So how do you do that?
There is still a place for traditional marketing (for example, mailers to the physical addresses of new residents), but the real penetration will be from digital marketing.
As our church’s marketing director likes to put it, we are meeting our consumers right where they are: online. We are using a mix of mediums that work together to maximize impressions. This involves running a paid search campaign on not only Google but all search engines so that when anyone, anywhere is searching for us directly, looking for a church, or searching any of the keywords we are using, we will show up at the top of the search page. We run a retargeting display campaign so that anyone who has searched for us or landed on our website will be served future ads as a result of their initial interest.
With traditional radio in decline, we focus on digital radio ads with a mix on Pandora, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and Sirius XM that can be much more targeted than on traditional radio. After doing our research and finding that our target demographic spends most of their time with digital video, specifically YouTube, we invest a good amount of outreach effort in that medium.
We also run a pre-roll campaign with a focus on YouTube to be sure we are in front of the people whose attention we are trying to capture. We do an email marketing campaign a handful of times a year that is sent to everyone who has given us permission to contact them throughout the years, using our own database. We do not purchase email lists, so we know that each person receiving the email communication has some sort of interest in or experience with Meck.
Finally, we run a social media campaign (which is different from simply boosting a post), primarily on Facebook and Instagram, where we have run tests to determine where we have been able to gain the most traction.
With all of these mediums, and with cross-device technology, we are able to be in front of more people, at more times, on more devices. And again, all of these efforts are produced with an unchurched person in mind.
If all of this sounds “big church,” think again. Financially, digital marketing is vastly cheaper than more traditional forms of marketing, whether it’s newspaper ads or direct mail. Further, most sites such as Google have online tutorials and easy step-by-step guidelines for getting started. The nomenclature may be intimidating, but the actual practice of marketing digitally is not.
Many of these marketing efforts are less expensive than you might think, but more important, they are good and effective investments.
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
