the third step in the process – concepting – which means you are half-way there. This step should be
broken down into three parts: 1) promotional pieces, 2) brainstorming and 3) design comp
presentation. Do not let the lingo turn you away; it is much more fun than it may sound!
Let us take the first part – promotional pieces. This part requires knowledge of your audience
and what advertising venues they will pay attention to, any marketing budget you may be assigned,
creative ideas to use in-house resources and an all-hands-on-deck attitude from faculty and staff
throughout the library, and outside of the library, for creative methods to distribute your pieces. For
example, OC&M knew that for the majority of our marketable services, our primary audience would be
students of all types – from undergraduate to graduate, freshmen to upper-classmen – and that we
were working with a limited budget that would possibly need to stretch us over the next two years so
we could not rely on large-scale print advertising or direct-mail pieces.
We also knew that the major thing we had going for us was that we had in-house resources that
would allow us to produce and distribute all of our marketing pieces. Whether we needed to print flyers,
table tents and bookmarks on the Library’s color laser printer or large, 21x27” posters and large-format
banners and window clings on the Library’s plotter printer, we were able to do so without spending
monies on external printing companies. For distribution of promotional pieces such as flyers and
bookmarks, we enlisted the services of our point-of-contact desks throughout the Library, such as the
Circulation Desk, our Document Delivery area, for inclusion of bookmarks and flyers with all deliveries
and pick-ups, and our partnerships throughout campus to post posters and flyers at their points of
contact. Plus, we utilized our subject librarians’ faculty connections for distribution of a direct e-mail
promotional piece to their faculty’s students. For a complete list of promotional pieces produced by
OC&M for our awareness campaign, see Attachment C.
Once you have an idea of what promotional pieces you will produce, you can begin the second
part of concepting – brainstorming. You might be wondering why you needed to list your promotional
pieces first. The reason is simple. Knowing what promotional pieces you are going to produce will help
you to know whether or not your design elements, imagery and/or illustrations will “fit” with your
pieces. For example, you wouldn’t want to brainstorm a campaign that is driven by full-color
photography if your budget is small and you don’t have access to a color printer.
Now that the creative juices are warmed up, it is time to get the ideas flowing to formulate your
campaign’s concept, or theme. This means, you have reached the second part of concepting –
brainstorming. Gather a group of open-minded, creative, witty, out-of-the-box thinkers and generate
two to three different concepts that “show” the marketable services in ways in which your audience will
identify. Think about things like the use of photography versus illustration and complex visual elements
versus the statement of simple, bold and solid elements. Consider what headlines can support your
visuals and grab the attention of your audience. Discuss how your text can be arranged on the
promotional piece so that it does not stop the audience from reading the entire piece. Try humor or play
on words. Whether you decide your concept will use photographs of people or illustrations of cartoon
characters, it needs to have the following:
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a consistent in look and feel for each promotional piece produced for each service
a consistent tone in the messaging for each promotional piece produced for each
service
capability to be integrated throughout your list of promotional pieces – from ecommunications to print pieces
tagline – the last line on all your pieces that emphasizes or clarifies the point or essence
of your campaign
Once you have brainstormed at least a couple different concepts, you should next draw up
these concepts into design comps. A design comp is a rough sketch or rough computer design. Present
these comps one at a time to a focus group of your audience. For each comp, ask your participants
questions such as:
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What does this say to you?
Is the messaging clear?
Are there any parts that conflict?
What’s the first thing you saw?
Does the piece flow?
How/what would you change to get the message across more clearly?
What advertising mediums do they pay attention to?
Which comp did you like best? (After they have seen all options.)
Based on the feedback you receive from the focus group participants, tweak your strongest
concept, finalize your messaging and design elements and adjust your promotional pieces list as needed.
Fourth Step – Internal Communication
At last, you have your awareness campaign calendar and the concept for your campaign. Before
you can move to the last step, you must communicate the campaign with your fellow library staff so that
they will be aware of what services are being promoted, how and when. Make presentations of the plan
sharing the calendar and showing a couple designed pieces at staff meetings. Provide examples of how
staff can use the messaging in their daily communication with patrons. You could even draft a bulleted
list of talking points to post at each service desk as a reminder to staff. Encourage all staff to include the
tagline in their e-mail signatures. Send heads-up e-mails prior to the launch of each new service
promotion to remind staff what is coming up and how the service is being promoted. Post the calendar
on the staff bulletin board. Most importantly, check in with the areas during their promotion to see if
demand has increased, if they are using the talking points for consistent messaging and/or what
questions they may be receiving from patrons.
Fifth Step – Execute
The fifth and final step is execution. For this step, all you need to do is be sure to build in enough
time prior to each service’s promotion to design, print, construct and install the promotional pieces.
Congratulations – all your hard work is going to come to fruition!