Conversational Marketing – Part 2

Yesterday we began a series of blog-entries about Conversational Marketing based on insights I’m grabbing a hold of in a book called, “Beyond Buzz,” by Lois Kelly. I think this stuff has everything to do with Church, Church Planting, and the business you find yourself in as well. I’ll start trying to add some questions to the content to get us thinking more. As always, feel free to jump on the “comment train,” and join the conversation. Part 2… Here we go…

In chapter 1 she writes, “The big idea is simply that marketing is about having conversations and engaging with people in interesting discussions, through new and traditional channels.” I believe as leaders in the Body of Christ, we have a responsibility to creatively provide reasons for people to want to engage in meaningful conversations about what God is doing in our church. I think our recent summer Baseball series was that for the people of NLC. We simply gave people a reason to “have a conversation” with someone about our church. And it worked. People came out of the woodwork, in the dead of summer, to be apart of something that was fun, and engaging and passion-filled, and creative. And the end result was that dozens and dozens of lives were changed, and dozens of people added to the church!

She makes the statement that, “People should like talking about your company (read church.)” I love that! People love being apart of something that is exciting and forward moving! All week long, they go to their jobs and move through their lives, if we can give them something to get excited about on a Sunday morning, then I think we’re on the right track! I have had more people say to me in the last 90 days, “Sunday mornings are the highlight of my week!” or “I haven’t seen my teenagers, or kids this excited about church in a long time!” It makes me smile inside, b/c I know that what they’re truly excited about is the Life-Giving presence of Jesus that permeates every environment of Next Level Church!

She gives 2 simple steps to helping people “Have Conversations” about your business, product or church (in our case.):

1. Create Forums. She says that you’ve got to be intentional about creating forums for people to have these conversations. Of course, she sights things like blogs, podcsats, etc. But when I think individually about the people of our church, I think in terms of invitation cards, or other small tangible items that can spark conversations. For example, 2 weeks before we launched the Baseball series, we handed everyone in church 3 “tickets” that advertised the upcoming series and drove people to the church website for more information. Something small like this can be a huge conversation starter. ? What can that look like in your world? What could you do creatively that would pull people into a conversation about your business or church or product?
2. Have something interesting to talk about. I love that she doesn’t leave this unsaid. People’s attention spans are short now days. If we’re not changing up the look and feel of things, every few weeks, we’re missing it. This is why we wanted to do a huge internal series like the Baseball series this summer. We knew we wanted to give our people something to talk about in the middle of summer, instead of just writing off the summer as a wash, like most churches do. Well, it worked and there are families and people whose lives have been changed for eternity because of it!

Here’s a closing question for us… What’s on the horizon of your business or church or world that you need to get ahead of in order to create opportunities for people to “Have Conversations” about it?

Just another conversational bloggish thought,

part 3 tomorrow,

Matt