Lead Time
Lead Time
Feel Like Your Church is Invisible? Church Marketing Conversation from an LCMS perspective
Discover actionable church marketing strategies to boost attendance and connect with your community. This episode emphasizes the importance of authentic outreach in today's changing landscape.
• Discusses the significance of church marketing for growth
• Shares three key outreach strategies: announcements, invitations, and hospitality
• Details the role of your church website as a welcome hub
• Explores the importance of analytics in measuring engagement
• Advises on setting marketing goals and budgets for effective outreach
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This is Lead Time.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Lead Time, tim Allman here with Jack Kauberg. This is episode two of four episodes. Part two talking around marketing branding. Bringing more people to church.
Speaker 3:I think that's a good thing to talk about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like the church is advancing, the cause of Jesus, the kingdom of God is advancing out and we as God's people, through word and sacrament, are called to be about the sending, the sending nature of God, and we are sent as we gather. We are then scattered. So I think, yeah, bringing people to church to be baptized, to hear the word of God, to be reminded their sins are forgiven through the Lord's Supper, very, very necessary. So before we get into the conversation for today, I've been blessed.
Speaker 2:Coming off of Best Practices Conference, I got to play in the alumni basketball game in St Louis. Went there with my brother-in-law, tim Lawson, and the old guys pulled out a squeaker. It was pretty fun. And yeah, shout out Dr Veltz, jack, I know that name maybe doesn't ring a bell to you, but maybe it does. He's one of our kind of foremost exegetes. I'm looking on my Greek where he's got a new book coming out. He's been a guest on my podcast.
Speaker 2:So Veltz was my coach when I was at seminary for two of the four years, two of the three years when we were there, and he got to coach our alumni team. It was super fun and got to hit a shot toward the end to help seal the deal. It was super fun. Anyway, the reason I'm bringing that up is I get to talk to so many students at the seminary and maybe new grads who are in the trenches right now these new grads and they're just trying to figure it out and got to hear I talked to a couple guys that were like well, thanks for what you're doing, you're setting up good conversations and I love this. I don't agree with everything you say and I don't know if I said this in the moment, but I'm like that's good, because I don't agree with everything, like we're testing out different ideas here, right, I mean we're working it out through the word.
Speaker 2:So you got to figure out what works in your context. There are some established best practices which we try to bring out on our show, but we really just want to partner with you and celebrate all that God is doing across the spectrum in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and it is quite a spectrum, from rural to suburban to urban to small town. And I think the biggest thing, we're developing a community conversation that lets everybody know your voice is valuable. We need to understand what it looks like in your context to reach people with the gospel and we don't need to compromise good Lutheran theology to do so at all.
Speaker 2:This is first article reality stuff. Well, you've probably long since stopped listening to lead time if you don't believe that God wants to work through first article means, which means God is a creator, we are his creation and his cause is advancing. And there are different like doing ministry today with the technology that we have today, the marketplace that we have today, the marketplace that we have today remarkably different than the fifties and sixties through the growth seasons of the Lutheran church Missouri synod. So we're simply trying to be responsible, understanding the times.
Speaker 3:Let's take it back in time. Let's take it back in time, tim. Uh. Martin Luther knew that he needed to use technology to get the word out. He used the printing press, and he was a master of it. Right, exactly so Lutherans can adapt.
Speaker 1:If Luther can do it so can we today.
Speaker 2:So, all right, let's get in, let's get into it. You want, you want people to come to church. Duh, yes, there are three kind of established ways that bring people into church. Let's start there, jack.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the three ways are announcements, and so if you're going to bring more people in, you need to do announcements. And just a quick FYI announcements means marketing. I'm making an announcement to the community about something they can be a part of, whether it's come to church on Sunday or come to our big event. That's an announcement, and usually what we think about is marketing is making announcements to the community.
Speaker 2:So that's social media, that's any. That's going to be a newspaper ad. It could be anything that's external that people could just run, run across.
Speaker 3:Yeah, good, okay, and then the next is invitations. So this is one person inviting another person to come check this place out, or come check to check out this event hey, I think you'd love our Harvest Fest. Or hey, we've got a very interesting sermon topic. That's a series that we're going to and maybe really relevant to you, so why don't you come check it out? So people inviting their friends.
