A recent study reports 61% of the companies surveyed indicated they “have experimented with social media but have not done much.”  61% also indicated they are having difficulty measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media.

Most churches, schools, and ministries are in the same boat.  Most are experimenting and having difficulty measuring the ROI.  This applies not just to social media but also to other online marketing efforts like search engine optimization, Google AdWords, and Facebook ads.

Organizations that aren’t measuring ROI effectively, are shooting in the dark.  They don’t have the information necessary to make informed decisions about which online initiatives to continue to experiment with, which to put more effort and resources into, and which to pull the plug on.

So, how does a church, school, ministry, or business measure ROI?

Ask

The challenge for most organizations is that while the social media, SEO, and ads are online, the desired results take place offline.

Sure you can track fans, followers, pageviews, and clicks.  But what ultimate matters is how many people visited your church because they heard about it on Facebook?  How many people called to tour your school because they saw it in a Google search?  How many people ate at your restaurant because they saw it on Twitter?

The only way to know is to ask.

A few weeks ago I wrote How Facebook Ads Filled My Church.  I was surprised by the ROI of the Facebook ads.   And we would never have known how effective the Facebook ads were if our communications director hadn’t made a point of asking people how they heard about the Christmas production.

Here are some ways organizations can ask how people heard about them.

• If people can request more info or make reservations online, the form to do that should ask how they found your organization.
• If your church has visitors fill out cards to get more info about the church, that card should ask how the person heard about your church.
• If people call your church, school, business asking for info, the people who answer the phones should be trained to ask every caller how they heard about your organization.
• If people stop by in person to ask for more info or to shop, the people who help them should be trained to ask how they heard about your organization.

Regardless of how or where you’re asking, there needs to be a place to log people’s responses.  Then periodically those logs need to be reviewed and statistics compiled.

Do you know the ROI your getting from your online initiatives?  Or do ye have not because ye ask not?  What are some other ways organizations can ask?  What challenges have you found in asking and getting good data?

[Image by squonk]

Why?

It appears that you, the Christian Web Trends community, simply aren’t interested.

In January and February we did 7 reviews.  Those posts averaged 2.5 comments excluding my own.  Those posts also averaged just 1 retweet excluding my own.  Additionally, as time went on we’ve got fewer and fewer requests for reviews, and many of those who requested reviews did not comment on the blog which was one of the requirements.

Add to that the fact that the reviews are very time consuming, and it just didn’t make any sense to continue doing them.

The positive is that those organizations whose sites were reviewed for the most part found them to be very helpful.  In fact I just saw a comment from Justin at The Grove Church in Hattiesburg, MS (review) that he completely redesigned their site, making a lot of the recommended improvements.

1. “Marketing”
2. “Search marketing”
3. “Church growth”

Your answers may have been something like:

1. (Marketing): “businesses” “ads” or “commercials”
2. (Search marketing): “Google”, “Adwords”, or “online company”
3. (Church growth): “evangelism”, “outreach”, or “flyers”

But what if I said they are all connected?

Let’s look at the case of Knott Avenue Christian Church where marketing, search marketing, and church growth are all connected.

Knott Avenue Christian Church
Knott Avenue Christian Church is a non-denominational, multi-ethnic Christian church located in Anaheim, California.  They are a vibrant and active church with a wide variety of ministries to help meet the spiritual needs of everyone they can and spread the Gospel in their community and the world.

In the past year Knott Avenue Christian Church (KACC) has been increasing their online presence through a variety ways.  They have started using Twitter and Facebook.  They are podcasting sermons and messages.  They even have an iPhone app allowing people to watch their sermons from anywhere on their iPhones.  In addition to these social media, KACC has been focusing on the local search engines.

Local Search for a Local Church
Most people these days go online to find information.  If they are looking for a church or looking a resource a church can offer (marriage help, addiction groups, answers to life’s questions), they will most likely go online to find what they are looking for.  So, it was important for KACC to start showing up so people could find them when they looked online.

