Transcription
Hey, what's up, y'all? In this video, we're going to be walking you through a simple framework that a church of 150 people has actually used to bring in 180 new visitors in the last 12 months. So, let's dive into how to promote your church. Coming up.
Hey, what's up, y'all? Welcome back. My name is Chris Abbott, but all my friends just call me "Abbo," and on this channel, we are specifically dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders be able to use social media and technology in order to grow their church and reach more people for Jesus. So, in this video, we're going to be breaking down a simple four-part framework that churches all over the country have been using. In fact, we've actually helped over 500 churches in the last 24 months use this exact strategy, and it's generated over 60,000 prayer requests and over 7,000 visitors to those churches. I told you about a friend of mine who pastors a church of 150; when they first started, they've had 180 new visitors just in the last 12 months using this. There's a church of 20 that was able to generate 209 new visitors in only five months, and a church of 40 who got 96 planned visits in only three months using the strategy. So, this works; it's been proven time and time again, and it works at churches no matter the size of your church, no matter where you're located in the country, and I think it's going to help you. So, let's dive in and take a look at this four-part framework.
Alright, so step number one is you want to create a targeted Facebook ad, and what you want to do is you actually want to create a Facebook ad, and the objective that you want to choose is messages. So what we're going to do is we're not going to send people to your church website. We're not going to run this for like engagement or reach or anything like that. Specifically what we want to do is we want Facebook's algorithm to optimize our ad to get us as many messages as possible. So that that means is people are going to click on the ad, and they're going to go into Facebook messenger where now we can have a conversation with them.
Now, just to clarify, when we're talking about a Facebook ad, this is not a boosted post. Boosted posts are a great way to be able to engage and reach all the people inside your church, but if we're trying to reach people outside the church, the best way to do that is with a targeted Facebook ad. The way to know the difference is that if you're doing everything on your page or in ad center, where like you're going in and you're posting something on your page and then you're boosting it and you're paying 20 bucks or 30 bucks in order to reach more people. Alright, that's a boosted post, and you know because you're boosting it and then you're checking everything in ad center. If you're creating a targeted Facebook ad, this is actually done in a completely different part of Facebook. What you do is you go to facebook.com/adsmanager, and then you're gonna create an ad from that dashboard. So it's something that looks completely different; it doesn't show up in ad center, and why they have ad center and ads manager or business manager, I have no idea. Facebook loves to make things confusing and kind of, you know, put things all over the place, and they're constantly changing things. But the most important thing to know is that you need a Facebook ad, not a boosted post. So you can go to facebook.com/adsmanager, and you can start a brand new Facebook ad, and you're going to choose the objective of messages.
Now, for your targeting, this is pretty simple; all you want to do is drop a pin on your location on your church and you just want to draw out a radius that is driving distance of your church. So, for most churches, that's probably 10 to 15 miles. I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma; for my church, we do about 15 miles. I know for a church in Manhattan that I ran for one time, they only did one mile because that was like two million people or something crazy. So, if you live in a really populated area, that might be smaller, but for most churches, either in a medium-sized city, it's probably 10 to 15 miles, or even the suburbs; if you're in more of a rural area, that might be more like 20, 30, or even 45 miles. Again, just depending on how far driving distance is for your church and how far people are willing to drive in your city. And finally, for the actual message of the ad, I would create something like, "How can I pray for you?" If we make this about prayer requests, what's gonna happen is we're gonna be able to reach everyone who lives in the driving distance of the church who's going through something. If you're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like you've got like the pyramid, this is going to reach everyone on the bottom three levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So people that have health needs, safety needs, financial needs, relationship needs. These are people that have real, felt needs that are kind of going through something, and you just want to put your ad out there to just say, "Hey, what's up? My name's Pastor Chris. How can I pray for you this week?" Then they're gonna click on the ad, and then they're gonna go to step two.
Step two is Facebook messenger. So, we set up the ad in step one; now when people click on the ad and they go to send their prayer requests, we're not gonna have them post it in the comments or email us. We want them to send their prayer requests through Facebook messenger. This does a couple of things. Number one, it allows people to be completely confidential. They don't have to put all of their personal stuff on blast by posting it publicly in the comments. It's also going to allow you to be able to have a personal one-on-one ministry conversation with them through Facebook messenger, and then number three, it's also going to keep a record of that conversation. So now, when you go back into Facebook messenger, now you have every single person that you've ever prayed for, and you can go back, look at the conversations, see what their prayer request is, and then you can even follow up with them, you know, a couple days or even a couple weeks down the line to see how things are going.
