Church experiences successful Facebook strategy

Robert Holland has been sharing his church’s experience with implementing Facebook Fan Pages. I find his results fascinating, as well as a profoundly impactful strategy for the church.

The church is strategically deploying a page for each of the church’s ministries. The concept is based upon NBC’s Fan Page structure and I am encouraged by this forward looking implementation.

Hat’s off to Robert and his team. You can read more about their experience at http://socialmediaseo.net/2009/08/26/church-facebook-fan-pages-churche/.

I would love to hear of other effective uses of Internet marketing to gain greater exposure for churches and religious organizations.

Church website hosting – value and functionality

There are few things more elemental to Internet marketing than the hosting environment for your website or blog. As a result, the importance of this service has a tendency to be glossed over. Besides, who worries about hosting until they have a service outage, or the site crashes and burns when you try to upgrade the software the site is using?

I hope that you will put some serious thought into laying the right foundation for your site. You not only want something easy to set up initially, but have you given thought to how easy it will be in the future to upgrade your site when new releases become available? Would you like to ensure that you use a company that has fantastic customer service?

I have been blessed to use some effective hosting environments over the past several years. We have business clients in three hosting environments currently, and two of those run neck and neck for the lead when it comes to functionality and service. I would recommend highly one of those providers for church and religious organization sites.

Bluehost.com has proven itself to us over and over again with great customer service, high level functionality in the Control Panel (CP), and incredible ease of use. Fortunately, Bluehost.com has provided a foundation for our sites that I no longer have to worry about.

The price is right, the service is phenomenal, and our experience with them has been rewarding.

Is Your Church Social?

Back in the day when you thought of the church being social, you imagined a church dinner. Plates piled high with fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Good old make your cholesterol rise kind of church social.

What we need to find out today is whether you are serving up some good social networking. (Almost like fellowship of that awesome church dinner, but virtually.) Besides, that dinner, whether you knew it or not, was for the purpose of helping people to connect and develop relationships. The church dinner was a tool.

Guess what? The church has some new tools at its disposal for developing connections and relationships. These tools make up what we categorize as Social Media. The church historically has been a bit slow to warm up to new ways to do things, and Social Media is no exception. Truth be told, in many areas of the Internet, the refrain, “I shall not be moved” is still being sung. Nevertheless, things are warming up. You are reading this article, right? That is a good sign.

There are various types of social media.

The goal is to select one or two types, and experiment with them to gauge their effectiveness. Blogging and a Facebook page for a church and two that come to mind that make a lot of sense.

Implementing social media will be the topic of future posts. I encourage you to be social.

Church Marketing for Outreach – Internet Marketing Impact

I will unabashedly state that I am a fan of church marketing, especially Internet marketing for churches and religious organizations. Why? Because I believe it is where you can make meaningful initial contact with people who could benefit from what the church has to offer.

Religious organizations have historically lagged far behind in advertising tactics embraced successfully by business. I ought to know, as I pastored 4 churches over a period of 15 ½ years, and our methods to reach out into the community were antiquated at best. Many times the “church” didn’t have a strong desire to even reach out beyond the building walls.

Being an effective Internet marketing consultant with a large portfolio of successful clients has served to fuel my passion for this type of marketing as a way to expose people to the mission and programs of the church. The right question might be, “Why not?” instead of why.

The church has been leveraging media for a couple of centuries now. On of the most significant uses was the printing press in order to “mass produce” the Bible. We have worked diligently to take advantage of radio and television as a form of media. The time to leverage Internet marketing is here and available right now! Will we be wise to figure out how it can be used to assist us in fulfilling the Great Commission and building the Kingdom of God?

People are looking for “everything under the sun” in search engines like Google and Bing. Believe it or not, whether directly or indirectly, they are also looking for the meaning of life. If you don’t believe me, do a search on a simple phrase like “spiritual truth.”

It is my hope and prayer that staff and volunteers both will recognize that these tools can assist them in fulfilling not only their mission, but also His mission.

Video Internet marketing training for churches

Not all aspects of Internet marketing involves “rocket science” knowledge. Let’s face it, much of what makes up effective marketing for a church or religious organization is just your typical “roll up you sleeves” and get to it type of work. The failure is not energy and effort, but the focused knowledge of what needs to be done.

Don’t get me wrong. In some areas, especially in the area of research, you need some additional levels of experience and expertise to do higher level work. I include that statement from experience since I perform a tremendous amount of Internet marketing for businesses throughout the US and Canada.

But getting back to the point, there is a tremendous amount of effective Internet marketing that could be accomplished on behalf of church and religious organizations … if they had a group of volunteers that were not only informed on what to do, but could grasp a bit of the big picture to see how their contributions fit in.

Producing video training in a LMS “Learning Media System” environment might be the perfect training tool since you can go through the initial training segments, be tested for comprehension, interact with a trainer, and review the material for as long as you have access to it. Another option would just be downloadable video training segments.

Internet marketing for churches has some distinct differences from marketing businesses. Having 15 1/2 years in serving 4 churches as a pastor makes that abundantly clear. Tapping into the power of outreach through the Internet for a church is potentially more powerful.

Let me know what you think!

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