Speaker 3:And then the third is what we call hospitality systems. That also result in good data capture, right? So having really good hospitality that gets a hold of people's information so that you can follow up with them. So those are what I'd say kind of your three most important things. Now, all of those are predicated on an idea first of all, that you have a goal set on how many new people that you're trying to bring in for the year, and then also that you have a really good brand for your church. So that's where we would say, right now, this is part two of the series of bringing more people to church. Right, if you haven't watched part one, I'd say pause this episode, go watch that first, so that this episode will make a lot more sense, because we're building on what we talked about in the first episode about branding. Does that make?
Speaker 2:sense? Yeah, absolutely, it's so necessary. So let's talk about the website being the front door for all of our new guests, and there is a lot of work that can be done. We did a masterclass episode with, was it? Jeremy? We've talked to so many people recently. Jeremy up in the Midwest why am I drawing a blank? Tim Seleska, jeremy Seleska there we go. Seleska's got his thing going, and he talked a lot on that episode about website. Anything more to say, though, about the website?
Speaker 3:Yeah, what I thought was a really great takeaway from that episode is how do we think about the website? Well, first and foremost, let's think of the website as your digital welcome booth, right? So if you thought about hey, people are just coming into the, into the Narthex or the courtyard or the lobby of your church, whatever, and you want to welcome people with a welcome booth that has all of the answers that people would have about your church, that's really what you're trying to do with your website. You're trying to engage the same people that have the same questions, and you want to design the website to be, first and foremost, to function that way, right? So let's stay right there for a minute, tim. What are the types of questions people would bring to a welcome booth? New people coming in? They're going to the welcome booth because they got questions. What are the questions that they're asking? What do you believe? What do you believe and what does this church believe, right, yeah?
Speaker 2:Hey, I'm just curious Exactly what are some of the ways, ministries, ways I could get involved potentially? How can I get connected? Are my kids probably a better one? Yeah, Are my kids going to enjoy it here? What's a kid been like?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, well, you guys have Sunday school, and where do I drop my kids off and what can they expect? What kind of experience are they going to have, right? These are all very reasonable questions. People are going to have Other questions. Do you guys have any fun events coming up, right? What would it look like? You know, hey, let's just say I really like this place. What would it look like to become a member here? I mean, these are just basic questions that people would have. That's really what your website needs to be doing. It's kind of that digital again, the digital welcome booth. That's welcoming people and giving people the answers that they need to. What it's not, what it's not and what we need to avoid the temptation for it to be. Is the community bulletin board, right? So the risk-? The church community bulletin board.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the church's internal community. You know there's a need for that. There is a purpose for that. These types of things are very important. What I recommend people would do is that that's more of something you would do, either as a combination with social media hey, join our Facebook page and people can talk about all the fun things that they're doing or an internal website would be your app. Setting up an app that's just for members and it's more of a member experience with insider stuff to help engage with them.
Speaker 3:But externally facing, try to keep your website clean and really focused on people that are brand new to the community, that are just trying to figure out more about your community. What is my worship experience going to look like? And people are just looking and you want to accurately represent your community. You want to be authentic with it. You don't want to use, you know, fake images from the not fake images, but like pre-shot stock images and say that that that's what your church experience is going to look like. Actually, have photos of your real campus with real people doing real stuff, so you present a real, authentic experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah that's good. Hey, two things here. I misspoke. I knew I was wrong about Seleska. It's James Seleska.
Speaker 3:James Seleska.
Speaker 2:Not Jeremy, I don't know what's wrong with me. Anyway, we record these, we stack our Mondays and Jack and I are just coming off of a meeting lots of meeting Mondays, so I'm starting to use a different part of my brain. Well, let's get into the analytics, jack. I mean, there are reliable new user to first-time guest data that's out there. This is kind of new. We're trying to drive first-time users and this is actually converting toward first-time guests on our campus. Talk about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So this might be fun for some folks. What I've discovered and I'm going to put a caveat in this I assumed that the numbers were going to be something like this. Based on previous jobs I've had before getting into ministry, I assumed that the ratio of new users to the website was going to be about 100 to 1, meaning 100 new people come to our website results in one person coming to check us out as a guest. And, lo and behold, that is exactly what it is, and it stays that way during seasons of you know, like your high seasons, like Easter and Christmas, and then when you have dips, it's the same thing dip in website, dip in guests and it's usually very consistent, around 100 to 1.
