AI can generate quick answers, but that doesn’t mean it replaces the value of a library collection.
A viewer recently asked how libraries can promote their collections as an alternative to AI, and I thought it was a fascinating question.
In this episode of The Library Marketing Show, we explore ways to position the library’s collection as something deeper, richer, and more trustworthy than an AI summary.
Plus, find out why a project that involves the whole of the United States is getting kudos!
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
Photo courtesy Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library
Lauren Tolman learned to read when she was just three years old.
“Books have been part of my life since I was little,” she explains. “My family made weekly trips to our local public library. I tore through Arthur,The Baby-sitters Club, Little House (on the Prairie), and any series I could get my hands on.”
“As a kid, my dream job swung between ‘mermaid’ and ‘librarian.’ The librarians at my local branch sat at this big wooden desk surrounded by paperback spinner racks, and they’d read to kids on carpeted risers. I visited the library again thirty years later… the same desk, the same brown carpet, the same happy library noise.”
Lauren’s first library job was as a shelver. In her 20+ year career, she’s been a page, a story time performer, a clerk, a children’s librarian, and a supervisor. Now, she’s the Communications Specialist in the Marketing Department at Utah Valley University’s Fulton Library.
Lauren and two other staff members market the library to the school’s 47,000 students. Lauren supervises the department full-time and handles project management, social media, and campus outreach. Her work is complemented by a part-time graphic designer and a part-time copywriter.
Lauren says the most effective channel for reaching her audience is Instagram. The library appears to have a formula down that works well for their audience. All the videos are short-form with a healthy dose of humor.
The library is also really, really good at putting its own, unique twist on trends, as they did for this video. (You will remember when this song was all the rage on Instagram and TikTok videos!)
But beyond social media, Lauren and her staff have other ways to reach students on campus.
“Our staff is our best ‘channel,’” shares Lauren. “They talk with students constantly through instruction sessions, resource fairs, research help, circulation desk interactions, etc.”
“Students love seeing other students in marketing. We also work with peer mentors, ambassadors, and other student leaders who help share our posts or pass along information to their programs.”
Recently, Lauren and her team worked through a library campaign refresh with new branding, colors, iconography, and more, called “Find It at the Fulton Library.”
“We aim for a new brand campaign every 3-4 years to keep our image fresh and current for our students,” explains Lauren. “The process can take 6-9 months, as we work with our campus marketing, communications, and photography departments to produce all the materials.”
“They help us with concepts and developing a brand kit with colors, fonts, and more to help maintain a consistent look among all of our deliverables. They also help us with student lifestyle photoshoots, giving us a high-quality photo library to use throughout the next couple of years.”
As you can see, this new brand has a vintage feel, while being fresh and colorful.
But not everything is all fun and games for an academic library looking for promotional success. Like most library marketers, there have been times when the strategiesy Lauren has tried just didn’t land with her audience.
“I will say I’ve had many disappointments where social media posts or Reels get low engagement,” explains Lauren. “It always seems to be the ones that are really informative or take forever to make that turn out to have the lowest interactions. That can be frustrating, but I try to learn from it. If even one student is helped by the content, that’s great. And there are always other channels to try to share that information!”
To that end, Lauren has some advice for libraries of all sizes and types when it comes to marketing.
“Get to know your audience, what they care about, where they hang out, what they struggle with. Lead with approachability and benefits. Our audience likes to feel seen and have their problems solved.”
“Track your results, even informally. This will help you figure out your strengths and weaknesses, and the direction your content should go. And don’t be afraid to experiment with types of content, even the casual kind. While we keep our language kind and professional, students love it when we go a little unhinged or use pop culture references in our content.”
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Should libraries stick with traditional opt-in email marketing or consider moving to an opt-out model?
A viewer recently asked this question, and it opens up an important conversation about reach, engagement, and email reputation.
In this episode of The Library Marketing Show, I share my perspective on this sometimes controversial topic and offer guidance for libraries that might be considering a change.
Plus, we’ll award kudos to a library using social proof to promote its value across its whole community.
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
What do you do when one format in your library collection just isn’t circulating the way it used to?
A viewer of The Library Marketing Show is facing exactly that challenge and reached out for advice. In this episode, I share a few marketing ideas that could help revive interest and invite you to contribute your own suggestions as well.
Plus, we’re giving kudos to a library that is handing out VERY special, limited edition library cards!
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library
Library marketing looks different everywhere.
At some libraries, it’s one person doing promotions part-time. At others, it’s a small communications team. Sometimes it’s staff at different branches or departments all creating their own flyers, emails, and social posts.
Many of you who are tasked with that work don’t have a marketing background. You may be librarians, programmers, or outreach staff who were asked to “help promote things.”
Library promotion often starts the same way: A program or service is planned, and then everyone rushes to create the promotional materials.
But effective marketing doesn’t start with tactics. It starts with a strategy.
Before you create the flyer, schedule social media posts, or draft the email, take a few minutes to answer five simple questions that will shape your promotional approach and set your library up for marketing success.
What are your library’s goals and priorities?
