Church Marketing Sucks

Remember a long, long time ago, when you were first thinking about church marketing? You had that argument with someone about whether stats mattered and whether churches should even keep track of the numbers. What do numbers really matter? It’s not about that anyways.

Well, unless your church is the Russian Orthodox Church, you probably ended up keeping some sort of statistics. You know how many people are at a service, Sunday school, etc.

So why don’t churches seem to care about the Internet? Too many times, we don’t notice when people share experiences about our churches online, and we don’t know how well we’re doing in using the Internet to reach out. But it’s not such a hard task.

Here are four quick and dirty ways to keep up with your church online:

• Keep up with your web stats. Perhaps your server provides this or maybe you need to install a tool like Google Analytics. But set some goals and see how you’re meeting them. If you aren’t, rethink what you can do to meet those goals.
• See if people are chatting on Twitter. Check out search.twitter.com and enter “Your Church’s Name.” See if people are mentioning you and what they’re saying.
• Search blogs. Google’s Blog Search or Technorati are good tools here.
• Get your Google on. You probably can’t hire someone to optimize your site for search engines, but it’s vastly-documented online. If you aren’t getting high up in search results, look it up online. Providing great content that stays up-to-date will pay great dividends.