Creating Buzz
I’ll start off by saying I’m not talking about what happens when you have 1 too many Cold Smokes from the Kettlehouse. What I’m talking about is marketing jargon. In the marketing world the goal is to create buzz; that is get people talking about your product, company, idea, or whatever. There are a lot of ways to create buzz. Bill Gates creates buzz when he donates $1 Billion to a good cause. Brittany Spears creates buzz by going out on the town without any underwear on. Again, the idea is to get people talking, which ultimately brings awareness to your brand. Although it doesn’t all have to be positive, I think it helps if most of the buzz is positive, especially if you are a church! (FYI, I almost always wear my underwear when I go outside).
Here is what River City Church has done to create buzz in Missoula. First of all, we are trying to meet everyone we can and tell them why we moved to Missoula. We also hand out cards. We’re hoping that once people get to hear our story, and get to know us a little bit, that they will begin talking about us and River City Church. This is also called viral marketing. You rely on word of mouth to get the news out. Although initially we may reach the fewest people this way, the contacts that we do make are good and long-lasting. Our strongest friendships that we’ve made here so far have come from just meeting people in our neighborhood and elsewhere around Missoula.
The next thing we did was partner with Tellstart to do a phone marketing campaign to 35,000 households in the Missoula area. I have to say that I was a little skeptical of this at first, but finally decided that this would indeed help to create some buzz, even if we ticked people off in the process. In fact, we did tick a few people off, but we also ended up with several people coming to our church because of it, and we got the whole town talking about it. Just ask any Missoulian about the church that called them, and I guarantee you they will have an opinion on the matter!
We also added a bulk mailing campaign to our marketing efforts in which we mailed 35,000 postcards out 3 times to the Missoula area. Again, some people liked it, and some people hated it, but it’s helped to create some buzz.
Lastly, we partnered with Rosauers and the Missoula Food Bank to fight hunger by doing a $5,500 Grocery Giveaway by giving out $25 grocery gift cards to everyone who walked through the door of Rosauers on a Thurs and Fri evening. We asked people to donate the cards and/or food to the food bank if they didn’t need them. We sent out some press releases and got some air time with the local radio and TV stations. We had $1073 donated to the food bank, and a bunch of food was purchased and donated. Again, this created some buzz.
Lastly, all of these approaches have been tied together through our website, which was designed by Factor 1 Studios.
I think what has been important for us is that this has been an integrated campaign. We didn’t just mail out a few postcards, or just call a few homes and call it good. We didn’t just build a website and hope that people somehow found it. We used a number of different approaches that created a synergy together that otherwise would not have happened had it not been integrated. We’ll see how many people come to our launch on Sep 7th. In a way, this will be the test to see how much buzz we’ve really created here in Missoula.
I know there are some Christians who would be opposed to modern marketing practices such as direct mail or phone calls. But really, there is no biblical basis for opposing these modern approaches. I believe the only reason they aren’t found in the bible is because they weren’t around then!
We all believe in marketing, yes, even marketing the gospel of Jesus. It doesn’t matter if it’s word of mouth, TV, internet, or mail. As long as we’re making Jesus famous, I think he’s smiling down on us.