Category: Advertising

Podcast: Can we duplicate content across Social Media Channels?

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date March 13, 2017

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This week’s tool: Open-Edit-Print.com

Church Graphics… Simplified Save Time. End Frustration. Attract Visitors.Get Unlimited Access to Done-for-you Media and Graphics for Email, Social Media, Worship Slides and Print Promotions. Get a free trial here!

Stacey asks about which Social Media channels to be on to connect with a young demographic, and if cross posting is a good idea:

Facebook is still the largest user base, so don’t let it go.
If you’re using Facebook consistently and seeing growth, reach a younger demographic on instagram or twitter – both have it’s perks as far as content and strategy.
Maximize the strengths of each platform (twitter is real time, instagram is image driven)
Send a consistent message across each platform, but it doesn’t have to be an identical message.
It’s cool to cross-post. Some people prefer one channel over another, so they won’t know you’re cross posting. Other people will see the same post, but at different times or in a different context.

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Guest Services Social Media

Using Social Media to get new church guests in your door

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date March 3, 2017

One of the reasons (if not THE reason) that Social Media is so popular and engrained in our culture is that humans have a need for interaction, engagement and relationship, and too often I hear of social media managers at churches saying “I just want to use my page / account / channel to let people know what’s going on” – basically, they’re saying “I want to broadcast”.

Here’s a timeline I see over and over:

Broadcast information about an event > Pay to Boost the broadcast post > No guests show up, just our members > Paying was a waste of money > Broadcast information about next event

But what if we created a social media model centered around relationships. There are 2 types of relationships that we can leverage: Existing and potential.

Existing Relationships:

Outside of Social Media, there are these real life people (I know, sometimes hard to wrap your mind around) who have real-life friendships. I’m not knocking friends who have met on Facebook, but there are relationships and connections that you have with people all around you that happened outside of social media and are strengthened through that connection.

Give you current people the tools to invite their friends, family, co-workers or neighbors on Social Media. Here are some ideas:

For Easter or Christmas, usually 3 weeks ahead, we send out an email blast to all of our members with 5 or 6 images that act as invites to our Easter weekend or Christmas Eve services. They are worded to be coming from the person that posts them, not our church, like ‘Would you join me at Easter?’ or ‘My family would love to celebrate Easter with you!’ or ‘Send me a private message, and I’ll save a seat for you.’ This gives our people an easy image to share that has all of the elevate details. Some people will post to Facebook, twitter or instagram and others will send them as a text message or in an email.
We create images that say something about being welcome at Life Church. Often “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, you’re welcome at Life Church.” When people share them to their personal profiles for their friends, it’s so open ended that it often start discussions for them, either publicly or privately and sometime IRL (…in real life…).

Potential Relationship:

Create ads or event-based posts to be focussed on the opportunity to build relationships. Even in our connected, digital culture, there are lots of people who are lonely, and looking for people to build friendships with. When creating content for the purpose of promoting the opportunity to build relationships, give clear details and a simple way to respond.

Love riding your motorcycle? We’re riding on Saturday morning at 8am leaving from Life Church.
Moms: If your infant was choking would you know what to do? Learn with other moms at our CPR class Thursday, 10am at Life Church.
COFFEE SHOP GRAND OPENING: Bring this coupon for a free coffee! (have people from your church hanging out at your new coffee shop to talk with people in line or sitting in the seats and introduce themselves, etc.)

Using Facebook targeting, you can target people in certain geographic areas, with certain interests, age groups and relationship statuses (ie. married, single engaged) and this is the best way to narrow down your audience to someone who may connect with what you’re offering. (Click here for more about that…)

Outside of ads, use Social to connect with other organizations and businesses to spread your awareness:

Thanks to XYZ restaurant for catering staff lunch today!
These guys are fast! Our Air Conditioning wasn’t working this morning at Church and they had to fixed before service started. THANK YOU!
Share or RT or Like posts about other events in your community – maybe from other non-profits or worthy causes promoted by businesses – to get exposure for your church.

Here is a Facebook live video I did on our Church Marketing Ideas Facebook group

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rkChVp-xzs

I would love to hear what’s worked for you to attract new guests with Social Media.

Advertising Marketing Podcast Tools Website

Podcast: Is my church’s website for new guests or our congregation?

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date February 20, 2017

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This week’s tool:

Unsplash is a growing library of “do whatever you want” photos from all over the world. For a quick hit of inspiration, sign up for their email newsletter where they’ll send you 10 new photos from their library every 10 days. This is one of our go-to resources on the fly to grab a photo to overlay a quote or a quick promo image with text. Most of our blog post featured images are generated from Unsplash content!

