No matter the place, no matter the time, the average human is always digitally connected to the Internet; this has lead to the expansion of digital marketing for church and targeting consumers in all sorts of ways. As companies continue to grow their digital presence, there is no reason the Church can not have their footprint in the digital world as well. Church content is the key, from your church’s website, social media accounts, emails, to bulletins, announcements, and sermons, the more content you create and utilize effectively, the greater amount of people you can reach.
While it is easy to create content, it is much harder to create consistent content that is effective at capturing the attention of the people. For your church to consistently create church content that reaches your intended audience and leads them to take action, you will need to create a content strategy.
Developing church marketing strategies sounds challenging and time-consuming on the surface, but it’s an easy concept to grasp and implement.
Marketing for Church 101
Preparations
It is important to have a grasp of your needs and requirements before planning anything. What are the goals you wish to achieve, who is the primary audience you are trying to reach, what requirements will be necessary, these questions help create a solid foundation. By examining your aims in great detail, helps understand and break down what you need to do as well as determine what will be the costs for attempting it.
Planning
People hear the words “social media” and immediately create accounts on websites such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and start posting, thinking that’s all they need to do. This leads to the content not being effective or reaching its intended audience. Think of promoting content aimed at the Elderly by publishing it on Snapchat. It will never reach.
It is important to determine what channels you need to use to reach your audience and develop a plan that includes what church content you will create for what channel and when you will publish it. This helps increase blog traffic and create awareness of your church in your community.
Production
From creating content for your website and managing multiple social media accounts, this is not an easy job to do. It is important to create a schedule and organize your ideas. This helps keep your production become consistent. Without consistency, your views and statistics can shift very easily as their is countless media being created. It is a fight to keep your audience. Content creation can come in many forms that you may not realize.
From recording sermons to daily activities, you can create a lot of content. Involve your community and see what they have to offer. By including your community, not only can your ideas increase, your audience feels as if they are a part of the entire plan.
Small Church Marketing Conclusion
These three steps are the building blocks to developing an effective church content strategy for your church. After you create a solid foundation, you can build upon this foundation by polishing your content strategy.