GUEST BLOG: David Tonen, Halifax, Novia Scotia
When most Christians hear the words church marketing what immediately comes to mind is advertising. Since most churches do not advertise on television, the type of advertising one envisions is something in print form:
Newspaper ads, Yellow Pages ads, postcards, or flyers.
Print marketing materials can be useful as part of a church marketing strategy but they all have one inherent problem…
They are “mass-media” and they are impersonal. They are not addressed to the recipient by name and they are general marketing or communication messages intended to “hit” a broad range of people.
Churches (for the most part) have very limited marketing budgets if they have one at all. So, doing wide-sweeping broadcast marketing through print media is really not effective, it is costly, and it is certainly not personal!
Mailing out thousands of postcards to your community inviting them to come to your church on Sunday (regardless of how compelling your new sermon series is) continues to generate less response because they don’t connect with genuine needs. People don’t think they need or want church.
Solution: Create practical events for specific audiences.
Find a need in your community and try to connect with those who specifically want that need met – people who want the practical solution you offer.
At my church we have run marriage and parenting seminars. There always seems to be a need in the community where marriages are in crisis and where parents need strategies for better parenting. Putting on these practical seminars has helped us connect with new (non-churched) people and we get to introduce them to bible-based relational principles for their home. Numerous couples have started attending our church after attending these seminars because we connected with them around a genuine felt-need and through that relationship we later invited them to experience our larger church community. We took the time to meet their need, build relationship and trust.
The challenge to connect.
I would like to challenge you to get creative and find genuine needs in your community. It could be seminars like the ones we did or it could be something completely different. No matter what need exists, if you can identify it and genuinely offer solutions and practical help, you will develop many more personal relationships that then can lead to a much more meaningful connect to your church community.
I should mention, that we did send out 20,000 postcards to our community to invite people to the seminars. The postcards received better results than generic church invitation cards we had mailed out in the past because they connected with a genuine need. There was very little reference to the church itself and the seminars were held in the local high school. A key to success was the non-threatening help-based nature of the seminar, the location, and that there was no expectation for attendees to “come to church”…even though it was clear the seminars were put on by a church.
So what do you think? Is connected relational marketing more effective than mass marketing and do you have any examples of connected marketing that you have seen a church implement?
Image from Flickr: Darwin Bell
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** Our thanks to David for the great post. David Tonen lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and writes regularly on his Marketing Integrity blog (http://navigateyourmarketing.com/blog/). He has a passion to utilize his 19 years of corporate sales and marketing experience to help churches communicate the message of Jesus with excellence through effective church marketing strategies. You can follow David on Twitter (http://twitter.com/DavidTonen).
