Promoting Discovery: Creating an In-Depth Library Marketing Campaign

Abstract

Abstract. This case study aims to describe how librarians at Indiana University Kokomo designed a marketing campaign to promote its discovery tool to undergraduate students during the Fall 2012 semester. The authors illustrate how, through the use of a coordinated marketing plan, librarians applied marketing principles to select a target audience, create promotional designs, organize events, and assess campaign effectiveness. The authors express how libraries can construct cost-effective yet comprehensive marketing campaigns, as well as learn from both unexpected successes and shortcomings of such projects. Ultimately, these takeaways can inform a library's future marketing endeavors.Keywords: marketing, promotion, discovery, discovery service, library services "About the Authors" Angie Thorpe received her MLS from Indiana University and her BA in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include discovery services, the marketing of e-resources, and using data to make collection and content decisions. She currently serves as the Digital User Experience Librarian at Indiana University Kokomo. She can be contacted at atthorpe@iuk.edu. (Vaughan, 2012). As a result, library users can use discovery services to simultaneously search full-text articles and multimedia databases, library catalogs, government document collections, and more with single search queries. Henrietta Thornton-Verma wrote in late 2011 that "Discovery services promise to enable all of a library's material -print and e-books, journal articles, streaming video, everything -to be uncovered through one search box" (p. 14). If the promise of discovery services is to be met, though, before libraries assess the effectiveness of these tools, they must first get the word out that they have these products.This article reports on a marketing campaign undertaken by the library faculty and staff at Indiana University (IU) Kokomo during the Fall 2012 semester. The intent of the marketing campaign was to increase awareness of the library's discovery service and officially brand the discovery service as EDS for the university community. Since IU Kokomo had not recently organized a marketing campaign to promote a specific electronic resource, the authors were also curious to observe the effects a targeted campaign might have on usage statistics for a chosen e-resource. The results of this promotional campaign would then be used to inform the planning and execution of future marketing efforts at the library. In broader strokes, the value of this article is to share how libraries -including small ones with limited resources both in terms of people, time, and funding -can design cost-effective yet still comprehensive marketing campaigns and then learn from both the successes and shortcomings of their projects. The authors' intent is to inspire other libraries to develop promotional campaigns and be unafraid to acknowledge the times when results fall short of expectations. Ultimately, there are positive takeaways from any project, which...

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