Name: Digital Strategies that Actually Work in 2024 & Beyond
Uploaded: 2024-09-16T15:01:16.670Z
Duration: 35 min 4 s
Description: Digital Strategies that Actually Work in 2024 & Beyond

Transcript for "Digital Strategies that Actually Work in 2024 & Beyond": Okay. I think I just get going here. So I wanna welcome you to, this session where we're gonna dive into digital strategies that actually work in 2024 and beyond. And so hopefully, you can see my, face and see my screen. My name is Jason Hamrock. I get to serve as the CEO of 3 different companies. We have Missional Marketing, which I'm representing here today. We also own Church Communications Group and then, Missional AI, which is, AI for churches. A couple of other notes I wanna bring your attention to. You might throw some, messages in the chat. I'll try to get to those, but I only have 30 minutes, so I'm gonna talk fast. The other thing is you can do is I'll have this QR code on every screen, and, you can scan in that QR code. And what it's gonna do, it's gonna take you to, like, a a a page that looks like, what it says, 1st hub. You can say book now. And if you click on book now, you can scroll down to my name my face and name, and it's under church website development, but I'm more than happy to schedule 30 minutes with anybody who wants to talk about their strategy and the things I'm gonna cover today. So take advantage of that. It's free consultation for 30 minutes, and, hopefully, you can do that. So I will, keep going here. We're gonna dive in, and this is the agenda I'm gonna talk about for the next 30 minutes. The first one is gonna be fundamental concepts, things, you know, foundational things that we wanna discuss. The second one would be the top digital platforms, that we wanna dive into. These are the things that you really wanna know about, and then what to do next, and then get some help. And so, we'll go we'll go quick. So let's first talk about church growth. And, you know, if you think about this, anybody who stepped foot in your church came from somewhere. Right? They they came to you. Maybe it was an event they came to in the past. Maybe they were invited by a friend, or they drove by, or maybe there's some traditional methods like, you know, print, like newspaper, or, maybe you do some radio or somehow people got to your church in one way or another. So my focus today is the digital side. How, how do people get to get to your church digitally speaking? So that's the first fundamental thing. It's gonna help us understand what we need to do for Outreach. The second is this, I always look at, your audience in 3 different rings. So, ring 1 are your people, people who go to your church, people who they come faithfully every week or maybe they just come at Christmas and Easter, right, and everybody in between. But that's ring 1. That's important to understand. Ring 2 are people who are looking for a church in your area. We don't know why. Maybe it's they moved to the area, or maybe their old church, you know, just split or just dissolved or whatever. Maybe it was a divorce situation, and so, you know, somebody's gotta go find a new church. We don't know why, but they're searching in Google and they're looking for a church. That's ring 2. Then there's ring 3, probably the biggest in fact, it is the biggest ring out there. It's people looking for help with felt need issues, issues that this book, the Bible, talks about and no doubt you preach on. You guys cover, you know, how to improve your marriage, how how how to know who Jesus is. That's a felt need issue. You know, parenting, relationships, finances, you know, mental health. I mean, there's just tons and tons of felony issues that people search for, and we have answers. So we're gonna dive into that. But those are the 3 rings I want you to know about. Okay? Now the whole point the whole goal is to reach more people digitally. If we can reach, engage, invite, and build trust with more people online every month, that's gonna result in more people attending. Right? We wanna open up that front door and have tons of people checking checking you out. Now, the next screen I'm gonna share is sort of a a funnel that I really, really like focusing on. So it's kinda like it kinda goes like this. You kinda move from awareness. This is individuals who are who are looking for a church. They go from awareness to now they know you because they found you. We'll talk about that. And once they know you, they're gonna click around on your website. They're gonna look at your Google business profile. They're gonna maybe check on YouTube. Right? And then if they like you, if they feel compelled enough, now they're starting to, attend online. No doubt this is what's happening. And sometimes they'll opt in to receive some more information from you. Right? We but we move them from awareness to now they know you. We really wanna move them to the, hey. I kinda like you guys. And over time, what's happening is they're developing trust. Now chances are, maybe they haven't even attended in person. They're watching online. We wanna move them towards attending. And, of course, now that they attend, you gotta close that back door. You've heard of those terms before. Front door, back door. So that they can stay there, and now you can work your discipleship plan. So this is a great concept of just the funnel of how people can go from awareness all the way to attending, staying, and being discipled. K? So that's important to understand. Here's another little bit of truth. I know this to be true probably for your church. I know it's true for my church and bunch of churches I get to serve. That is people will watch will check you out, find you online, check