Steven Records

Church Marketing

10 Marketing Tactics for Christian Youth Camps

Wed, Aug 29, 2012

I had a question come in from a church in India asking about how to market for Christian youth camps. It really is a good question in which I thought the response could benefit a lot of other churches as well. So here are my 10 ways to market Christian youth camps.

Look at what you are currently doing and be resourceful

The first thing I look at in strategizing marketing is what the organization is currently doing, and how we can use those things to promote upcoming events. Utilize what you have. Most youth groups do events and outreaches, but rarely do they strategize the timing of those events in regards to how they can build surrounding events as well. Big Idea: Plan events in advance and promote camp at outreaches to gain interest beyond your regular attendance.

Have attractions not Christian constants

In regards to the language and driving points for a youth camp, if your target is both Christian and non-Christian, then build your attractions to something that would appeal to them. Time of worship and prayer are not huge attractions for lost youth, but having a known band, a great location that screams “vacation”, or taking along a comedian/entertainer can really make the event appeal to those you are after.

Early registration pricing

One of the greatest initiatives you can have is to get pre-registrations for the following year during the camp and the few weeks after. This is so key in getting people committed to come early on. You can also push registrations by reducing price if they sign up at other events and during pre-registration initiative

Leverage social media

You can do giveaways where they enter to win by posting about camp on Facebook. Resolve issues by creating a group or event page to use for communication about problems, reminders, and Q&A.

Remember the parent

You cannot forget that parents play a factor in the decision. Announce youth camps in main service as well as youth services so they can be familiarized with what is going on. Have take home information for parents to look at and make a decision for their kids.

Do more than an announcement

Don’t stop at doing a video announcement or a stage announcement. That does not fully give a taste of the event. Theme a few services that are special camp services that have fun presentations, camp themed messages, announcement of camp, encourage youth to dress in camp attire, have camp band lead worship, the whole nine yards. Be sure to do this BEFORE it is too late to sign up. Also, have students share their experience through previous years.

Build everything in careful planning

Do major outreaches and community engagements to build your youth group several months before camp. It is a great way to build your youth group and provide an avenue for growth, community, and discipleship within close proximity of when they arrived.

Lead the way with word of mouth

You and your leadership team should be asking students if they are signed up, if they are going to camp, and working through the situations that hinder them from coming. This catches on and students start asking the same thing to each other and it can encourage them to invite their friends outside church.

Contact your contacts

It’s amazing how people get details and never use that information they are given. Call people who are in your database. Send out email updates to parents and students about camp and upcoming events. Parents want to know what is going on within the church for their kids.

Measure your outcomes

To continue to grow you need to see where you are currently and challenge yourself to grow the following year. To help track how you are doing, log the number of sign ups for each week of the year to see if you are doing better to date compared to the previous year. This helps to see if the promotional initiatives are effective and if not, you can then adjust accordingly.

Cheers,

_rec

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It is my, Steven Records, desire to see the American Church be all that it can be... healthy, faithful, and growing. So this free resource is made available to help churches and ministry's grow through practical ideas and strategies. Please, watch this vision video to know what I am all about and how you can support the vision to create thriving churches and reach the lost.

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Growing Churches by Building Relationships

Fri, May 04, 2012

Relationships are instrumental to opportunity

Networking tends to be a poorly represented tool for churches. We often think of networking as a thing for businesses and NGOs rather than a means to gain opportunities for growth for the local church. One of the most important resources I have learned to value while at Hillsong is relationship. Relationships are instrumental to opportunity and are the basis of influence. It is far more likely that people will take you at your word if they know who you are. The more someone knows you the more they are willing to listen and therefore respond.

A plan to make it work

Have you tried throwing out ads on radio or doing a direct mailer to generate interest about your church and seen little to no results? Chances are the reason for the poor results is a lack of public relationship. General public needs to know who you are before you can invite them to the party so to speak. The most valuable information you can use in promotion is not statistics, but awareness of where you stand with the public. By being aware of that stance you can then effectively strategize ways to move up the latter of relationship and in so doing, the latter of influence.

