The 2017 Marketers’ Confidence Index rose by 6 points in the past year to 69 out of 100 possible points. However, 30% of marketers say they are concerned that their organization is not investing in the right customers. That figure is down 13% from 2016.

The findings from the Marketers’ Confidence Index, a biannual survey released by the ÂÜÀòÉçčÙÍű, in partnership with , measures the degree of optimism on the state of the economy that U.S. marketers are expressing through their organizational spending and growth. 

The survey also revealed 32% of marketers had lost confidence in their team’s ability to understand the ROI of marketing plans. That number is 11% lower than one year ago when the confidence was at 43%, representing a sharp decline.

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Also declining was marketers’ confidence in whether their organization is investing in the right operating model. Only 25% of respondents felt their team had the right tools and processes in place, which is down 8% from 2016.

“While the Marketers’ Confidence Index revealed optimism in several key areas, there are some critical concerns leadership teams need to address and cannot afford to ignore,” says Marc de Swaan Arons, chief marketing officer and executive board member of Kantar Vermeer. “With technology changing the way customers engage, we all must harness the power of data and analytics as part of an integrated marketing strategy for growth, profitability and differentiation.”

The index also shed light on areas where CMOs need to better prepare for the future, including knowing more about new digital technologies, insights and analytics and how larger organizations can communicate as effectively as smaller ones.

The areas marketers are most excited about include new digital tools to support social media, personalization, marketing automation and augmented reality. Marketers are also hoping to more effectively demonstrate the added value of their marketing initiatives, especially around analytics, Big Data and innovation. 

“This study shows a major shift in how organizations are investing and spending their time,” says Russ Klein, CEO of the ÂÜÀòÉçčÙÍű. “While marketers hold a positive outlook on their industry and organization, and anticipate higher budget, they need senior leadership to know more about metrics and analytics for ROI and creating a customer-centric organization.”

Other key insights from the latest survey include:

• Of marketers under age 35, 86% are optimistic about the power and influence of marketing in an organization over the next few years while 56% of marketers age 56 and older feel confident.
• Of younger marketers (35 and under), 78% are confident that organizations should be making investments right now; only 59% of marketers age 36-45 felt now was a good time. However, this growing optimism from younger marketers has not yet resulted in growing budgets.
• Marketing budgets are ripe for growth. More marketers are expecting increased budgets in the next six months: 36% of marketers expect an increase, up 8% from Q2 2016. This is a stark contrast from January 2016, when 22% of respondents felt their marketing budgets would decrease.
• Marketing budget allocation has remained stable, but when it comes to budget cuts, 24% of respondents said they would reduce their media placement budget, but only 4% would cut their analytics budget.

ÂÜÀòÉçčÙÍűt the Survey

The survey’s margin of error is plus/minus 4.7% at the 90% confidence level. The Marketers’ Confidence Index presents the findings of an online survey conducted by Kantar Vermeer in December 2016, among a sample of 304 marketers across the U.S.

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Last spring, General Mills sent shockwaves through the agency world with the announcement it was launching a review of all its creative part ners for U.S. retail brands. Lucrative part nerships with power players McCann, Saatchi & Saatchi and Wieden & Kennedy were all under examination, all put on notice with a terse statement released by the company and attributed to no one in part icular: “We have a responsibility to ensure we have the right agency partners to continue growing our business, and agency reviews are a routine part of running a successful business today.”

Much of the industry kicked into high gear, putting together proposals. At stake was more than $700 million of ad spend hyping supermarket staples such as Betty Crocker, Cheerios, Nature Valley and Yoplait. By the time the dust settled at the beginning of December 2016, 72andSunny and Redscout, both owned by marketing holding company MDC Partners, were tapped as agencies of record (AOR). Three other shops—Joan, The Community and â€”were named as “preferred U.S. project-based agencies.” For San Francisco-based Erich & Kallman, the announcement capped off a year ripe with winning. Well, three-quarters of a year.

The indie ad shop had only announced its formation that April, weeks before word of the General Mills agency review trickled out. By the time it became a preferred project provider for the food giant, it had already landed other highly sought clients, including Chick-Fil-A, which choose the Bay Area startup over five rivals after dumping The Richards Group, its AOR for the past 22 years.

A STAR IS BORN

To agency managing director Steven Erich, success was welcome, but not altogether surprising. He formed the agency with co-eponymous creative director Eric Kallman after decades spent playing midwife to marketers’ gestating brand identities. That’s given him some strong hunches about what the people who place ad orders are looking for. “I’ve always thought, ‘Why does the world need another advertising agency? There’s plenty of them,’” Erich says. “I didn’t want to do something that just didn’t make any sense.”

Bucking much of modern marketing thinking, Erich wanted his agency to eschew the drive toward Big Data, as it was neither he nor his partner’s forte. “Everything that was happening in the industry was around the tech-based stuff—data learning and programmatic, [with] much more data analysis at the center of the offering and things that were focusing on media,” he says. “If analytics is gaging how people are using the products or buying the products, that’s fine. 
 Where I’ve not seen it successful is deciding what advertising is successful and what’s going to move the market.”

Erich and Kallman saw themselves as experts of the artistic side of advertising. Pathos, ethos and logos subtly working within a captivating mise-enscùne. And, Erich says, these experts are most absent in today’s ad world.

“We don’t really think creative work has gotten better in the past few years. In fact, it’s gotten worse,” he says. “We thought there might be an opportunity to focus on the creative product. Not the technology, not the data, but the engagement of consumers. We have that going for us.”

It’s clear the partners are on the same page. While with another agency in 2010, Kallman espoused a similar philosophy on YouTube’s “Show + Tell.” “There’s no way to sway anything, except with creativity and except with ideas,” he says. “It’s almost like the solution for advertising 
 is to want to be more creative, because now you’re just trying to make something people want to look at or watch just as much as the actual article or program or whatever it is.”

Kallman most recently spent time at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, filling the role of executive creative director. Before that he held the same position at Barton F. Graf and was a copywriter at TBWA/Chiat/Day and Widen + Kennedy, where he notched a towering career highlight when he co-created “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign for Old Spice.

Erich spent the bulk of his career at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, rising through the ranks as an account manager and later managing director, before being named president at the start of 2014. It was at CP + B the pair met one another. Kallman was looking for an exit from Barton F. Graf and was going through the interview process at CP + B. The outfit liked him and extended a job offer. Erich made a personal pitch for him to join corporate headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. But in the end, Kallman declined and decided he’d rather return to his native San Francisco.

ÂÜÀòÉçčÙÍűt 18 months later, both men were free agents, having left their respective places of employment. They arranged a phone call to discuss career prospects.

“I thought [Eric] would take another big role at a big ad agency, but he was interested in starting his own thing, and I had been investigating starting my own agency,” Erich says. “I immediately said we should do something together. I think so [highly] of his work, and I thought it would be a unique and powerful combination.”

