We talk a lot about SEO and social media on the Church Marketing Online, but one thing I haven’t talked much about (if at all) is press releases.  Often times I think people think of press releases as being something for businesses or politicians or that something has to be amazingly spectacular to be worthy of a lofty press release, but that isn’t the case, especially in the Internet age.

Why Should Churches Send Out Press Releases?
I came across an article by Kenny Jahng which reminded me of the value of press releases and how under used press releases tend to be by churches.  Kenny points out three benefits from churches using press releases:

1. Gets your news out on the web.
2. Alerts your local news outlets about what your church is doing
3. It can insert your church into an active conversation

His central theme is that press releases can put your ministry in front of new audiences.  I would also add to this that press releases are a great way to build inbound links to help your search rankings.  You can put links into your press releases and any articles that are written by the press or bloggers may also have a link to your site.

Press Releases Cost Too Much
Press releases can be expensive.  Depending on who you use, how long your press release is, how wide a distribution you want, and how many links you put in the release, it can indeed get expensive.  But it doesn’t have to be.  There are plenty of free press release options, like:

• PR.com
• free-press-release.com
• i-newswire.com

The free options from these services are bit more limited, but you can get a link and decent distribution for well under $100.

When To Send a Press Release
So, what really is worthy of a press release? Pretty much whatever will interest people.  Do you have an upcoming event that people would be interested in?  Send a press release.  Did your church do some community service?  Send a press release.  Are you going to be preaching about a popular or controversial topic?  Send a press release.  If you think people would be interested, or especially a reporter would write about it, then you can send a press release.

3 Tips For Effective Press Releases

1. Have a compelling title.  Journalists are looking at hundreds, if not thousands, of press releases, you have to get their attention.  Use a compelling or provocative title and, if possible, throw in a popular keyword or two.  When I say keywords, I don’t mean for SEO purposes, but attention purposes.  For example, I’ve noticed that if I include “Facebook” in a title to my posts, I tend to get more readers.
2. Don’t be self promotional.  Write the press release like a non-biased observer reporting about an event.  If you want to get a more self-promotional point across, put it in a quote.  If your press release sounds too self-promotional, most journalists will move on.
3. Send the press release out early.  Most journalists are looking at their press release sources first thing in the morning.  So, try to get your release out by 7am – 8am.  Also, if your writing about an upcoming event, journalists may need a few days to get the story published.  So, it’s best to send the press release out a couple of weeks in advance of the event.

Especially as Christmas approaches, consider sending out some press releases about upcoming events or ways your church is serving the community.  They are a great way to reach more people and get more links.

What do you think?

Does your church use press releases?

If so, what tips do you have about what works best?

A lot of what we focus on here at Church Marketing Online is reaching out to share the Gospel and bring people into your church.  But it is also important to reach out to those who are already in your church.

I’ve seen many a church who did some great work in outreach and were bringing in lots of new people, but the church never seemed to grow.  The reason was that they were doing such a poor job with their existing members that people were leaving as fast as new people were coming.  Not good.

There are many elements to keeping people as members of a church.  Feeding members with spiritual food (though physical food helps too ), helping them to grow, and helping them in times of need are some very important things every church needs to be doing.  But possibly the most important thing a church can do to retain membership is form and maintain a connection with its members.  Social media, including Facebook, can play a important roll in that.

I came across this article by Dave Hakes with InternetToolboxForChurches.com about ways churches can use social media to interact with its people.  It has some great ideas in it.  Some of the ideas I thought are most important are:

1. Use your social media tools for interaction as well as broadcasting news and info.
2. When getting started see if there are places members are already interacting and join them there.  It’s a lot easier to join an existing community than start an entirely new one and entice people to join you.
3. Listen to what people are talking about to learn what concerns and interests people.  This not only helps with interaction, but can provide an unending stream of content ideas.
4. Conduct online discussions.
5. Present ideas and ask people for feedback.
6. Keep people informed with regular updates and discussions about ongoing church projects and ministries.  I would add to this to encourage members involved in these projects and ministries to contribute as well.  So, it’s not always just the church’s leadership posting things.  Members can contribute stories, pictures, video, and even the update posts themselves.
7. Help build relationships by encouraging members to connect with each other.