Speaker 2:So you could see at Christmas, for instance, Christmas Eve, that we saw a huge spike in first-time users and we obviously, like most churches, well over doubled our normal Sunday attendance on Christmas Eve and so we doubled new users to the website. Basically, compared to a normal month, Tripled it, actually Tripled it.
Speaker 3:But especially what was noticeable was the number of new users that come. So that was you know, you have kind of a baseline number of people that are coming and every church website is going to have people that you know, existing, pre-existing users that are coming back for whatever reason. You've got events on there so your members are like, hey, what time is that event? So they go to your website to look that up. So there's a lot of natural traffic of people that are just members of the church looking at the website. But we really want to look at is the new users right? Because it's the new users who become the first time guests. It's not the returning user that comes back all the time looking at your calendar. That's not your first time guest. So the goal was to find the actual measurement that makes sense for this type of activity.
Speaker 2:So you can get that data. Go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, this is kind of getting into the weeds. You get into website analytics to see do you have? You don't know exactly who they are. And now I'm asking honest questions. We don't know who they are Unless they tell you on a form, unless they tell you Right, yeah, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, you can learn things about their demographics and stuff. So this is all, and I just want to clarify things here. Nobody's going to watch this episode and become an expert at marketing. My goal in this lead time episode is you're a senior leader and you're trying to think of this issue as a senior leader. How would I engage with a vendor? How might I engage with a marketing team if I had one? How am I thinking from the senior leader level? So, as the senior leader, you need data to hold people accountable. What is the data that you're going to hold a marketing team or communications team accountable to?
Speaker 3:In this case, I'm highly recommending that you would use this metric called new users, and you can get that data through Google Analytics. You don't have to be an expert on Google Analytics. You can kind of watch videos on how to set that up or work with somebody who knows how to do that, but that's where you would get the data from. You would have either. There's a little code set up on your website. It sends its data to Google Analytics and Google Analytics creates all the reports and it's all there prepackaged for you.
Speaker 2:Like even a pastor, could maybe figure this out.
Speaker 3:You just have to be able to log into it and see it.
Speaker 2:Maybe I'm glad you guys do it, but I trust the data. So let's talk about an annual goal. How would a team start to look at an annual goal for new website visitors turning into new visitors on our campuses?
Speaker 3:So if you watched our first episode or listened to our first episode, we talked about setting goal for new guests to begin with. So we call it the one-to-one ratio. We call it the one-to-one ratio For every one person that you have in average weekly attendance. That's the same number of people that you're trying to attract in a year to become a first-time guest. So 500 in average weekly attendance means that that church should be setting a goal of 500 guests first-time guests for a year in order to sustain growth in a way that's higher than the amount of natural attrition that the church has. So that would keep you on a steady, healthy growth trajectory.
Speaker 2:What is that rough? I'm sorry to press into it, but what is a healthy growth trajectory? Do you think to replace people moving and dying? 10%.
Speaker 3:So the natural attrition of a church that's not losing people to other churches. Let's just say people are content with your church, you're still going to be losing about roughly 5% per year due to death and people moving right. So if you don't add any new guests, you're just going to slowly die as a church just because people die right. So now you have to bring people in. How many people do you need to bring in? Well, if you bring in that one-to-one ratio let's say you bring in 500, on average you'll retain about 15% of that right. 15% of those new guests will become new members of the church. So let's just say you lose 5%, you gain 15, you're netting 10. So that would put you on a 10% annual growth rate and you could sustain that year after year if you're being very intentional about it.
Speaker 2:Love. It All right, let's get more into the weeds here. How?
Speaker 3:do you?
Speaker 2:actually get new yeah. Before summarizing, before we go yeah, real quick. So how does that?
Speaker 3:translate to new users on the website. So you take that number, you multiply it times 100. So in this church that needs 500 guests. That means they need 50,000 new users coming to their website in a year to reverse engineer into that number of 500 guests.
Speaker 2:So we need 80. And the cool thing is, you can actually do that there's things that you can do to actually make that happen. Well, that's what we're going to talk about. So we need like 80,000 first timers to continue on a healthy growth trajectory, praise God. So how do you do that? How do you get those new users to your website? What are some strategies there?