The pair spent a few months canvassing contacts to assess interest in their vision. Receiving affirmation, they moved forward. By the time of the official unveiling in April, they had already completed work for MTV and were pitching Chick-Fil-A.

EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR ILLUSIONS AND THE FADNESS OF CROWDS

Just because Erich & Kallman are creative, it doesn’t mean their work is overwrought or high-concept. Quite the opposite, Erich says. More than anything else, they prefer to make ads that are sure to be talked about.

“The work we’ve done in the past is not niche, award-winning or things that are inherently personal or one-on-one. It’s very broad, water-cooler kind of stuff,” says Erich. “It’s work meant for people to see and react to and share and then hopefully move them to purchase or the [desired] action.”

While others may be looking to nurture a personal bond with a consumer, Erich & Kallman want to be quoted. The way they see it, the more intimate the ad, the less people talk about it with one another. “The work that we do is meant to be broadly appealing and shareable because it’s a better way to spend your money. Your media buy increases much more if people are going to share with other people,” Erich says.

A lot of the time this means being funny. The ads they created for Chick-Fil-A hyping its new Egg White Grill breakfast sandwich, for instance, feature famous historical figures such as Michelangelo and Amelia Earhart scoffing at critics who called them crazy right before they went on the change they world. When Apple did something similar two decades ago with its “Think Different” campaign, it was all about somber hero worship. The Chick-Fil-A spots are playing for laughs, depicting Beethoven bragging in song about being the greatest composer of all time, and Thomas Edison gloating about the success of the electric light.

“Their feeling was, especially with breakfast, they needed the work to not look like Chick-Fil-A ads,” Erich says. “The work that we did got people to notice that [Chick-Fil-A had] a [breakfast] part that they didn’t know about, or forgot about, and that there was this new product that they had never heard of and they needed to consider.”

Another example of this line of thinking is borne out in a recent spot for ONEHOPE Wine, a California social enterprise that sells wine and coffee and donates the proceeds to charity. Instead of creating an earnest web ad laying out the emotion behind the philanthropy, Erich and Kallman decided to go funny. They created an arrogant fictional pitchman named Charles Faircloth who has everything from a dinosaur egg he uses as a doorstop in his guest bathroom to a fleet of hovercrafts he’s never even seen, and hawks ONEHOPE to “normal people” as a token gesture of giving back.

“The humor wasn’t part of the brief, but it was to get people to notice the brand,” Erich says. “It’s got very quotable stuff in there. You find yourself quoting what this dude is saying to other people. 
 It’s just a goofy, fun spot, and they loved it.”

SMALL MATTERS

Waxing defiant in the face of Big Data aside, there is another huge trend that Erich & Kallman has working to its advantage: size. A statement by the General Mills COO Michael Fanuele, given after the preferred project partners were named, praised the virtues of bite-size boutiques like Erich & Kallman.

“In looking to round out our roster, we met with dozens of interesting agencies and were wildly impressed by the breadth of talent out there. The industry is teeming with small agencies of every variety doing really powerful work,” he said.

Some might bristle at being called small, but there’s a compelling argument that this is where a lot of the industry is heading, and Erich and Kallman view the descriptor as the cornerstone of their pitch process—which shouldn’t be surprising, considering Erich was part of the team that developed the Small Business Saturday campaign for American Express.

As he sees it, small is lean and nimble in ways the big players can’t be. One of their clients, Gusto, an online HR services platform, reached out to them with a request to put together a campaign at nearbreakneck speed. Six weeks after making the initial contact, the campaign went live on the internet in the form of a series of spots staring actress Kristen Schaal as a deluged human resources managerforced to perform a variety of roles to keep her company running smoothly.

“That would be very difficult at a larger agency. It’s doable, but it’s very much against the normal process,” Erich says. “Our process is very streamlined. We don’t have a lot of people involved. We work with the best talent we can hire. And there’s not a lot that can get in the way.”

Erich & Kallman can respond rapidly in large part because the founders set up the agency to handle a lot of individual project work. With just six employees at the core of the agency, the close-knit group can get on the same page quickly. In boom times, extra work is outsourced to well-established freelancers. “Freelance is stronger than it’s ever been,” Erich says. “It’s arguable there might be more talent outside of agencies than inside of agencies.”

Small is also trustworthy, or at least less suspicious. After the Association of National Advertisers’ bombshell report came out last year alleging that some large agencies were hiding discounts from clients, many brands are wary of how the creative sausage is made.

“Absolutely, agencies are taking a hit. There is a call for more transparency, and it is a hard time to be an agency,” Kallman says. “[With] the most honest, transparent big agency in the world, just because they are that big, there are going to be some doubts [from clients], even if there’s nothing going on.”

Add it all up, and what companies like Chick-Fil-A and General Mills are deciding is that small shops such as Erich & Kallman are a better value for their marketing dollars, which is exactly what Erich suspected heading to the agency-ownership stage of his career.

“There might be an opportunity where an agency that’s billed on project work, that’s billed on speed, that’s very creatively focused and that uses talent that’s out there now might have a place in the market,” Erich says. “We’re not going to steal business from everybody. But we think there might be an opportunity in the marketplace for somebody like us.”

Winning project work from General Mills is a good sign there is. Currently, Erich & Kallman has General Mills CCO Michael Fanuele singing its praises, telling Marketing News, “Obviously Steve and Eric are massive talents, two of the best in the industry, but the entrepreneurial energy of their own agency is turbo-charging that talent with a wide-eyed ambition and ferocious pragmatism. It’s personal for them now—and that’s only good news for the rest of us. Their creative muscle and agile model are sure to deliver treasures for us.”

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Goal

Have a great idea but can’t get it to market? Since 2008, the answer for many inventors has been to turn to crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo and GoFundMe. Let the marketplace evaluate the merits of your contraption. Seems nice.

Yet not all crowdfunding campaigns are created equal. While some entrepreneurs may turn to crowdfunding as a way to avoid the trappings of marketing, it’s clear crowdfunding platforms can be a potent tool in the hands of a skilled marketer.

Polygons Design is a small company, headed by Indian designer Rahul Agarwal, that produces a single, small product: the measuring spoon. Agarwal’s creations, dubbed Polygons, are simple shapeshifting kitchen utensils that fold along different angles, allowing cooks to toggle between teaspoon and tablespoon quantities with ease. 

“Polygons are inspired by the human hand, the same way it lies flat, but cupping itself to different sizes depending on the amount of the substance it is holding,” Agarwal says.

Reinventing the spoon was merely the start of Agarwal’s quest to bring a new idea to market. To launch, he’d have to raise a good deal of capital, and he needed powerful, persuasive professionals to secure that funding. He reached out to Command Partners, a North Carolina-based agency specializing in crowdfunding endeavors.

 founder and president Roy Morejon says his company receives more than 100 inquiries a day from inventors like Agarwal. He believes good ideas on their own are no longer enough to gain traction, and crowdfunding darlings need a high-powered campaign behind them if they are to achieve their funding goals.

“There’re hundreds, if not thousands, of projects that now launch every single day,” Morejon says. “If you truly want to move the needle—raise significant six, seven figures for campaigns—you need marketing support, period.”

Agarwal says he was drawn to the agency for its crowdfunding track record. “They had an impressive history and experience in this space, and we didn’t want a good product to be let down by mismanaged marketing,” he says.

The feeling was mutual. “They’re just so cool,” Morejon says of Polygons. “It’s cheap enough where people have that wow factor. It’s really utilitarian where anybody can use it. It makes sense.”

After an initial round of meetings, Agarwal and Morejon decided an external goal of $10,000 was needed to go forward.

Action

The Polygons/Command Partners partnership was unusual in the length of time the two parties worked together before launching the funding project. The initial contact between the two was in July 2015, more than a year before crowdfunding commenced.

They spent much of that time identifying people who were likely to be interested in the campaign once it went live. The earliest steps involved building up a database of prospective customers and influencers. “Building up our e-mail database is our No. 1 factor of success upon launching a campaign,” Morejon says.

The final list of e-mail addresses they amassed numbers in the tens of thousands, the majority belonging to users fitting into one or more of roughly two dozen personas. Morejon’s team felt that stay-at-home moms, people who like cooking and people who like crowdfunding projects would be more inclined to purchase the measuring spoons.

The users behind the e-mail addresses were then blasted with hot Polygon content authored by Command Partners. A short video shows the spoons at work, measuring out heaps of spices and dollops of oils. At every turn early in the process, the team asked viewers for their thoughts on improving the product. “It’s not necessarily about vanity numbers of likes and followers, but truly trying to have a conversation with people beforehand, asking them their advice,” Morejon says.

The early feedback suggested there was demand for measuring spoons in metric sizes, which Morejon says never would have occurred to them had it not been for the pre-funding efforts. “The feedback channel is one of those beautiful elements of crowdfunding that you just don’t have putting a product on a store shelf,” he says.

The $10,000 number was a balance of necessity and psychology. On one hand, it was the absolute minimum needed to guarantee that Polygons could be manufactured. But the figure was intentionally set low enough that the goal would be reached as early as possible.

According to Morejon, that’s because people are more inclined to donate to a proven winner than to respond to calls to help reach a threshold while still climbing. 

“Part of our strategy is to build the crowd before the campaign begins, build that groundswell of excitement for the campaign. 
 People want to feel like they’re not the last one to the party or the first one on the dance floor,” Morejon says. “We want to reach those funding goals within the first day.”

Results

The campaign went live on Oct. 11, 2016. The $10,000 threshold was breached almost immediately. By the end of day one, the Polygons banked close to 10 times that amount. When it closed 45 days later, it had surpassed the $1 million benchmark. The efforts of Morejon and Command Partners had turned Polygon Design from a wannabe small business hoping to fund a shoestring operation into a seven-figure startup.

The campaign garnered 36,800 individual backers, the majority of whom kicked in between $10 and $12 for a single set of spoons. But larger funders took notice as well, including more than 500 people who Morejon says have expressed interest in wholesaling the product once it’s in regular production. 

Eight backers made a pledge of at least $500 in exchange for 50 sets of Polygons. And one generous patron ponied up $1,000 for 100 customized spoons, though there was a little funny business behind that bid. “That was me. I backed that so I could get product for everyone in my office,” Morejon says.

Agarwal himself was floored by the response.

“Though we’d already gotten a hint of it from the response to the precampaign marketing, the huge support we got from so many backers was absolutely overwhelming and humbling. The funds raised have allowed us to go for an even superior product than earlier planned, and we’re quite excited to get it into people’s hands,” he says. 

After securing $1 million for a product that only exists on paper, fulfilling the orders may prove to be the easy part.

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What makes a great data-driven marketing leader?

Some say you need knowledge and expertise of cutting-edge computer hardware, state-of-the-art software and facility with the most advanced statistical techniques.

After reading â€™ newest book, , I’m convinced the most important thing we marketers must understand is how the mental rules of thumb—or heuristics—we use when making decisions can bias our decision-making.

We may think we are highly rational, left brain-leaning and deeply knowledgeable in statistical methods. Yet, as The Undoing Project explains, we consistently and systematically make errors in judgment and decision-making.

If you’ve not heard of the “representativeness heuristic” or the “availability heuristic” or the idea of “anchoring” and how they influence us, even the best data-mining algorithms may not advance your marketing aims.

What Lewis has written is an entertaining and educational book that describes the lives and academic work of two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. 

Lewis’ storytelling is remarkable in bringing to life and making relevant a series of highly complex concepts that govern our decision-making.

He simultaneously provides the reader with a powerful biography of the psychologists and case illustrations from the worlds of sport and medicine that manifest the impact of their groundbreaking research. 

The Undoing Project is a fun-to-read book that even the marketer with only a casual interest in data analytics will find hard to put down. For those interested in delving deeper, Lewis has provided a series of references and citations sufficient to power the motivated reader to become an expert in the mind’s influence on decision-making. 

NEW YORK, NY – NOVEMBER 23: (L-R) Director Adam McKay, author Michael Lewis and actor Brad Pitt attend ‘The Big Short’ New York premiere at Ziegfeld Theater on November 23, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images)

How it Begins: Professional Sports and Analytics

The book begins where Lewis’ 2003 best-seller, Moneyball, left off.

In Moneyball, Lewis explored how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane revolutionized baseball by applying data and analytics to the game.

In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas are transforming the practice of medicine, modern finance, economics, professional sports and, of course, marketing.

Lewis begins by describing the journey of a committed data and analytics pioneer: Daryl Morey. The general manager of the Houston Rockets, Morey is a self-proclaimed geek who sought, with some success, to build an analytics engine to improve player screening and recruiting for his NBA team.

“Morey’s job was to replace one form of decision-making, which relied upon the intuition of basketball experts, with another, which relied mainly on the analysis of data,” Lewis writes. “One of the first things Morey did after he arrived in Houston (in 2006) was to install his statistical model for predicting the future performance of basketball players.”

Morey’s analytics model improved the Rockets’ performance. “The players he’d drafted performed better than the players drafted by three quarters of the other NBA teams. His approach had been sufficiently effective that other NBA teams were adopting it,” writes Lewis. And the Rockets’ performance was consistently strong.

Yet, there were consistent and systematic errors. Poor decisions made because of the ways that our minds work. For example, in the 2007 draft, Morey’s model favored Marc Gasol, a 22-year-old, seven-foot-one-inch center playing in Europe. “The scouts had found a photograph of him playing shirtless. He was pudgy and baby-faced and had these jiggly pecs. The Rockets’ staff had given Marc Gasol a nickname: ‘Man Boobs,’ ” Lewis writes.

