Justin Blaney > Successful Marketing Is about Helping People

The first time I met with Rick Wong, we sat at a round table in a strip mall suburban Seattle Starbucks,

the flagship variety that comes with a Clover machine and hordes of middle school kids at around three in the afternoon.

Rick is a middle-aged sales expert who has experience running major divisions at Microsoft and Hewlett Packard and even earned quarterly meetings with Michael Dell for a season. When I met him he had just launched a consulting firm and was writing a book, all in the name of helping others with their careers. I’d heard him speak at an event and was compelled to reach out to him. He was kind enough to set up a meeting so we could get to know each other.

As we were wrapping up this introductory meeting, a thought occurred suddenly to Rick.

“You should meet Lisa Hufford. You’d love her! She runs an enormously successful consulting firm that’s about to break $50 million in revenue and she’s only been at it a few years.” Rick leaned toward me then, as if he was about to share the secret to his grandmother’s cookie recipe. “Lisa is so successful because she loves helping people.”

Something I’ve learned about Rick as I’ve gotten to know him is that he lives by the same principles he ascribed to Lisa, which is probably why the two of them run in the same circle. People like Rick and Lisa achieve a disproportionate amount of success because, in part, of their willingness to help others. This willingness has caused them to acquire influential friends, people willing to do anything for them, and a small army of advocates who recommend them whenever the opportunity arises. I’ve seen, not just in Rick and Lisa but in hundreds of others, that this helpful spirit is often correlated with success in business and, to the point of this blog, attendance numbers and marketing.

We need to pause here and consider the elephant in the room. Marketing is evil, right? Well, it can certainly be abused, but so can anything done with nefarious purposes or through less than honorable means. The truth is marketing is a tool, a great tool, but there are a lot of misconceptions about it and its role.

When I was first starting out in business, I learned a lot about marketing from business people, in business school and from dozens of books on marketing. When I actually entered the business world for myself, observation quickly showed me that many of the things I’d been taught were nothing more than myths. Here are a few examples:

 Myth: Marketing is important no matter the outcome.

Observation: Marketing is worthless if it doesn’t result in an increase. That could be an increase in sales, in supporters or in attendance.

Myth: Good marketing can increase numbers for any company.

Observation: Marketing is just one small piece of a whole organization and if the other areas, like your greeters, services or the content of your sermons are out of sync, marketing will produce few, if any, results.

Myth: Companies can’t succeed without good marketing.

Observation: I’ve seen firsthand how many churches can do little to no marketing—and what marketing they do is atrocious—and still manage to achieve enormous success.

Myth: Networking isn’t marketing.

Observation: This is true when you narrowly define networking. Expand that definition, as we’ll explore later, and networking becomes an important part of marketing for many churches and nonprofits. It’s also one of the easiest and least costly methods.

Myth: Getting the word out about your church is all about who you know.

Observation: It’s far more important to consider who knows you.

So now that we know what marketing is not, let’s get back to basics and consider what marketing is—or at least, what it’s supposed to be.

So what is marketing anyway?

Marketing is a means for introducing You to someone else. You could be your service or product, an organization or church or, well, You could be you. Marketing unlocks the principal that it’s all about who knows You. The most well known, most traditional marketing methods such as television or outdoor advertising are all about getting a message in front of more people so the public will know about a product or service. These methods rely on sending the same message so often that the consumer will know one brand better than any other and will select that brand when the time comes. This is all about being known for a certain niche and being known more than others. BMW is known for being a fun car to drive and it’s known more than Fisker because, among other factors, of the volume of advertising over time.

The problem: marketing is broken.

The world is too cluttered for most of us to use traditional marketing. We’re all bombarded with emails, advertisements, phone calls and even people flipping signs on the street corner. We’ve been taught for the last century that marketing is all about blasting a message through a bullhorn and, as more people have started blasting their messages, most of us have simply tried to find a louder bullhorn. Even if your church can afford to fork over the millions that would cost, you’ll probably find that the people you’re trying to shout at are tired of all the shouting and self-promotion.

