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Diary of an Expensive Church Planting Marketing Outreach Flop
By chris | June 26, 2008
A church planting team launched a new church in their community the church is called “Family Worship Center” A family oriented church. The team decided to “pull out all the stops”. They allocated $20,000 dollars for a marketing budget to announce the launch of their new church.
They used the following media:
- Mailed 30,000 postcards to people in the zip codes near their church that they purchased from a Christian marketing company
- Had a graphics designer do a professional full color brochure with pictures of families with children, service times and their mission, vision and core values printed on them
- Sent press releases to the local newspapers
- Bought set of banners to hang inside their new church location.
- Posted a website on the internet with a really cool introduction done up with the latest web technology.
- With the money they had left they bought a small advertisement in the Sunday newspaper on the day of their launch.
The Marketing Outreach was a Flop
The church planting team was very unhappy when they spent all that money and only had two visitors to their new church launch. The Planter pastor became so discouraged and frustrated he wanted to quit. How could they spend all that money on marketing and see such small results?
He called his team together and they talked and decided that marketing doesn’t work .One of the team members who had been against the marketing campaign spoke up and said, “See, I like I said five weeks ago when we started planning this marketing, marketing is not God’s will. God won’t bless us if we use Satan’s ways!” The team huddled together and prayed to God asking Him to forgive them for being so worldly
What went wrong?
- They didn’t match their Media to their Audience. They did their mailing based on zip codes, not according to the target they were best equipped to reach.
- The church is located downtown near the bus station in an old church building that is not in the same area of town they targeted with their mailing. Frankly, the people they targeted with their marketing are uncomfortable to even drive in the part of town where the church planters are locating their new church plant.
- The zip code of 30,000 names sounds impressive until you realize that 63% of the residents in the database of addresses are retired people, 24% Laotian, and 7% Hispanic immigrants and the rest, 6% are lower income families.
- They did not provide a map to the location on their postcard they sent, but depended on the prospects to visit the website to get directions to the location of the church launch.
- The brochure was nice but it had no information about the church address, website, or programs.
- Also, the families in the photos all looked like upper middle class families. The lower income families who received the mailing didn’t see themselves in the images they selected for their promotion. It looked like a church for Anglo upper middle class people.
- The press releases were sent to the Religion Editor of the newspapers. Unchurched people who read the paper don’t often read this section of the newspaper.
- No one saw the indoor banners. Outdoor banners might have been better to get more of the passing street traffic.
- The website was slow loading because the Pastor insisted his 15 year-old nephew developed the site in all Flash. Most site visitors didn’t wait for the site to load and it was invisible to search engines. The site was really cool, but nobody saw it.
- By the time people could have read the advertisement that ran in the Sunday paper (the day of the launch) it was too late. Most of the people who don’t already attend church on Sunday in the community don’t get their papers until later in the morning (evidently they like to sleep in on Sunday).
- Finally, the church planting team planned and launched their entire marketing campaign in the space of five weeks. They were in a last minute rush to prepare all their marketing. Because they didn’t do the due diligence in their planning, they had an ineffective media plan.
- They blamed the Devil or the failure of marketing as a tool for ministry. But didn’t consider they Devil was in the details.
Areas to think about when Planning a Marketing Campaign
Audience: When you buy media you are not buying media per se, you are buying eyes and ears of particular people. Audience comes first in media. When you have done your homework, you know who your audience is and you find the media channels that reach them best. When you don’t have a particular audience in mind, media sales people have a way of convincing you their media is the best way to reach people. Know the people you want to reach!
Use of Media: Think about media as the tools you use to travel to the audience you want to reach. It’s like traveling in a train. Say you wanted to get to New York City by train. You can’t get on just any train to get to New York. Imagine someone saying after failing to get to New York by train, “I tried train travel, but trains can’t get you to New York. The Devil wants to keep me outta NYC!” The fact is trains can get you to New York, if you take the right trains. You have to take a train that is going to New York. In the same way, you need the right media “vehicle” to get to your audience.
Reach and Frequency: In media you can’t get to the audience in one trip. You have to reach them several times before the will notice you. Generally it takes 8-12 exposures to a message in these days, before people start to notice. You need to “reach” the right audience enough times “frequency” to get their attention. In the example above the church planters reached people one time in the mail box and one time in the news paper. And because they lacked planning, they have no way of knowing how many times they reached the same audience, or even if they reached the people they were most likely to minister to effectively even once.
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June 26th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Great post, Chris. I especially loved the part about trying to get to NY by train. “Trains can’t get you to NY” is classic.
I experienced the same thing 15-20 years ago when churches were first starting to do contemporary or seeker services. They’d do poor planning or execution and wouldn’t develop a core group or basic strategies to support the new service. Then when things would fizzle, they’d say, “See, seeker services don’t work around here”, or “The people have spoken, they only like traditional services”. They might as well have said, “That train can’t reach seekers”.
Thanks for your insights!
June 26th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Thanks Mark! Yeah I think trains can’t get you to some places in Montana–but everywhere else is covered
June 26th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
And what was the compelling response generating benefit proposition?
And what was the immediate benefit to the person who would respond?
And what response channels were presented on the postcard?
And what “Previously demonstrated behavior” and “individual or household characteristics” were used to select the 30,000?
Why 30,000?
What was the expected result?