How To Tap Into Your Local Library For Market Research – with Andrew Mangels

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In This Episode

So what kind of memories do you have of the library?  If you’re like most people, it goes back to your early childhood days and story time.  Perhaps you rediscovered the library when you had your own kids.  Many of us spent time in the library during high school or college.  But chances are that once you got into the business world you stopped visiting your local library altogether.

One of the reasons we invited today’s guest, Andrew Mangels, to join us on the podcast was so that he could help educate all of us how the library can help us in business.  This includes everything from job seekers pulling together their resume to business owners looking to create a 3D printed prototype for their product and everything in between.

During the show today, Andrew shared several examples of resources that business owners can tap into starting with their local community library and how that can tie into a network of public libraries across the region or state.  One of the most popular business resources is Reference Solutions (formerly known as Reference USA) where people perform lots of market research on everything from the competition to potential new customers.  Andrew even shared a recent example of how his library is using their own tools to create a list of new residents to send welcome post cards to the new folks in town and invite them to their library.

Perhaps the best and most underutilized resource is the Business Librarian.  If your local library doesn’t have a Business Librarian, no worries as all Librarians are skilled in doing research.  They are problem solvers.  As Andrew put it, everything starts with the “reference interview” where the Librarian is trying to help you figure out “What’s the question” you are asking.  As we all know from our own searches online where we see millions of results for our searches, it can be intimidating to wade through all that info to find what you’re truly looking for.  If we ask better questions we will usually get better results.

We covered a lot in the 40-minute interview and we have included links to several resources in the notes below.  We cannot encourage you enough to check out your local library and see what they can do to help you with the growth of your business.  It is a wonderful part of the community that can also do wonders for your business!

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

Join Us Next Time

Join us next week when we will chat about how to rebuild or reset your Organization which is important to do when coming out of a pandemic!

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