Don’t miss Michael Krauss at the 2017 ÂÜÀòÉçčÙÍű Spring Marketing Workshops, May 8-9 in Chicago. Krauss will speak about what it takes to be a successful marketing leader. Reserve your seat today!

Morey chose not to draft Gasol, who went on to become a two-time NBA All-Star. Morey said, “I made a new rule right then. I banned nicknames.”

The problem, we learn from Lewis, is a tendency that Tversky and Kahneman called “representativeness” in thir article, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” published in Science in 1974 and one of the most often-cited academic papers of all time. 

The same phenomenon that caused the Rockets to pass on Gasol was true of Harvard basketball player, Jeremy Lin. “He lit up our model,” said Morey.

The problem was, “The objective measurement of Jeremy Lin didn’t square with what the experts saw when they watched him play: a not terribly athletic Asian kid,” reports Lewis.

“At the bottom of the transformation in decision-making in professional sports—but not only in professional sports—were ideas about the human mind and how it functioned when faced with uncertain situations,” writes Lewis.

Despite the fact that the Houston Rockets and Morey were writing the book on applied analytics in basketball they were making systematic errors. And they are not alone.

Lewis describes the impact Tversky and Kahneman’s article had on a young high school student named Don Redelmeier. Redelmeier, Lewis explains, went on to became a physician and to co-author academic papers with Tversky, including, “Discrepancy between Medical Decisions for Individual Patients and Group,” published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1990.

“ ‘Watch any NBA game,’ Tversky explained to Redelmeier, and you saw that the announcers, the fans and maybe even the coaches seemed to believe that basketball shooters had the ‘hot hand.’ Simply because some player had made his last few shots, he was thought to be more likely to make his next shot.” Lewis writes. Tversky collected data on NBA shooting streaks to see if the “hot hand” was statistically significant and found it was not.

“Tversky had the clear idea of how people misperceived randomness. [
] People had incredible ability to see meaning in these patterns where none existed,” Lewis writes.

Transition: Medical Accidents and Heuristics

Today, Redelmeier is a physician at one of Toronto’s most important trauma centers, Sunnybrook Hospital. In part, his job is to check the understanding of the specialists for mental errors. Lewis shares a frightening and powerful story of how an accident victim with multiple injuries nearly died due to this decision-making phenomenon.

Lewis explains that ER doctors observed the accident victim with a wildly irregular heartbeat. Before passing out, the victim told the ER physicians she had an overactive thyroid. The treating physicians were about to administer drugs for hyperthyroidism to the patient until Redelmeier arrived in the ER.

Lewis reports that Redelmeier, “Asked everyone to slow down. To wait. Just a moment. Just to check their thinking and to make sure they were not trying to force the facts into an easy, coherent and ultimately false story.”

It turned out the patient had a collapsed lung which, if left untreated, would have killed her.

“It was a classic case of the representativeness heuristic,” said Redelmeier. “You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything at once. That’s when you need to stop and check your thinking.”

If that story moves you as a marketer, you should read Lewis’ The Undoing Project.

You might follow that with a reading of Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 best-seller, . Then you might want to proceed to the other academic journal articles described by Lewis in his book.

Reading The Undoing Project, you’ll realize the biggest challenge we have as decision-making marketers is our own human fallibility, not our capacity to process and analyze the data. 

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Nearly 50% of all areas have been allocated to create communication landscapes, giving countless opportunities to employees to collaborate and communicate with other Googlers in a diverse environment that will serve all different requirements and needs.

“There is clear separation between the employees’ traditional desk-based work environment and those communication areas, granting privacy and focus when required,” says Stephan Camenzind, founder of Evolution Design, which designed the interiors.

Orange Grove Breakout Meeting Spaces

Tube Slide

Fresh Foods Kitchen

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The marketing and ad tech industry is valued at more than $110 billion according to U.S. aggregate revenue data. Revenue has increased every year since 2010. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 9% increase in employment for marketers through 2024, 2% above the average growth rate of other industries.

Marketing is becoming one of the most promising industries to make a career in, and it’s attracting a lot of strong candidates, which means it’s harder than ever to stand out.

Pre-application: Take a self-inventory.

Before you apply, you need to know what you have to offer. Don’t fail at knowing you. A healthy self-knowledge will help you convey to a company why you’re a good fit for them. You have to know the kind of environment and culture you thrive in. Do you need a quiet environment? Do you like working on group projects? Are you looking for a certain level of autonomy? Understand what motivates you, and reflect on what type of manager and leader gets the best out of you.

Ask yourself what type of work you enjoy most. An agency role might be best for someone who prefers working with multiple clients and interacting with different personalities and cultures. Others work better with a deeper knowledge of one client at a time. In-house roles may be better for this individual. Be honest with yourself about what you’re looking for and why you want it.

The research phase: Target companies that fit.

Thoroughly research companies before applying, which means going beyond reading their website and scanning social media. Talk to employees. Read stories their company leaders were quoted in. Dig into what the culture is like. Does it align with what you want? Do you have the skills required? What are the key words in the job description? If it mentions proficiency in graphic design, a high-demand skill for marketers today, be honest about your ability. If you don’t have much experience with it, enroll in a course. Sharpen your skills. Don’t waste your time or the employer’s by embellishing.

Your marketing résumé: What do you bring?

In the marketing industry right now, we’re seeing a skills gap on the technical side and a high demand for digital proficiency.

A survey of employers by the Economist Intelligence Unit revealed that candidates who are strong with HTML and CSS coding, data analytics and graphic design are getting ahead. If you’re weak in those areas, and they are important components of jobs you are applying to, invest in yourself. Take a course, shadow another marketer, pick up a book at the library. Start to learn and expand your skill set. Your rĂ©sumĂ© is your calling card. As a marketer, your rĂ©sumĂ© is held to a higher standard. There should be no spelling or grammar errors. Take time to ensure the formatting is consistent and tenses are correct. Triple-check everything. Ask someone else to proofread it, too. Your rĂ©sumĂ© should mesh with the research you’ve done on the company.

The more work you’ve done in the pre-application phase, the easier it will be to align with what hiring managers are looking for. If you noticed in your research that a job description uses certain key words, use them. Don’t embellish, but accurately describe your experience. When employers are looking at hundreds of rĂ©sumĂ©s for only a few seconds each, seeing those words that show a fit right off the bat can put you at the top of the list.

Before you submit, step into the hiring manager’s shoes. What would make them pass on your rĂ©sumĂ© given the job description? Find the holes and fix them.

The interview: Be bold and win the job.

