Photo courtesy Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library

Do you feel like you’re playing a rigged game of hide and seek as you try to figure out how to reach target audiences?

Hide and seek is fun for kids. For adults working in library marketing… not so much.

Loyal library users and fans are likely subscribed to your library’s emails. They follow you on social media. They visit your library either in person or virtually.

But (and I know I’m stating the obvious here) finding community members who have no regular interaction with your library is incredibly difficult and costly.

This is where robots can be helpful. You can use ChatGPT to figure out the channels your target audience uses.

Here’s how this works

Let’s say your library has partnered with a health and wellness center to create a new, monthly program for community members with memory loss. The program will include activities for caregivers as well.

Your job is to make sure the right people know the program is available for free at your library. Specifically, your marketing goal is to ensure at least 10 people attend the program each month.

Who do you target?

Your first step is to figure out who your target audience is.

For this example, you could go to the Alzheimer’s Association website and search for statistics on patients with memory loss and their caregivers.

From this, you can create two focused target audiences.

  • Memory loss patients: Specifically, women of color over the age of 65, who are most likely to suffer from memory loss.
  • Caregivers: Women between the ages of 30 and 50 with a household income of $50,000 or less are most likely to be caring for someone with memory loss.

Double-checking your work

ChatGPT can help you check your work. Did you miss anyone who might be interested in the memory loss program?

In the ChatGPT search, you can type “Pretend you work at a library. The library has partnered with a health and wellness center to create a new, monthly program for community members with memory loss. The program will include activities for caregivers of those with memory loss as well. Can you give me the target audience for promotions of this program?”

ChatGPT will weigh in on whether you’re on the right track with your two target audiences. But it will also show you audiences you would have missed. In this instance, ChatGPT says:

With this information, you are ready to move to your next research step.

How do you reach these three audiences?

Of course, you would start by sending an eblast to the members of your subscriber list who match this target. You would also promote the program on your library’s website, through in-library digital signs, and bookmarks.

But outside of your library resources, what other channels can you use to reach these three audiences? ChatGPT can be a starting point for answering that question.

In ChatGPT, you can type, “What online blogs or publications are most popular for women in *your area*?” (For this example, I used Cincinnati because that’s where I work, which allows me to check ChatGPT’s accuracy.)

Now you have a list of publications to start your research. You can go to those websites, see what kinds of articles they publish, and determine if they would be a good place to pitch a story about your new memory loss program.

Radio stations are still popular with people over the age of 50. And your might be wondering if it would make sense to advertise your memory loss program on the radio.

There are 30+ radio stations in Cincinnati! I suspect there are a similar number in the city or town where you live. You’ll want to whittle your list down before you research. You can use ChatGPT for that too.

In the search you can type, “Which radio stations are most popular for people over the age of 65 in *your area*?”

ChatGPT identified four target stations in Cincinnati. That’s so much easier than going through the list of 30 radio stations!

Help from ChatGPT with another idea

There may be neighborhoods in your city or town that consist mainly of people over the age of 65. You can use ChatGPT to help you identify those neighborhoods.

In the search, you can type, “Which neighborhoods in *your area* have a population that is mainly over 65?” Here are the results for Cincinnati.

With that information, you can do some geo-targeting with your message.

For example, you can pull a list of cardholders who have named the branches in those neighborhoods as their home branch. Then, you can send them an email about the memory program.

You might also consider boosting a Facebook post and targeting users living in your target neighborhoods.

Finally, you can ask ChatGPT, “How do I reach an audience of doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals who work with patients with memory loss in *my area*?” ChatGPT will give you a list to use as a starting point.

The bottom line

ChatGPT won’t replace you. And of course, there are drawbacks.

While you will still need to do some research, ChatGPT is a helpful and free tool to help you get started as you identify ways to reach your target audiences. The results it generates for this task tend to be more focused and helpful than a Google search.

PS You might also find this helpful

How To Use ChatGPT To Build Target Personas and Hit the Mark Every Time With Your Library Promotions

Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email whenever I post. To do that, enter your email address and click on the “Follow” button in the lower left-hand corner of the page. You can also follow me on the following social media platforms: