Steps in the Marketing Process

Establish a planning procedure

Where do you begin?

1. Begin the marketing process by examining your library's mission or purpose.

The marketing process explores the library's capabilities and matches them to user needs. The foundation of the process is knowing what the library's purpose is in the community. Does your library have a mission statement, a document that outlines the purpose of the organization and defines customer service? A primary goal for any marketing plan is to contribute to the library's mission of serving the community, whatever that community may be -- the local area, worldwide on the Internet, or special user groups.

2. Assess library capabilities with a marketing audit, an internal assessment.

Know what you can do. What services and resources do you offer? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Determine the marketing mix, or 4 P's: product, place, price, and promotion. (Module 3)

3. Know your user through market research.

What do your users want from you? Which services or resources do you have but need to promote, which do you need to acquire or create? Market research takes many forms (e.g. surveys, focus groups). Results help you select a target user group (market segment) and choose a specific product to promote or a problem on which to focus.

4. Develop goals and objectives to market the chosen products (e.g. service, program, or event) or to target a specific user group.

Define specific, measurable goals. Outline the objectives for the goals. For example, if your goal is to bring in more retirees to an event, an objective might be to state the percentage attending who will be retirees. 

5. To meet your goals, select promotional strategies that will work best, be affordable, and reach your customers.

Different strategies of promotion work better for specific groups and for specific types of products. Promotion methods are determined through the planning process! What you learn about how your customers make decisions determines the most effective methods of promotion -- direct marketing, special advertising, public relations, press releases, displays, newsletters, etc. (Module 4). Include the Internet in your plan (Module 5). Look at what others are doing (Module 6).

6. Put goals and promotion strategies together in a detailed, written market plan.

State your target audience and the product/service to be developed or promoted, based on your research of customer needs and your audit of library capabilities and situation. The goals and strategies together are the basis of your market plan, part of which is a detailed action plan of specific tasks necessary to accomplish the goals. Be realistic in your expectations, and be specific in outlining the details of managing and accomplishing the project, step by step. Create a timeline, and consider who will be assigned each task, the costs, and availability of resources.

7. Evaluate how well you have done.

What works, what needs improvement? Methods include surveys, focus groups, statistical analysis of usage, polls, etc. How well did you meet your goals? Use results to develop a new or ongoing marketing plan.

The result of following the marketing process is the development of a marketing plan of goals and strategies that will promote library products to targeted customers, based on their specific needs.

In your marketing plan, describe the budget and time restraints that you think a marketing project would face in your library.

• If you work at a large library, ask what the budget is for marketing and public relations.

• If you are at a small library, what do you think are the realities of budgeting for marketing and for setting aside time to do marketing?

• Describe this in the financial/budget part of your plan.

• If you do not have access to a library marketing plan, look at sample library marketing plans from Module 2 or Sample Marketing Plans from NSLS and Members. You may also look at online plans for several types of business available on a commercial site. Choose one or two of the non-profit plans to scan. These plans are more complex than the plan you will be working on in this module, but will give you an idea of the way that marketing audits, market research, and the whole planning process are reflected in the final marketing plan.

The marketing audit