Asking good questions makes you stand out. Don’t miss the opportunity. Ask the interviewer if he or she has any hesitations about your background. Then, address them on the spot. Be open about your weaknesses and what you’re doing to work on them. This shows self-awareness, a critical skill for marketers that is hard to convey on a rĂ©sumĂ©.

Ask what made the last person in this role fail or succeed. If it’s a new role, ask what characteristics a successful candidate should have.

Another way to stand out is to come with ideas. Prepare opportunities for the company to grow their brand, suggestions of things the company could do to improve or successes they can build on. Be prepared to discuss how you would implement your suggestions if hired.

If done right, it’s respectfully bold and shows two crucial skills marketers need to have: critical thinking and problem solving. It reflects that you’ve put time in to research the company and understand what it’s doing. If it’s good, it can lead to substantive conversation in the interview that demonstrates your vision and elevates you above the pack. If you have a portfolio to back it up, bring it. If you don’t, try to build a body of work, even if it’s freelance samples that show your ability.

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Ever since marketers started putting up Facebook fan pages and creating Twitter accounts for their brands, they have recognized the benefits of social media. Here are channels that help them directly engage with customers, build brand affinity and share content such as articles, photos and videos at low cost. Marketers continue to make social a priority and will boost their social media investments from 10.6% to 20.9% of budgets over the next five years, according to the most recent results of The CMO Survey.

But social media is moving beyond just marketing. According to the survey, more than a quarter of marketers say their companies will make social media investments for activities that typically fall under the human resource department’s purview—such as employee engagement and talent acquisition. We interviewed leaders from a range of organizations to get insights into the nature and effect of these investments. We discovered what we call the social media multiplier effect: Social media investments impact important employee and customer activities that spill over to benefit the organization in many important ways. Below are some examples of the social media multiplier effect, and brands that are getting it right.

Igniting Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is the foundational element activating the social media multiplier effect. Our research reveals six ways organizations use social media to create, nurture and express this engagement:

1. Bringing the brand to life: Given its public status, social media offers employees an opportunity to represent the company’s brand to the outside world. Reebok recently launched #fitasscompany, an externally focused social media initiative that encourages employees to show how they live the brand’s promise in their work and play. Posts such as “See ya soda” or “See ya never body contouring! We honor our bodies & earn the muscles we create!” allow employees not only to live the brand but also to develop it in authentic ways. 

#fitasscompany

2. Building brand ownership: Social media use also encourages employees to manage the company’s brand as if it were their own, meaning that through their publicly shared stories and content, they take full responsibility for the success of the company. As one Reebok manager posted, “That’s my #FitAssCompany!” 

3. Sharing the company’s story: Maersk Line, a Denmark-based shipping company, used social media to share the company’s rich history. Photos from the company’s digital archive were selected to tell the company’s story, including video of Clara Maersk and Maersk ships involved in the rescue of more than 3,000 Vietnamese fugitives in 1975. In the first 11 months, Maersk Line attracted more than 400,000 people to its Facebook page—many of whom were its own employees participating in this public forum who not only learned a great deal about the company, but shared photos from Maersk ships around the world.

Maersk Line

4. Crowdsourcing an electronic water cooler: Internal social media networks can improve employee communication across roles, functions and geographies, especially in large complex organizations. For example, Best Buy created Best Buy Connect, which aggregates tweets, feeds and blogs from across the Best Buy digital communities and delivers them to a centralized location where employees can learn from one another to solve customer problems.

5. Fostering an internal community: Even beyond information, internal social media helps build communities by fostering communication, comaraderie and collaboration within companies. L’Oreal launched the #LorealCommunity to give employees the opportunity to share their successes and positive experiences with one another both inside and outside of work through Instagram.

6. Creating thought leaders: Social media can be used to tap and support a few budding thought leaders who might otherwise go unnoticed. Even C-suite executives with status can emerge as thought leaders using social media. For example, Peter Aceto, CEO of ING Direct Canada, has evolved to grow with the brand over his three years using social media.

How the Social Media Multiplier Pays Off

While the direct effect of social media on customer outcomes, such as increased engagement or referrals, has received more attention from practitioners, the pathway through employee engagement is less understood. Here are four different human capital outcomes that can result: 

1. Enhanced talent acquisition: When current employees are active on social media, potential employees notice. They notice the brand and see that the company trusts its employees to act on its behalf and share their voice. For millennial candidates, this trust is valued and plays a role in job decisions.

2. Improved employee retention: When social media investment in employees fosters brand engagement and ownership, employees find work more rewarding and fulfilling. Engaged employees are more attentive and vigilant. They look out for the needs of their coworkers and the overall enterprise because they personally own the result of their work and that of the organization.

3. Increased employee productivity: Social media-inspired collaboration and best practice sharing improves employee productivity. In fact, 39% of workers believe access to social media results in increased productivity. Time and frustration are saved when employees can cut through problems using support from social media.

4. Enriched company culture: Social media investments that serve employees and ignite their engagement help build and reinforce a company’s culture. Company culture, in turn, drives the talent acquisition and employee outcomes we have discussed.

Social media engagement programs are not without risk, and many of us can quickly recall at least one story of employee activity on social media gone wrong. Organizations that recognize this and create programs that include training and social media policies to guide employees, as well as governance and work flow to manage risk, create a better environment for employees and leadership to achieve success.

The power of social lies in acquiring and delighting customers. Engaging employees in social media creates an indirect but equally powerful pathways to impact. These benefits, in turn, spur crucial human capital outcomes linked to talent attraction, productivity, retention and culture, which benefits customers, employees and the bottom line. There is no way to firewall part of the company from the effect of social media—that’s the social media multiplier effect.

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A quote from Kurt Lewin, the father of modern social psychology, is indelibly written into my brain: “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” Lewin saw theories as immensely helpful not just in understanding behavior but in generating new ideas to solve problems. I fear, however, that Lewin’s message is often lost in this age of Big Data and analytics.

Sophisticated software tools search mounds of customer data for patterns of regularity, leading to thousands of poorly controlled micro “field experiments.” Actions (e.g., targeted offers) that seem to work, for some reason, are repeated until they stop working, for some reason. Empirical prediction trumps explanation. It is a process that creates little learning, limits creativity and ultimately produces waste.

People say that I am a bit “model happy.” Yes, I’m one of those people who draws circles, boxes and arrows on the white board to explain why customers are acting the way they are and what can be done to improve results. Experience has taught me that marketing phenomena are complex, that data can be misleading, and things are not always what they seem.

Models can help sort things out. They can serve as an application of theory to explain a problem, or a way of capturing observations to help build a theory. In either case, they are abstract, often visual, representations of cause and effect that can be tested for their fit with reality. When the fit is strong, the decision maker can have more confidence that doing X will lead to Y. When the fit is weak, marketers should conclude that they don’t really understand the situation, e.g., the theory is flawed, it’s the wrong theory or perhaps the measures are bad. Under any of those conditions, caution is needed since actions may not produce their intended results.