Here are three additional ideas I’d add to Dave’s list:

1. Help to facilitate members helping each other by posting information (possibly anonymously if preferred) about needs members have.  Also, provide a way for members to post about needs as well.  For example, Suzy and Tim may be having their first baby and could really use a crib.  One of the other members may have a crib they are no longer using that they could give.
2. Ask members what topics they would like to hear about in sermons or discuss in a Bible study.  Pastors, if you are ever having any trouble with sermons this is a great source of ideas.  This also makes sure Pastors and Bible studies are addressing the topics and issues that are closest to the members’ hearts.
3. Spotlight members.  Generally speaking, people like to be noticed and want to feel like the members of the church (especially the Pastor and leaders) know who they are.  That’s why being able to remember someone’s name when they return for a second visit to a church is so impactful on the people.  By spotlighting members you can demonstrate that the church knows who they are and cares.  By including a short bio in the spotlight you can demonstrate that you’ve taken the time to learn about them.  This is also a great way to recognize members for the way they may be serving in the church, something especially important when they are doing those unseen tasks.

You can read the rest of Dave’s list at:

http://www.internettoolboxforchurches.com/church-social-media-use-for-internal-interaction

What do you think?

Do you have additional ideas for ways church’s can use social media to reach out to and connect with their members?  Share those ideas.

I ran across an article by Dean Seddon recently about why people don’t come to church and it got me thinking…not so much about those specific reasons that he mentioned, but rather about the church marketing approach that we churches use.  There are reasons people don’t come to church.  Are we making sure that we are addressing those reasons in our marketing campaigns?  More than that, are we giving people a reason to come to church?

Why Don’t You Go To Church?
There are a lot of reasons people don’t attend church.

• They want to sleep in on Sundays
• They think all church is like a high Catholic Mass and don’t like that style
• They think church goers (or Christians in general) are self righteous
• They think church goers are fake
• They don’t believe in God
• They don’t have a car
• They had a bad experience at a previous church
• They haven’t been asked
• They have to work on Sundays
• They think they are too sinful
• They travel too much to consistently attend and connect with others
• They don’t believe in organized religion

The list could go on and on I’m sure.

Addressing Real-Life Obstacles
Some of the reasons listed above are personal opinions and perceptions, but others are real world problems that have to be solved for the person to become a member of your church.  For example, your church can tell my how exciting the worship is and how “real” your members are until you’re blue in the face, but if i don’t have a car and thus no way to get to your church, I’m not going to come.  That’s a real-life problem that has to be addressed before I can come to your service.

Take some time to come up with possible real-life issues that prevent people from coming to your church and come up with ways to address them.  For the example above, maybe your church has a bus or could create a carpool system.  If a person works on Sundays, maybe your church has a service or functions on other days.  For people who travel a lot, perhaps you church offers streaming services and other online features and functions.  Be sure to mention these options in your marketing campaigns, including your website.

Fighting Preconceptions
Many reasons why people don’t attend church are due to preconceived ideas of what church is.  This may be based on  TV stereotypes, past experiences, or just things they’ve heard.  One possible marketing strategy is to attack these preconceptions in your marketing campaign.  There is a church in my home town that advertises itself as the church for people who hate church.  They’re basically saying, “Look, we aren’t like what your preconceived idea of church is.  So, try us out.”  That church’s approach is pretty broad, but you can address specific preconceptions as well, whether it’s advertising a contemporary service, describing yourself as real or sinners, etc.  Of course the most important part of this is that your church has to fit your description.  Don’t describe yourself as contemporary just because you have a guy playing guitar for the hymns instead of an organ.

Giving People A Reason To Come
The last group reasons people don’t come to church are neither real-world obstacles or preconceived notions, they are simply that the people don’t have a good enough reason to come to church instead of doing something else…like getting out of bed.  For these reasons you must give a reason for people to come to your church, a reason compelling enough to win out against the competition.  What does your church offer?

I think these reasons have to go deep.  ”Our church has an awesome praise band.” isn’t going to cut it.  What do people really want?  Maybe they want to find meaning for their life, to fix their marriage, or get help with an addiction.  Talk to the inner longings people have.

One other thing to consider is how you deliver that message.  If you are trying to reach the unchurched, speak their language.  Not everyone knows what “sins” are.  For some people “grace” is something you say before dinner.  So, think outside the church language box and find the words that will properly communicate with the people you are trying to reach.

The Strongest of the Three
Giving people a compelling reason to come to your church is by far the strongest motivator to get someone to step through the doors of your church.  Not only can a good reason get people to be willing to not do something else, but it can convince them to look past their preconceived ideas and it can get them to find ways around those real-world obstacles.

