Right-size your promotion for church activities and win!
How do you make sure smaller church activities and ministries receive a great promotion? Dive into how you can right-size the same large event strategies and get the results you need.
Large scale promotion for large church events or community outreach means breaking out all the bells and whistles. What about getting people to come out to your women’s bible study or the 5th Sunday breakfast? The good news is, you can scale down the strategies covered in last week’s post and target your message to the right people.
If everything is important, nothing is important
Not everything can receive the same level of promotion. Not only is it a poor use of resources, but your messages become white noise over time, and people tune out.
How do you decide on the scale then? The size of the invited audience plays into whether you’re promoting a church-wide or niche event. You’ll need to discern realistically who your best audience is. For example, a women’s conference held at the church on a Saturday should get the full, church-wide promotion. A bible study for moms can be promoted in a different way, which we’ll detail shortly.
What’s vital to understand is that this does not diminish the importance of other events and activities. It’s about putting the right messages in front of the right people at the right time and talking about it in a way that answers, “why should they care.” With so much going on at any given time, different messages HAVE to have different priority levels. If everything is important, nothing is important.
Similar to your church-wide event, promote the activity using a scaled-down approach. The difference here is you’ll focus on channels that make sense for the audiences you want to attract.
Scaling your internal communications for smaller church activities
A full 2-minute talk focusing on a niche event doesn’t make sense for the whole congregation to hear. Your “announcements time” is still valuable! How do you scale that? Talk about where to get info about upcoming events. Mention one by name. By telling people where to look for event info, you get them in the habit of using the right channels.
You can also appropriately place posters, handouts, etc., in places where the people you want to reach, gather naturally. For example, children’s ministry or mom-oriented event signage and flyers can go in the children’s ministry area.
Provide event details on the ministry or events page
You’ll still want to have event information on your website. People will naturally look for information on your church activities there. Give them what they want!
Placement will vary depending on how your site is set-up. Some natural places to include event information are on an events page, or if those ministries have specific pages on your website. An image or two, event date/time/location, registration information, and contact info for questions works well here.
Leverage email newsletter, texting, or other messaging groups
If you have a larger church, you likely have done some kind of audience grouping or segmentation out of sheer necessity. You may have a list for your children’s ministry, or for those who are active in local missions and service work. If you haven’t done this, I’d recommend developing lists around any of your other larger groups first that regularly get together. Children’s ministry and other groups are great places to start!
Your church app may also have small group or other niche options people can opt into that you can use similarly to texting.
Format any of these messages similar to how you’d send them out for church-wide events. The only difference is the audience size.
Don’t be a SPAMMY! If you have the option to add someone to a list, particularly email or texting, it’s best to have people “opt-in” to this list either online or through other digital means.
It’s tempting to grow your list by adding everyone you get from all the different places. It’s more important to have a quality list of people that want to receive your messages. No likes messages that are irrelevant, or worse, annoying.
Social media ministry pages or groups
Social continues to go towards engagement in smaller communities. Whether you have specific pages or groups for your ministries, these should also be a part of your niche event communications plan. Post similar types of content and watch how you track towards goals as you would for larger events. It really is the same! Just at a smaller scale.
Make the planning work for you!
Communications and marketing are more art than science. Think of all of this as a framework to start from as you strategize your church activities promotion planning. Focus on what you need to accomplish and how your audience prefers to get their information. Keep your eyes and ears open and be where your audience is to keep learning!
Have all the pieces but not sure how to put them together into a solid strategy? We can show you the way, give you a solid framework and elevate your church marketing efforts. Give the team at Firm Foundations Marketing a call. Learn more here.