attracting more visitors to your church - acr straegies

Increase Visitors > Target a Crowd > Build Relationships

Attracting more visitors to your churchRELATIONSHIPS!

Relationships are key: A relationship with Christ is what we need to strive for daily. The Bible is a relationship story about a God that loves us and wants a personal relationship with us. As Christians we all want that relationship.

Small groups is another church “relationship” builder that helps people grow in their faith and experience genuine relationships with other believers.

The gospel is meant to be shared through relationships. Otherwise, evangelism would be as simple as posting scripture on billboards across the world. The greatest tool to reach non-believers is through genuine, authentic, relationships.

Is your church, like a lot of other churches, struggling with inviting guests? Between the workplace and children’s activities, families are busier, and it seems harder to get people’s attention. Yet without guests, your church will not grow. In fact, it will decline! You need to at least be gaining enough new members to replace people that leave, move, or pass on. (For a free spreadsheet that will help you examine your numbers click here www.acrstrategies.com/church and go to Free Resources.)

So, knowing that relationships is the key, how do you grow? - Every church has something they do extremely well. For some it’s Bible classes, for others it may be music, youth group, sports, small groups, sermons, etc. What part of your church is your “Relationships” builder? The area that people seem to talk about and join.

Once you find your “Relationships Builder” then what? - Ok, you have found at least one area, maybe more than one that is your key relationship area(s). Now it is time to find people in your community that will respond to this area and develop relationships with them.

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Attracting more visitors to your churchRELATIONSHIPS!

Community - Of course the best way to develop relationships with your community is through your members. But, how do you reach people who are not currently connected to your members and build relationships with them?

It used to be that we knew our neighbors and as a community we had more face to face conversations with people in our community. Today a lot of that takes place in the non face to face environment called Social Media. People still want to connect and have conversations they just do a lot of it on-line. Facebook, LinkedIn and others allow people to create groups and invite others that have like interests. If you have an interest in something there are hundreds of groups that you can join.

Matching your “Relationship Builder” to Community Interest – Do people in your community even know about your relationship builders? If you think about it, how would they know unless someone tells them!

Social Media – Facebook, LinkedIn, others are the “Key” - Let’s examine how this would take place. - Ok, you have determined your best “relationship builder” is your Praise Band that plays Contemporary Christian music. Let’s find a Social Media audience and connect.

Step 1. – examine Facebook and LinkedIn for groups that have an interest in Christian music. Join the groups, join conversations, contribute value, develop relationships. (No Cost!)

Step 2. – Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to place your post (or ads) in front of a target audience that you define! Within Facebook, you can define your target audience as people who like Christian Music or, even more narrowly, people who like or have an interest in Contemporary Christian Music! (Cost can be as low as $5 a day. You determine how much you want to spend and for how long.)

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Attracting more visitors to your church

RELATIONSHIPS!

Step 3. – Post interesting stuff about your Praise Band Post a video so people can hear and see how good they are, include a click to your church website to hear more songs from the band. (Note: both Facebook and LinkedIn offer what is called Pay Per Click advertising. This means you only pay for your advertising if someone clicks and goes to your website!)

Our best “Relationship Builder” is our Pastor’s sermons! – Ok, let’s say Pastor is doing a sermon series on Nehemiah and Leadership. You could go into both Facebook and LinkedIn and develop a target audience of people who have the title of Manager, Director, C-Suite, etc. Then post information, ask questions, “ what would you do” type of posts and have the person click to your website for the answer. Of course right on your website is information about Pastor’s Leadership sermons and an invite for this Sunday.

When the leadership sermon series is over you can still target “leaders” and have them click to the past sermon series on your website.

The KEY is Defining your “AUDIENCE” and putting “CONTENT” in front of them that they value. Here are some examples.

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How can we help? ACR Strategies

[email protected]

Attracting more visitors to your church

RELATIONSHIPS!

The “Key” to more visitors is “Relationships.” This is not a new concept but in today’s on-line society the answer may lie in growing relationships in a different manner.

We at ACR Strategies hope you found this valuable. If you have any questions, please contact us and we would be more than happy to assist you.

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attracting more visitors to your church - acr straegies

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