Today’s question comes from Dan:

How do you decide if your church’s website content should be focussed on guests or on regulars?

A few thoughts:

Keep your home page content targeted to new guests, especially what they will see before they scroll.
New guests need to instantly get a sense of what your church is about and if they want to connect with you.
Use your subpages of your website for information your congregation needs: Upcoming events, registration forms, membership information, etc.
If possible, choose real photos of your church on your website over stock photos.
If you need to use stock photos, make sure they accurately represent what someone will experience when they visit your church.

Check out my ebook: TrustGlue: 11 ways to create a first impression that sticks and look for the section on making a first impression for new guests using your website.

From Brady Shearer at Pro Church Tools, here are 11 things your church website needs based on an eye-tracking study from new visitors. Read more…

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Podcast Social Media Tools

Podcast 9: Which Social Media channels could you use for your church plant?

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date February 13, 2017

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This week’s tool:

More than a backup storage mechanism, dropbox is a great way to share files between departments, send proofs to other team and get their feedback on the sidebar next to the document itself. For live collaboration, have a shared dropbox folder to save images, quotes and videos from your phone, tablet, laptop desktop or all of the above. Click here to sign up for free trial account!

Nicole asks about how many social media channels her church launch needs. Here are a few ideas:

Get intentional and successful on one channel before expanding to other channels. You’ll be more engaged with your audience if you do one channel well, rather than a few channels poorly.
If you’re not sure which one channel to start with, I would recommend Facebook: It’s already got the largest audience, and the most versatile options for what you can post.
If you’re not sure if you need a Facebook page or Facebook group, read this info here!
You’re going to have a lot of decisions to make in your first 30 days managing your Social Media. Here is an article about what to expect and what conversations to have with your team.
When you’re ready to move to a second channel, consider instagram. You can do live ‘stories’ like snapchat, video and image posts with longer status than twitter.

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Podcast

Podcast: How to target advertising to people who are ready to hear the Gospel

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date February 6, 2017

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This week’s tool:

Katie Allred (KatieAllred.com) joins us to share about sip which allows you to grab the hex code for any color on your screen.

Micheal asks about how to reach people in your area who are ready to hear about the Gospel:

Ryan Holck from Rad-ideas.com joins us to answer Michael’s question. Using targetted Facebook and Google ads, direct invitations to learn more about the gospel based on these 4 ideas:

Keyword
Topic
Location
Type of Audience

Build ads to target those people. If you’re not sure where yo start, start with Facebook with $5-10/day for a few days. If you’re seeing results, continue the campaign. If it’s not getting the results you’re looking for, adjust and retarget.

Focus on sending those people to a specific ministry, not just generally “come learn about us” but “come connect with this group that is addressing the issues you’re looking for more information about.

Looking for more information? Here are a few blog posts from Ryan about Facebook and google advertising:

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Podcast Tools

Podcast Episode 6: The future of Print vs Digital in Church (with Ryan Holck)

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date January 23, 2017

This week’ tool:

Use ChurchIpsum to generate hilarious cliche church text content to use as placeholder text when working on print or web projects for your church. The cheesiness will be extra incentive for that person to get you the proper text content you’re looking for…

Theresa asks about the future of print and digital in your church.

We had Ryan Holck from Rad-ideas.com to answer Theresa’s question. Here are some of his thoughts.

Different generations will best retain information in different ways – some in print and some in digital. Some people would miss content if print is entirely removed.

Use both as a tool to be redundant and get important information out in multiple ways. Print can become a smaller dynamic, but during that process, be strategic with how you use it.
Use print as an introduction and point people for complete information to a digital resource (like your website).

How to transition some of your print to digital:

Use Email as an alternative to your church bulletin, and use email as a reinforcement for what you put in print.
Start by converting your print to a PDF and make a download link available.
Convert your PDF to a digital magazine format using a service like issuu.com
Design an email with MailChimp.com and print it for pickup as needed.

More ways to connect with Ryan Holck from Rad-Ideas.com:

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Podcast Social Media

Podcast: How to create a Social Media strategy with Katie Allred

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date January 16, 2017

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This week’s Social Media tool:

If you’re wanting to make a major decision that will affect your church, feedback is your friend. There are a few ways to get that feedback, whether by posting a poll on Facebook, sending out an email and asking for a reply, or handing out a piece of paper at a service.

Better than anything else, we’ve found that using an anonymous online survey, like Survey Monkey gives us our fastest and highest quantity of results. Learn more about Survey Monkey…

Here’s an awkward screen shot of Katie and Adam on Skype during our podcast interview!

