Get New Church Visitors in 15 Minutes Or Less
If you could get new people to visit your church with just a few minutes work, would you? This is the question you can present to your congregation, because each of them can help to bring in new visitors to your church by taking just a few minutes to post a couple positive reviews in your church’s online listings.
Positive online reviews can have a huge impact both on local search rankings and getting people to visit your church. So, here are…
5 Ways To Get Members To Post Reviews:
1. Ask Them.
Don’t think that just because your church has listings and has members that those members will eventually post reviews. Take some time in a service to mention that the church has listings and how the members can support the church by posting positive reviews. Include a request for members to post reviews in newsletters and mailings. You can even send out an email or physical letter solely about asking members to post reveiws.
2. Tell of the Impact Members Can Have
“Hey, our church has listings online. Please go post a review.”
or
“Our church has created listings online so people searching for answers can find us and we can minister to them. The biggest influencing factor of whether people who find our listings come and visit our church is whether they find reviews about the church and what those reviews say. By posting a review, you can help people to decide to visit our church or contact us so we can minister to them. Your reviews can even help to lead people to Christ.”
Which of these messages do you think would be more effective in motivating people to post a review?
3. Have Computers Available At the Church
The longer people have to wait between the call to action and when they can respond the less likely they are to do that action. When you talk about posting reviews to your members, have computers with Internet access available as people leave the service and ask them to just take a few minutes as they leave to post a few reviews. You could even have a lunch after the service so people have more of a reason to stay around and then encourage people throughout the lunch to go post a review.
4. Link to Your Listings From the Church Website
Make it as easy as possible for people to post reviews. So, create a page on your church website that links to each of the church listings where people can post reviews. Then you can just direct people to the church website when asking them to post reviews.
5. Give Ideas
There may be some people who are nervous about posting a review because they don’t know what to say. So, give some ideas of topics people may want to write about. You can even provide some examples of reviews, but be careful with examples. You don’t want people to all be posting the same basic thing. So, if you provide examples, provide several different types of examples and be very clear that people shouldn’t just copy an example. They are just there to get the creative juices flowing.
The last thing I would add is don’t just do this once. Ask people to do this from time to time throughout the year. At least once a year, have the computers out and actively encourage people to go to post reviews. This will get more people posting, keep the reviews for the church fresh, and allow new members (who may have found your church because of a review) the opportunity to post their thoughts.
Picture by Thomas Hawk
Have you had members post reviews for your church?
What have you found worked to motivate people to post reviews?
