Three Marketing Tips that Can Help Corporate Librarians

Marketing and promoting your information resources can be a tiresome project for corporate librarians. These three tips can help.

The challenge most corporate librarians face is effectively marketing their information resources. The goal is to help employees see value, understand where to access and how to utilize the information available for optimal research. Promoting resources often requires corporate librarians to put on a “marketing hat,” which can be unfamiliar, tricky and time consuming. Here are three fundamental tips to help corporate librarians make sense of promoting their information resources and services.

Tip #1: Start with a Strategy

Starting with an effective strategy will help you to stay on course with your marketing promotions. Organize all of your campaign information in a central document for you and your team to refer back to. This document should contain the following:

• Audience – are you focused on a specific department or group?
• Basic Message – keep this to one to two sentences
• Tactics – the vehicles/channels you will use to promote
• Timing – time frame for your campaign
• Goal – what you hope to achieve through your efforts and what you hope the audience achieves. Make sure your goals are both qualitative and quantitative.

Tip #2: Recruit and Retain

Make sure that the campaign strategies you have in place target new employees as well as current employees, also consider where and when promotions make the most sense. One EBSCO customer notes:

“When promoting new products to our users in the U.S., we do the following:

• Targeted campaigns (visually attractive emails to certain user groups)
• Promotion on large flat TV screens
• Highlight in our new hire orientation
• Presentations at other department’s staff meetings”

Tip #3: Tell a Story with Content

Your company may be comprised of different generations who are shaped by today’s consumer experience. This experience is focused on meaning and value answering the question “how can this product or service help me?” rather than “what does this product or service do?” When it comes to messaging, crafting a story and providing a benefits-driven message is key. Take your marketing to the next level by employing a variety of content to communicate your message. This is also known as content marketing and it includes a variety of tactics to employ, examples include:

• Infographics – Visual representations, usually of data or a key topic
• Videos – A popular and proven media for today
• Employee Success Stories – Build trust and provide a human quality and peer-to-peer learning
• E-newsletters – Often send monthly or quarterly providing news, tips or interesting topics
• Presentations – Reinforces awareness, and can be utilized again and again if recorded
• Webinars/Webcasts – Focus on a trending topic but still have an impact on users and resources

One EBSCO customer told us about their effective content marketing approach: “Our library group sends out three newsletters per year that go to everyone in our global R&D function. Each one features a “spotlight” database that we describe, offer tips on, and provide training links for, if available.”

Want to take marketing your information resources to the next level?