Photo by Lauren Powell-Smothers

What do you think?

What are some of the more common reasons people don’t come to church?

How has your church addressed real-life obstacles?

What reasons does your church offer to get people to come to church?

The search engines are constantly changing. New sites area being created and shut down every day. More sites are realizing the value of search engine optimization. New strategies for SEO and link building are developed. Even the search engines themselves change as they try to refine their algorithms to produce the most relevant search results.  So, what do you do?

You Need To Keep Up
All this means that your search engine rankings are going to change, keyword popularity will change, and links will come and go. Thus for a website you want to become and stay successful, the SEO work is never really done. Running reports, tracking keywords, and watching how visitors interact with your website is essential for devising an effective strategy for search engine marketing.

More than Just Information
You can then take the information you gather from tracking these metrics and create good strategies to continue to build upon the success of your website.  This isn’t just nice information to have.  The information you get from tracking rankings, links, website traffic, and conversions are warning bells when something starts to go wrong.  They are clues to opportunities where you can grow.  They are the light that prevents you from making decisions about your church’s marketing in the dark.

It is vital to the success of your church’s website, and to that extent the success of your church ministry to setup proper tracking for your website, your church marketing, and your conversions.

What do you think?

Do you think it’s important to track rankings, links, site traffic and conversions?

In our last article in this series we started looking at website analytics and how you can use analytics to track the traffic on your website.  In addition to tracking things like how many visitors you are getting and from where those visitors are coming, most analytics solutions have a feature for tracking your website conversions, an invaluable piece of information.

Online Goals
Every website has a purpose (or at least it should).  In many cases the webmaster wants the visitors to the site to do something.  This may be wanting people to buy a product, download a document, make a donation, submit a contact form, etc.  These are all goals, goals that can usually be tracked by analytics.

By tracking who is completing these goals we can learn a lot.  One thing you may learn is that certain traffic sources or even certain keywords tend to bring visitors that complete the website goals more often than others.  This can tell where to focus your marketing efforts for the most success.  You can also learn where your biggest opportunities are for increasing the number of conversions.

For example, let’s say you want to have people complete a contact form, but you are only getting 1 form submitted a week.  In analytics you may find that you only get a handfull of visitors each week and that’s your problem, but you may also find that you are getting lots of visitors.  In that case you may find that visitors aren’t making it to contact form or you may find that they are getting to the form, but most don’t submit the form.  By tracking the goals you can learn where the issue is that is preventing people from completing those goals and address the issue directly.

Offline Goals
Churches (and many other organizations) always have offline goals as well.  The most obvious being new visitors to the church.  Of course analytics cannot track this.  So, you have to rely on offline tracking methods for these.  Here are some possible offline tracking methods you may want to use:

• Include a “Where did you hear about our church?” question on your visitor card/book.
• Have your greeters ask.
• When people call the church, have the secretary (or whomever) ask the caller.
• When visitors start a new members class or request to join the church, ask them how they found the church.

These are all really variations of the same thing.  You have to ask.  And, of course, after you ask you have to write it down somewhere for later analysis.

For churches, “conversions” should now have two meanings, coming to faith in Christ and completing one of the goals of the church website.  I don’t know if you are tracking faith conversions, but you definitely need to be tracking your website conversions.

In the next article of this series we will offer some final thoughts about tracking and reporting for the marketing of your church.

Photo by Lawrence OP

What do you think?

Do you track where how visitors have found your church?

If so, what method do you use?

Throughout this series we have compared SEO to trying to loose weight (the SEO Diet).  When trying to loose weight, most people have several aspects to their strategy. They do cardio workouts, aerobics, and weight lifting as well as eating certain foods at certain times.

Now imagine you are dieting and exercising and someone tells you they can tell you exactly which foods are helping you loose weight and which are hurting your weight loss efforts. They can also tell you which exercises are most effective and which you are wasting effort on, not just because they know what tends to work, but because they can monitor exactly how your individual body is being affected by each food choice or exercise.

In the same way, when trying to get more traffic and more conversions through your website, you target a variety of different keywords and use various optimization methods. Now imagine someone can tell you exactly which keywords are actually bringing people to your site, and which keywords are producing the most conversions and bringing the most new people in contact with your ministry. Welcome to the world of analytics.

