Categories
Advertising

How to sell a parachute to a penguin

Let’s say you’re going to sell a parachute to a penguin (stay with me on this) and all you know is that a penguin is a bird. That is 100% fact. You strike up the conversation like you’re talking to a sparrow or flamingo or seagull; after all, you’re talking to a bird.

You start by asking how his morning flight was or when his favorite time to catch a worm is, or how long his wife incubates on the eggs before they’re hatched. The penguin has a couple of options. He can ignore you, correct you politely, tell you bluntly what his life is like or go along with you anyway, but despite his choice of response, he’s not in a position to embrace the parachute you’re trying to sell.

Why? Because you didn’t take the time to learn about the penguin, you brought to the conversation your understanding of birds.

If you had learned about your audience, you would know that, even though penguins are birds, they don’t fly, they spend 75% of their hunting time under water and the male holds the egg on his feet to hatch while the female scavenges and brings back food.

This isn’t to say you couldn’t find an opportunity to a penguin that needs a parachute in case he fell from the top of an iceberg or needed to jump off the end of a cliff to escape a hungry seal. After all, penguins can’t fly. But until that penguin knows you understand him, he’s not interested in what you have to sell. He’ll assume you don’t understand his needs and can’t then provide a solution. Even with facts in hand (A penguin is a bird. It’s a fact) don’t assume you already know.

The same thing happens when we try to communicate to an audience we don’t understand. Whether through advertising, creating a guest experience, speaking to a crowd or building a friendship, fundamentally, you have to understand the penguin in order to sell him the parachute.

The best way to get to know him? Ask.

 

 

 

Categories
Advertising Marketing

4 ways to create audience-focused advertising

Advertising is an important part of what we do and the goal is to inspire a response. Something like “That’s for me” or “I hadn’t thought of it that way” or “I can be part of that”.

Advertising has 2 parts:

Tell people what to expect

Whether you’re promoting a trunk-or-treat Halloween event, Christmas concert, a new series topic, small groups or a new members class, advertising is an essential first step, and gives people a window into what to expect from your event. When your event happens, if the event is as good or better than they expected, then you’re starting to build trust. This is true for internal promotions (like your bulletin or announcements) and external promotions (on Social Media, road signs, billboards or mailers) and every step of the way is an opportunity to strengthen trust. Tell them what to expect and come through on it.

 

Inspire a response

Telling people what to expect is about the WHAT, and inspiring a response is about the WHY. Why would someone get off their couch on a Tuesday night and come to this event? Why would someone stay late after church or spend $25 to come to this event? If you can nail the WHY, then the WHAT just falls into place.

Here’s an example: Your favorite band is coming to town on Saturday night. It’s on your bucket list to see them and your best friend wants to take you and buy your tickets. Why do you want to go to the concert? Because your favorite bucket-list band is coming to town and you have tickets.

Does it matter if the show starts at 7 or 7:30? Does it matter if the ticket was $20 or $25? Does it matter who is opening for them? These are all the ‘WHAT’ details and at some point they matter, but they’re not the WHY behind making the decision for you.

It’s important to realize that, in this example, your WHY may not be someone else’s WHY. Maybe their “WHY” is their boyfriend is in the opening band, or their kids want to go and they want to spend time together or they have a goal of seeing a live band every month this year, and this happens to be the closest concert.

 

Discovering what motivates your audience will help you craft your “Why” message in your advertising. Here are 5 ways to discover your audience’s “why”.

 

1. Imagine you are your audience

If YOU are the target audience, what would inspire you to go? What incentive would you need? Would you want to go alone or take someone with you? Based solely on your personality, what would motivate you to arrive? Now, take those answers, and figure out how your audience is different than you. Are they in a different income bracket, or have larger families, or work later than you or newer to your church? Tweak your perspective based on those differences and figure out WHY they would want to attend.

 

2. Ask someone who has attended before

If this is a new members class, then have a survey at the beginning of the class asking how they first heard about your church, what made them want to come and why they’ve chosen to come to your new members class. That information is valuable in discovering their WHY, and using that as a way of advertising the class next time.

For instance, if they say they came to your new members class because they want to serve on your kids team and being a member is a pre-requisite, then your advertisement next time could be ‘If you’d like to get involved in serving on a team at church, come to our membership class to learn more.’

