Mark Batterson, a CMS favorite and annual interviewee, had a little to say about marketing last week in his Evotional blog. He said a few things I wanted to point out and share here.
He lets us in on the lens through which his church views marketing:
“The greatest message deserves the greatest marketing … we don’t want anybody in the metro DC area to be able to deny our existence!”
Philosophically speaking, we couldn’t agree with him more. We love to say that the church has the greatest story ever told. After all, that’s why the Center for Church Communication exists.
Another interesting note from Mark’s post is that 86% of National Community Church attenders came because of a personal invitation. We’ve talked about advertising from blogs to billboards, but at least for National Community Church, personal invitation reigns supreme.
Have you seen similar numbers at your own churches, or is this something specific to Washington, D.C.?
Matt
August 20, 2007
We had a similar experience at our next gen service called seven16 (www.seven16.com) We were launching in September of ’05 and we wanted to create some buzz about the service, so we made the web site the center of attention. We made simple yard signs that said http://www.seven16.com. That’s all they said, simple black text with our logo on a white yard sign. We posted these yard signs along the streets of Reynoldsburg and a few surrounding areas, (with permission, of course) and our first night brought over 300 curious people.
Josh Reich
August 22, 2007
We have seen almost 90% of our guests come from personal invitation. We are in Tucson, AZ.