Remember way back in 2008 when you would have rave cards printed to distribute to your people so they could help you promote your new series? I’ll be honest, we still do that for our a number of our sermon series.
But it’s 2010 and people want to share what’s happening at their church on Facebook and Twitter. To that end, over the last six months I have been tinkering with landing pages for our High Invite series’ at Gateway Church. We direct people to share the landing page in their social media circles and in some cases we also direct pay per click ads to the page. We’re still experimenting with different ideas and changing things up looking for the best results and so far I’ve been really happy with the response.
We haven’t got it all figured out but here’s what I’m learning:
Make It Easy
The written content has to be snappy and right to the point. Make sure the end of your copy and your call to action are above the fold so that visitors can see the end of what it is you are asking them to read and know that this will only take a few seconds.
Better yet, express the same info in a video, not just your series bumper but a video of a human talking right to the vistor and making the ask. For that matter, don’t waste anyone’s time with your bumper on the landing page, save that for your home page. If you do use a video, still use copy along side it to reinforce the content.
There has been a direct correlation between the amount of content (copy and video) and the response. Simple works.
Measurable Action
When our team first sat down I asked the question; how do we create an action for people to take so that we can measure if this is working or not? In business the measurable action is either a sale right on the site, a contact request or a phone call. We settled on adding a form for people to fill out so that we could send them a reminder to show up on Sunday.
Good data informs the changes that need to be made.
Maintain the Buzz
This probably goes without saying, but you need the ability to share the page on Facebook and Twitter and it needs to be clear and easy.
I put Facebook like buttons and Retweet buttons in several places and we have a comment stream that is also pulling in Tweets that link to the page. That’s a good start but I’m sure most churches will have saturated their social media networks with the page after a week and it will pretty much die after that.
To keep people coming back we post each week’s video on the page and ask people to continue the conversation in the comment stream.
Stimulating a wave on the internet takes some hustle…and killer content.
Here’s our latest landing page although for this series the video team didn’t have the bandwidth to kick out a video.
Is your church rolling landing/promo pages? What are you learning? Link ’em if you got ’em.
Stephen Bateman says
It’s been liked 256 times on Facebook, not bad!
We kicked around the idea of adjusting our site’s background to be on brand with the series. This sounds like a good alternative. How long do you spend on these landing pages?
Vince Marotte says
Not a lot of time needed to roll one…especially if you have solid CMS. Just copy and paste for the buttons and Echo chat component and a few minutes to slap together the Wufoo form for the reminder.
Kyle Reed says
I love this, I love that you are thinking creatively about this.
Great stuff