Connect with Katie Allred:

Have a question you’d like answered on a future podcast? Ask here!

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Advertising Branding Marketing Podcast

How to create a winning church communications strategy

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date January 2, 2017

https://youtu.be/cCKycHY_lMg

This week’s tool:

Slack:

Slack is a chat app on steroids. If you’re using a Facebook group or text message thread to communicate with your team, imagine being able to group your chats: communication projects, personal needs, funny comments, feedback, stage design ideas or communications about your upcoming volunteer banquet.

Slack includes different “channels” – chats based on topics. When you upload a file, like a proof for instance, other users can comment on that proof so you know how to make revisions.

Slack also comes with multiple add ons, so you can find an app for finances, expense tracking or communication integrations.

Dan asks a great question about how to build a communications strategy. For us, we’ve built our strategy based on 3 concepts: Branding, Marketing and Advertising give us the opportunity to build trust in every interaction. We call this TrustGlue that makes people stick around when they see we’re living out our values. Download our free ebook here:

Have a church communications question you’d like answered? Ask it here. We’ll reply to all of them and pick a few for our podcast!

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Advertising Marketing

What’s your ‘Why?’

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date December 8, 2016

When I have a conversation within our organization about something that needs to be communicated, part of the conversation always includes “Why?” because whenever you communicate something, it sparks a response from the listener – sometimes audibly, sometimes internally and silently, but always a decision about how to respond.

If you tell someone there’s an event coming up, they are having an internal conversation – maybe ‘I’m not available, I’m not interested, I can’t wait, I’m coming for sure, I wonder if my friend is going…’

Recognizing that there’s always a conversation happening will help you communicate in a way that helps move the conversation forward, not a dead end. (One of the ways to stop from creating a conversation dead end is to avoid using these 4 words.)

Move the conversation forward by talking about the ‘WHY’.

Why would someone get off their couch on a Tuesday night and come to your event?
Why would someone get up early on a Sunday to serve on a team rather than just attend church?
Why would someone choose to add in this new ministry into their monthly giving budget?
Why would someone who doesn’t have a teenager sponsor a family to send their kids to camp?

Features vs. benefits:

In sales you mention the features, but sell on the benefits.

Mention the feature that a car has a 4 litre engine instead of a 5 litre engine. Talk about the benefit of saving money in rising gas costs.

Mention the feature that the TV has a front HD input, but sell the benefit that if someone brings over their playstation, you can plug it into the front of the TV, rather than trying to get the cable into the back of the TV while mounted on the wall.

So when it comes to announcements, mention the features of what you’re announcing (the who, what, where, when and how) but drive home the point with the WHY.

Here’s are some examples of focussing on the WHY:

Youth Camp – Selling the features:

We have a youth camp coming up in 6 weeks. Parents your permission slips and fees are due next Sunday. We have some families who can’t afford to send their teenager to camp, so if you’d like to sponsor them, stop by the guest services kiosk.

Youth Camp – Selling the WHY:

Remember that feeling after youth camp that you were coming back to make a difference in your school, your home, and your community? Many of us are still connected with friends we made at youth camp, and have memories of how those few days away impacted our lives, and we want to be sure all of our teens have that same experience.

Parents, stop by the guest services kiosk to complete your student’s registration. If you don’t have teenagers, we have sponsorship opportunities available for anyone who would like to impact the life of a student who otherwise may not be able to go to camp. Stop by the guest services kiosk to complete your registration or sponsorship today.

Small Groups – Selling the features:

We have small groups that meet every Tuesday night at 7pm for dessert and coffee. They’re at different homes in our city, so stop by the guest services kiosk to pick up a list of small groups meeting this week and register for your group.

Small Groups – Selling the WHY:

If you’re looking to meet some new friends at our church, or learn more about the foundations of the bible, one of the best ways to do that is by connecting with a small group. We have coffee and dessert and casual conversations every Tuesday at 7pm. These groups meet all through our city, and if you stop by the guest services kiosk, they can help you find the group closest to your home or the group that best matches your study interests so you can start or continue to build friendships with other believers.

Try transitioning your announcements, social media posts, email newsletters, and volunteer pushes to focussing on the WHY. I guarantee with a little practise that your response rate will be better than ever.

Comment below with how you’ve seen this working for you!

Advertising Marketing Tools

5 Ways to maximize your email list: Guest Post on ThatCC.com

Post author By Adam McLaughlin
Post date November 16, 2016

Your email list gives you access unlike any other form of media. If you can convince the recipient to open the email (1 click) then you have complete control over what is communicated, unlike your website where people have to go out of their way to visit, or Social Media where your exposure is restricted by someone else’s metrics.