Speaker 3:Well, the first thing to know is that you're online, you're engaging with three types of audiences. So these different types of audiences are people that are telling themselves they have a felt need. That's kind of the theme in their head, and those felt needs are people that are looking for church. And those felt needs are people that are looking for church. So this would be the type of person that goes on online and says, hey, I'm new in the town, or hey, I'm in a new phase of life or whatever, or maybe I'm discontent from this church, I'm looking for a different one. So they're basically saying what are the churches near me? They're searching for it. So they've already identified they're looking for a church's your goal. So, um, that's where. Uh, google search is a big deal, right? Search ads are a huge one when, when people type in church near me, do you pop up in the search? Also, google, my business is big. This is what we call local SEO. Um, your SEO in general makes it easier for you to be found road signage, believe it or not, as a big deal, right, because you're driving. Oh, I'm looking for a church, there's one, right? So that actually makes a difference.
Speaker 3:So the next audience, then is people that are looking for stuff to do, looking for something fun, right. So we get a huge number of people in our ministry from two big things that happen in the year our Harvest Fest and our VBS. Lots of people coming to those events that are just looking for something to do. Where can I go and take my kids? Where it's A, it's safe, it's wholesome and they're going to burn off a lot of energy, right? So huge Events almost market themselves, right, they do, but that's an example. I'm looking for something to do.
Speaker 3:And then the third audience then is people looking for hope. Now, of course, our ultimate hope is in Jesus, right. But a lot of times the way that that hope question looks like is more like hey, how do I fix my broken marriage? Or hey, how do I deal with, maybe in some cases, addiction, or I just lost somebody. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with the grief of losing somebody. So it's people who are looking for hope in the midst of their hurts. So they're searching about their hurts. So do you have a website that's set up and programs that you can invite people to that especially deals with the hurts that they have and you can have marketing for those specific things and invite people to community through those things. It is what we call a side door into the church.
Speaker 2:Different social media campaigns that focus on those three targets, leading them to your website, leading them to, maybe, a specific landing page for Harvest Fest or whatever. That's what drives that social media engagement, but it's three different types of audiences. Let's be clear.
Speaker 3:Three different types of audiences. So if you can think intentionally by that, so now you're a senior leader and you can say, okay, I'm going to hold my marketing or my comms team or my vendor accountable. You know, let's lay out what are we doing intentionally in those three areas.
Speaker 2:right, all right, that gives you a way to work on Amen. So three core audiences. Let's get into organic SEO, search engine optimization, yep.
Speaker 3:That's going to be huge with your inbound audience. That's going to be really huge with the people that are searching for church. So a person already says I know I want to go to church. I'm just trying to find the ones that are near me that seem to be good. That's what your search engine optimization is for. It gets your website more visible when people are searching with the types of ministry services that you offer, right.
Speaker 3:So if you have content on your website about marriage ministry and people are searching for marriage help, that'll help that website be seen. If you have blog posts about topics that people care about, that's huge for search engine optimization. That's something that often goes neglected on websites. And then what we talk about is local SEO. This would be the things like the Google my Business, which is huge. When you search churches near me and you see a little map pop up and you see all the little dots that are near you that Google has identified as churches, you want to be sure that you're up there with one of those that is being recommended to people of blogs.
Speaker 2:really quick, jack, for the pastor who's like oh my gosh, I don't have this much time, so what you could do this is an appropriate use of AI. Run your sermon through AI and ask it to condense it and turn it into a blog post with the appropriate headers. Jack, what do you think?
Speaker 3:No, that's exactly what it is now AI is making. This is the beauty of it. I mean, there's tools that exist right now that are specifically for helping churches do this with their content. So think of that sermon now as the content hub that things now can spoke out of. So, using AI, there's a really great platform called Church Tech that's kind of built explicitly to do this. You put in a sermon video or a sermon manuscript either way is fine and it'll generate blog posts, it'll generate small group curriculum, it'll generate all kinds of you know, marketing posts and stuff like that automatically for you so that you can use it for marketing purposes, right?
Speaker 3:So this is really cool this is one of the beautiful things with AI and it's still your original content, right? I'm not saying you have to write the sermon with AI, but you write, you put the effort into writing this beautiful sermon and now you can recycle it in multiple ways and it does the work of recontextualizing it and making it appropriate for those different formats.
Speaker 2:Amen, I love it. So organic SEO, let's move into Google Grants, jack.
