Courses: Marketing the Virtual Information Service

A very interesting day, even though it started badly with over-running engineering works that meant missing the introductory session and coffee.

How best to market a library service has always been a debatable question and with the 'virtual' (or should that be digital or online or 'e'?) dimension it becomes even more difficult to answer.

Something that came up in several sessions struck me as potentially the way we need to go. That is segmenting our market and tailoring our marketing to different groups. How to segment though? By subject? By level? By mode of attendance? And how to find out what those groups want so that we can market effectively to them?

There's also the question of Google. Google has something our customers value highly (ease of use) and we're trying to sell them what we value highly (quality of information.)

Of course we're just lucky, in the business area, that we have so many high quality and easy to use resources like ABI Inform, Mintel and (oops, I seem to have slipped into marketing mode!)