Church Marketing Are You Hitting The Mark

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Church Marketing Are You Hitting The Mark

Church marketing can be tricky at best. Where do I spend my dollars, where do I market, and who do I target?

Most pastors relate their outreach as their main church marketing strategy. We get in front of the community and get our people involved in ministry. A win win right!

Your Church Marketing Strategy

Whatever your strategy you need to ensure you have some method of measuring your results. Whether that is in discipleship, outreach, worship, or ministry.

Real Metrics For The Church

When I planted a church I had limited leaders, dollars, and energy. I needed to capitalize on everything.

My main form and method of church growth was growing the church through the Word of God and building disciples who made disciples who made disciples.

That all sounds good and Holy, but did it work? How would I know that it worked?

We have tendencies of doing things because they sound cool, or because some wrote about it, or we think it might be a great idea. But in reality, did it work.

1. Is your church larger today than it was this time last year?
2. How do you know?

In the marketing world there is a measurement called the 7 P’s. It is used to measure your effectiveness at marketing. Marketing is designed to impact the bottom line.

The 7 P’s would be Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical evidence – these elements of the marketing mix form core tactical components of a marketing plan.

Now before you tune this out, lets take this measurement and apply it to church marketing. This will give you a solid metric to look at when you think of your church.

• How is your church viewed by those who are members
• How is your church viewed by those who are in the community
• How is your church viewed by those who are Christian
• How is your church viewed by those who are not christian

You can answer these questions and so much more by taking these 7 p’s of marketing and applying them to your own church marketing strategy.

Product: Church

First, you view your church through the eyes of those outside of your core.

1. What ministries do we offer and how does that reflect the need of the community?
2. Are your sermons hitting the mark with what the church is struggling with?
3. Does the person who checks in the kids smile or stare at you when your new?

You need to develop the habit of assessing your church honestly.

1. Give Yourself A Grade:
2. How Do You Improve This?

Prices

Of course you are not selling Jesus. But there is some element to this.

I would suggest taking a look at what you’re spending money on. Staff, building, etc.

Take a hard look at where the dollars are going and evaluate whether or not it is netting any type of return. This gets tricky when you have a place that does the same thing year after year, but does not net any results.

I hear all the time. If only one person comes to Christ then it is worth it.

That may be the case, but if you spent 80 man hours, staff, volunteers, 100′s if not thousands of dollars,…

I would suggest how do you improve, or upgrade what you are doing, or do it different to reach even more. Or even…kill that ministry, fire that staff person…

1. Give Yourself Grade:
2. How Do You Improve This?

Place

I heard it said one time that the most important room in your church is the bathroom. Is it messy or nice.

I love the church I attend. It is so great!

Music is playing, people are smiling and laughing, kids running around, and the place is just energized. You walk into that place and you know something is taking place.

You need to walk your halls and know what needs to be fixed. Signs need to be visible. Newcomers need to know the flow.

Make it inviting and fun to be there.

1. Give Yourself Grade:
2. How Do You Improve This?

Promotion

Large and small companies in every industry continually experiment with different ways of advertising, promoting, and selling their products and services.

And here is the rule: Whatever method of marketing you’re using today will, sooner or later, stop working. Sometimes it will stop working for reasons you know, and sometimes it will be for reasons you don’t know. In either case, your methods of marketing and sales will eventually stop working, and you’ll have to develop new sales, marketing and advertising approaches, offerings, and strategies.

Now a large majority of people still use invite cards, mailers, and bandit signs.

But let me tell you one of the best promotions on the planet. Followup.

The church I attend is the best at followup. They connected with me right off the bat and fully engaged me and my family. The letter I get from the staff is top-notch. The first three weeks of attending was non-stop communication. It was lite and fun. Talk about connecting the church to a visitor…it was out of this world. Done better than any church I have ever seen…and I have seen and visited a lot of them.

But how are you communicating upcoming events outside of Sunday morning.

1. Give Yourself Grade:
2. How Do You Improve This?

 Package

This is more or less what you present in your ministries.

How do you communicate, set up for Sunday morning. Greeting team, small group sign up, prayer time, etc. All aspects of what others see coming from you and your staff in the way of communication. How do you package the events, videos, worship, etc.

1. Give Yourself Grade:
2. How Do You Improve This?

Positioning

The next P is positioning.

You should develop the habit of thinking continually about how you are positioned in the hearts and minds of your members.

1. How do people think and talk about you when you’re not present?
2. How do people think and talk about your church?
3. What positioning do you have in your community?

Believe it or not…churches in the community carry a certain understanding among those in the community.

I am a biker and love to hang out with other people who do not attend church. Almost all of them have some perspective about your church and why they would or would not attend your church. That is positioning.

In the famous book by Al Reis and Jack Trout, Positioning, the authors point out that how you are seen and thought about by your customers is the critical determinant of your success in a competitive marketplace.

Attribution theory says that most customers think of you in terms of a single attribute, either positive or negative. Sometimes it’s “service.” Sometimes it’s “excellence.” Sometimes it’s “quality engineering,” as with Mercedes Benz. Sometimes it’s “the ultimate driving machine,” as with BMW.

In every case, how deeply entrenched that attribute is in the minds of your customers and prospective customers determines how readily they’ll buy your product or service and how much they’ll pay.

Again we are not selling, but this still plays a part in how you are viewed.

There is a mega church pastor in our community who is not well liked. It is effecting the size and growth (decline of the church)

Recently both his kids showed up drunk to a school dance and actually got arrested. He openly criticized the public school system and went on the attack, blaming the school for calling the cops on his kids. Saying they were after him. A week later he apologized for his remarks. How has he positioned himself in the community?

A lot of pastors carry ZERO position in the community and are not known at all outside of the places they visit to eat.

Develop the habit of thinking about how you could improve your positioning.

Begin by determining the position you’d like to have.

If you could create the ideal impression in the hearts and minds of your community, what would it be?

What changes do you need to make in the way interact with your community today in order to be seen as the very best choice for your community tomorrow?

1. Give Yourself Grade:
2. How Do You Improve This?

People

The final P of the marketing mix is people.

Develop the habit of thinking in terms of the people inside and outside of your church who are responsible for every element of your church and it’s activities.

It’s amazing how many pastors will work extremely hard to think through every element of their church and then pay little attention to the fact that every single decision and policy has to be carried out by a specific person, in a specific way.

Your ability to select, recruit, hire and retain the proper people, with the skills and abilities to do the job you need to have done, is more important than everything else put together.

In his best-selling book, Good to Great, Jim Collins discovered the most important factor applied by the best companies was that they first of all “got the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus.” Once these companies had hired the right people, the second step was to “get the right people in the right seats on the bus.”

To be help your church, you must develop the habit of thinking in terms of exactly who is going to carry out each task and responsibility. In many cases, it’s not possible to move forward until you can attract and put the right person into the right position.

1. Give Yourself Grade:
2. How Do You Improve This?

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