Speaker 3:So Google Grants is something that basically every big church does and I think a lot of tiny, very few tiny churches do, because they don't know about it. But basically what happens is Google, as part of its you know, as a tax break, I suppose its philanthropy gives away search ads to nonprofits, including churches, believe it or not, and what that looks like is they will give up to not guaranteed, but they'll give up to $10,000 a month in free Google search ads to your ministry to address specific things. They have guidelines on how to use it, but basically this is free advertising. You could increase, in theory, your marketing budget by, you know, $120,000 a year. You could be a tiny little church with $100,000 budget and have a $120,000 marketing budget. So you can see how sometimes, how some churches can grow really rapidly if they know what they're doing on the marketing side of things. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now but a small, you should probably not try and do this.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't do this yourself. I would try and find a vendor that would do this for you and a lot of times vendors. You know the cost can range anywhere between 300 and $500 a month. Still, the way you think about it is, I'm getting up to ten thousand dollars a month in free advertising by paying an expert five hundred dollars a month in administrative costs to run these programs for me, and they'll do things like they'll. They'll go through the application process and actually get you qualified for it and and get you set up for that.
Speaker 3:I'm not going to give specific recommendations. I will say that we worked with well. I will give a recommendation. We had a great luck for a while working with a company called Missional Marketing. They were fantastic in that area. They really specialized in that area. I know there's a lot of other great ministry-oriented vendors out there that will do the same, and what I would say is, as a matter of accountability again, your goal is to get new users to your website. Really, look at how many new users is that generating? Some of the data I'm saying is that, on average, churches can get about 1,400 new users and I would say if you're executing really, really well, you can probably get more in the range of 1,500 to 2,500 new users just from that program.
Speaker 3:So it's a very, very efficient way to get more traffic per month to your website.
Speaker 2:That's significant, All right. So organic SEO largely for those that are looking for churches near them. Who's Google Grants most for? Is that for churches near it's the same thing.
Speaker 3:It's search, but it's also towards the people looking for hope. So, again, a really perfect thing for Google Grants is you know how do I enrich my marriage, how do I improve my marriage? Well, if you've got a marriage ministry, you can get that search ads tied to a landing page. This is the key thing with all of these things that you're doing with social media or search ads is they come to your website on a landing page, oftentimes a dedicated landing page that you've created just for that search, so that people can get some free content on that area. You've created just for that search, so that people can get some free content on that area and then decide if they want to take their next step, to actually participate in a ministry or come see you in person on a Sunday.
Speaker 3:So there should always be a clear next step for them Something free that you're giving Usually it could be a blog post or some content or some PDFs or whatever and then something next that they could do if they want to tie in closer to your community.
Speaker 2:Love it Organic SEO, Google Grants. Now let's talk paid ads, yeah paid ads then.
Speaker 3:So Google Grants you have to go through a bunch of hoops to be able to qualify to get that and you'll get a certain amount allotted to you based on the quality of the ads. When you pay for your own ads, a lot of those restrictions go away. So you have a lot more freedom with the ads that you pay for yourself and you're not necessarily subject to kind of meeting all of the requirements that they have to get those ads shown. So you can decide what it is that you want to market with a little bit more freedom. And the cool thing is you don't pay unless people click. So that's the beauty. Well, a lot of marketing formats If you buy a billboard, you're going to pay for that, regardless of how many people see that, right? But with Google ads or other online social media ads, the pay is for the click, so they click through it Then you. Then you're charged for it. That means they're actually coming to your website and at that point in time you're really looking at what kind of campaign is getting me the most traffic for the least cost.
Speaker 3:So I do recommend doing some sort of Google ad campaigns, but we have actually found that the most efficient way is doing social media ads. This is where a really robust social media campaign comes in place. If we're marketing Christmas, most of our traffic for Christmas is from Facebook or Instagram and that's either viral posts that we've done or posts that we've paid to have shown to a lot of people and we're seeing that we can get people in. You know 50 cents a click versus sometimes $2 a click on Google or $1 a click on Google. So sometimes we can get it for about half the cost by doing event marketing on Facebook. So highly recommended and again, the best thing for the social media ads would be really event-based. Christmas is an event in people's minds. Easter is an event. It's a worship service, but for them that's an event because it's a cultural thing. Right, harvestfest, vbs, these big things are events. A sermon series can be thought of as an event that you're inviting people to based on the themes of that sermon series.
Speaker 2:Hey, if there's a pastor listening right now we got a lot of pastors and you're like I don't really like this content. There's someone on your team and or someones that will
Speaker 3:geek out on this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So invite them to listen and then take your right next step, Because I think a lot of times with this just pausing Jack, this is great content is like oh my gosh, this seems like it's so much.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the thing.
