If you think that marketing does not apply to religious services, that’s not the case. Marketing can make a world of difference for your establishment and the services that you provide. There’s no gainsaying that every organization offering religious services must have a strategy. Like every other business venture, they’re not exempt from marketing their services.
However, marketing religious services can take various forms; while some organizations favor traditional approaches, some prefer modern methods. On that note, read on to learn how marketing religious services work in this age and time.
1. Word of Mouth Advertising
Word-of-mouth marketing is an excellent old-fashioned method that’s still very much relevant. However, regardless of how much effort you put into online and social media marketing, the impact won’t be as strong as word-of-mouth referrals. A satisfied client can drive dozens of potential customers your way.
For example, let’s say you deal in church candles, a customer who bought beeswax altar candles from you may likely refer you to someone else looking to buy beeswax candles. If you’re looking to improve brand awareness, try to go above and beyond for your current customers. However, don’t leave everything in the hands of your sales or customer service teams.
2. Social Media Marketing
In recent years, churches have joined the trend of having a social media presence. Social media has proven itself to become a valuable tool for communicating with church members and sourcing information. If you’re new to social media, you can start with Instagram.
Once you’ve created your Instagram account, you now have to incorporate it into your marketing plan. Businesses and social media influencers use Instagram Stories to drive their strategies. You can share content, a photo, or a video, so your Instagram followers can view it.
When posting on your Instagram profile, you can integrate your company’s color or logo into your stories to increase brand awareness. That shouldn’t be so difficult with the Canva or Adobe Photoshop mobile app. Better still, try to make use of Instagram templates. These customizable templates will help you create eye-catching content that resonates well with your target audience.
3. Content Strategy
One of the best ways to market religious services is always to have readily available content. That said, you need to come up with a foolproof content strategy and content calendar. In addition, try to pay special attention when creating unique content that promotes the religious services you provide.
If you can afford to hire content managers to spearhead the content marketing campaign, by all means, do so. Your marketing campaign managers will help oversee the implementation of your content marketing strategy. What’s more, they’ll help check the type of content that goes out to see if it meets SEO standards.
Conversely, if you’re on a tight budget, you can set up different content teams to manage your content marketing effort. Thanks to technology, you now have access to various content marketing software that streamlines content creation and marketing processes.
Whether it’s a blog post or sales copy, a content marketing platform (CMP) can help you create, distribute, and measure the impact of quality content. Typical examples of the content management system (CMS) include SEMrush, Optimizely, and CoSchedule. In addition, some of these platforms employ keyword research and SEO data tools to create better content.
4. Traditional Advertising
Traditional advertising channels are some of the best ways of reaching a specific demographic of your target audience that is not on social media. For example, your marketing team can put out ads in local newspapers, advertise upcoming television or radio station events, or post ads on billboards. Once you start seeing the results of your marketing strategy, go a step further to consolidate on the gains made to ensure your customers or members keep coming back. One way to do that is to adopt the old-fashioned method of writing newsletters.
You can keep your members abreast with upcoming events, new products, and services your organization plans to roll out. You can also send the newsletters via emails to your younger customers since that’s how it’s done these days.
5. Customer Service
Customer retention should form the basis of your marketing strategy. Besides, it’s easier and cost-effective to retain old customers than acquire new ones. Additionally, existing customers tend to deliver more revenue and profitability than new customers.
That’s why you need to prioritize delivering quality customer service from now on. A satisfied customer will always come to do business with you. The key to providing a good service is to know what the customer wants. That entails asking questions to identify the needs of your customer.
Nowadays, businesses use customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to establish and maintain strong customer relationships. A CRM tool will help you know your customers better, segment existing customers, improve customer interaction and customer retention. You can also use content marketing software to push content directly to your customer relationship management (CRM) solution, which will significantly impact lead generation and return on investment (ROI).