you out, and they'll watch for a season at a time. Anywhere from, you know, a couple months to almost a full year before they trust you enough to say, now let's go attend in person. Okay. We like these people. We like this pastor. Let's bring the kids. Let's go this weekend. We know that there's a gap there of of months sometimes before people feel comfortable enough to come in person. You gotta know that when you're talking about your your digital strategy. Okay. Let me keep going. So there's top digital platforms, and I'm just gonna dive into these 6 today. I only have 30 minute I only have 20 24 minutes left. I gotta go quick. So these are the the the 6 that I wanna talk about. No doubt you have heard about these, but maybe some of you are like, I I've never heard of that before. So we're gonna dive in. So the first one I'm gonna dive into is called SEO, search engine optimization. This is critical to your digital success. You optimize 2 things, your local SEO and on page SEO. We're gonna talk about both of them. What is the difference here? Local SEO is when somebody is searching in Google for a location of some sort. They are typing in, you know, parks near me, restaurants near me, malls near me, maybe bars near me, and they're certainly typing in churches near me. We know this, so I I can tell you the volume of that traffic. It's a lot. It's local. It's how it's how Google sees your brick and mortar location. That's how that's what's important. They they recognize that you are a physical business. You've got a physical location. You're open for business, and you're in the right spot. That's important for local SEO. I'm gonna talk about that. The other one is on page SEO, how you optimize your website, and that shows up organically. And so if I were to share this screen with you, this right here I just did a screen grab of where I am here in Phoenix, Arizona. A little shout out to anybody in the valley. This is a little this is just a screenshot from a Google search result, and if you'll notice that what you're looking at here, you see 4 businesses listed. Now anytime you do this, you're always gonna see 3. That 4th one at the top, that's a paid ad. So Generation Church paid some money to be in that top spot, and then the 3 below that organically showed up. This is called the Google local pack, Google local pack. K? Now, of course, if I click on one of these, and I just did I've clicked on Sun Valley, happens to be the church that I get to go to. It's my home church. Now I'm looking at Sun Valley's Google Business Profile. Right? So why is it important to local local SEO, focus on local SEO? It's because of this right here. You want people finding your Google Business Profile because it's it's people that click on this are more likely to actually check that business out. They're interested. And I'll tell you, anybody who's looking for a location, 7 out of 10 times, they're gonna click on one of these search results at the in the local pack 7 out of 10 times, or maybe they might click on an ad. K? Only 3 out of 10 are gonna scroll down to the organics, and I'll get to that in a second. But that's important to understand. So your Google business profile, you really wanna pay attention to that. You wanna make sure you add photos, add videos, ask for reviews, respond to those reviews. So important to growing digitally. You gotta pay attention to your Google business profile. A lot of churches tend to avoid that because they really don't know anything about that. So that's really, really important. Now if I click again and I go to this page, now if I were to scroll down and show you this, this is now the organic SEO, not local SEO, but organic SEO. Now I'm looking at further down the page in Google. On the right hand side, I'm seeing the list of websites. That is how you optimize a website. I happen to just put this, southwestchurch.com. We literally just built this website because we we build church websites, and we launched this last week and, which is kinda cool, so you can go check that out. But on the right hand side is is that's where you see that organic listing. So you wanna optimize your website so you show up in the in Google, and, it's so important. It's so important. Remember, 7 out of 10 people will click on the local pack, and 3 out of 10 will scroll down to the organic. So you wanna cover both. K? That's the first thing, SEO. The second thing I wanna talk about is Google search ads. Google search ads. You've seen them. I know you've seen them. So whenever you Google something, you might see an ad. Now I'll hear from people going, oh, you know, I never click on those ads. Well, Google is about a $130,000,000,000 empire. They literally own the search engine world. They own 94, 95 percent market share. 130,000,000,000 plus last year. And of that, about 30,000,000,000 were devices or their, you know, their their tech they sell. So what does that tell you? About a 100,000,000,000 came in the form of people clicking on ads. So someone's clicking on these ads. Right? And I know a lot of people do because we run a lot of campaigns for churches, and I'll tell you this stuff works. So there's 2 types. You can run a Google paid campaign where you actually spend money with Google, and when you do that, they roll out the red carpet. They will pay attention to you because you are spending money. You're giving Google money to be in a a search result. That's amazing. People are typing in churches near me or churches in my city. There you go. There's an ad for your church. Click. Now they're on your website. It works. It works really, really well. The second opportunity is the Google Ad Grant. You can run Google Ad Grant campaigns. And, I won't