On Wednesday 16 October GO | School for Information provided the opening keynote speach for the ‘Magical Marketing’ track at ILI2019 in London.
We started the presentation with the request to the 50+ audience to describe marketing in their own words. As expected it turned out that marketing has different meanings for different people, from just ‘promoting you services’ to ‘Engagement and promotion of a service or a product through multiple channels suitable to meet your target audience’, it is useful to have a mutual understanding of a defintion. Presenter Eric Kokke shared his defenition with the delegates. His message for his presentation was clear: “Marketing is nothing more than Adjusting your services and products to the needs and wishes of your users and communicate about this.”
Through a set of Mentimeter polls (an online tool to present questions to the audience) it became clear that this group of attendees was not a stranger to conducting marketing activities themselves. 48% of the audience spends over 60 minutes a week on marketing within their current job.
At the start of the presentation Eric made clear he had 3 goals with his presentation:
- Making the audience aware of the importance of marketing skills
- Make the audience enthusiastic about starting marketing activities to position their products and services
- Concvince the audience that they can be ‘Information Heroes’
Via a set of slides on trends & developments (competition, treaths or opportunities), awareness of librarians added value and some tips & tricks Eric challenged the attendees to make a choice between remaining the ‘old fashioned’ librarian and slowly get out of sight of the outside world (become a Kodak) or be creative, change the focus on customers and become an Information Hero.
As most people made a dash for the ‘Information Hero’ T-shirts we were convinced that our message was picked up and that our 3 targets were met!