Building Public Relations from Nothing

Starting out with no PR can be tough and slow going, but it’s not impossible. By going to public events that fit your target audience and just being intentional to network can be a start. Make it a goal to meet at least 30 people, get 5 contacts and go for coffee with a few of the people you meet at each event. Although you may not have any professional need from these contacts you are building relationships and physically representing your church in the community you are trying to reach. Once people start to know who you are, you build credibility out of relationships, which in turn gives you a better response for those less personal church growth efforts.

Is there an easier way?

A church is a community, and a community is formed out of relationships. Although relationships take time and effort, they make a church what it is. Although I could point to many marketing campaign strategies that might work, you will be far more confident in getting results if there is a foundation to launch off of. Even so, you don’t have to be the only person going to events to network and promote the church. Hopefully you have a team. That team can engage with your local community as well, giving this slow going process momentum. Doing the math, if you have a team of 5 people and every week you all talk briefly about the church to 30 people then in a month you have promoted to 600 people. In one quarter that would be 1,800 people that have heard about your church from a person they now have some sort of relationship with.

Cheers,

_rec

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Making Your Church “Marketable”

Fri, Mar 02, 2012

Before we cast out the idea of talking about church and marketing in the same sentence, lets think about what it means to be marketable. The goal of a business is to be marketable, to sell products and make money. For a church though, the aim is completely different, it is all about influence. We want to impact lives by pointing people to Jesus and developing them along the way. Marketability is simply making yourself desirable. So the big question is, are you desirable? Why should people want to go to your church instead for the mosque down the road?

Allow me to relate marketability to something us single guys are very familiar with, the interest in a potential spouse. We all have our proverbial list of what that spouse should be like. I want a girl that shares my beliefs, that laughs at my corny jokes, that is far more compassionate than I ever could be, a girl that brings the best out of me, and is faithful through and through. These are points of marketability. These are the things that separate the grain from the chaff, the curds from the whey, the one I choose and the one I don’t.

In relation to the church we need to look at what makes the church desirable. Is your service exciting, relevant to the crowd, and inspiring? Or is it boring, outdated, and leaves people to go home unchanged and unmotivated? At the heart of the church are people inviting, authentic, active in the pursuit of the vision? Or would people describe the congregation as closed off, fake, and uninvolved? Sometimes our perspective of church marketability is so small, as to only include having a cool band or a big name at an event. However in the grand scheme of things, a band or a speaker is like jewelry and apparel. It might catch an eye or two, but it is not enough to get someone engaged, if you get my double meaning.

Instead of listing out all the ways you can make a church marketable let me just suggest one idea that very well may change they way you do ministry in every sphere of the church. That one idea is this, standards! Where are your standards? We do all things as to the Lord, so everything we do should meet a standard of excellence. Think of the standards for sacrifices in the Old Testament. They were to be without blemish. Think of the detail and craftsmanship involved in the building of the Temple. God has standards, shouldn’t we as well?

Standards are the difference between another service and life changing moment.

Standards give us the opportunity to get better; it drives us to advance the vision. Standards are the difference between another service and life changing moment. Your standards need to be the same in front of a group of 10 as they are with group of 10,000. The consistency is appealing and it shows that you are serious about the church regardless of size or status. Teams should get better over the years. Your worship team should be better today than it was yesterday. The messages should be all the more powerful now than at the start of the ministry. The people should be far more mature in the faith now than 6 years ago. There should be a continual progression in every aspect of the ministry; that progression, that advancement in skill and influence is so attractive. It is something to be admired and something to be desired. It is something that people will travel from the far reaches of the earth to be a part of. Your standards define your ministry in every area. It affects your culture, it affects your people, it affects your marketability.

Growing with you,

_rec

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Church Growth / Church Marketing — No Comments

Hillsong Week 3: Making the most of what you have

Mon, Feb 13, 2012

So BIG news about this week here in the land down under. I have been presented a few great opportunities within Hillsong to help advance the vision and purposes of God for Hillsong Church. Before I explain those to you I want to let you know some background on myself that makes it all the more of a God send. Something like 6 months ago I made the change from blogging about the technical aspects of photography and design to church growth and marketing because I felt that there was a greater need and a greater purpose behind helping local churches be all that they can be.

