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