Speaker 2:We weren't doing all of this when we started. Nope, you just start baby steps, right, it's right. So if someone's listening, like they've heard, organic SEO, google grants, paid ads like what's the lowest hanging fruit here, jack? If someone's just going to start to implement one thing, I would say well, you know?
Speaker 3:I would say, first and foremost, if you don't know where to start, let's just say you're a sole pastor with a very limited staff. Right, that's just a scenario. I would say your best bet is to find a really good vendor and get onto something that would be akin to like a subscription model with them, where they go and they clean up your website and they have a strategy for giving you the best kind of search engine optimization for your website. It may require redoing the whole thing, depending on how good it is to begin with, and then have them in charge of your Google grants campaign and then set certain goals for external marketing. Hey, I've got a plan for events for the year. Work with the vendor, Let them do the work.
Speaker 3:But I would say here's a really good thing is make sure that you're transparent with the goals that you're setting. Is make sure that you're transparent with the goals that you're setting. You know, if you're that church with 500 people in worship and you're trying to get 50,000 new users, make sure you tell that vendor that's my goal, and then you can work on a plan. You can reverse engineer a plan that makes sense, and they can actually we use the term clarity as kindness this is kindness for a vendor or a staff person that you have to help say, okay, this is what we're going to do and we're going to clear the field for anything that's not that right. We are going to reverse engineer I like to use that term a lot.
Speaker 3:We're going to try and think as we're designing our events how do we make it marketable, right? How do we make our sermon series marketable? It's got to be great discipleship, but there's also a marketable piece to it, right. And then you can hand that off to the vendor and we can say, okay, here's the strategy. You know 50,000 new users for the year. How do we get there? So then you're meeting with them, hopefully then monthly or more often than monthly, to say how close are we to meeting this goal? Do we need to make any adjustments? Is there something that we need to shift with in terms of the content that we have on the website? And all of this is achievable, right? That's the cool thing.
Speaker 2:I got to draw some attention to this, Jack. We have amazing theology.
Speaker 1:We do.
Speaker 2:Word and sacrament, the confessions, the whole. You hear us talk about that a lot we get and you may think this is too harsh. Maybe it is, but I don't think generally it is we get crushed by the non-denom world. We do. In this game right here in this area.
Speaker 3:We don't have to Crushed. We don't have to we don't have to be right there's no rule.
Speaker 2:Why wouldn't we want to market the bejeebers out of a confessional, missional Lutheranism? That doesn't make any sense to me, but we don't. We're like, wow, you know, this is the first hour of stuff. Well, okay, it is what it is. But there are people that are looking for churches, that are going right past your church, going to a church down the road. That's preaching decision theology, that's emotionalism.
Speaker 3:That all this kind of stuff, whatever that is, whatever Right.
Speaker 2:So they're passing you up because you're not caring about this. Stuff like this is just understanding the times. Jack, if we were in a different time we'd be talking about a different thing. But this is. People interact with us, first and foremost online, and are we developing a good impression?
Speaker 3:of ourselves as if somebody was using the printing press better than us, right I mean? Yeah, let's go back in time to that context, right? So all right, all right, I'm done off off my. There is some shrewdness to this. Let's not get crushed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's go back in time to that context right yeah, all right, all right, I'm done Off off my-.
Speaker 3:There is some shrewdness to this right. Let's not get crushed.
Speaker 2:There is some shrewdness to this. Let's not get crushed on this man. So non-website marketing talk about what non-web? Because this is mostly website driven.
Speaker 3:but there's other marketing strategies, jack no-transcript ahead on online marketing as we are now. But at that point in time, 50% of the people enrolled because they saw our building. So they were driving by and they saw our building and it said it's a school. Oh, it's a school. I mean, go check it out, right? So you can't neglect the power of street visibility. Street visibility is a big deal and it will always continue to be a big deal.
Speaker 3:Look at your campus from the lens of an outsider. We tend to always look at. This is the thing I would say happens a lot is we tend to think about our website, not our website, our campus, through the lens of somebody who's just comfortable with the stuff being here. But what would it look like if you look at it with a different lens? Think of yourself as a guest, and how would you evaluate the quality, the visibility, the signage, the upkeep of your campus? Is it a guest-friendly appearance? Is the signage really accessible to people?