Over the past several months KACC has been working to achieve high rankings in the search engines for searches in their local area through the Top Church Search Rankings service.  So far they have obtained over 500 top ten rankings with well over 100 #1 rankings.  These are rankings for search terms related to churches in their area, such as churches in Anaheim, CA.  In addition to the search engines, the service also setup listings in local review sites, (like CitySearch.com) and Internet yellow pages, and church directories.

Results
The results for KACC’s website have been fantastic.  KACC.com has been averaging about 1250 visitors a month from the search engines alone.  Over 50% of the visitors to the website are new visitors.  I asked Jack Scalfani from KACC about the results and he said,

“I know that the website has been surviving with lots of help from your SEO. Obviously it has, because we have been consistently getting 100 visitors a day and mostly new visitors.”

But, in the end, the church website is just a tool of the church.  The real results are in the church itself and how it has helped them fulfill their ministry.  In addition to talking about the website, Jack went on to say,

“Our rankings that OurChurch.Com helped us get are bringing in new donations, new members, and new viewers on our live broadcast on our website.”

KACC has maintained having about 100 visitors to their church each week.  These visitors include people who hear the Word of God and become followers of Christ, families who find a church home, and Christians who are strengthened and go out to minister to their community.  They are a growing church in part because they are growing in the search engines.

Are you and your church engaging people online?  What online church marketing strategy are you using?  What results have you seen?

That was the motivation behind the creation of the ChurchMarketingOnline.com website and Church Marketing Online University.

Church Marketing Online University includes more than a dozen articles that explain search engines, search engine marketing, and the specific applications of search engine marketing for churches, all in great detail.  Check out these articles:

• About CMO University
• How people find a church
• Is Marketing Evil?
• How Do Search Engines Work?
• Search Marketing Parable
• What is SEO?
• SEO – Keyword Research
• SEO – On-Page Optimization
• SEO – Link Building
• SEO – Tracking and Reporting
• What is Local SEO?
• Pay-Per-Click Search Marketing
• Search Marketing Glossary

If you’ve read some of the Church Marketing Online University articles, what was your biggest take-away?  What questions do you have about search marketing for churches not covered in these articles?

So, here are 9 questions about search engine marketing every organization should be able to answer. Can you?

1) How important are search engine rankings are for your organization, really?

Almost everyone says search rankings are important, but few do much to improve them. If you’re not willing to invest time and/or money to improve your search rankings, then be honest with yourself that search marketing isn’t a priority.  If search marketing really is important, then make sure that’s reflected in the time and money you budget for it.

2) Which keywords/phrases is your organization targeting?

Before a web page can be optimized, you have to know for which keywords its being optimized.  Each web page can really only be optimized for 2-3 good keywords. Try to optimize for more than that and rankings will drop for the 2-3 best keywords.

3) How did you determine which keywords to target?

Selecting the right keywords makes all the difference in the world.  Pick the wrong keywords and you could end up targeting phrases that don’t produce any traffic or your site can’t possibly rank well for.  Selecting the best keywords takes research – research into how many searches a keyword gets and research into how strong your site is compared with the sites that are already in the top 10 for that keyword.

3) Does someone on your staff understand SEO well enough to do it well?

Search engine optimization is not rocket science, but it also isn’t something you pick up in an afternoon reading articles.  Don’t just assume it’s something your web design guy (or girl) knows how to do.  If no one on staff really understands SEO well, you may be better off outsourcing that work to someone who does.

4) Is your website search engine friendly?

If you use a web builder or content management system, does it allow you to set different title, keywords, and description tags for each page?  Does it allow you to include keywords in the filename or URL of each page or does it have a bunch of variables in the URL?  Was your site built with Flash?

5) When was the last time your website was optimized?  Ever?

Many people just assume their web developer optimized their site when it was built.  That’s usually a bad assumption?  If a website has been optimized, often other people who are unfamiliar with SEO or the targeted keywords update the content of the site and unknowingly destroy the optimization that was originally done.

6) How well is your organization doing in search engines?

Are you regularly checking your website’s search rankings for the keywords being targeted?