Start by writing down your library’s goals and priorities for the next 6-12 months. This step helps you define your promotional focus.
For example, let’s say your library wants to bridge the learning gap for children in kindergarten through third grade. To do that, the library plans to increase participation in early reader services by 5 percent and boost the circulation of children’s books by 10 percent. With this defined priority, a large percentage of your promotions should primarily target parents, caregivers, and teachers.
Goal setting and prioritization matter because library marketing is often very activity-driven. We promote every program, every service, every resource equally.
But success requires strategy, and strategy requires prioritization. When you know the library’s big goals, you can decide what deserves the most promotional attention and what might get lighter promotion.
Write those goals down and keep them visible. Every promotion should connect back to them in some way.
Next, take a few minutes to write down what you know about your community and your current users. This might sound silly, but it is crucial. The more clearly you understand your audience, the easier it becomes to create promotions that speak to their needs and interests.
Ask yourself:
Who are your cardholders?
What do they typically use the library for?
Where do they live?
What groups of people in your community are not using the library yet?
You should also think about what competes for your audience’s attention. That might include bookstores, streaming services, after-school programs, and Google or AI.
Next, do some analysis of the data you have at hand, including:
Circulation trends
Foot traffic to your branches
Database usage
Program attendance
Email engagement
Social media engagement
Website traffic
Any survey data you may have from patrons or community members
You may think you know the current state of your library. But once you’ve done this analysis, you’ll likely make some interesting discoveries that will make it clear exactly what you need to do to be more successful in your library marketing.
What things can you use to promote your library?
Take inventory of your promotional tools. Write down every communication channel your library uses. This might include:
Your library website
E-newsletters
Social media platforms
Digital signage
Flyers and posters
Press releases and media outreach
In-library displays
Staff recommendations and readers’ advisory
Partnerships with schools or community groups
Many libraries discover during this exercise that they’re using more channels than they can realistically manage well. (Raise your hand if you suspect that’s you!)
That’s okay. The goal here isn’t to use everything. The goal is to understand what tools are available so you can choose the right ones for each promotion.
Ask yourself:How can you put your library’s promotional tools to work?
This is where strategy starts to take shape.
Consider your goals and your audience, then decide which promotional tools will work best to reach them.
For example, you may know from past experience that most people register for summer reading after clicking links in your e-newsletter. If that’s the case, the newsletter should be a major part of your summer reading promotion. Or, if you know that the majority of attendees at your author events are also members of a book club, you can partner with book clubs hosted by other organizations, like bookstores or community groups, to reach your target audience.
You don’t need to promote everything everywhere. Instead, focus your energy on the channels that are most likely to reach the people you want to serve. This step is really about matching the right message to the right audience in the right place.
If that sounds complicated, I created this guide to help you use AI to match audiences with channels.
How will you measure your success (or failure)?
Too often, libraries judge marketing success based on vague feelings like “that seemed popular” or “we saw a lot of people talking about it.”
Feelings aren’t facts. You must measure the effectiveness of your promotions so you can replicate successes and stop doing the things that don’t work.
This part of library marketing success does not need to be complicated. Write down a few clear success measures. For example, with summer reading, you might track:
Clicks on the registration link in your e-newsletter
Weekly registration totals
Program attendance
Circulation of summer reading titles
Not every promotion will succeed. That’s okay! The important thing is learning from what happens.
When something works, try to understand why. When something doesn’t work, resist the temptation to repeat it out of habit.
Need help with metrics? I created a mini-metric toolkit. And here are 4 metrics that will evaluate your library marketing success in 30 minutes or less. Easy peasy!
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Today I’m sharing some personal news: I’m starting a new chapter in my career that brings me back to where my library marketing journey first began — my hometown library.
In this short episode, I’m sharing where I’m headed next, why this opportunity meant so much to me, and what it means for the future of Super Library Marketing and The Library Marketing Show.
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
Creating short-form videos is one of the best ways to reach your community. But… convincing colleagues to step in front of the camera is difficult!
If you’re running into resistance — or just quiet reluctance — this episode is for you. I break down how to reframe video participation, build buy-in internally, and help staff feel confident instead of self-conscious on camera.
Plus, I’m giving kudos to a library that created a hilarious parody video with staff in the midst of a snowstorm!
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
Photo courtesy Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library
Key Takeaways:
1. Hyper‑local social media works but only with empowered staff. By giving staff autonomy to create content tailored to each branch’s unique audience, the library sees more meaningful engagement than a one‑size‑fits‑all strategy could ever provide.
2. Incentives can spark huge engagement if the program is simple. Josh’s initial point‑based contest led to dramatic increases in reach, interactions, and followers at participating branches. But it also revealed the importance of designing challenges that align with staff capacity.
3. Start small, collaborate early, and refine as you go. Josh’s biggest lesson: don’t skip the research stage. Understanding staff time, motivations, and manager buy‑in is essential.
Josh Mosey lives in the same town where he grew up: Middleville, Michigan.
