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The Analogy of the Parade (Promotion)
By chris | November 29, 2006
When people think about marketing, they usually think about the fun stuff. The glossy side of marketing, the promotion element of the Marketing Mix is very attractive. Obviously, you have to develop a promotional plan if you want people outside the doors of your church to know about what is going on inside. As a marketing coach, you can help ministry leaders implement all the elements of the Marketing Mix, so the promotion side stands a greater chance of having lasting impact. It is easier to get people in the door, than it is to keep them coming back once they come.
Church promotion is like a parade. I imagine it like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. As you watch the floats going by, you see some pretty amazing designs and very interesting ideas. It’s very entertaining just watching the parade. At one moment your attention is directed towards a fascinating float, and as the float slowly moves forward, you begin to notice the interesting float behind it. Your senses are filled as the floats go by one after another. Time passes, then you see the Santa Claus float. “Okay, how many more shopping days until Christmas?” You know the parade is over until next year—time to eat, then you watch some football!
In the same way, the typical church calendar is a parade of events. Some events are more creative than others. Some of the promotional elements have really great design, others, just pass by without much fanfare. By the time Christmas rolls by, you know it is almost over—until next year when the parade starts again.
What is needed is a master plan for making the parade make sense. You need someone who can make the individual parts of the promotion lead somewhere productive. You need a “Grand Marshal” who can integrate all the marketing promotions into the rest of the marketing mix.
Silos in Ministry Marketing
In my experience, churches tend to practice all the elements of the Marketing Mix separately in silos. They do not integrate programming into their marketing planning, they make programming plans, without taking measures to understand “price” and turn to making promotion strategies with only a slight glance toward “place”. Add to this the fact that nobody has a marketing calendar anywhere in the church and you see why it is hard to build momentum in ministry marketing.
I have seen churches put together major promotional events, where their location wasn’t prepared at all for response. The parking lot was jammed, people crowded the halls, and everyone felt amazed that the church could have such an impact. Then a week later, nobody from the week before came back. What’s up with that? Lack of understanding the Marketing Mix, that’s what!
Honestly, if most churches had just a 2% response rate to everything they promoted and managed to keep the people they reached, the churches would not be able to handle the number of people. We would not have the church growth problems we have now.
Large churches have trouble with marketing just like little churches. Most of them have better programming and planning. But the elements of marketing are often managed in silos; children’s programming is not developed in concert with adult ministry, issues about location only come up when the adult ministry “needs childcare”. Who knows what the youth guys are doing! Large staff churches crank out programming by the ton and (if they aren’t each doing their own promotional strategies) hand off promotion to someone who knows how to use a Mac, but hasn’t a clue about ministry. Sometimes the silos in a big church can get very dysfunctional and even work against each other.
In small churches, the planning may be done by the limited staff. But all the elements of the Marketing Mix are not considered together either. Programming is often based on what is available from the bookstore or denominational office. So these churches suffer from ineffective marketing because much of the Marketing Mix is planned remotely by people in other places who don’t know anything about the particular church, or her situation.
The reason churches experience ineffective marketing is they are operating a parade, with no Grand Marshal to pull it all together. The Grand Marshal is not a person, it is the marketing plan. Planning all the elements of the Marketing Mix, involves developing programs based on having a clearly defined mission, knowing who your target audiences are, understanding their needs, so you can link your message to solutions that have life-application to unchurched people. Then you are able to select proper media and line-up your marketing activities to attract people. In your planning, you plan for follow-up and are ready to receive and retain the people you attract.
Media Does Not Automate Response
While coaching a missionary to Western Europe, I had a coaching conversation that went like this:
The missionary showed me a catalog with gospel tracts in various languages. “Do you think these tracts would be good for the refugees I will be serving? They are three cents each. I was wondering if they are a good deal.”
I looked at the catalog and then told the missionary, “I am sorry, I can’t tell you if they are good or not. I need more information about the people you will give them to. For example, I need to know if they know how to read. It may be that you hand these out to people who can’t understand them. Also, I would want to know what the tracts say. They are not translated in this catalog. It could be that even though the refugees can read, the message might not relate to them at all”
The missionary looked at me stunned, “Yeah, but they are only three cents!”
It was as if the missionary felt the media should be effective just because it existed. Not everything you find in a catalog is a good thing. And despite the low price, the tracts could be a waste of money. It only makes sense to understand more about the refugees, learn more about what their needs are, and find or develop media and messages that speak to where they are emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Merely throwing around slips of paper in someone’s mother tongue is not evangelism.
Turning that illustration back on us, most churches that are ineffective in ministry have the same mentality as the missionary. They look to marketing promotion to bail out bad strategy. (By the way, for the record, handing out tracts to people is marketing promotion. Sorry to inform you if you are an anti-marketing tract-handing-out guy! Smile you are a marketer!)
Help Ministry Leaders Meet the Grand Marshal of the Promotional Parade
People will come to you to as a marketing coach and ask you to help them with the promotion of one of the “floats” in their parade of activities. If you help them without helping them understand the entire parade, they will be ineffective in the long run. When the Santa Claus float pulls up at the end of the year, they will have nothing to show for all their parading. But if you help them find meaning and develop a “marketing parade Grand Marshal” marketing plan—there will be all kinds of Thanksgiving! (Get it?)
Topics: Define the Mission |
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