Archived Event

Knowing Who We Serve - To Serve Them Better Geo-Marketing: Customer-Based Research

Date : Feb 08, 2006
Start Time : 11 a.m. Eastern
Length : 00:58:58

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Geo-marketing is the application of these tried and true marketing principles:

  • Customer research
  • Segmentation
  • Marketing mix strategy
  • Evaluationin conjunction with geographic data.

This session is designed to review marketing practices and principles and to take a look at a new decision-making tool, the Internet-accessible Public Library Geographic Database.

Participants will learn how to:
  1. Identify geographic market areas and extract important customer characteristics (such as age, education levels, and language spoken)
  2. Ask "what if" questions (e.g., What if my library moved a mile? How would the population characteristics change?)
  3. Create unique maps that can be printed, bookmarked, or emailed.

Learning about your customers, through their demographics and patterns of using the library, are critically important for providing these customers optimum services, building convincing funding requests, and ensuring that future needs will be consistently met.

Dr. Christie Koontz ?College of Information, Florida State University

Dr. Christie Koontz is a faculty member at the College of Information, Florida State University. Koontz pioneered the critical need to understand the spatial nature of libraries by collecting data that describe people who use a single library, what materials and services they use, and approximating the distance they will travel for library services. Koontz' research is the basis of the U.S. Public Library Geographic Database www.geolib.org/PLGDB.cfm. The database includes relevant U.S. census data and library use data from 16,000 communities. Koontz teaches and presents workshops on marketing. Koontz serves on the award jury of the International Federation of Library Agencies (IFLA) International Marketing Award, sponsored by SirsiDynix.