I have been given the amazing task of coming up with strategies to grow the conferences that hillsong puts on. The great significance with this is that the purpose for the Hillsong Conference is to help local churches be all that they can be and accomplish their God given mandate. So the very thing I was set out to do six months ago has advanced to what I am now a part of at Hillsong. God is definitely on the move. Praise and thanks be to Him, for He places us where we will not only best grow, but where we will best produce fruit.

As I have been conceptualizing ideas for the conference my train of thought has really been, “How do we make the most of what we have?” A lot of times we tend to under utilize the things that are in our hands. We take a look at the people we have within our sphere of leadership and make assumptions or excuses that exclude them from being a help to the needs within the church. Or we separate one branch of the ministry from another. Sometimes to the extent that the idea of working together for the mutual benefit of one another isn’t even a consideration. We need to transport our way of thinking to “how we, as one, can accomplish a God given purpose.”

The potential in people needs to be identified, encouraged and cultivated.

As a leader people need to be trained, developed and mentored. Everyone needs to work towards the same goal and the potential in people needs to be identified, encouraged and cultivated. Sometimes all that is needed is a tiny adjustment to draw the best out of what you have.

From a promotional standpoint for the church, think of how you can use the ministries, talent, and resources you currently have to best capture the community around you. Be creative and make the most of what you have. You will see that you are far more capable than you thought.

Oh, and I was asked to manage the new hillsong college website.

Glory to God,

_rec

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Is Cost Per Click Advertising A Good Way to Promote?

Thu, Jan 19, 2012

Cost Per Click Advertising has become a widely used form of promotion. The big question is, “Is it worth using?” To answer, I will have to explain through the pros and cons, and explore any alternative methods that might be a better use of money.

Cost Per click advertising is where you pay an amount for every time an advertisement link is clicked on. Normally you are spending $0.60-$2.00 for every click. This all is contingent upon the targeting specifications you use, and the keywords that are relevant to your website.

The pros are that you are guaranteed traffic, it is fast, it is easy, is involves no additional costs, you can target who is viewing your ads. The only question really is if the amount you are paying for each click worth the traffic increase you are getting. Please understand that a VERY small percentage of people who actually click your ad will come to the event. Often times less than 1%. So is the $60-200 worth the 1 person that ends up attending your service or event? But if you are able to increase your percentage from 1% to lets say 10% then you are really doing pretty good in comparison to direct mailers for instance where you are paying about $0.40 per impression.

The cons to cost per click advertising are that you may have people clicking on your ad just to drain your budget. Yes, people do this. Another consideration is that people often times ignore or devalue those who use those forms of advertising. You also will need a massive budget to get any big results from this form of promotion because it does get pricey fast. CPC (cost per click) also doesn’t do anything for you for brand personality and public relations. Successful promotions are never strictly informational, they bring style, personality, interest, humor, insight, creativity, emotion that create a positive memorable moment and connection with people. You just don’t get that from CPC.

So where do I stand on the issue? CPC is good for certain things, if you are needing fast promotion that would appeal to a specific group of people in a specific area then CPC would possibly be a great choice. But CPC really shouldn’t be used for lasting results or general advertising. If you want traffic to your site, then get some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work done and do link building to get consistent organic traffic to your site. You will get a much bigger bang for your buck. I rarely suggest CPC simply because there are usually better, more cost effective forms of promotion that produce better results.

Diversify your forms of promotion for the best results

Also don’t forget that you should diversify your forms of promotion for the best results. No one form of promotion is going to draw the traffic you want. As it is said, “One man can case a thousand away, but two can put ten thousand to flight”. The two together is greater than the sum total. Having multiple forms of promotion is far more effective than just the one.

In conclusion I would rate this form of promotion a 2 out of 10. It is fast and easy, but fast and easy isn’t always better, or more affordable. Think of some other options and weigh those against CPC before deciding if CPC is the way to go.

