A Unified Church is Essential for Effective Online Marketing

Whether your church has been doing online marketing for a while, or just created your website, you know that disunity within your church will hinder its growth. In order to communicate effectively on online mediums, your church needs to communicate effectively internally. This will not only result in greater church unity, but effective communication is the key to all churches’ success.

Starting Internet Marketing At A Church

When a church first starts doing internet marketing it is pretty simple. They post a Bible verse, update the calendar and invite people to the Christmas Eve service at their church. It is simple, but it is not exactly effective online marketing. Effective online marketing has a strategy behind it, a clear goal and a clear message. Posting without intent has the potential to open up a pandora’s box of problems. Also, posting without intent will likely annoy people within your church or leadership simply because they don’t have the same humor as you, or feel the post is misrepresenting your church. How can you post on your church’s blog or social media in a way that keeps everyone happy?

The Obstacle: Effective Online Marketing for Churches Starts Inside the Church

Take a step back from social media posts and updating the website. How do you know when the website or social media needs to be posted? How do you know that the pastor approves of this going online? Is it mentioned in passing on a Sunday morning at church? Or, have you ever received that frantic text an hour before an event asking for you to do an update while you are in the middle of a wedding or on vacation? This is the definition of ineffective communication. Your updates will be sporadic and poorly done because there just wasn’t enough time. Certain ministries in the church might get their feeling hurt because you never post about their events (which is simply because you aren’t part of their ministry and are unaware of their events).

The Solution: Setting Up Internal Communication Processes for the Church

If you standardize the process for updating the website and social media then you will see increased unity and a unified, effective online marketing process.

The benefits of creating processes around internal church communication:

• Everyone (every ministry) is treated equally and feels they are treated equally.
• No mistakes (hopefully) are made or details missed.
• Everyone will have equal access and ways to
• Clear expectations are made.
• Updates are made within a correct timeframe
• A filing system of church activities is naturally created
• The leadership of the church is aware and informed of all church activities and online updates.

Creating An Internal Church Communication Process

Creating internal communication processes is extremely difficult, and time-consuming. The benefits do outweigh the cost in the initial time investment.

Step 1: Make an internal communication plan (the internal plan is conveniently listed below).

Step 2: Identify forms of internal communication that happen more than once in a year. Finding processes that will help your leadership and not just the marketing team will help increase the church’s unity and assist the church leadership. Examples of actions that happen that should have a process:

• A person at church requests social media posts.
• A person at church requests a website update.
• A person at church has a great idea they want to see happen.
• A yearly event needs volunteers.
• A person in leadership needs the bulletin changed.
• A person wants to get more involved with the church and volunteer.
• A person requests to get baptized.
• A person wants to start a bible study.
• The list goes on and on, so pick the high priority ones first.

Step 3: Make a process for each of the high priority requests. How? Take the “person requests a social media post” for example. Create a document that has a list of questions to acquire the necessary information (What is the social media post about? When does it need to be up? Who should be contacted for questions regarding the post? When is this event taking place? How does this ost serve the church’s mission? Don’t fret if you can’t think of everything, you can always go back and make changes. I recommend you make a disclaimer section that indicates the turnover time (the social media post must be requested no less than 5 days before the post needs to be made). This establishes clear expectations.

Step 4: Once you have completed creating your plan, meet with your church’s leadership and explain your plan. You need them on your side in order for it to succeed.

Step 5: Enact your plan. Make the documents available, communicate these expectations. In Christ Link’s internet marketing process we set up points of contact within the different ministries who are responsible for communicating events and social media posts. You will need to train your internal team and leadership within the church on the appropriate processes.

Maintaining An Internal Church Communication Process

Once your internal set up is complete, maintaining the processes is vital. If you compromise the processes, then the processes will not remain in use. What this means is, if someone comes up to you and asks for you to put up a quick social media post and you do it without following the established process, that person will no longer follow the process.

If you want to create lasting unity in the church, you must follow the processes that were set up for that very purpose. As that process takes hold of your church, it will seem like you always did it that way.

Making Your Church’s Online Marketing Effective

After setting up all of the internal processes and communication you will naturally see your external communication improve and become more effective. It will be more effective but you aren’t done yet.

Making your Church’s online marketing effective first required advanced unity within the church. The next step is to unify your message outside of the church. This is where you get into marketing terms like branding, a unified voice, strategic marketing and integrated marketing communications.

While we cannot set up your entire marketing plan through a blog post, we can help you get started. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my Church’s goal?
• If my church had one purpose what would it be?
• What is my church good at?
• What does my community need (local community, not church community)
• How would I describe the majority of people in our church?

The Most Important Church Marketing Question

What does God want our Church to do?

 

If you are interested in getting your church internally unified and set up effective church online marketing, contact Christ Link today to start our process.