7) How many visitors are you getting from search engines and which keywords are producing the most traffic?

Good rankings are important, but their not worth much if they’re not resulting in real people visiting your website.

8 ) How many conversions (sales, leads, visitors to your church) are you getting from search engines?

Visitors are important, but they’re not worth much either if they’re not producing the real results you’re looking for.  Are you even tracking where your sales, leads, church visitors are coming from?

9) Do you have the search marketing tools you need?

Do you have tools to do keyword research, generate regular search ranking reports, and track visitors and conversions?  You don’t want to go into the search marketing battle unarmed.  Google Analytics (if you know how to use it) can track visitors and online conversions.  Other software for keyword research and ranking reports can be pricey.

Which of these questions can you answer? Which do you have some more work to do before you can answer?

In Content Alone Doesn’t Cut It for Traffic, SEO, he makes the case that great content is important, but “distribution is just as important.”

In other words:

Content x Distribution = Success

Great content with poor distribution will result in a great site that has few visitors. Poor content with great distribution will result in a flood of one-time visitors who never return.  You need good content and good distribution.  And search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of good distribution.

John goes on to say, “Perhaps you need to sit down and plan it out. Ever think about that?”

Have you done that? Are you giving equal importance to content and distribution? Do you have a search marketing plan?  Or are you just hoping that Google will find your great content, put it at the top of the search results for frequently searched phrases, and people will show up at your site?

About CLU
Christian Leadership University (cluonline.com) is a an online Christian university that offers Associate, Bachelor, Master, and Doctoral degrees in several fields, including theology, Biblical studies, Christian counseling, Christian leadership, youth ministry, and many more.  CLU believes that faculty should be experienced leaders in the Christian community and include Christian leaders such as Nate Krupp, Mark Virkler, and Ron Luce.  Their educational philosophy (Lamad method of learning) sets them apart as each student’s curriculum is fashioned for them focusing on life experience, gifts and abilities, and resting on the Bible and Holy Spirit.

About the Service
About 1 ½ years ago, Christian Leadership University signed up for OurChurch.Com’s Progressive SEO Management service.  As part of the service, the cluonline.com homepage was optimized for the search engines, CLU was registered in over 2000 search directories over the course of the first year, and OurChurch.Com employed several link building strategies to gain inbound links to the cluonline.com website.  One of the main strategies for link building was creating remarkable content and spreading the word about that content.

With the optimization of the CLU website, CLU began seeing an immediate bump in traffic to their website.  Then the link building strategies began to increase the authority of cluonline.com in the eyes of the search engines as we obtained thousands of new links to the CLU website.  As a result, cluonline.com has moved from a Google Page Rank of 4 (out of ten) up to a Page Rank of 5 (out of ten), a significant increase.  The Page Rank scale works a bit like the Richter Scale for earthquakes.  Each level up indicates much more authority in Google where a Page Rank 5 website may have 10 times the authority as a Page Rank 4.

More authority in the search engines means a website is capable of ranking for more competitive keywords.  So, we were able to continue to update the search engine optimization of the CLU website to focus on more and more competitive keywords.  Currently, cluonline.com has top ten rankings for such general and competitive keywords in their field as “Bible colleges”, “Christian colleges”, “Seminaries”, “Christian Theology” and many more.

Real World Results
Top ten rankings and increased links are nice, but how do they translate into real world results?  For CLU they meant an increase of over 1000 people contacting them from their website during the first year.  Most importantly, they experienced over 10% growth in enrollment…all during a recession.  This has increased their financial base, but more importantly for them, it has increased their ability to minister to people and train up new leaders in the Christian community.

Things to Take Home

• Optimizing your website for the search engines can provide traffic to your website fairly quickly.
• Employing link building strategies can build up your website’s authority in the search engines increasing your search rankings.
• One of the best ways to gain quality, inbound links to your website is by creating remarkable content.
• As your website grows in the search engines, you should modify your search engine optimization to target more and more competitive keywords.
• A good search marketing plan creates beneficial, real world results and pays for itself.