spend a ton of time in in that. If you wanna do a consultation on either one of those, again, scan in my QR code, schedule some time with me, and I'll walk you through it. But you can get an ad grant if you're a 501c3 nonprofit organization with the IRS. You will get up to $10,000 every month. Yes. You heard me right. $10,000 every month from Google with their Google Ad Grant. Now you're not gonna get a check for $10,000. Uh-uh. There's no money being exchanged. This is like, monopoly money that you don't get to see, but Google gives you an opportunity to go on their AdWords platform and spend $10,000 a month. And then the next month, it just goes back to 0. Spend another 10,000. Next month, it goes back to 0, so on and so forth. Once you sign up for it, you got it. The catch is you've got to man you manage it. You have to get into it. Google did this because, well, it's a nice little tax write off form because they can give this money away to nonprofits, so that's cool. But really, the the second reason is they really want you tasting advertising because, advertising because, of course, Google's not just in a in the charity business, they're in the money making business. And they wanna take care of their customers so they can keep getting more customers, and they, love making money. The third reason is really just that. They want you advertising because when you advertise with the Google Ad Grant, you're kind of in competition with other people who are spending money. Therefore, there's some competition, price per click goes up, Google makes more money on the backside from people spending money by giving you some, you know you know, I I call it monopoly money. But it works. It works extremely well. We manage hundreds of churches, Google Ad Grant. We can talk about that, and I can share with you the details. But that's a great strategy to build more digital traffic, in the years to come and drive people to your website that will then help you gain more trust, more awareness, and hopefully more people in seats because that's the goal. K. Here's a snapshot of what, you know, a church ad would look like in in the goo in Google search. Right? Central Christian Church, that's an ad that that we took a snapshot of, and you can see that. That that happens all the time. It's very, very effective. I know you've seen these when you've gone to Google. K? The next form of Google advertising is called Google Display Ads. I love these ads. They're my favorite, and here's why they're my favorite. They hit your target audience. They will hit your target audience. My guess is your church, is a church that's focused on reaching all people with the gospel. I always have my Bible handy. Right? You wanna reach everybody with the gospel, but you're also probably trying to target maybe younger families. Who isn't trying to target, you know, people in their twenties and thirties and maybe forties? Because those you want younger families coming to your church. Every church. Every church is probably doing that. So why do I say that? Here's how you can get in front of them. K. I'm gonna talk about some other platforms down the road here in just a minute. But Google display ads, these are ads that will show up on different websites, different games, different apps. They're all geotargeted around your church or if you're a multi campus church, you know, around your campuses. So you can you can literally go, like, 10 miles around my campus. I wanna run ads. They show up. The users who click on these ad campaigns, and we've literally ran thousands of campaigns over the years. Almost always 20 to 40 year olds are the majority of the clicks, and it's almost a 50 50 split between male and female. How cool is that? So what would you use Google display ads for? Well, you could simply invite people to church. You know, we'd love to have you join us for church, and you could put, images of whatever images you want, but you if that target audience, there's a dad with his little baby. I mean, come on now. That's that evokes some emotion. So you can invite people to church. You can invite them to you know, Christmas is coming up, guys. We're literally like, we're planning it now for all the campaigns we're gonna be running at Christmas time. So Christmas, Easter, you know, maybe you guys have a a fall harvest party coming up, like a Halloween alternate type of thing. You know you know what I'm saying? Those trunk or treat things. That's a great, great campaign to run a display ad. These are relatively cheap. You can spend $100. You could spend a $1,000. You could spend $5,000 if you wanted to. But most churches spend a few $100 a month and run ads, and they get tons of traffic on their website from Google Display ads. It is it is the best, in my opinion, when it comes to really interrupting and get in front of people in your community. Right? And that's a little different from the Google search ads I just had on the screen before because people searching for a church, it's kind of a hot lead. Right? Someone's looking for a church, you wanna make sure you're in front of them. This one, though, gets a ton of awareness and a ton of clicks to your website. So Google Display. Next. Well, here's some images that you could take a look at that like, you can see there's just different ways to show an ad on a on a mobile device because this is where they all go. Right? So a big fan of display. The other product from Google is a thing that's kinda relatively new. It's about a year or so, year and a half old. It's called p max or performance max ads, Google Performance Max Ads. It's a mix and max strategy. So what Google does is they say, hey. Give us 10 of your best top titles. Okay. Like, God