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Cost Effective Event Promotion Ideas

Sat, Dec 17, 2011

The continual challenge churches face in the promotional side of things is how to get the biggest impact for the lowest investment. Now I would love to say that there are 5 promotional methods that generate the best results for all circumstances, locations and churches, but the truth is there are a lot of factors involved which could be the difference between total success and total failure. That being said here is a list of some cost effective promotional methods that just might work for you.

It seems like an ancient concept I know. Email for promotion seems like the way of the spammer, which in most cases it is. However a lot of major companies contribute their success from email marketing. Facebook is one of those. The key to doing this right is to always connect the email with someone the recipient knows. If you are sending event info via email to people that attend your church then since they know you they will welcome the email. To expand your reach you need other people the send or forward the email to their contacts. Forewarning, if you abuse email by overuse people will ignore you regardless if you’re their best friend or worst enemy.

Cost= Free

Host The Event of Someone Else

I mention a similar idea in this Article

Promote an event by hosting a different event. If you have your own building, why not use it more than a few times a week. Offer to host an event for free. Doing this for an outside company’s Christmas party or for a few bands to come and play is a great way to get some new blood in the door. While they are there you can set up banners, run a commercial on loop in the lobby, and have a booth with volunteers from the church to run it. Remember, just because it isn’t a service doesn’t mean that they are not a guest. So be a good host to them, and be intentional about the opportunity hosing another event presents.

Cost= Clean up and Electric

Be a Guest Speaker

Girls like to try on a pair of shoes before buying and guys like to test drive cars before signing the papers. People like to have a preview before getting committed. So by being a guest speaker at a school, conference, or a group you can give people who know nothing about your church a “preview”. Of course you can also fit a mention of your church and an upcoming event.

Cost= A Few Hours Time

Tickets Instead of Fliers

People are far more prone to go to an event if they have tickets than fliers. Even if the event is free, and there is no requirement for the ticket. Take advantage of this approach to get congregation more involved by giving away free tickets, instead of passing out fliers. Just mimic the look of common event tickets and even try and use the same paper type and stub perforation if you can budget it. Tickets are a much more inviting way to get event promotion by word of mouth. It is also more effective when done for events that could outwardly be seen as a ticket event, like having a live band, comedian, entertainer, or special guest.

Cost= Printing Expenses

One for the Holidays

Lets say you are among the majority of churches that like to put on a Christmas event or special service, and you are looking for a way to advertise. It’s Christmas season. It’s time to take the boxes of all the decorations from the basement, addict, or shed and deck the place with Christmas lights and cheer. Why not take a “Christmas pole” to see who can come up with the best Christmas Event Outdoor Décor? The point is to have people in the congregation make outdoor decorations for the Christmas Event and you can show photos of the decorations people came up with during a portion of service each week leading up to the event. People drive around to look at Christmas lights and décor so the creative promotion is sure to get noticed, especially if there are several houses participating. The church can provide the event info needed on the decoration and if there is budget for it, even possibly a banner that they just need to frame and/or stand.

Cost= A Couple Minutes During Service

That’s all for now. Remember, there are ways to get good effective promotion for little to no cost. It all comes down to being creative, being strategic, and executing the promotional plan well.

Merry Christmas,

_rec

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Church Growth / Church Marketing — No Comments

5 Creative Ways to Get Your Name Out There

Tue, Dec 06, 2011

One of the things that I constantly have to think through for clients is how to creatively get their name out to the general public. Here are a few cost effective ways to spread your churches name that you may have not thought of.

Advertise in a coupon book

Coupon books are fairly inexpensive to advertise in and there are some that are distributed in local neighborhoods as door hangers. Today, coupons have become a fad of sorts; there are now tv shows that are all about saving money using coupons. It would be wise to ride the coupon train for a special event or even your Sunday service. “FREE” is a huge buzzword today for coupons, so having “Free Admission” could catch the viewers eye to at least notice and read the coupon. Also this is a very targeted approach to getting your name out there because you can usually have them distributed to selected neighborhoods.

