As anyone who has been following this blog knows we have not had any budget for marketing LifePoint. We haven’t really had any money to budget ;). Our Grand Opening service is Easter Sunday, only 9 days away. Up until now we have relied solely on word of mouth which has done pretty well. Around 150 first time guests have graced our services among our 3 preview services. I am no expert but that seems pretty good for about 12 active people. We want to try and get as many people as possible to our first official service and are trying to come up with inexpensive ways to get the word out. Here are a few thoughts that we have had and or tried. Let us know if you think they are good or bad ideas and why. Also include some of your own ideas that might help the marketing challenged like ourselves.
The MySpace Blitz – We have done this one for our preview services and seems to have created a little traffic. Basically I create a graphic to advertise our coming service or series with a link to our website and I leave it as a comment to everyone on our friends list and in a bulletin. I also offer the code so that other can paste the ad on their page or comment their friends with it.
Windshield Flyers – I’m not sure how I feel about this one. I have to really like what’s on the flyer to not get annoyed that it was on my windshield. That makes me hesitate on this one a bit. We simply print up a hopefully compelling flyer and go to a bunch of places where there are a lot of cars parked and leave them under the windshield. A simple concept but is it effective?
Ghetto Billboards – I call it this because it is a cheap alternative to the Satan Hates Life campaign that lifechurch.tv is doing. We obviously can’t afford billboard space but we can afford a couple sheets of corrugated plastic, stencils and some spray paint. The idea is to create a website at a very interesting domain name that will at least cause curiosity. The domain name should be something relevant to the culture of our area and at least open discussion on some issue where people really live. We put this domain on something similar to yard sale sign all over the city in higher traffic areas. Once people go to the website they will find some hopefully good information about the subject and an invitation to our church.
These are a few of our ideas. Critique and suggest away. We really want you comments on this.