What are you doing to market your website in the search engines?  What comments and questions do you have about CLU’s search marketing campaign?

It’s always good when talking about a topic to have a good idea of where your audience is on that topic.  So, I’d like to open the month and the conversation by listening.

I remember when OCC first started providing search marketing services about 6 years ago, it was an uphill battle just to convince people that their search rankings mattered.

Now just about everyone says search rankings are important, but there also seems to be a disparity between how important organizations say search rankings are (very) and how much time and money they’re willing to budget towards improving them (little to none).

I also hear a lot of confusion about how to know if a site is doing well in search engines, what keywords to target, and how to improve a site’s search rankings.

So, where does your organization stand when it comes to search engines?

• How important are search rankings to your organization compared with other marketing efforts?
• What have you done or are you doing to improve them?
• How well is your site doing in search rankings and how do you know?
• What specific questions/issues regarding search engines do you have?

While you’re thinking about what you’re going to write in your comment, why not take 2 seconds to vote in this week’s poll over in the right sidebar.

In the two weeks since, we have been hard at work implementing those recommendations.  Mike Cotton, one of our web designers, did a design consultation over the phone with the church’s web administrator Barb Stuck.  Then Mike went to work creating a custom template with a custom Flash header.  Barb wrote content for the site.  And reorganized the menu and redesigned most of the pages.  We wrapped up the work today, so now it’s time to…

Move That Bus!!!

Appearance & Layout

This is what the site used to look like.

I recommended a custom template be created with a custom header that includes the church’s logo.  This is what we created for them.

The new template is much more attractive.  The new header includes the churche’s logo and utilizes Flash to animate some of the church’s values and rotate through a set of images.

Navigation & Usability

Before, there were too many (15) links in the main navigation menu.

In the review I wrote, “There are too many items in the main menu.  Pages should be organized into a handful of sub-menus. It would also be helpful if there was an ‘About” or “New to FBC’ section of the site specifically designed for visitors.

Here’s the new navigation menu.

The new navigation menu has 6 items in the main menu.  It utilizes drop-down sub-menus. It’s much easier for a person to find their way around. It also has a new “New to FBC?” link for visitors.

Mission & Goals

The church’s mission comes through right away in the pastor’s welcome message on the homepage.  In addition to that, the church’s mission statement is easy to find in the About Us sub-menu.

Content

Before the content of the site was poor.  The homepage had nothing but a picture of the church on it.  Many of the pages had nothing on them at all.  Those that did had no images and were not formatted well.  Here’s an example.

These were my recommendations…

Let’s start with the homepage.

• There ought to be some kind of a welcome message from the pastor or at least the church’s mission statement.
• I would also suggest replacing the picture with a larger picture with people prominent.

Other general notes about the content

• Complete or get rid of pages that are currently blank.
• Include at least one picture on each page, either a real picture of people in the church or a stock photo.
• The “Website under construction” on the homepage needs to go.  Either use the news module to show upcoming activities or remove it.
• Remove the Bible search from below the navigation menu.
• Google makes it easy to embed a map into the map page.

Here’s a look at the new homepage.

It’s not mind-blowingly awesome. There are a some cool things we could have done, like create custom graphics for the services, sermon series, and upcoming events, but we decided to keep it simple. The site was built with OurChurch.Com’s NE1 Web Builder, and there’s nothing we did with the content than any novice user couldn’t do with the web builder.

Now there’s a nice message from the pastor as well as his picture.  Service times and on the homepage as well as a description of the current sermon series.  Some of the clutter was removed too.

Additionally…

• Barb provided content for many pages on the site, which we inserted for her.
• We added images to every page of the site.
• We removed the remaining pages that had no content.
• We added a calendar.
• We embedded a Google Map into the Contact Us page.

Finding the Website

The title, keywords, and description meta tags were optimized Church, Libby, and Montana.  Keywords were added to the alt and title tags of some of the images.  These changes were made today, so there hasn’t been time for them to influence Faith Bible Church’s search rankings, but they should have a positive impact soon.