Analytics
Analytics is software that can track traffic to and from your website as well as on your website. With analytics software you can see how many people are coming to your site from inbound links you’ve gotten or from the search engines. The software can tell you which keywords people searched for when they found and visited your website. It can even tell you how long they stayed on your site, what pages they visited, and whether or not they completed certain tasks like completing an information request form. In addition to giving you insights into your website design, this is invaluable information that can serve as the other side of the keyword research coin.

Analytics and Keyword Research

Keyword research tells you the estimated popularity and competitiveness of keywords. Analytics can tell you the real popularity of the keyword and its effectiveness.

• You may find that even when you rank well for certain keywords, people don’t click through to your site for those keywords. The keyword popularity predicts 500 searches a day and, even though you rank number 1, you are only getting 5-10 clicks a day. This may indicate that the people searching for that keyword aren’t actually looking for what you are offering or that the keyword isn’t really as popular as the keyword research indicated. So, it may be a good idea change the SEO / link building from targeting that keyword to targeting another keyword.
• You may also find that a large percentage of visitors searching for a lower popularity keyword not only click through to your site, but end up contacting the church. This could lead you to focus more attention on that keyword to make sure you rank number 1.
• Analytics reports may indicate that links on certain types of sites (maybe other church sites or local city listing sites) produce more traffic than other links. This would indicate that it would be more valuable to focus your link building efforts on getting links on those kinds of sites.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of the information you can get from analytics. There are several analytics options to choose from include software you can purchase, professional analytics management services, and free analytics options. One of the more popular analytics options is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is free and one of the better analytics options out there, a good combination.  All you need to do is create a Google Analytics account and then put their tracking code onto your website.  The software will start recording all the information about the people visiting your website.

One of the things Google Analytics allows you to do is track conversions.  Knowing how well certain keywords, links and web pages convert traffic is invaluble.  We’ll look more at tracking conversions in our next article.

What do you think?

Have you ever used analytics?

What analytics software do you like best?

What metrics in the analytics do you pay attention to most?

There’s an interesting thing happening in Mansfield, OH.  A church put up several billboards, but people thought the billboards were actually put up by an antheist group.  Why?  Because the church got a little too creative with their marketing and lost the message.

Here’s what happened:
McElroy Road Church of Christ in Mansfield, Ohio wanted to create a marketing campaign that would cause people to stop and think.  So, they put up several billboards with thought provoking messages.  The sign causing the most controversy (seen above) has “THERE IS NO GOD.” in huge letters at the top of the billboard.  Obviously, this is what draws people’s attention.  In much smaller letters below that the sign reads, “Don’t believe everything you read.” and then there is the church’s web address and logo.

The Good Part:
There are two big positives to the billboard:

1. The billboard gets people’s attention.
2. They used the church’s web address so people can find more information.

The Not So Good Part:
One of the problems with the message is that it’s not clear what they are trying to say.  You can read the sign as saying:

You shouldn’t believe it if you hear there is no God.  Instead, you should come to our church and hear the truth.  (I suspect this is what the church intended people to think)

But you can also read the sign as saying:

There is no God and you shouldn’t believe what you are hearing at McElroy Road Church of Christ.

If you think about it long enough, the first interpretation makes more sense.  After all, why would an atheist group include the church’s web address rather than their own web address.  But we’re talking about a billboard here.  Most people will have about 3 seconds at most to take in the message and their sharing their focus with driving and whatever else is going on the car (radio, discussion, kids, etc.).  Can you really expect people to evaluate the meaning of an unclear message or even catch all the parts of the billboard during that time?

Was It Effective?
According to the  Mid Ohio Atheists (MOA) organization, they’ve received messages congratulating them on the sign and they thanked the church for advertising their views for them.  The church has also received several angry emails from Christians about the signs, though the Pastor (Frank Moore) said that once the sign was explained, those people were supportive.

That doesn’t sound too good, but then again the church is getting some media attention, including blogs (like ChristianPost where I learned about this and, of course, our blog).  So, I guess it depends on whether you believe that any publicity is good publicity.  I think getting publicity for being controversial can be good if it defines you in a good way.  A church that takes a very public stand against abortion with positive message about life may be controversial, but it defines the church in a way the church wants to be known.  On the other hand, being controversial because people misunderstood the message you were trying to get out is probably not the kind of publicity that is helpful.

