For years, marketers have tried to attribute social directly to sales, but industry standards and consumer data reveal that their true focus should be expanding awareness and consideration.Think long-term, not quick fix. Think relationships, not attribution. Source: The 2018 Sprout Social Index | Sprout Social The biggest mistake I see churches and nonprofits make when……
Category: Marketing
What to do about the end of auto-sharing to Facebook profiles and creating episodic social media content
If you auto-share items from your site to Facebook (blog posts for example), you’ll want to take note of the big changes coming this week. Many people, nonprofits, small businesses, churches etc use the built-in social media auto-sharing features on platforms such as WordPress or Squarespace or Wix or Weebly etc to share content to Facebook, Twitter,……
Churches Should Realize That Branding is Dead
As with many things to do with marketing and messaging, churches are way behind the curve when realizing that relationships are much more powerful than advertisements or fancy branding. Marketing data points have already moved larger brands to this realization but there’s still a large vacuum in the world of nonprofit and religious org marketing……
Video at every stage of the customer journey
Holistic marketing campaigns that are based on customer journeys and utilize a mixture of text, video, and image based ads have always been the vehicle for real results if you had enough budget. It’s great to see Google (YouTube) helping to make this reachable for nonprofits, community groups, and religious orgs with a limited budget……
Harrelson Agency and Google’s New Responsive Search Ads
At Harrelson Agency, we manage a number of Google Ads campaigns (formerly AdWords as of July 24, 2018) for clients. Simply put, there’s really no better way to drive web traffic to a site or a landing page regardless of your budget, size, or goal. Whether you’re selling stuff, raising awareness, or trying to get more……
The 2018 Instagram Hashtag Guide
Common sense advice here, but I see mistakes like using the same hashtags over and over and over (or using hashtags that have nothing to do with a post) way too often (particularly from nonprofits)… As for the practice of using the same long list of hashtags on every post… Don’t do it. Instagram’s community……
Churches and Social Media
Some good points in this post regarding churches using social media as outreach, particularly for youth. It’s important to keep in mind the “how’s” and “why’s” and “where’s” of different age groups and social media use as well. I tell my clients all the time that just like we don’t all listen to music or……
Facebook ads prices are too high and companies are shifting to Instagram
The impression-based market on Facebook ads haven’t resulted in a solid and stable pricing model for most direct-to-consumer companies (or nonprofits, churches, community groups etc). The targeting capabilities are exciting, but the pricing costs for ads have to match up with the returns. So now we’re all flocking to Instagram Stories… Digiday spoke with 10……
Cautionary Tale of Patheos and Having Your Own Blog
Wow, this is quite something and a good example of why you should always run your own blog instead of relying on a blog network. Same with podcasting. What a strange turn of events. Patheos was at the center of the Mars Hill Church and Gospel for Asia stories and now they host Mark Driscoll……
Ultimate guide to SEO for small businesses (and nonprofits)
There’s some really helpful advice here for small businesses, nonprofits, and / or churches looking to get a start on SEO basics. You can take a course on Lynda.com or watch some YouTube videos to learn more about what SEO can mean for your group, but the fundamentals here are pretty spot on: SEO isn’t……
Owning your own platform is important, and valuable
I often get the question from clients of why I mostly recommend having your own website on WordPress or a self-hosted platform in the age of Facebook. As companies who built their businesses and traffic flow on the back of Facebook over the years have found out, that can be a very precarious decision. Audience……
Why you should quit blogging
Fun post that highlights many of the concerns I hear from clients and friends when I encourage them to blog. Blogging and newsletters are still incredibly impactful for businesses, churches, nonprofits… or just sharing what’s on your mind. Get out there. Be yourself. It’ll be ok. You think that you are a terrible writer. No……
Blogging Guide for Churches and Small Businesses
Blogging is still a great way to get the word out about your business, church, nonprofit, cause, or interests. It’s a slow grind in the sense that it can take many months of consistency to build up an audience and see any sort of response that might make you feel like the endeavor is “worth……
Focus on Engagement and Newsletters Rather than Likes and Shares
In fact, research shows that there isn’t a high correlation between reading time and social sharing. As you can see from the graph, the high read time doesn’t translate to shares. Just because someone clicked a share button, it doesn’t mean that they were engaged with the content. Source: How to Effectively Manage Engagement for Stronger Influence
A Spotless Newsfeed?
Not April 1… Tide-to-Go will partner with Google Chrome to provide a downloadable extension that will allow users to remove negative content from their social media newsfeed – helping to make more than just clothes a little bit brighter. Source: Tide Digital Advert By S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications: Social Stain Remover | Ads……
SEO for beginners free course
Here’s a free and good course on SEO basics. Whether you’re a business, church or nonprofit, you should have some basic understandings of what SEO means to your website and how just a few tweaks can really make a big difference. I went through most of the course and there’s some good info here, especially……
2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Social Media Examiner
“Nearly all marketers (83%+) who’ve been employing social media marketing for 1 year or longer report it generates exposure for their businesses.” I’m skeptical of these sorts of reports generally, but SME does a good job of presenting digestible data. There are certainly some good takeaways here for businesses of all sizes, nonprofits, and churches looking to……
Will you be able to buy items on Instagram soon?
Looks that way. This is potentially huge for small businesses that use Instagram for promotions of their products (I know I follow several boutique accounts promoting everything from pens to knives to stationary)… Instagram just stealthily added a native payments feature to its app for some users. It lets you register a debit or credit……
Millennials, Boomers, and Marketing
Interesting to note here as well: Millennials face a near-future of heavy automation and artificial intelligence that Boomers did not have to face as they moved into their 40’s and 50’s. Jobs, as we knew them thirty years ago, are becoming rarer. The divide between these two groups will only grow. Perhaps that’s another reason that……
Bible Domains
When the society — which lists several conservative Christian “founding partners” on the get.bible website — first applied for the rights to .bible, it pledged to provide wide access to “all qualified parties” interested in Bible issues. Soon after acquiring the domain name, though, ABS barred publication of material it defined as “antithetical to New Testament……