I listen to a podcast every week by an advertising copywriter who is fond of saying that “expensive rent is the best money you can spend on advertising.” My church benefits from this first-hand. Our building can be seen from one of the two major streets in our town. Getting to it is a little more difficult, but I can tell people which church I go to just by saying “it's the one you can see from New Circle Road.”
Online, it's not as easy though. There are few websites that people “drive past” on their way somewhere else. Google is one, but there aren't a lot of “major roads” that you can build a site on that people will see it on.
Just having a live-stream of your church service isn't a guarantee that people will watch, let alone participate. You have to tell people that your live-stream exists and guide them to it.
Advertising is more than selling
A lot of churches balk at the idea of advertising. “Why should we advertise?,” they may say. “That's what corporations do to get people to buy things they don't need. The church is different. People need Jesus.”
People do need Jesus; that part is true. What's not true is that advertising is just to get people to buy things. It can also us it to share information that they don't know.
Start with the premise that there are people out there who would attend your online church service if they knew about it. No matter if you're a high-church Lutheran or a non-denominational church that worships through rap, there are people looking for your church. You just need to find them.
Jesus talked about it in the parable of the great banquet in Luke 14:15-24. People were invited, but all made excuses. Then, the Master had his servant go out and bring in anyone and everyone.
Notice what the Master didn't do. He didn't order the servant to stay in the house and hope people found it. The announcement about the great banquet was wonderful news, and some people were happy to come to once they found out about it. The Master wasn't happy with just a few people, though. He wanted a full house.
Consider your live stream as an opportunity for people who are spiritually starving to come to a feast. Go out and invite them to come in.
How do you do that? The first Christians did it by public speaking in the town square. We really don't have that today. Sure, there are big events where people gather and some try to capitalize on these situations by renting portable sound equipment and preaching to the disinterested crowds.
There are other ways to “compel them” in the 21st century, though.
The first is by having a remarkable live stream. People sometimes share things that are remarkably bad, but I'm sure you don't want your church service lumped into the same category. Let's concentrate on “remarkably good” instead. When a message is delivered with high quality, people assume that the message must be important. Why else would you put so much work into something? That may be enough to increase the numbers of people who watch online, but while you may rejoice with an increase in viewers or attendees, there is “still room.”
Entice people with compelling content
This is where social media can be important. Share something compelling. Make something that people will want to share. Create something that makes people laugh, cry, think, or moan. At the end, or as part of it, share your church website or live stream address.
If you're on social media, you've seen this kind of content. When was the last time that you commented on a post, liked it, or even shared it? Especially if you shared it, you did so because there was something about it that was worth sharing. You wanted your friends to think of you as the type of person who would share something like it.
You probably didn't share a link that you felt guilty about clicking on. It was probably something funny or thought-provoking. What can your church make that's shareable like this? What can you make that people in your congregation will want to put on their walls or retweet? What will make people want to check out a church that would put something like this out online?
If you do a good enough job, this type of shareable content could go viral, but that's rare. More often, content will get a few shares or a few comments. That's progress, but don't give up when the first funny video doesn't take off or when the thought-provoking piece falls flat. Make more. You may think that something will take off and release it to no reaction whatsoever. You might also create something as an after-thought and release it just so the work doesn't go to waste on your hard drive, but then be surprised at the interest it generates.
One caution. You may be tempted to water-down content that you want to share. In the name of “appealing to more people” you may leave out things that you shouldn't. Believe it or not, that could be a recipe for failure. Don't offend for offense sake. Don't hide who you are either. Think about the successful corporate brands that have embraced their message despite offending some (or many). Now, think about all the inoffensive messages that draw people in. Politicians offend the opposition all the time. Entertainers do it too.
Cheapest isn't best
Churches like to go the cheapest route in many of their endeavors and this may be a place you'd be tempted to do the same.
There are ways create an impact that won't cause you to mortgage your church building, but they may not be the free ways you may be thinking of. I'm thinking of ads on Google, FaceBook, and YouTube. This is another place where specificity can yield great results. Does your church have a ministry to single parents? Why not highlight a story of a single parent your church has helped, but direct the ad toward single parents? Have a thriving ministry to teens? Target teens in your advertising.
Of course you can drive traffic to your church's website for a video that would interest your target audience. But it doesn't have to end there. Once someone comes to your site, you can use a “pixel targeting” to automatically add them to a list of interested people whether they take any further action or not. Then, using the “retargeting” feature of whichever service you chose, you can continue to advertise to them.
Here's an example: You may have noticed that when you search for a book on Amazon, ads for that book just happen to show up on Facebook. I hate to break it to you, but that's not coincidence. It's an effort by Amazon to remind you of the book you were thinking about earlier.
So, back to our example of the ministry to teens: What if you created a short ad for your youth ministry and advertised before videos of hot bands on YouTube, retargeting teens who click on the ads? I'd bet you could start to get more and more of them to come to your site, maybe even for the live stream of your youth program.
One technique is to attract people to something entertaining and then invite them back for something similar, but with more spiritual meat.
Another technique is to provide value repeatedly and then occasionally invite them to something else. A good way to do this is to provide resources (or even links to other people's resources) that help people with their situation. On occasion, remind them that you're a part of a church that cares about them and invite them to the live-stream.
Repeat it until you're tired of it, then repeat more
Sometimes, just repeating the same message over and over will get you results that you may not believe are possible. In February, I started tweeting about once an hour 24/7. This was just an experiment to see what would happen if I used the same updates repeatedly, adding in new stuff as I made it. I started with 28 updates, so each repeated every 28 hours or so. To my surprise, I continued to get favorites, retweets, and interactions no matter how many times a tweet was repeated.
To do the same thing, I'd suggest that your church could create a snippet of the sermon from each week for the last few months and share them on social media, on a continuous loop. See how much engagement you get and tweak your timing and content to get more interaction.
Whatever you do, don't rely on the “if we build it they will come” method of getting the word out. Instead, figure out how to invite people to come. How can you let people know you exist? Answer that question and the online congregation will grow --- and it may grow larger than you may think. And regardless of how big your audience gets, there are still more people to invite. Try not to miss any of them.
