Differentiating reading audiences
In the retail sector, companies know a great deal about their customers and, when planning marketing strategies, they break their market down into very specific segments. This helps them to target their marketing more successfully. In the public sector, where we are committed to offering a quality service across the board, it is harder to adopt the principle of aiming specific services or promotions to specific groups.
The promotion which is aimed at everybody tends to miss everybody. We need to target more specifically to be successful but we don't have to follow the standard differentiation of the commercial market based on lifestyle and income.
In planning targeted promotions think about new ways of differentiating between your users:
- by time - the person who rushes in during their lunchbreak has quite different needs from the retired borrower who builds a lengthy library visit into their weekly routine.
- by frequency of visit - people who come in every day, people who come in once during the borrowing period, people who drop in occasionally. Any book displays could be refreshed according to these patterns of use so that borrowers weren't seeing the same things every time they visited.
- by purpose of visit – small mobile selections of books could be used to provide pop up displays to tempt parents accompanying small children to storytimes, young people dropping in after school, members of an audience, people attending a regular club.