You could also do a raffle at your outreach event asking 3 questions and collecting contact info. This will help you know who came any why so you can prepare for next year’s event.

 

3. Ask someone who has not attended

This is a typical conversation for me: “I know you’ve been coming for a few months, and it’s great to see you every Sunday. Have you been to our membership class? I look after our communications here, and it would be helpful for me to get your perspective about what you think about the class.”  Answers vary from work schedule (they work every Sunday and classes are on Sunday afternoons) or didn’t realize that was a way to get to serve on a team.

At one point, we were trying to get everyone to that class within the first 3 months they started attending, so in our announcements I was saying “If you’ve started coming to Life Church in the last 90 days, we’d like to invite you to Connect At Life…”. The feedback that we received is there were people who had been coming for a 6 months or a year and how thought they’d missed the window to attend, so by focussing on one audience (people who had just started attending) I was eliminating another (people who had been around for more than 90 days).

More causally “I’ll see you Tuesday at Trunk or Treat!” and hopefully they’ll confirm, or let you know they won’t be there, and maybe offer a why.

 

4. Explore who else is reaching your audience well

In a world of Social Media advertising, YouTube and crazy amounts of big data, it’s relatively easy to track down someone who is already reaching your audience and pick apart their strategy to expose the WHY.

Need to advertise a youth event? Who are your youth following and can you figure out why they resonate?

Need to reach single moms? Look around your church to see who has their attention.

Duplicating or dissecting what’s working for someone else can help get you a step closer to resonating with that audience.

 

Remember, the WHY matters more than the WHAT. Always ask yourself “Why would someone attend this event?” and target your advertising to them. What have you found to work well in your church’s advertising? Leave a comment!

 

 

Categories
Post Evaluation Preparation Presentation

Evaluating Live Announcements

Whether live or video, printed or digital, your church’s announcements are asking people to respond in some way, like come to an event, register for something, sign up for a team.  In business, this is called a ‘call-to-action.’  and in order for your call-to-action to be successful, it needs to have 3 components, and often in this order:

  1. Attention
  2. Inspiration
  3. Information

I’ll explain each of these 3 items, then below an example of a live announcement I did from this past weekend and how it worked, plus a few things I noticed that I’d like to work on moving forward.

 

1. Get Your Audience’s Attention

If you have inspiration and information, but you don’t have your audience’s attention, it’s worth nothing.  We’ve all had an experience where we had a technical difficulty and a video didn’t play in service.  At that point, it doesn’t matter how much inspiration and information is in that video if no one sees it.

How to get your audience’s attention: Ask a question, mention something that everyone is experiencing and tie it to your announcement, or start with an interesting fact.

Keep your audience’s attention by only talking about things that are relevant to them (Here’s how we determine what to include in our announcements).

While you may switch the other 2 around, I would suggest that getting attention needs to be first on the list.

 

2. Inspire Your Audience

Make them laugh, make them cry, make them feel  hopeful or make them experience someone else’s hopelessness.  Trigger an emotion that makes them want to respond.  This is your WHY.  (side note: Here’s an article on communicating your WHY… not just how to respond but WHY.)

 

3. Give Your Audience Information

This is possibly the easiest piece of the puzzle, but so often done poorly.  The 2 extremes are too much information (too much to remember) or too little information (the person is walking away wondering how to respond.)

Find the middle ground, and this takes some practise – enough information to get someone interested, but not more than they need.  Then give ONE way to respond. On campus, we’re pointing people to the horseshoe (our Guest info kiosk that because of its location is shaped like a horseshoe) and online, we’re pointing people to our website.

A mistake in the response that I’ve seen is saying “Visit our website example.com/adults/women/prayer” or “Go see John Smith after service to sign up.” (You’re basically saying “If you know who John Smith is, you’re welcome to get involved. If you’re new, we know you don’t know who John Smith is, so we don’t want you to be involved.)

Multiple ways to respond isn’t helpful either. Stop by guest services, or sign up on our website, or join our Facebook group, or call the office this week, or send an email to PastorJohnSmith@example.com… Overload…

 

Here’s my opening announcement on January 8, 2017 at Life Church in Fort Myers, Florida. I’ve made some notes below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkZ_lL6GkBc&feature=youtu.be

 

1. Attention

I started by talking about the cool breeze this morning.  In south west Florida in January, we don’t often have a morning where it’s down to 50 F. People are pulling out warm clothes or jackets that they may only wear a few days each year, so it was a common thread everyone could identify with.