Merch it up

Merchandising is a great way to make walking billboards for your church. The best part is that people are willing to pay for your t-shirt or other apparel with your church name on it which means people are paying to advertise for you. Usually 60% of your church attendance will want some sort of apparel (assuming it isn’t hideous), and you can also give them out at events. This method requires some initial investment but you should be able to at least break even and get some good exposure from it.

Bike Trail Chalk

Sounds a bit outlandish I know, but people are intrigued by things that are out of the ordinary. During the spring-fall months hundreds of bikers, runners, and walkers roam the trails daily. Spending $5-10 on sidewalk chalk and writing a message every couple miles on the trail is a great way to get your name to a group of people that are obviously trying to improve themselves. The thought process here is to identify where people spend their time, understand their motives, and appeal to those motives in a cost effective way.

Take it to the streets

If I was to own a new restaurant I would take my food the streets for people to try it and tell them about the restaurant. Just as a restaurant has great food to offer the community Churches have much to offer as well. So why not take it to the streets? Do you have a great praise and worship band? Have them play in high traffic areas or in local venues so the community can experience what you have to offer and learn more about the church. Most local venues are easy to be booked at and can really present great opportunities to witness.

Have an online presence

Social media sites like facebook and twitter are power tools to get information out there. The huge benefit to these forms of communication is sharing. People can share your flier or message with their hundreds or even thousands of friends instantly. If you have 50 people share a flier or even post it as a profile picture then you’re talking massive amounts of free exposure to people that are generally in your area. Try creating a flier, formatting and making it readily available for web, then encouraging your church to get involved by sharing the flier online.

If you have any creative ideas for getting your name in public eye, feel free to post them as a comment. Remember, growing public interest is necessary for growing a ministry. In the end, it is all about spreading the gospel to the ends of the earth and making disciples for the advancement of the kingdom of God.

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Advertising / Church Growth / Church Marketing — No Comments

Stop Designing for Christians

Tue, Nov 29, 2011

An archer is not successful unless he knows what his target is and assesses all the factors in reaching the target. The same concept goes for advertisement. One common mistake I see unfortunately is that churches tend to design for christians and market in christian circles when the advertising should be focused on bringing in non-believers.

The big tip here is to throw out everything you know about design and think through the mindset and eye of the secular world. What interests them, what style do they appeal to, where do they spend most of their time? Paul wrote, “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some” -1 Corinthians 9:22. It’s not that he compromised his values or withheld truth, but that he adapted to become relatable with the people he was trying to reach. We should follow his example in the way we communicate with the public through advertisement. Make things modern with the world in mind, instead of the church.

Design Tips:
Style
One style that is very popular today is simple bold vibrant colors with a black and white accent. This style is easy to produce and is popular because it utilizes the bold and vibrant HD technology that is taking over. Advocates of this style include TBS and MTV.
Wording
For general public advertising, avoid church jargon like the plague. Saying things like, “worship with us” or “see the revival” will send non-believers the other way. Try saying something like “experience the difference” or “a new kind of church”.
More about wording
In the US, the majority of the public knows about Christianity, and has probably had some ties to the church in the past, but have rejected it due to a negative experience; so it is wise to speak to those who have had a negative experience in the church. As a guide, really know who you are talking to and speak to the needs, experiences, and thoughts of those people in a relatable and intriguing way. Being simply informative doesn’t cut it in todays world.

Again remember, that church advertising is not about money, it is about reaching the community in order to advance the Kingdom of God. Churches are not in competition with each other, we are battling for those in the world. So we must do all that we can to communicate and reach out to those who are without salvation.

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Church Marketing / Design / Tips — No Comments

How To Expand Your Ministry For Free

Fri, Nov 11, 2011

What are you about? Are you about gaining numbers or expanding your influence? Are you about collecting change or changing lives? This way of expanding your ministry won’t cost your a dime to do but will take time and some careful thought. It will help and minister to people, but it may not fill a single chair or gain a single dollar for your church.