loves you. You're invited to our church. You know? Meet new people. Like, 10 titles, 10 subtitles, you know, that's just a sentence. We care about your kids, and we wanna help you grow in faith. Right? Some some kind of a just like another subject line title. Right? So you have 10 titles, 10 little subject lines, and then 10 images, 10 of your best images. Right? Great images of your target audience. When you add that into Google's platform, the Performance Max does a really cool thing. What they do is they grab, you know, one of those images, one of those subtitles, and one of those those titles, and they mix and match. And they will throw ads out on display on YouTube, the Google local pack. Gmail, you can advertise in Gmail and search. Right? And this is all geotargeted. It's a really great strategy to build tons of awareness about your church and generate clicks to your website. It's fantastic. It's a relatively new thing from Google, meaning it's only been around for about a year, year and a half or so, maybe 2 years. Can't quite remember. But it's relatively new, and it keeps developing. Google keeps getting better and better and better at honing in. They again, they care about they care about their customers, and they care about making money. So they want to perform for you because they want you to keep paying them. And it works, you know? It's just a thing, but it it totally works. So I really like that. Next one is YouTube advertising and optimization. So YouTube ads are really, really good too. You know, a lot of younger people live on YouTube and, they just watch video after video after video. Well, same thing, you can advertise on specific keywords, geotargeted, you can have different things that you can force a video to play at the beginning of the video or maybe and, you know, when you're watching a YouTube thing, there's like a a commercial that pops up, you can advertise in that. And of course, if people click on that, now you can send them on their way. You know, I I like YouTube advertising. I still like Google Display Network better, but YouTube is really good. Now what I would recommend you do is really learn a lot about SEO when it comes to your YouTube channel and how you add your sermons in there. You gotta pay attention. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine right behind Google, and Google owns both. So it's it's more than just going and, you know, adding your video. In fact, if you go to YouTube and you, search for Missional Marketing, there's a a video that one of my coaches, Bart, he's one of my executives on our team. Bart created a video on the best way to optimize your your sermon in YouTube. It's a great, great video. It's like a how to, step 1, step 2, step 3. Go check that out because he has a lot of tips and tricks in there. And, got more I could share with you if you schedule some time with me because it it really is worth it. But YouTube is really, really good. Okay. Now everybody knows about this, Facebook, right, and Instagram ads. I I still like them. I still like them. Now we understand that people who click on those ads tend to be more female dominated, like 80%, sometimes higher, maybe sometimes lower, depends on what you're promoting, But they tend to be older. Right? You know, 50 and older typically click on a majority of those clicks. So I don't have a problem with that because we are reaching, people. We're reaching people. And sometimes, you know, the the the mom, or the grandma is the decision maker, so she's like, come on, guys, we're gonna go to church, or we're gonna get involved in this event. I also really like Facebook to generate leads. This is a very popular trend. So you can invite people to church, say, you're invited to church this weekend. You know, hey, plan your visit. Give us you know, click here and we'll send you some more information. And when you do, when they click, you can capture their name, their email, maybe you even wanna have, you know, a mobile in there. And now you've captured some leads, and then you can, you know, send them on their way, but now you've got a lead to to go after. I I'm a big fan of Facebook ads. So if you guys, you know, wanna learn more about that, just let me know. I I'm a big fan of that. So, I'm ask I got Philip who's asking Jason, will there be a copy of this on yes. I'll I'll have this deck for you guys. And if you wanna, I mean, I can get you the slides. Just literally, like, scan in the QR code. I'll have my email at the end. I can make sure you guys get the get the email as well. Okay. Let's keep going. So Facebook, Instagram ads. Again, big fan. Love that. But, again, this is probably my second or third favorite platform. Here's an idea of some ads you can really run. And, you know, it's great because you can put videos in there. You can have images. You know, you are gonna get people that are younger, mostly, you know, or older, mostly female. They're gonna click on these ads. K. So what do you do next? We're gonna kinda wind this down a little bit. I wanna make sure I, get to anybody else who has questions. But here's what you gotta do. You you gotta build a strategy. You gotta figure out a budget. So I get that question all the time. Jason, I run the comms team or, you know, I'm executive pastor. I got a comms director, but we we don't really know where to start when it comes to budgeting for digital. Right? Go back to that that slice. Right? People, you know, people get to your church somehow. What's that slice of digital in in for you? How how big is that slice? And so I'm telling you, I'm just from experience, because I was a comm director for a long time, and I I actually do a lot of consulting with comm directors