Churches are lagging when it comes to influencer marketing. While this church marketing tactic is prevalent and trending, few churches use it.
Churches have long been hesitant to use influencer marketing, but the solution may be to create their influencers instead of looking to the world for them.
Local influencer marketing is very different from enterprise-level marketing and is still relatively uncharted territory. Wouldn’t it have been great if your church had jumped on the social media and digital marketing bandwagon in the early days before it became ubiquitous?
If you want to be more effective in reaching your community, you might want to give influencer marketing a try.
What’s Holding Back Influencer Marketing for Churches?
There are top three reasons why churches have not yet started working with influencers, even though they pursue other church marketing strategies.
1. Cost
The cost is one of the main factors preventing churches from getting involved. Influencer marketing is still in flux, and it can be challenging to trust influencers’ metrics. In addition, many influencers are only interested in working with brands that offer high monetary compensation.
2. Wide Audiences
The second reason churches are avoiding influencer marketing is that influencers’ followers could be from anywhere, while churches’ primary audiences are usually from the area around the church. Even larger multisite churches are still localized.
Paying a celebrity to attend and promote your event can reach a much larger audience than you would with paid advertising alone. Celebrities can reach hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, which can help you get the word out about your Easter service.
3. Lack of Authenticity
The third reason is that it just doesn’t look authentic. Having a celebrity talk about your church on Instagram will come across as fake and insincere. That’s not a good look for a religion that’s founded on the idea of authentic relationships.
Besides that, authenticity affects one’s ROI. It will perform much better if it feels like a genuine recommendation.
Is Influencer Marketing for Churches Worth a Risk?
Even though the reasons why influencer marketing wouldn’t be a good idea for churches, you might also wonder what could happen if you tried it. And after thinking about it, here are the three great reasons in favor of influencer marketing to be part of your church marketing technique.
1. Encourages More People
Church influencer marketing is simply recommending something to others, which they have been doing all along. But now it has started doing it online.
Besides that, influencer marketing is evangelizing. When you use the term “Influencer Marketing,” it usually refers to people with many followers. They were able to gain those followers by actively participating in a community and interacting with other users by providing helpful and quality content.
The church is supposed to be doing things like this! Both individually and as a group. For this reason, The world saw how effective it could be when it was done right and started hiring its brand evangelists and influencers.
2. Brings Strong Impact to Gospel Sharing
After SEO, influencer marketing may be the second-best digital evangelism method available to churches. A group of people who have a lot of influence can have an even more significant impact in sharing the Gospel with people who haven’t heard of it yet (we’ll talk more about this later).
3. Offers Higher ROI
Although SEO can have a wider reach, I believe that influencer marketing could create more engagement and higher ROI. The reason that influencer marketing is becoming popular is that it is more successful in terms of ROI. Most importantly, influencer marketing is much more effective than other methods and reaches a larger audience.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is a great way to impact your community and share the Gospel message significantly. However, it will require considerable time and effort from volunteers. But if you don’t have enough time to spare or you’re not sure about the effectiveness of influencer marketing, you might wait for someone to invent an automated platform to make things easier.
On the other hand, if you have the resources to spend and are looking forward to creating your influencer marketing campaign, then go for it!
If you’re ready to learn how to use influencer marketing to promote your church or organization. In that case, check out the Church Candy Podcast to listen to different church marketing tips to reinvigorate your community!