What tends to be the online trend for churches is that they have a church website and then a secondary blog site that is usually the lead pastors blog that talks about what is going on in the church. This is a great strategy; to have a main hub site for the general public that are looking for a home church and the attendees to get details on events, and the pastors blog for the attendees and press to get updates and data about what is going on in the church. The only thing that this online presence does not have is a resource for anyone and everyone to be ministered to regardless if they are looking for a church or not.

One wise strategy that not enough churches are utilizing is the use of a blog for the sake of offering biblical counseling to the online community. This can expand your influence for free. Starting and operating a blog costs nothing unless you are wanting it integrated into your current website.

How it works
The way you expand your ministry through the blog is really from search engine traffic, guest blogging, and social bookmarking. People are looking to address their problems alone so they don’t have to feel ashamed of what they are going through or expose what they are doing. So by writing articles on how to biblically handle situations you provide answers to peoples questions without ever meeting them. Today people gain a lot of their information from the internet, so the global church really could benefit from providing more online resources that would be an alternative resource to non-biblical and even down right wrong advice. Doing a short search for “breaking addictions”, not a single biblical resource comes up in the top 10 results on google, even after rephrasing several different ways. This just shows how big of a need there is for more biblical counseling resources online.

Blogs are search engine gold, they are constantly being updated and generate tons keywords that are dynamically created with the search engines in mind. This means that blogs are easy to get higher rankings for a wide range of keywords on search engines. They are also very marketable because you are giving a resource that people value and desire. So you can post them on social bookmarking sites like reddit or stumble upon as well as repost them on guest blog sites to expand your reach quickly and efficiently. Five minutes of social bookmarking can easily generate 300 first time guest visits.

You can start a blog for free using a site like wordpress or blogger. Both are relatively easy to use, I personally use wordpress. A few things that will help with your search engine rankings is changing your permalink structure. You will want the url address and title of the page to be the same as the title of the blog post.

Regards,

_rec

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Church Marketing / SEO — No Comments

SEO and Why Your Church Needs It

Sun, Sep 11, 2011

The big question for many is what is what is SEO to begin with. Most people are not familiar with the term. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In short it is the work needed to make your site reach the top of search engines for certain keywords. Right now I am currently doing this search engine marketing strategy for a client of mine. There is a lot of work that goes into but the evident result is a constant stream of wanted traffic to your website that you are not having to pay out for.

Now there is a lot of information out there about SEO and for the most part it is constantly changing so information varies. Point being you will want to hire out to someone that knows what they are doing for the most part. At least for the first few stages of SEOing.

The first stage is KEYWORDS.
Finding relevant, non-competitive keywords that have a decent amount of searches is a pain, but it can result in drawing the right people to your site and ultimately, to your church. In this case, SEO is an evangelistic tactic in reaching the lost. People do searches for anything and everything. Lets say you have an addiction recovery program and someone does a search for “alcoholism recovery” and yours is the first one that shows up, then they decide to choose your bible based program over a program that is not Christian simply because yours was the first one on google.

The second stage is OPTIMIZATION
Once you have your keywords you need your site to contain those keywords throughout every part of the site. This will also help visitors know that they found what they were searching for when the site content is relevant to their original search. This also will boost your rankings for those keywords you searched for because your site content is relevant to those keywords.

The third stage is LINK BUILDING
Once you arrive at this point the need for an expert decreases, but it will take some research and time to know what to do. Link building is an long process of getting people to create a link to your site. Popularity is relevance to search engines, so the more links you have to your site the higher your page will be ranked. Remember that you want quality links that have high page ranks and/or .edu .gov web addresses. Your site needs to be submitted to search engines, and linked on social networks, blogs, articles, rss feeds and anything else you can link to.

The last thing to do is CHECK YOUR RESULTS
You need to see what keywords are driving traffic to your site after 3-6 months and then adjust your content to what is working.

Remember that SEO is an ongoing thing that is not just a set it and forget it marketing strategy. It will help build a web presence for your church and draw traffic to your site. If the quality of your sites content is good then the more likely you will turn visitors to disciples.

Best wishes,

_rec