Church Marketing Sucks

Every week I hold online office hours and answer questions from folks like you. This week we’ve got a question about how to get a basic Twitter strategy up and running and how important it is to get buy-in from your senior leadership! Take a look and be sure to join me every Wednesday from 2-4 p.m. CDT for online office hours!

What’s the least you can do on Twitter and not be a waste of time? I’d love to start a Twitter feed for my church, but I’m afraid I’ll get busy and it’ll quickly go silent. Is it OK if we only tweet once a week? Or is that just lame?

My answer:

More than anything, an audience wants to know what to expect (at least when it comes to communication, anyway). My advice? Start small and build up.

If you have time for one tweet a week, great! That’s a good starting point. Just make sure you’re consistent and build time in your schedule to make that tweet appointment.

My experience has shown that people actually have much more time available than they realize. If social media are a priority (which they should be), try and carve out just five minutes a day to build a strategy. You’d be surprised at what you can do in those few moments.

Build small. Build simple. Be consistent. Scale as you’re able.

My church has no communications team. There have been failed efforts to start a volunteer committee over the past decade, but nothing sticks. How can we get started and improve our marketing in a sustainable way with no staff?

My answer: 

First things first, it is crucial for you to set the need for a communications team, be it volunteer or staff-led. I don’t need to tell you this, but it’s important to verbalize how vital communications are to the life of a church

Secondly, I’d dig down into what the goals are of senior leadership. Find them out and then tie them into your communication efforts. Let me be clear: for any sort of communication strategy/effort to work, the senior leadership needs to buy-in to the process. Without this endorsement, it’s going to make it very hard for something to stick, long term. My guess is, this is where you’re feeling the tension

If you can hinge the communication efforts to the goals of the organization, and paint a very clear picture of how the former depends on the latter, you’ll probably start seeing more traction.

Thanks for the great questions everybody! Hopefully this information will help you get from where you are to where you want to go. See you next time in the office!