So what do most churches do? Nothing. Or close to nothing. You didn’t go to seminary to learn marketing. Besides, marketing isn’t fun. It’s horrible actually, and many great churches have given up on marketing altogether. They’re frustrated with how hard it is to get anyone’s attention so they get by on their own momentum and a bit of word of mouth. Nonprofits have it the worst, barely scraping by on a few big events each year that increasingly feel like déjà vu to those who attend. Many businesses, churches and individuals are in this together. They could grow so much and help so many people. Churches capable of enormous impact shouldn’t have to struggle to get their message out there and attract new attendees.

If this is you, know that there’s good news. A growing number of churches have discovered the power of becoming known by helping others. This isn’t a new idea. It’s been around as long as humans have and it really is at the center of what churches have traditionally done. It’s just that people moved away from these ideas when marketing came on the scene. Marketing is a shortcut to getting your message out and it worked pretty well for a while—remember when email was new and spam quickly followed? So helping is coming back into fashion. Yes it’s slow and, in some ways, more difficult. But many have discovered the quiet power of helping. They’ve pivoted from talking about themselves to talking about others. They’ve given up hyping their own game and instead are spending their energy serving their target audience selflessly. As a result, their attendance and influence have been growing faster than they thought possible, far faster than those churches who are still relying on strategies used by male enhancement drugs and scam artists claiming to have come into a royal inheritance in Africa.

There is no better way to grow, no better way to cut through the clutter, no better way to reach your audience than to help them. I call it becoming famously helpful. I’ve seen this work for job seekers, sales people, churches, even people looking for a friend. This is about becoming so known for your helpfulness that people flock to you for advice. They search your website for information on a subject. They invite their friends to attend your services. They retweet everything you say. They buy the books you recommend and donate to the causes you champion. Eventually. But you have to go through the process of what I call helpeting. Yes, it’s a little bit corny, but it’ll grow on you. It’s important to distinguish between marketing/self-promotion/hype and the concepts discussed in this book. Having a word to quickly describe this new way of building influence is essential.

So what is helpeting?

In many ways it’s the opposite of marketing. Where marketing is about self-promotion, helpeting is about promoting others. Where marketing is about spamming people with your message until they remember you, helpeting is about serving people and building relationships that turn into increased attendance. Where marketing is about spending as much cash as you can to blast your message across the sky, helpeting is about spending a limited budget carefully, focusing on how to serve your target audience with resources, advice and connections. Helpeting goes beyond merely being known. It’s a system for you to serve your target market and become powerfully known without spending millions on advertising.

Finally, helpeting makes it easy for people to understand who you are and what you do. Millions of people may know and trust you, but if they don’t realize you actually care for people the way Jesus does or that you actually have the answer they’ve been looking for—namely, the gospel—they’re not going to attend. Many churches make the mistake of thinking that people who know and trust them will take the initiative to learn about what they teach. That sounds awfully nice, but in my experience it’s unrealistic to even expect your friends to do this. The burden is on you to present your church’s value clearly, concisely and readily. Repetition still counts in helpeting. Even people who don’t like you will remember what you teach if they hear about it often enough, and with helpeting the repetition won’t come from you obnoxiously spamming people.

To sum it up, there are three steps to increasing attendance through helpeting:

1. Become known by helping people.
2. Increase trust through consistency over time.
3. Make it easy for people to understand your unique value.

Don’t be fooled by the simplicity and commonsense of these three principals. They have the power to make you more successful in marketing your church than anything I’ve encountered in business. Over the following weeks, we’ll explore case studies, research and practical examples of how to implement each of these steps into your church.

Read more on JustinBlaney.com or check out Justin’s new book, Famously Helpful.

This post originally appeared on Justin’s blog.

Join the conversation About Justin Blaney

Justin Blaney is the #1 bestselling author of 6 books. His passion is helping individuals and organizations develop and share their uniqueness, enabling them to achieve their greatest success in life and business. He has founded over a dozen companies and runs two blogs JustinBlaney.com and I4J.org, which receive over 100,000 monthly views. Justin and his family live outside Seattle. Follow Justin on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and Youtube.visit this web-siteкрышки для кастрюлькупить шины continental киев