Creating Effective Marketing Messages:
When marketing, it’s important that your message is able to be clearly understood.  Here are a few ideas to help ensure your church’s marketing message is effective.

• Test the message with outsiders.  I recommend letting some people not affiliated with you church see your marketing message before you put it out there.  People in your church have a certain bias in the way they think that people outside your church do not have.  So, it’s important to know how the people you are marketing to will receive the message.   This is also true of internal church marketing.  Let members of the church (not just staff) review those internal marketing messages.
• Keep your marketing channel in mind.  A message that will work in Facebook, may not work on a flyer or a billboard.  Tailor your message for the marketing channel.
• Keep the attention getting aspect of your marketing in line with your message…or at least don’t let it be in conflict.  It’s important to get people’s attention, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of hurting your message.

In the end, I think McElroy Road Church of Christ’s intentions were good, but their execution wasn’t so great.  They let their creativity muddle their message.  Getting attention is good.  Enticing people to respond to your message is great.  Confusing people with your message is not good.

What do you think?

Despite the confusion, do you think the billboard ad will work?

Do you have any examples of effective or ineffective church marketing messages?

I usually post more humorous church videos simply because I like funny videos, but church videos don’t have to be funny to be good.  Certainly serious or touching videos can be great for church members and church marketing alike.

This week we have a touching video that is getting a lot of attention lately.  It’s a special Father’s day surprise.  It’s a great video, though I wish the poster would have mentioned what church this was at.  It’s another great example of how a viral video doesn’t have to be a professional video.

Unfortunately, it seems Godvine doesn’t give the option to embed their videos.  So, I can only provide a link.  Check it out.  I think you’ll enjoy it.

http://www.godvine.com/Mom-and-Dad-Get-an-Amazing-Surprise-in-Church-615.html

Link building is the exercise of SEO.  With a good link building campaign you can improve the rankings of your website and bring new, more competitive keywords into reach.  Links strengthen your website.  So, it’s important to know how many inbound links you have pointing to your website and what pages / keywords may need some more targeting.

There are two things that you track regarding inbound links.

1. The overall number of inbound links to your site and to specific pages.
2. The specific links you are getting from your various link building strategies.

Total Links
It’s important to know how many links you have pointing to your website and even to specific pages to gauge your the strength of your site and pages as well as see the overall effectiveness of your link building campaigns.  There are currently three good places to find information about your total inbound links:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Site Explorer (this will be moved to Bing Webmaster Tools in some form in the next few months)
• Majestic SEO

Google Webmaster Tools is, unfortunately, suspect in their figures.  Google has never been one to give out their information, so it’s no surprise that their linking data isn’t the most accurate.  Yahoo Site Explorer is good, but we’ll see how it works once it’s Bing Webmaster Tools.  Then there’s Majestic SEO.  On the plus side, Majestic SEO exists specifically to give you as much link data as they can.  On the down side they have their own web crawlers and their own database, so the links they find are not necessarily the same links Google or Bing will find, but it should be pretty close.

Specific Links:
In addition to getting an overall picture of your link building, you will most likely want to track the specific links of your link building campaigns.  There are several ways to do this depending on the link building strategy you are using.

Some Examples:

• If your link building strategy involves getting links on specific pages (possibly because you are contacting webmasters for links or you are doing directory registration), then you can use software like Internet Business Promoter.  IBP has a feature which allows you to enter URLs and it will help you keep track of whether they are linking to your site or not.  Their software is also helpful in finding possibly linking sources.
• If you are doing article marketing and want to find websites that are adding your articles to their sites, then you can setup a Google Alert for the specific title of your article or some other unique part of the article.  Google will alert you whenever it finds a page with that unique text (i.e. your article).
• If you are blogging, turn on ping back notifications.  This will let you know when someone links back to your blog post.

These are just some of the ways that you can track the links for the specific link building strategies you are using to see how each is performing individually.  There isn’t enough time to mention all the different tracking methods for all the different link building strategies, but the point here is that it’s a good idea to track the links.  This will tell you which strategies are working and which aren’t.  With some, like article marketing, this can even tell you if certain tactics (like specific kinds of articles) are more effective within a strategy thus helping you to optimize that strategy.

Photos by Erik J. Gustafson and Gatis Gribusts

In our next article we’ll look at tracking the traffic to your website through website analytics.

What do you think?

What is your favorite site/tool for tracking inbound links to your website?