“My older brother and I used to ride our bikes to the library in the summer when we were kids and take part in the summer reading program,” remembers Josh. “I wasn’t as big a reader then, but I did enjoy the books on cassette tape that came with the physical books attached. When nothing new was available in that form, I’d pick a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book, which I would read until one or two endings and call it good.”
“I was a notorious cheater when it came to counting books for the summer reading challenge back then. I’m making up for it now by reading voraciously as a grownup.”
Josh can get plenty of books, thanks to his current job as part of the six-person Library Marketing and Communications team and the Kent District Library. KDL serves 440,000 residents in Kent County, MI, excluding the city of Grand Rapids and a couple of smaller municipalities on the north end of the county. The library consists of twenty branches, one express library, and a bookmobile.
Josh is responsible for email and social media marketing for KDL. And the social media part of his job involves working with 20 “social media branch champions”. These are staff members appointed to create content and list events on their branch’s Facebook page.
“The social media branch champions have been around for as long as each branch has had its own Facebook page,” explains Josh. “They are chosen by that location’s manager as someone who either has time, interest, or expertise in that area. While I oversee the group, give tips, and create content they can use, the social media branch champions don’t take orders from me.”
Josh says the goal of our social media branch champions is to engage with their community, cultivate relationships with community members who might come to their events in person, and reflect the things that make their communities unique.
“Since the patrons at each branch can vary widely in interests and socioeconomic makeup, a one-size-fits-all mentality doesn’t work for our branch pages,” he says.
But this system has its challenges.
“Skills and interests vary widely from branch to branch,” explains Josh. “My graphic design background is borne out of the fact that my roommate in college was a graphic design major, and he let me play around on his computer with Photoshop. I’ve been able to do a lot with that over the years, but I’m a rarity among library staff members. Most folks have backgrounds in library science, literature, or education.”
“And while we have a comprehensive brand guideline and I’ve given the team examples of what a well-designed image should look like, some folks just don’t have the time, interest, or expertise to create on-brand, engaging content.”
And because this job likely falls under the “other duties as assigned” for many of the social media branch champions, they may not want to take on the frustrating job of posting to social media. So, Josh decided to incentivize social media work for this library.
“The incentives are based on best practices like consistent posting, interacting with local groups, sharing posts from the main KDL page, promoting branch events, and so on,” explains Josh. “Each of those activities is awarded a specific point value, and the points are calculated quarterly. At the end of each quarter, the branch with the most points wins a pizza party for their branch, a bookstore gift card for themselves, and temporary ownership of a goat trophy that says, ‘You’re the G.O.A.T.’”
Josh says the incentives worked well… at first.
“While some branches simply didn’t have time to put their numbers in (or participate, really), the branches that took the competition seriously saw massive increases in followers, interaction, and post views and likes.”
For example, Josh says the first branch to win was the Alto Branch of KDL. The results were as follows:
Views increased by more than 356 percent.
Reach increased by 811 percent.
Content interactions increased 334 percent.
Link clicks increased by 1,400 percent.
Visits to the Alto Facebook page increased 51 percent.
Follows increased by nearly 191 percent.
That sounds like a great leap. But when Josh solicited feedback from the branch champions on the incentive program, he discovered that most felt participation was just one more thing they needed to squeeze into their already busy routines, especially in the summer and fall. So Josh is making some changes.
“The program is going to change from a cumbersome Excel spreadsheet into a simple, physical Bingo sheet with twenty-five challenges that a branch can do monthly,” says Josh. “The more bingos a champion earns, the more chances they’ll have to win a prize. This should still get at the heart of what motivated the ones who participated while addressing the complexity of the previous version of the challenge for those who didn’t do much with it.”
Josh has some candid advice for anyone considering a similar incentive program for staff.
“I was too quick to go from the ideation phase into implementation,” confesses Josh. “I should have done a little more research into what my champions had time for and what exactly would motivate them.”
“I would encourage libraries that want to do this to sit down with the folks who manage their library’s social media presences, along with those folks’ managers, to increase the level of buy-in at the beginning.”
“Also, simpler is better. I was trying to get my people to do all the right things from the beginning, but I probably should have started smaller by focusing on two or three things each month until everyone had some momentum going for a bigger training and competition event.”
And Josh has one more, unrelated piece of social media advice for libraries.
“Don’t give up on social media posts that use words,” advises Josh. “Photos and videos are great, but it’s okay to make basic, nice-looking posts with nothing but words on them. It’s been working for us since I started in my role four years ago, across all our platforms.”
Subscribe to this blog, and you’ll receive an email whenever I post. To do that, enter your email address and click on the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page. You can also follow me on the following social media platforms:
Are “marketing” and “promotion” the same thing? We say they are… but should we?
One of my readers challenged me to think more intentionally about our terminology, and it sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole.
In this episode of The Library Marketing Show, I’m making the case for why these words matter more than we think, and how rethinking them can change the way your library connects with your community.
Plus, I’m giving kudos to a library staff member who had a recent brush with fame for their work outside the library!
Do you have a suggestion for a future episode’s topic? Do you want to nominate someone for kudos? Let me know here.
Super Library Marketing: Practical Tips and Ideas for Library Promotion 