Church Marketing Sucks

This is part nine in our series on guerrilla church marketing, Power to the Pews.

Teens live online. Therefore what affects their lives affects their media, which affects their networks and luckily for the church becomes an influx to influencing other teens. The perfect equation for guerrilla church marketing.

I for one have been on multiple mission trips, camps and conventions; there are two variables that rarely change:

• Lives are changed.
• It will be posted.

Marketing is happening without anyone having to try. Oh and one other thing, it is costing nothing. For everyone who wants to have amazing marketing without doing almost anything and have it cost nothing, listen up.

Your most valuable asset to reaching youth is youth. They do everything already without you asking them to do it. Every time a conference, camp or trip is taken you are essentially putting up billboards for your church, that event and godly character. I’ve been to services when at worship and altar time people are taking pictures because what they see is so incredible. They aren’t just taking pictures so they can look at them; they create them so they can put them online to show off how incredible something looked.

This sounds awesome right? it’s free, it’s marketing to a group that tends to be harder to reach without doing anything. There is only one con.

Just as the best asset to reaching youth is youth, your worst tool for reaching them is you. For if you put on a bad event, you don’t prepare or just something unplanned happens; once they post the picture they are also posting that memory good or bad. So in short, the best part of free marketing is also the worst. Teens take pictures so they can remember, so what they remember is up to you.

Here are some ways to make sure they are posting the right things and tagging the right pictures.

• Make your events, eventful; make sure every student is entertained and impacted.
• Let them know your Twitter or Facebook so they can tag you, so that their followers can follow you.
• Do small or large giveaways to students for funniest/most creative tweet that tags the ministry. You can also have feed live tweets on the screen.
• Make sure every sermon has a hashtag.

Simply remember that students will tweet everything. So make everything tweetable.

Go get ’em.