For many years, I served as a customer experience consultant to a large power utility company. Like most power companies, this utility was beholden to the local public service commission when it came to seeking rate hikes. The commission, in turn, was sensitive to the feelings of customers regarding how well they were being served, especially when it came to the core element of power quality and reliability. To better understand the mechanisms at work, we undertook research that sought to operationalize a simple model: the direct power outage experience of customers influences their perceptions of power reliability, which influences their willingness to support (or at least not object to) a rate increase.

We tested the model by appending electric circuit data to customers’ survey responses. By knowing what circuit a customer was on we could objectively determine how many momentary and sustained power interruptions they had actually experienced in a given time period. The model testing proved that we were only “half right.” Yes, perceptions of power reliability explained the willingness of customers to support the utility. However, there was no link between customers’ actual outage experience and their perceptions and intentions. Instead, many customers were found to be heavily influenced by media reports regarding the outage experience of others (“
 10,000 customers are without power for the third day in a row 
”).

To be clear, these findings did not stop the power company from continuing to invest in reliability improvements at a reasonable pace. But the findings did help avoid an over-investment in bricks and mortar and led the utility to reallocate some of those resources to public relations and citizenship programs.

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There are two routes marketers can take to optimize their websites for search: create the very best content or update the backend of the site so it checks all the right boxes for a query.

Rather than choosing one option or the other, experts suggest 2017 is the year to combine these two efforts. The trick is to have both the best answer to search questions and to do so in a way that complies with the search engine analytics.

Google is the reigning king of query, but many people also perform searches on Facebook and YouTube. Marketing News spoke with experts in these three areas to determine the best SEO practices for 2017.

Google

Russ Jones, principal search scientist at , which builds tools for inbound marketing, says he expects SEO specialists to become more adept at targeting Google’s search features, those items that appear in Google organic results that are not the so-called 10 blue links. Jones says to pay particular attention to related questions, which are a series of questions involving the search term, featured snippets, which includes a summary of the answer extracted from a webpage plus a link to the site, and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

Jones says technology is beginning to allow SEO specialists to easily identify where featured snippets and related questions are within a website, and he expects more and more studies to be released that show how to take advantage of this technology, whether it’s optimizing content or code so a site is more likely to show up in the featured snippets.

“One way or another, SEO [experts] are going to crack that nut,” Jones says. “And when they do, it’s going to be a big land grab.”

Jones says Google is investing in AMP and it’s available to essentially everyone, plus there is a myriad of plug-ins for WordPress. He expects a lot of SEO experts to push their customers to adopt AMP on their sites.

These areas will gain attention, Jones says, because they provide an opportunity to jump the competition dramatically. With featured snippets, for example, a website can jump an entire page of search results, and AMP can allow a site to be lumped in at the top with other stories, as opposed to being substantially further down. 

Jones says marketers should have a strong technical SEO specialist at their disposal, whether it’s an employee, a friend or a contracted company to take advantage of these technologies. Jones also recommends creating content that answers both the short and long questions at the same time.

“Let’s say I wanted to create a page that tells you how to cook filet mignon,” Jones says. “I want to answer the short question, which is just a quick, bulleted list that Google can easily pick up and use in the featured snippet. You also want to answer the thorough question, which is all the techniques: how long you let the meat rest or how to pick out the best cut of meat.”

As Google Hummingbird and Google RankBrain get better at identifying related content, Jones says websites will want to grab all related terms and phrases that a site could potentially rank for and make sure those occur in a document.

Jones says it is better to present good content than to dress up irrelevant content. Instead of convincing Google to give a website a top ranking by optimizing a lackluster page, he says it’s much better to build the best content overall.

“It’s not to say you shouldn’t go out and try to push your content, of course you should,” Jones says. “But first thing’s first: be the objective best answer for the query. Be the best, don’t just seem the best.”

Facebook

Expect 2017 to be very heavy on mobile, according to Rocco Baldassarre, search engine marketing consultant and founder and CEO of digital marketing agency . He says the majority of people on Facebook use the site on both computers and mobile devices, and a big percentage use only mobile, versus a very small portion that uses desktop alone. This shift is leading more and more companies to optimize their sites for mobile use.

In terms of paid ads, Baldassarre says Facebook made a move in 2016 to push advertisers toward automatic placements. He says the option to select this manually still exists, but the system is set up for ads to go automatic. Facebook is pushing the audience network, he explains, which allows advertisers to extend their campaigns beyond Facebook and into other mobile apps. He says people are beginning to understand this shift and break down their campaign by device. The result, he says, is an increase in the cost per impression.

“One year ago, you could get very good conversions on Facebook for a very low cost, but many businesses are experiencing an increase in the cost per thousand impressions because anybody can do Facebook ads,” Baldassarre says. “This is going to create an entry barrier for businesses.”

Baldassarre doesn’t foresee any huge changes in organic content on Facebook and expects Facebook to continue to favor content with high engagement. If a business’ post doesn’t perform well in terms of engagement, it will drop to the bottom of a Facebook user’s feed. He expects this to push businesses to seek more paid traffic. This was done to promote advertising, which makes money for Facebook, Baldassarre says, but with the cost per impression on the rise, advertisers may end up abandoning the platform.

“For organic, what is going to happen is that Facebook is going to figure out ways to boost local pages and local businesses,” Baldassarre says. “For example, if you’re in Miami and you’re searching for something on Facebook, they will adjust the results algorithmically based on your location to get some local boost for businesses.”

Video searches have also received more focus from Facebook in recent months, says Mark Robertson, founder of , a resource providing analysis, tips and trends for the online video and internet marketing industries. The Facebook app, for example, has a video tab with a recently added search box.

“A year ago, or even six months ago, I would have suggested metadata isn’t as important for Facebook,” Robertson says. “That’s changing and they want to provide users the ability to find content that they saw on their newsfeed via search. They’ve been notoriously behind the game with search, but they’re focusing much more on that now.”

Robertson says that of the top 25,000 most-engaged videos from the Q3 2016, half of them didn’t have a title. Of all of those, the average description length was about 88 characters. This didn’t necessarily correlate with performance, he says, which makes sense considering the nature of what data is consumed on Facebook: It just shows up on the newsfeed.

Although a lot of publishers aren’t focusing on filling in titles or descriptions for Facebook videos, it does affect search performance, Robertson says.

“There are a lot of people now who are going on Facebook and searching for a video they saw last week on their wall or heard about,” he says. “The best practice is—and this goes for pretty much any platform—if they ask you to give them some metadata, leverage it.”

YouTube

A few years ago, YouTube changed its algorithm so that the videos that showed up first in a search query were no longer those with the most views. The top videos are now the most relevant and those that drive longer viewing times across YouTube.

