Blog Correspondent Mary Taylor also attended these conference sessions on the topics of marketing and promotion on October 14 and shares this report:
Linda E. Bunyan
Adventures in Marketing
Linda Bunyan is the head librarian at Summa Health System in Akron, Ohio. The Corporate Communications division assigned a marketing liaison to the library. While the library staff had been involved in outreach activities, including serving on several hospital committees and the Institutional Review Board, they were not reaching the managers or attending physicians. The marketing liaison helped them by scheduling presentations by library staff to system management groups, writing articles based on librarian-provided content for the physician and employee newsletters, and arranging for orientation sessions with the nursing staff. She was unable to get the library an Intranet presence.
Linda felt that some of the efforts didn’t provide much payback. Scattershot, “broad” efforts such as newsletter articles were less effective than “deep” efforts, such as services on hospital committees, including the CME, Nursing Research, and IRB.
Elizabeth M. Smigielski
Case studies in Marketing & Promoting to Health Sciences Students: Lessons Learned, Solutions Shared
Elizabeth Smigielski discussed marketing and presented two case studies for discussion. Marketing is not the same as promotion; promotion is one part of marketing.
Marketing should be a continuous cycle:
Identify your users. You should only market to one group at a time.
Identify your users’ needs. Write a list.
Analyze your services.
Change your services based on what your users have said. Identify what you can and cannot change.
Inform your users of the change or inability to change. This is where promotion comes in.
The information you learn from your users should be used for strategic planning. If marketing is done correctly, the process can take several years. Your administration must acknowledge and support this for marketing to be successful.
She also mentioned the 4-P’s of marketing:
Product: What are your services?
Place: Where and how your users connect to your services.
Price: Staff time and resources.
Promotion
One practical suggestion was to involve marketing departmental staff for creative promotion ideas, after doing the analysis of your users’ needs.
Elizabeth Smigielski sent along her thoughts about the discussion session:
"A Different Kind of Presentation"
After hearing lots of "we did it great" and sitting through lots of presentations, I opted to try a new means of engaging the audience this year, a discussion session examining mistakes our library made in marketing and promotion. A 15 minute overview was followed by 45 minute discussion using talking points to spark the talk. As presenter, I can't fairly judge, but people seemed to enjoy the exchange and format, especially discussing mistakes. Lots of people spoke up and no one left early. Several people reported enjoying the novel format. Next year, let's see more discussion sessions on the program and get away from the standard 20 minute presentations and posters.
]]>
