The Career Development Group of the Library Association of Ireland (LAI CDG) held its AGM on Friday the 7th December in the Bank of Ireland Trinity Innovation Hub. Preceding the AGM was a day long workshop on creative content marketing for libraries. The day kicked off with a talk from Martina Chapman from Media Literacy Ireland/Broadcast Authority of Ireland. She discussed Media Literacy Ireland which is a collection of groups and individuals working together to promote media literacy across Ireland. It is open to anyone to join and they are interested in adding more library staff to their ranks. The group aims to build safety and trust as well as enhance employability through positive practice as coordination, communication and collaboration.
Following Martina Chapman’s presentation was the half-day creative content marketing workshop run by content marketing agency Far From Avocados. The workshop discussed how to identify a library’s core audiences and how to best market your library’s services. Tips and tricks were provided such as asking yourself ‘so what?’ before putting out any piece of content as people have become very selective with their time. In order to figure out the best ways to reach your audience the attendees were shown how to create personas in order to define their users, which included information such as their goals, their motivation and their challenges. By defining our target audience and thinking of what we would like them to do we can then go on to think of how we can do this.
The attendees were shown different models and methodologies such as the AIDA model, inbound methodology and the Flywheel model. Throughout the workshop attendees were given opportunities to exam and discuss their audiences, such as examining their drivers, barriers and opportunities available to remove those barriers or enhance the drivers. Other topics that were discussed were creating content pillars which are the categories in which our content can be fuelled to help us keep hitting the key points with consistency. One excellent tip that was given was one for getting written testimonials. People seldom take the time to write out a testimonial but you could ask them a few questions in person and record their answer and then type it up after.
The day ended with the CDG’s AGM. The committee was voted back into their positions and we have received applications to join the committee. Thank you to all our members and attendees for making the day such a success and a big thank you to our two speakers.
Post by Robert Alfis, Research Librarian at Dublin Business School
LAI CDG 