Did you know that 15 percent of people are late to work at least once a week? I can’t lie. I’ve been late to work a time or two, and I really don’t like when it happens. It throws off my day and everything starts to feel rushed.
That may seem like a random thought, but it has everything to do with a common marketing mistake that churches often make.
You might think I’m referring to not having a church Facebook page or not sending out postcards to promote Easter services. But I’m not.
The worst mistake you can make when it comes to marketing is procrastinating or starting a project too late.
Here are four reasons why I believe this is one of the worst things you can do when running any type of campaign at your church:
1. Rush jobs allow more room for mistakes.
When deadlines are tight, it’s sometimes easy to miss errors you would have caught if you’d had more time. Proofing and editing are two very important elements in a successful campaign (whether print or digital) that can easily be overlooked.
Don’t rush this. Take your time and make it perfect
2. You don’t have time to think strategically.
When time is lacking, and you’re rushing to come up with ways to promote your event, you’ll find yourself doing what has always been done (which might be fine if what has always been done has great results).
However, planning ahead and allowing time for you and your team to think strategically about how you want to market an event could allow for some pretty cool creative breakthroughs. Don’t sell yourself short by always rushing your marketing materials out the door.
3. There isn’t time to set up a way to track results.
Alright, so you’ve gotten everything together. Maybe you’ve set up online advertising for your event, put an ad in the newspaper or sent out postcards to the area to get the word out.
So now what? Was there time to figure out how to track results of your marketing efforts? Probably not if you only had a couple of days to get the plan together and produced. Make time for this! You won’t waste money in the future on things that don’t work, and you can invest more money into the successful things.
4. There are no “do-overs.”
This relates to the first point. Maybe you came up with a catchy idea that sounded great at first, but now you are doubting if that was the best way to tell the community about your event.
Well, once you send something to print, whether it’s a postcard or a billboard, there really are no take-backs. By planning out your marketing schedule way before an event, you can avoid these errors.
Of course, there are other marketing mistakes that are pretty common, and I’ll go over that in a future blog post.