right now for churches. I I honestly think, you know, overall advertising marketing should be, like, 3 or 4% of the overall church budget. Now that might it depends on what that is for you, but that could that's quite a bit of money. And of that, I would spend at least 50, probably 60 or 70% of that all in digital. I'm still a fan of doing direct mail in a strategy. You gotta have a strategy. You gotta figure out how do we wanna promote. If all you're doing is promoting Easter and Christmas, that's not smart. Stop doing that. Why, Jason? Those are the 2 most important holidays. Right. Who else is advertising those same holidays? Every other church. So if you're just advertising at Christmas and Easter, you're just joining the noise that is going on. Is it a must? Yeah. It's kind of a must, but here's my point. Don't put all your eggs in the Easter Christmas basket. Put eggs in that basket, but have other baskets. You know, be promoting things in summertime or fall. Maybe you got something going on your church. Like, maybe there's a big old barbecue you're gonna do, a picnic barbecue. Nobody else is advertising that. You should be advertising that. At the movies. Church I'm working with is literally just got started with At the Movies. We promoted At the Movies because not a lot of other churches around the area are promoting At the Movies. What a great way to so you get my point is spread your eggs. Build a strategy. Figure out what your budget is, and then and then figure out the strategy. And I can help you with that. I can help you with that. I love just talking about that. Free advice. I'm I'm giving you free advice on that. And then just launch. Get started. Get started somewhere. Whatever you're doing, wherever you are, you know, some of you probably are spending some money. Maybe some of you are not spending any money. Just get started. Right? Start with Facebook ads. You know, if you can't really figure out Google, connect with us. We can help you with that, because we'd love being able to teach. Now we get hired to run those ads because we do it all the time, but we also love to teach the strategy. So maybe there's a volunteer in your church. Who knows a little bit about this? Right? So just start somewhere because, yeah, you get some people clicking on your website, you're gonna be in good shape. Now this really works to move people from finding your your you online to eventually showing up in church. But I will go back to one more slide that I think is really important, and it's this funnel. And I'm hovering around the no. K? Here's why. It's somewhat easy. We're spending money building awareness, digital campaigns, working on SEO. Now I'm also all about using other means to grow your church. We're this is a this is a digital conversation, but I I'd be remiss if I didn't say that you gotta focus on your own people to help bring you know, invite and bring people to church. Duh. Right? And there's some I I just kinda mentioned there's traditional methods. You could do direct mail pieces, but I would do that in partnership with a digital campaign to focus on that area. Go to a community, right, that you've got your people, and that's a big community. Maybe there's a bunch of homes right there. Do a direct mail piece. Do display ads. Do Facebook ads, but also equip the people who go to your church, who live in those communities to say, hey. Here's some handout cards. Just let you know, you're part of our our marketing strategy. We need you handing these cards out to your friends, your neighbors. Right? They're gonna see ads. They're gonna get something in their mailbox. We want to get them to church. So that's a cool strategy, but here's why I focus on the no. Users that click start exploring your digital assets, your social, Google Business Profile, YouTube, websites. That's what I wanna end with, website. It is critical that your website has a phenomenal homepage that is just inviting for unchurched or de churched people. You don't put your mission statement on your homepage. Nobody cares about that. That's unchurched or de churched. They wanna know what do you have to offer me? So I'm a big fan of StoryBrand. You guys little plug for Donald Miller. His books, Building the StoryBrand, kinda walk somebody through. You've got somebody who's checking that out. They're a character. They've got a problem. They need a guide. Right? It's that whole it's that whole matrix of building a a website that speaks to unchurched people. I kinda say it like this all the time around here. I go, we're going after the one ahead of the 99, the one ahead of the 99. So build your website in such a way that you can target them. K? Now here's I I guess I get to plug this. So, this is what we do at Missional Marketing. We run a lot of digital ad campaigns. We do a lot of local SEO work. We build websites. We provide communications consulting. That's with our church communications group. But in all this, I we're a servant leader. We wanna teach. We wanna inform and let you know, here's what you can do for 20 the rest of 2024, 2025, 26, 20 moving forward, here's how you can build a really great strategy and get a funnel process that actually works to engage more people digitally and move them towards attending. Yes. That's the goal, and we're passionate about that. So we wanna teach, inform, equip you guys. These are the things that we actually do. Now, last slide. Again, you can scan in that QR code, or jhamrock@missionalmarketing.com. Take a little picture of that. Shoot me an email. I'd send you the slide deck. Be happy to connect with you guys. I don't think I have any other questions. So I'm just about I have 20 seconds left. So, hey, guys. Thanks for listen.