Relationships, Marketing, and Your Library: From Theory to Practice

When you think of library marketing, you may envision stereotypical, boring library posters of cats on a stack of books, but marketing encompasses so much more. Since there is little empirical research on library marketing, we propose exploring best practices from the business world, specifically the application of relationship marketing. We will discuss the theory of relationship marketing and how you can put it into practice in your library. We will share relevant research and provide examples of how we have implemented this approach in our customer service philosophy, a library services fair event, social media strategy, and customer feedback channels. This session will incorporate active questioning, examples of typical library marketing, and an opportunity for attendees to re-frame those examples from a relationship marketing perspective.