I kept the attention with a couple of jokes that led me to New Years Resolutions.

 

2. Inspiration

We’ve created a way for you to reach people who may have decided on a new years resolution, and here’s a way the you can connect them to Life Church and God.

 

3. Information

The business cards are simple for you to carry around and hand out. You can pick them up at the horseshoe in the foyer (our Guest Info kiosk is shaped like a horseshoe).

 

A few things I would like to work on when I present Live Announcements:

  • Our media team expecting whoever is speaking to be standing on the grey carpet you see on our stage (that’s simply an indication of where that first camera shot is positioned.) I need to wait until I’m on that carpet to start speaking. (This is a cut from our Live Broadcast feed, so this is actually what was broadcast online that morning.)
  • I walk back a forth more than I’d like to. A little is fine so it feels conversational, but I don’t want it to be distracting for the message.
  • I didn’t hit the inspiration part as well as I’d like to.  I don’t often script my live announcements, so in this case, I would have like to help create more of a sense that people are looking for the information and our people can help connect them with it.
  • I have some verbal static (repeating myself talking about resolutions, I say ‘Actually, Believe it or not, typically, umm, ah…’) Verbal static is when you say words that offer no value to the conversation while you gather your thoughts to say something meaningful. Slowing down a little would allow me to vocalize those thoughts without the static.

 

If you’re interested, here is my full announcement clip from that Sunday:

https://youtu.be/I5pPqNxz7Xo

 

Brady Shearer from Pro Church Tools has a great way to integrate stories into your announcements (more than 35% of the time Jesus was teaching, He used stories!) Check out Brady’s 2-part formula here!

 

I’d love to hear your thoughts, or if you have a clip of your live announcements, post it in the comments!

 

 

 

Categories
Advertising Graphic Design

Maximizing Digital Signage at Church

It’s not out of the ordinary to have projector screens & LCD or Plasma TVs in your auditorium or through your church building, but many churches miss the opportunity to capitalize on the reach that these screens have.  For instance, we have screens in our auditorium for lyrics and scriptures during service. Before service, we use them as a 20 minute countdown to service starting.  During that 20 minute countdown, we have various screens on a 7-second rotation.  They include silencing your phone before service, moving backgrounds with our logo, follow along with us and download the YouVersion Bible App, and our monthly new-membership dinner.

HorseshoeWe also have 4 LCDs in the foyer.  2 that duplicate the countdown happening in the auditorium, 1 that’s designated for kids check in, and 1 that’s designated for our Horseshoe information center (we call it the horseshoe because… well, it’s shaped like a horseshoe.  Also, during service, when we say “Sign Up At The Horseshoe in the foyer,” just about every new visitor can figure out where that is any why it’s called that.)

For the Horseshoe TV specifically, we like to change up that image every week, but not have it rotate – just static.  It’s a single image that either tells what’s happening this week at Life Church, or it’s information about what you can do at the horseshoe (sign up for an event on the iPads, order a CD or DVD of this week’s service, etc.)

When we have a specific registration focus, the Horseshoe TV will say “Register for Life Groups (our small groups) here!”

If we have a training session during the week or on a Saturday, I’ll put the name of the session and the room where it’s being held.  I also include arrows to point the way.  We do have signage in the building, but I’m a fan of strategic redundancy.

I like to use unsplash.com images for the background of the horseshoe TV.  They’re colorful and high resolution, so I can use just a portion of the image if that’s what suits best.  In this case for design, I’m looking to maximize contrast (so it can be read across the foyer even with all the lights on) and maximize font size.  I also like to include our ‘L’ icon in some way if it doesn’t detract from the design.

Here are a few of the horseshoe designs we’ve used, and at the bottom you’ll find the layered photoshop files that you can use.  Our horseshoe TV is 1080p widescreen (1920×1080 px) and your photoshop file should be RGB color because it’s going to be shown on a screen (rather than CMYK if it’s going to be printed.)  We run ours from a USB stick that slides in the back – the only cable running to that TV is for power.

In the future, we may get an Apple TV so we can remotely change the image, or series of images, but until now, that hasn’t been necessary.

PSD Files:

Horseshoe TV Buy DVDs

This Week at Life Church Horseshoe TV

Hospitality HorseShoe Screen

This week at Life Church