Robertson says YouTube has also been testing machine learning and artificial intelligence within its suggested and recommended videos algorithm, and it’s using Google RankBrain for this. 

“It really comes down to, in the end, having good video content and in the right format for the viewing audience on YouTube,” Robertson says. “For example, for a brand to upload a video to YouTube that has a 15-second intro on it, with the logo and everything, doesn’t work. For a lot of people, the first five seconds are critical to a video’s success.”

Robertson says another tactic that has been important the past few years is to drive viewership from one video to other videos on YouTube using annotations, playlists or links to other videos. He says it’s no longer always a good idea to link off of YouTube, considering YouTube’s algorithm preferences.

“The clichĂ© of content is queen or content is king is really going to start being the case,” Robertson says. “If you put up a video and it’s not something people watch, it’s not going to do well on YouTube. Or if you do a web page and follow all the best practices but it takes too long to load for someone and they end up going back to Google, it’s not going to do so well. There are some technical best practices, but all those aside, there aren’t as many hacks or special tricks that you can do to fool an algorithm.”

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“Spoiler Alert! Dumbledore dies on page 596.”

This message, which appeared on a billboard in Arkansas, wasn’t really a surprise (the Harry Potter books and movies had been out for years), but the messenger provided the shock value: It was an advertisement for the local public library.

Once upon a time, libraries never had to market themselves. If you wanted to know something, they were the only game in town. They had a monopoly on knowledge that lasted for centuries or longer; however, it was a trust busted by the advent of Google, Amazon and numerous other internet resources. Suddenly this well-known entity was tasked with doing something that was once entirely unnecessary: It had to vie for our attention.

“Libraries realized they had to transition the way they were functioning in their communities because the world was changing around them,” says Ben Bizzle, CEO of , a solutions firm for libraries. “It’s impressive to see an industry this large, that has been what it’s been for so long, embrace that and make that transition.”

Librarians themselves have two enormously important marketing skills working to their advantage: They’re data-driven and creative. But there are obstacles that limit them, be it time, money or professional expertise. Plus their audience is no longer on site. The old ways of marketing the library, such as a pamphlet located at the check-out desk or a bookmark slipped inside a paperback, won’t reach the desired customer anymore.

When Google and Amazon Inc. debuted in the mid-1990s, it was time for the library to move out from behind the desk and into people’s lives. If libraries were going to spend their funding on collections, events and other resources, the audience needed to know they existed.

“As funding has become tighter, people have realized that it’s really important to have good usage data and users who feel like the library is meeting their needs,” says Mary Mackay, marketing director at the . “It’s no longer just a question of libraries pushing out information about the programs they’re offering, it’s more [about] community engagement.”

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

A public library’s audience is its community, and that community can vary widely. Mary Beth Mulholland, director of marketing at the , can attest to just how varied and dynamic that group can be. Her library system has about 80 locations, one in every Chicago neighborhood, and each neighborhood’s needs can be completely different. In addition, each patron within those neighborhoods requires different outreach.

CPL was looking to launch a campaign for its digital skill-building program for those with limited or no technological skills. The library typically aims to incorporate a digital element in its marketing efforts, such as social media or e-newsletters; however, those lacking digital skills weren’t likely to see such ads.

“We backpedaled from that and couldn’t do any digital advertising,” Mulholland says. “We focused that campaign around the [Chicago Transit Authority] and print advertisement, which we hadn’t done in a really long time.”

Some of the most objective data sets libraries have at their disposal are basic demographics, which can be free and easy to access. Kathy Dempsey, conference chair for the  and founder of  says she often advises libraries to use U.S. Census data.

“Everything is free at census.gov,” Dempsey says. “A very simple start that a library can do is look at their population area, get all the addresses within it and check their patron database against those addresses to see what percentage of people in their service area actually do have library cards.”

Public libraries are often under city or county management, and those associations have a slew of geographic and demographic data that’s free for the libraries to access. While the specifics of what cardholders check out remains private, libraries can track how much patrons check out and what type of media they access. A March 2016 report funded by the  used 2014 patron and checkout data to group top library users by lifestyle, interest, preference and behavior. The report, “,” pulled this market segmentation data from 10 public library systems across the U.S.—a tactic often used by major corporations. One of the study’s unexpected results, according to Library Journal, was the number of single-adult households that are core customers, which included both middle-class and so-called struggling households. The study also found Latino households to be one of the fastest-growing population groups among library users.

Should a library’s budget allow, there are also products that provide a snapshot of specific communities.  (AOD), a data solution from Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is intended to help libraries quickly and easily learn more about their users and communities. The platform allows libraries to upload their existing data—such as number of checkouts per household—and combine it with some other information from the U.S. Census Bureau and Experian, which specializes in consumer and business credit reporting and marketing services. The user chooses the geographic area to view, which can be narrowed by zip code, city or even driving distance from the library.

“What we wanted to do was take a look at the data any given library has access to,” says David Ziembiec, western region district manager at Gale and co-founder of AOD. “Once we were able to find that out, we then asked the question: How can we turn that data into an actionable insight? It’s really no different than how a business would do this.”

Ziembiec says the Patron Profiles app is the cornerstone app on the service with 99% of AOD customers using it. The app provides libraries with a report that details where their patrons live, average household incomes and other details, such as Mosaic groups, a segmentation created by Experian that describes lifestyle information. With this report, marketers can anticipate the behavior, attitudes and preferences of various customers.

 was an early adopter of AOD. Amy Calhoun, communications and virtual services manager at SPL, says one of the most notable improvements in the library’s marketing efforts since using AOD has been the open rate of its e-mails. Anyone who opens a library card or opts into the e-mail list receives newsletters from the library. When the library sent out e-mails to this general list detailing summer reading programs or other services, the open rate was about 12%.

SPL then decided to use the Mosaic profiles from the Patron Profiles app to sort its e-mail addresses. To promote tech classes or the library’s e-book collection, SPL only e-mailed those considered tech-savvy or early adopters. The result was an open rate of 30% to 40%.

“We’ve learned that, rather than just going by zip code or even blasting the whole list, we want people to find the e-mail relevant and open it,” Calhoun says. “Even if it’s a segmented list, the higher open rate is important to us. Not only is it serving us better, but it’s serving them better. They’re finding the e-mail more relevant.”

COMING UP SHORT

There may be data aplenty at the disposal of a given library, but from there, the momentum can often slow. Nancy Dowd, project lead for  at  and co-author of , says the next step can often take a very sophisticated marketing strategy. Talking about community profiles means creating unique content for those groups and finding the appropriate communication channels to reach them.

“Data is a first step,” Dowd says. “Developing the mindset that your library is really going to respond to the needs of your community is something else.”

