The ABC's of Marketing

How do you keep teachers coming back to your library, update students about the latest resources available, and draw parents to after-school training sessions? The answers lie in effectively promoting your library media center program.

Marketing isn't traditionally taught in library school. But with budget cuts taking center stage nationwide, it's never been more necessary to promote your program as an integral part of the learning process. Marketing your media center program follows the same basic guidelines found in the business world: create a product that people like, target your advertising, build a base of satisfied customers, take time to manage the details, and grow your program slowly so that each stage is a success.

Publicizing library-sponsored events, such as book fairs, booktalks, and author visits, is an easy place to start. By taking advantage of a few simple strategies, your events will run more smoothly and leave teachers and students feeling positive about them.

Before scheduling your events, take a close look at your school's events calendar to ensure there aren't any conflicts with prearranged field trips, concert practices, or other significant school happenings. Schedule your special events during the school day, and, if possible, offer an extra, early-evening session so parents and their kids can attend together. (Parents especially like to attend book fairs and readings with popular authors.) Afterward, create an online news group so parents and students can discuss the event and post their comments.

When scheduling library events for teachers, make sure they receive ample advance notice, and don't forget to give them a last-minute reminder. Given the busy lives of classroom teachers, they'll appreciate the heads-up.

One obvious way to devise creative marketing ideas for your library is to ask fellow library media specialists. Subscribing to online discussion groups, like LM_NET, attending state, regional, and national library conferences, and reading trade publications, like School Library Journal¸Multimedia Schools¸ and Library Media Connection, can lead to a lot of helpful ideas. LM_NET—with more than 14,000 subscribers from 64 different countries—is a wonderful resource, and you can easily search its archives for information on promoting your library media center.

Providing access to resources is what school media specialists do best. How do you share the new and exciting things you uncover with teachers, parents, and students? A tried-and-true method is to include little blurbs in school announcements and home-school newsletters, and to create attractive bulletin boards that students can't resist.

Technology has certainly provided innovative ways to reach potential "customers." One includes sending teachers a brief e-mail each week and highlighting a new book or Web site that will be of interest to them. Don't send the same note to all teachers, but, on the other hand, don't just include teachers who are technophiles. Use your e-mail to create two distribution lists: one grouped by grade level and the other by subject. This type of targeted "advertising" provides teachers with the specific resources they need. Your thoughtfulness will make them much more open to working with you on future collaborative projects. They'll also realize that you truly understand their classroom needs and curriculum.

To reach parents and students at home, create a Web page with links to helpful resources (like the ones mentioned above for teachers), organized and annotated in a way that's useful for homework and special projects. Take a look at the many great library media Web sites available by visiting some of the "best of" lists that appear on library-related Web sites. Don't be afraid to copy ideas and tips. Once your own site is up and running, be sure to include your library's Web address on everything you create, including press releases, newsletters, handbooks, how-to guides, printed pathfinders, and bookmarks. Also make sure to ask your Web-page-hosting service to provide monthly statistics on your most visited sites. You can also add a counter to the bottom of your site to monitor the most popular and valuable pages for your users.

These marketing strategies and ideas are easy to follow, and can transform your library media center into a must-visit destination for students, parents, teachers, and administrators. You'll also discover an abundance of satisfied visitors—and a satisfied customer always comes back for more.

Kathy Schrock (kathy@kathyschrock.net) is the administrator for technology for the Nauset Public Schools in Cape Cod, MA.