Library Buzz: 360° Marketing for Content Buyers

360° Marketing for Content Buyers
Military Libraries Training Workshop
December 9, 2015

Dave Shumaker,
Department of Library and Information Science,
Catholic University of America

The role of marketing in the process – marketing to stakeholders to gauge interest and get buy-in.

Marketing pervades all 360° of the buying cycle.

Keep marketing principles in the foreground throughout the process. Be prepared!

Licensing cycle:

Do your homework: monitor community needs and monitor the marketplace.
Place the contract: test and negotiate
Implement: test for technical issues; promote and train
Evaluate – which leads back to monitoring to see that we are meeting the information needs.
Marketing – a set of process for creating, communicating and delivering value to a community and managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. Marketing is more than promoting and communicating. Tie marketing to the mission/vision/strategy for your organization.

Dr. Shumaker uses the analogy of a chain to relate the steps in the marketing process. He uses a chain because the steps are linked together.

Mission/vision/strategy Placement Positioning Promotion

Product development Pricing Branding Politics Relationships

Research & Understanding

Marketing tasks – the 4 P’s:

Product development
Placement – Branding and Positioning
Pricing
Promotion – includes Politics & Relationships

Step 1 – Do your homework: Who are you? How do you contribute to the mission?

Align with agency mission/vision/strategy

Research – know your audience. Understand the marketplace. Who are the agency stakeholders? What are the disciplines? Identify different segments in the community. Know the differences and know the scope of the product.

Step 2 – Place the contract:

Product development – choices to customize for your agency.
Placement – make it easy for the users
Pricing – negotiations over dollars, the cost of time and effort; the cost to the community for using the system.

Negotiations: Getting to Yes (in negotiating). One question to keep in mind – What is the cost/impact if I have to walk away from a negotiation.

Step 3 – Implementation

Branding – does the product present our brand or the vendor brand? This is negotiable!
Position – what do people think when they see your brand? There should be more trust when they see your organizational brand – this was selected by your library.
Promote – specific to your agency. State your objectives and develop a strategy.

Promotion plan:

Message	Audience	Medium	Timing	Location

First consider who your audience is.

The message should include the benefits of the new resource/tool – show how it will make life better for your people.

Medium – where do users hangout? What medium works best? What will reach the people? It varies depending upon the agency and depending upon the user group. Go to their meetings – they won’t come to you. Go to their executive meetings! Show the executives how the product will benefit the staff. Get the bosses to promote it.

Timing – work it into the flow of your organization

Location – find the right meeting to promote the new resource.

Step 4 – Evaluation

Often we count clicks or downloads. What we need to count is the cost per download. Make comparisons between the subscription cost per download and the single purchase price.

Our measures need to tell a story about more than activity – but outcomes. How are people using the materials they are get? What is the impact to the organization by having access to these materials?

Go back to the mission – how did this help us meet our mission? Did it solve a problem? Did we use the materials to brief an executive? Did it support our learning and understanding as we worked on a project?

Step 5 - Marketing

Marketing principles:

Politics – the art of getting stuff done. Form coalitions with people who can get things done.

Relationships – internal and external. People buy from people.

The key to marketing new resources is to be a net-centric librarian. The net-centric librarian has relationships in all areas – the work community, the library community and with vendors of resources.