Dowd says librarians tend to think in terms of creating programs and collections that they believe are good for the community. The missing piece is actually reaching out and connecting to that community. For example, while working at the  in Arkansas—of “Dumbledore dies” fame—Bizzle says he noticed a local bar and grill lacked drink coasters, so he asked if the library could make some for them. The coasters included spoofs of book titles (for example, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Malfunction” or “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Parlor”), plus the library’s web address. Bizzle figured people play on their smartphones while they wait for their food, so why not give them a website to visit?

Libraries can sometimes get overwhelmed with demographic information and other community statistics, and Dowd recommends starting simple. The  in Broomfield, Colorado, was an early adopter of AOD technology and has used it to better target those without library cards and focus its online marketing as well. There’s still a lot more the data could be used for, says Kathryn Lynip, manager of collection and technology services at the library.

“We’re basically still at the very start of this, and it would be beneficial for us to have someone that’s dedicated to this,” Lynip says. “It’s a great tool, and we’re just barely touching the surface of what we could be using it for if we were a little bit more targeted and more knowledgeable.”

In November 2012,  surveyed library professionals from 471 public libraries and found 77% of respondents completely agree that library marketing increases overall community awareness of the library. Despite this, less than 20% of all libraries reported having a marketing plan in place, and only 11% of those were current and up-to-date. The survey also found 47% said they measure the effectiveness of their communications and 46% of respondents said evaluation/measurement is “a great idea, but we don’t have time to do it.” To Lynip’s point, the need to market isn’t lost on librarians, but their ability to do so is often the missing piece, whether because of a lack of time or expertise.

Librarians receive little, if any, formal marketing education. Dempsey says she performed a small survey of accredited library schools in the U.S. a few years ago, but of those 40 or 50 library schools, only one taught a full-semester marketing class as a core part of the curriculum. Another handful of them had a full-semester marketing class as an elective while many library schools cover marketing for a week or two under a management course. The onus to gain marketing expertise falls on the librarian.

“That’s why [the Library Marketing and Communications Conference] has taken off so well,” Dempsey says. “People get out of library school with all their knowledge of cataloging, technology, databases, information search and organization, but then they get into the day-to-day and they realize, we’re doing all this great stuff and no one is using it.”

Dempsey’s book, , describes the number of people who work in libraries who never had that formal marketing class and suddenly need to catch up. To combat this gap, many libraries are starting to bring in an outside marketing perspective, those without a background in library science but expertise in fields such as information technology or public relations. These insights are adding value to the library and its programs and resources.

“These tools are great, but we still need to know how to use them,” Lynip says. “Yes, librarians should be in libraries, but we could also be bringing in people from other professions to partner with us.”

THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS

Libraries, at their core, specialize in the sharing of knowledge. Whether that means bringing in outsiders with new skill sets or sharing best practices among themselves, libraries have found ways to pull promotional concepts from a variety of communities.

The American Library Association has led a number of campaigns over the years, most notably the Celebrity READ Campaign and the @your library campaign. Its most recent effort is , which just entered its second year. More than 3,700 libraries and supporters have joined the awareness program, many of which are small and rural libraries, Mackay says. â€œA lot of big urban library systems have programs in place and professional marketers, but small libraries with few people on staff are less likely to have a marketing professional, so they need support, resources and tools,” Mackay says. Libraries can join the campaign for free and download various tools and materials related to the effort. “One of the most important things we provide is a chance for people to find others in similar situations whom they can network with and then share ideas, as well as using tools and resources. ALA is an important hub for that networking and connection.”

Jeff Julian, director of the ALA Public Awareness Office, says much of the success the Libraries Transform effort has had is driven by how individual libraries have used the campaign locally. Julian says the ALA turns these ideas into items for the campaign toolkit so others can pull from their success.

“I always talk about the campaign in three ways: that it can be used for awareness, it can be used for impact and it can be used to illustrate value,” Julian says. “This is a plug-and-play marketing campaign. If you don’t have a marketing department, if you don’t even have a marketing person, which is the reality for a lot of libraries, this campaign is ready to go.”

Julian says the ALA also wanted the campaign to be flexible so libraries with well-established brands or big marketing departments could use elements individually or to illustrate a program.

The  of the Libraries Transform website provides some general insights and data, and Julian says individual libraries have localized some of this national information. For example, more than a quarter of U.S. households don’t have a computer with an internet connection, according to Libraries Transform. Some libraries localized this number to reflect their own communities and used it in their own campaigns.

Julian says the ALA considers what external partnerships make sense as well, and they look to organizations that have similar values, missions or goals that the ALA or local libraries can work with to spread and amplify their messaging.

The Chicago Public Library won the  for its 2015 program, “,” thanks in part to collaborations. The program was designed in cooperation with the Museum of Science and Industry and was promoted through a variety of channels, including social media and branch librarians visiting schools. CPL also receives nonprofit rates for advertising on public transit and has a pro-bono partner in marketing agency .

“We have a private funding partner, the , and that public-private partnership allows us to not only leverage the programmatic dollars, but be a little more flexible with our marketing and outreach abilities,” Mulholland says.

There are other examples of small and large partnerships at work across the country. The , for instance, wanted to reach out to patrons in their 20s. To do so, the library partnered with a coffeehouse and a brewery for its adult reading program.

“It’s a perfect partnership,” Dowd says. “They might not have the connection to their 20-somethings, but the bars and the coffee shops do.”

Libraries often share their marketing success stories at events or via online platforms. , a Tumblr-esque website, is intended to spark inspiration and features advertising, marketing and branding efforts by libraries or campaigns. It includes posters and art from Banned Books Week, a library relocation flier and infographics.

FINDING SUCCESS STORIES

Finding the ROI for library marketing can be a puzzle because libraries don’t sell anything, nor do they promote with coupons that can be automatically tabulated. The defining outcome is added value.

“Much of what librarians do is personal service and helping people with particular problems—be it employment, trying to fix their rĂ©sumĂ©s or learning a new skill so they can get another job,” Dempsey says. “You just can’t measure that sort of stuff.”

Libraries succeed in marketing when their data is humanized, when they review their insights and reach out to meet the subjects. Bizzle says libraries must have an understanding of the effect that marketing has on the value of the services they provide. He says ROI for libraries can be measured in increased utilization and increased value.

Guerilla marketing is an excellent example of insight and action meeting, as it pushes the librarian and their libraries into the community. “” is a weeklong campaign that brings libraries out to the community. The 2016 event, which included 264 participating organizations, sent book bikes gliding through neighborhoods and books to the beach and block parties where neighbors had a chance to meet.

Dowd says what may scare many libraries away from marketing is trying to do extensive community profiles and being overwhelmed with information. She says libraries can start with small insights and move from there. It’s much more important to get out and engage.

“Outreach is about going to the schools and participating or setting up interactive locations, putting books on a bike and riding out into the neighborhood and having people come and browse,” Bizzle says. “It’s more of fitting in rather than being behind a table and talking.” 

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