Speaker 3:Tim, we have two worship spaces. People have to go decide which side of the courtyard they're going to go to. How easy is it for people to understand that? I know what that is, but a brand new guest they could easily be confused by that. So we have to have really great signage to make it very clear to people. And the same thing is true to the signage on the road. Right, does the signage on the road invite people in? Does it clearly say your worship times? Right, so that every time they drive by it's a billboard that you don't have to pay for? Right?
Speaker 3:Well, this is a raw one for us. We've had the same sign out there for a long time. I know we're trying to get a larger sign. I don't need to go into it. We're going through some permitting issues right now.
Speaker 2:There's some permitting issues that we're walking through, so so good, hey, final comments, though, as you wrap this one up.
Speaker 3:Jack, this has been good, yeah. So final comments. You know where do we go from here, wrapping this up. Like I said, if you're new to this, if you don't have a communications department which is probably 90% of churches out there you know the focus on having a really good vendor, find a vendor who can, who actually cares about ministry. I mean, there are website and marketing vendors that specialize on church and ministry marketing. I would work with them. First and foremost, budget for it. You are going to have to budget for it. I would say our rule, you know, as I've done the analysis on it, we have to probably always depend on the idea that we're spending about 1% of our annual giving, you know, on marketing, and when I say on marketing I mean buying ads. That's above and beyond the cost of running our comm team and running a website and all that kind of stuff is like actually just buying advertising to bring people onto the web.
Speaker 2:So for us roughly a $2 million plus budget.
Speaker 3:We're spending $20K in these $20 to $25K per year on ads is enough to get us our goal, and so people would know. Our goal is to get 85,000 people to visit our website for the first time, and we're tracking that every single month. So when we do our Metrics Monday, part of Metrics Monday for us is how many new users are coming to the website. Are we meeting our goals or not meeting our goals in that area?
Speaker 2:Everybody on our team gets super stoked when Metrics Monday comes around. No, it's good, it's necessary. Jack, I'm not being silly. I actually get stoked because here's the reality I'm a competitor and I want to win More than that.
Speaker 1:I think Jesus is competitive.
Speaker 2:He wants more people to have an experience with him, to come into a saving At the end of the day. You may think this is all about the metric numbers $80, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no, it's about the one person that comes onto your campus that experiences the love and the hospitality of Christ, hears the word and, just like yesterday, a baptismal invitation comes out and they say, yeah, what's to prohibit me from receiving the water connected to the word we just had that? Yeah, that's so, so exciting. The Lord is at work in beautiful ways.
Speaker 2:And really, this is about the 1%. Are you getting 1% better as it relates to your marketing and brand strategy every single day, every single year? If you're just making those incremental steps, you'll look back and say, wow, remember when we used to have those conversations. Now we're having these conversations. I think this driving to the website first time, 100 folks to one visitor, the guest that comes onto your campus that's a great metric that should be a staple for us across all of our congregations in the LCMS. Any final comments? Jack, this has been fun, no.
Speaker 3:I mean this is bringing to conclusion our talk about marketing. Again. We had kind of an expert on websites on a recent episode here, so we encourage you checking that out. On our next two episodes, we're going to be talking about invitation strategies, so we're taking things to the next level now. We were just talking about marketing, now we're going to talk about invitation and then we're going to talk about hospitable tracking systems, which is kind of fun, but that's going to be the whole package here. When we talk about, you're going to go through the series, you're going to know everything that you need to know about attracting people to your church.
Speaker 2:Amen, amen. It's a good day. Go, make it a great day. Please like, subscribe, comment wherever it is you take these in, and having conversations around brand and marketing is not liberal Doesn't mean we're compromising anything related to theology. We're just understanding the times and we want to reach as many people as possible with the gospel. Jesus loves you so much and go with his joy, go with his love, go with his peace as you lead a learning organization, a humble learning organization called the church, seeking to bring more people into a saving relationship with Jesus. It's a good day. Go and make it a great day.
Speaker 1:Wonderful work, jack Take care and, god bless, you've been listening to Lead Time, a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective. The ULC's mission is to collaborate with the local church to discover, develop and deploy leaders through biblical Lutheran doctrine and innovative methods To partner with us in this gospel message. Subscribe to our channel, then go to theuniteleadershiporg to create your free login for exclusive material and resources and then to explore ways in which you can sponsor an episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for next week's episode.