Interactivity & Social Networking

Two weeks ago when we did the initial review, FBC had no interactivity on their site and no social media presence.  Since then, however, they created a Facebook Group, which already has 38 members.  And unless you’re blind, you probably noticed the big, honkin’ Facebook icon added to the site just below the navigation menu.

A Facebook Page would have been a much better option than a group, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

Conclusion

We implement all 5 of the top 5 recommendations from the original review. The additional recommendation of a “New to FBC” page was also added as well as a Facebook group.

What do you think of the change and the new site now?

The 4-page “digital plan” starts with a general vision and philosophy for digital media and follows with a 2-page list of every conceivable feature anyone could ever want on a website, including:

• digital brochures for products
• online store for physical and downloadable products.
• hundreds of PowerPoint presentations
• video and audio presentations
• membership, log-in, member directory, member profiles
• discussion forums
• mechanisms for receiving daily reminders via popular push mechanisms
• individual pages on team members, including photos, bios, responsibilities
• links to team members’ blogs, newsletters, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
• online donations

And that’s only a fraction of the items listed.

The “plan” follows with a list of social media tools they want used in the campaign as well, including a Facebook page, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, e-books, smart phone aps, email subscriptions, podcasts, YouTube, and more.

The document is a good start, but it’s not a plan.  To use a football analogy, what they have is a…

Playbook

Every team in the NFL has a playbook.  For the most part they are very similar.  They have the same formations, the same runs, and the same passing routes.  Most of them have hundreds of plays in them even though in a typical game each team will only run 60-70 total plays.

But when teams run out onto the field on a Sunday afternoon, the playbook is nowhere to be seen.  Instead, they come to play with a…

Game Plan

In preparation for a game, the coaching staff reviews film of their opponent and selects plays from the playbook they think will work best in the upcoming game.  They look for favorable match-ups where they can focus their attention.  Some teams script the first series of plays they plan to run.  They may even draw up a few new plays that aren’t even in the playbook.  The end result is a game plan that is unique to that game.

Game planning is one of the most important things that separates winners from losers in the NFL.

Social Media Game Plan

The same is true when it comes to social media.  Everyone has the same social media playbook.  It includes websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, email, and so forth.  What separates great social media campaigns from good ones (and bad ones) is not the playbook but the game plan.

• Where is the favorable mach-up – the groups and demographics to focus on?
• Which social media tools go into this game plan and which get left out?
• How can these specific tools best work together in this campaign?
• Is there a sequence of scripted social media plays leading up to and beyond the launch?
• Are there some creative social media plays that aren’t even in the playbook?

Our Proposal

We submitted a proposal to create a social media game plan for the product launch.

A couple of days later we spoke with the marketing manager.  He was disappointed with our proposal.  It was partially our fault for not clarifying what the expectations were, but he essentially wanted us to develop the social media marketing campaign for his product for free and give it to him as a proposal   If he liked the our plan he would hire us to execute it.

We considered that option, but while discussing it realized that the success of the campaign would be determined equally by the quality of the plan and by its execution.  By expecting us to give him the plan for free, the marketing manager was demonstrating he did not place any value on having a great plan nor on the time, effort, creativity and expertise to develop it.

We tried to help him see the value of the plan by comparing the campaign to a construction project and the development of the plan to the development of blueprints.  In a construction project, the client doesn’t expect the construction company to create the blueprints for free and then decide whether to hire the construction company.  They hire an architect.

In the end, we just couldn’t see eye to eye.  The marketing manager indicated he was just going to have their web guy do the social media campaign, apparently without a real game plan (as I see it).

It’s disappointing not only because it would have been a really neat project, but also because the product itself is remarkable and word of it is probably not going to get out like it could.  Thousands of people who could benefit from it will probably never hear about it, and seems unlikely that a passionate social networking community will form around it.

Thoughts?

So, what do you think?  Does the playbook/game plan analogy ring true to you?  Do you think a social media marketing plan is comparable to architectural blueprints and thus should be paid for rather than given away in a proposal?

And how about you?  Does your social media plan look more like a playbook or a game plan?

[image by mrvilay]