Okay, so before I get to my last couple of points, and I want to hear from you: Have you ever tried running Facebook ads before? Have you ever tried running specifically a messages ad where you're running a Facebook ad into Facebook messenger? If so, post it in the comments below; I want to hear from you. What worked? What didn't work? And if you have any questions, feel free to ask me; I'll make sure to answer every single one.
Alright, step number three is plan your visit. So what we want to do is every single prayer request that comes in, we want to promise to pray for them. We want to engage with them. But then we also want to invite them to plan a visit for this Sunday, and an easy way to do this is just to say, "Hey, thank you so much, John. I'll definitely be praying for you, man. Thanks for trusting me with your prayer request. Man, we're actually having church this Sunday at 10 o'clock; would you like to come out so that we can pray for you in person?" Whenever you do this, you're usually going to see about 10% of the people that submit a prayer request then go on to plan a visit to your church. So if they say, "Yes, I'd love to come to church on Sunday," and say, "Okay, great, let me get a little bit of information so we can send you some important details about your visit on Sunday," and you just collect their phone number and email so you can follow up; you can send them a reminder text Saturday night and then also like to call them within 15 minutes of them actually planning a visit. So you can just introduce yourself as the pastor and just let them know, "Hey, I just wanted to reach out to you personally, introduce myself, answer any questions you might have about, you know, coming out to the church, about, you know, where to park or what to wear." So if they don't answer, just leave them a voicemail and then shoot them a text that says basically the exact same thing. Then if they like talking on the phone, they'll call you back; if they like texting, they'll text you back.
Alright, and finally, step number four, the audio prayer. So, what we want to do here is we're going to use something that I call the conversation elevation framework. It's a three-part framework that we're going to do because right now when people saw your ad and you're saying, "Hey, how can I pray for you?", they still don't know you, and you don't know them. It's still kind of this online, kind of anonymous conversation. But when we send an audio prayer, and now they hear your voice using their name, praying for their situation, what it's going to do is it's going to elevate that conversation to a personal connection. So it takes it from this online, anonymous interaction to a personal connection. Now when they show up to church, they're not just showing up wondering if they like the music or if they're gonna like the chairs or do they like the color of the inside of your sanctuary. Is it 72 degrees, but they like it chili, 71. None of that stuff matters because now they're showing up because of relationship. They feel like they have a personal connection to you. So if someone says, "Hey, have you ever been to First Baptist, Jinx?", it's not just like, "Oh, no, hey, know the pastor," it's not just, "Hey, yes, I've been," or "Hey, they prayed for me online." No... I know Pastor Jim. That's a game-changer because now we've elevated it, conversation elevation from an online conversation to a personal connection. So let's say John reached out with a prayer request and said, "Hey, my wife Susie is having surgery next week. We're just a little bit nervous about it, so if you could pray for her, that'd be awesome." So what you're going to do is you're going to send an audio prayer. You're just going to use that three-part framework. You're going to introduce yourself, say, "Hey, John, what's up? This is Pastor Chris. Man, thank you so much for reaching out. I just want to reach out to you and pray for you personally, so let's pray. Alright, dear God, I thank you for John and his wife Susie, gotta pray for her surgery next week. I pray for the doctors that'll be performing the surgery, all the nurses that are involved." You're going to go through your prayer and say, "In Jesus' name, Amen," and then you want to end it with a question. So you say, "John, I tell you what, we're actually having church this Sunday at 10 o'clock. Can you make it?" That's a three-part framework: introduce yourself, pray for him, end it with a question. You want to make sure the last part of your audio prayer should be a question mark. Don't say anything after you ask the question. You don't want to say, "Hey, can you make it, and just let me know we sure would love to host you and Susie and your family," or, "Oh, okay, just let me know, bro." You're going to close the loop in their brain that you open by asking a question. So, ask a question and leave it hanging. Now, they're going to feel on the hook to respond. So they might say, "Yes, I'll be there Sunday," or, "Shoot, I can't make it this Sunday, but I'll be there next Sunday," or they might say, "Hey, actually, I've already got a church." Either way, we just want to bring it to an invitation, and we want to bring it to a yes or a no. We don't want to leave them kind of in that warm, you know, no man's land. So, they say yes, awesome; if they say no, awesome, but we want to make sure to invite them to church, end it with a question, and have them say yes or no.
Alright, so if you like this video and you found it valuable and you want to learn a little bit more about the system, or if you're interested in just having me and my team actually set it up for you, just go over to churchgrowthagency.com or click on the link in the description below. We've got a free video that's going to walk you through a little bit more information, and if you'd like, we'll hop on a call and even talk about what it would look like for us to set it up for you.