Transcript:
Katie Allred: Welcome to the Church Communications podcast. I’m Katie Allred.
Kenny Jahng: And I’m Kenny Jahng.
Katie Allred: We want to help you become a better church communicator.
Kenny Jahng: And this is the place we’re going to talk about strategies and best practices for your church.
Katie Allred: Let’s get started.
Kenny Jahng: Okay, folks, we are back at it. In the recording chair is Katie Allred, Kenny Jahng here for Church Communications. I am raring, ready to go. Katie, what about you? How are you feeling today?
Katie Allred: I’m feeling pretty jazzed because this podcast is going to be pretty incredible. Also very heavy.
Kenny Jahng: It’s going to rock the world, as they say.
Katie Allred: Yes, it’s going to rock your world, change your thinking hopefully.
Kenny Jahng: I hope. I think we’ve had some really good, actually, we’ve had some really good responses from the other episodes. Our first episode got, I think 3,000 views on Facebook alone when we posted it in the first less than a week, which was pretty stellar. And then we’ve got the podcast outlets and we got YouTube, et cetera. I think this episode has the ability to 5X that because I think if we do it right, Katie, we do, there’s a lot of pressure.
Katie Allred: It’s all depending on us.
Kenny Jahng: We’re setting us up. But I think the information here is actually one, it’s like the tip of the sword for so many things that I’m doing with churches and it’s effective today. This stuff works. This episode, this stuff is what works today. And so basically sit back, get your pen and paper out. Let’s take some notes and I guess let’s just get started.
Katie Allred: Let’s do it.
Kenny Jahng: Okay. Why don’t you help frame what we’re doing today?
Katie Allred: Okay, yeah. We’re going to be talking about felt needs and how we can create landing pages so that we can succeed with a Google ad grant.
Kenny Jahng: Whoa. That’s a lot of things going on.
Katie Allred: I know. What is a landing page? What’s a Google ad grant? Why would I need to even, what are felt needs?
Kenny Jahng: Yes. I want to work backwards because I think one of the biggest tools that churches have available to them and not still many churches don’t know about it, is the Google nonprofit program and their AdWords ad grant program. Can you just give us, people can Google it and learn more about it. Give us a 10,000 foot view. What is it? Why is it valuable?
Katie Allred: The Google nonprofit ad grant, is essentially a $10,000 a month, $120,000 a year ad grants that Google gives to 501C3 nonprofits.
Kenny Jahng: Which most churches are.
Katie Allred: Right, most churches are. Some of them are incorporated. I know every church operates differently, but if your church is tax exempt, if it’s a 501C3, you qualify for this ad grant. And so of course there are different things you’ve got to apply for it. It’s not automatically given.
Kenny Jahng: No. And there’s two programs. I just want to separate. There’s one that’s the Google nonprofit program and then once you get into that, then there’s the ad grant program. The nonprofit program actually has other benefits too, regardless of if you want to pursue this ad grant, people should get into the nonprofit program.
Katie Allred: Right. And our partner, Missional Marketing, they have this way that you can actually check if you are eligible for it. It’s missionalmarketing.com/grant and if you want to, you can go ahead and jump on that website and just find out if you are eligible for it. More than likely you probably are.
Kenny Jahng: That’s great. Okay, so let’s talk about landing pages in general because I think this is again, this is one of those things where I’m using it with my corporate clients, with my nonprofit organization clients, but churches just haven’t adopted landing page strategies yet. What is a landing page?
Katie Allred: Yeah, so a landing page is a separate thing from your website. It might even be set up on a sub domain. It’s something where your menu is not at the top. There’s nowhere else that they can go. They have landed on this page and it is it. We just talked about in previous episodes about how you want to keep people bouncing on, not bouncing, but keep them going on there. You want to create a flow on your website so people continually are engaged. Call to action after call to action. Well, a landing page is very much like we want you to do this one specific thing and we want you to go nowhere else. Okay, so yeah.
Kenny Jahng: One thing.
Katie Allred: We want you to do one thing.
Kenny Jahng: You’re basically forcing the issue and it says, “Are you going to do what we want you to do? Or are you going to basically leave?”
Katie Allred: Right. A landing page is usually set up based on a felt need. What’s a felt need, Kenny?
Kenny Jahng: Felt need is, I think everyone has heard of felt needs in the church and that’s our outside of the church. It’s something that, it’s a call to action for someone who, I’m dramatically lost for words right now.
Katie Allred: Okay. A felt need for a church member might be parenting teenagers. Parenting teenagers might be a felt need. Food, I need food or whatever, are hungry, blah, blah blah. Or depression or anxiety. All those things are felt needs for a church. For people who are in a community that might be searching for these things. They’re searching for solutions to anxiety, help with depression, help with addiction. Those are felt needs that somebody from a church might be looking for. If you’re a corporation, you have a different set of felt needs for your company.
Katie Allred: I just worked with a company that sells houses. Or buys and sells houses for cheap. That kind of a company and their felt need, they wanted me to set up a landing page for somebody that had too many repairs for their house and they wanted to sell their house because it had too many repairs. We could try to write for the key word, too many repairs. And so you have a different set of felt needs for your church. You need to set up a landing page. Missional Marketing gave us a great example, actually of parenting teenagers in Scottsdale. All right, so this was Gateway Church. They wanted, they set up a targeted landing page for their Google ads for parenting teenagers in Scottsdale.
Kenny Jahng: If you think about the family that is in that situation, they might have real needs and that’s another set of problems that you want to address. But if you want to put yourselves empathetically in that family’s shoes, that’s what you’re going to start to try to figure out. What are the types of things that they’re needing? What are the deficiencies that they’re needing right now? What’s the wishes that they’re needing right now? And then you’re going to match that with solutions that your church offers, whether it be preaching and helping them in terms of giving them frameworks and philosophies and approaches of life. Whether it actually is events and actually groups and fellowships and ministries that you guys are doing. Or it might be actual ministry opportunities where you’re actually giving them care, physical or spiritual. There might be different ways of positioning that. But felt needs are something that you really need to think about from the other person’s point of view. It’s really critical to frame that because people are out there searching for their wishes, their wants. Those are the things that you need to define for them.
Katie Allred: And you can use, there’s some tools that you can use to find out what is trending in your area for searches. There’s trends, Google trends, there’s BuzzSumo, there’s a couple ways to figure out what are the keywords that people are searching for in our community. And so what I love too about this one from Gateway Church, just an example of a landing page for teenagers, their call to action is to find a connection, let’s talk. And then they have, they really have three calls to action here, plan a visit, contact our family pastor or explore life groups. And so, maybe people are just trying to find a way to, let’s talk. They have an immediate call to action of a form where they can talk about what’s going on with their teenager. And maybe they also have some really good verbiage on here just about raising teenagers. And that’s getting tough. Those kind of things.
Kenny Jahng: Yeah, it’s, I like, the one phrase that stood out to me is it’s speaking directly the audience with you language. And one of the lines says, “You’re raising a teenager and things are on track, but you’d like to be proactive and get solid advice to keep it that way.” That’s one type of felt need. It’s to the parent that might not be in crisis because that’s one of the things that church leaders always say is that I actually had a conversation recently and the church leader said, “We don’t want to go out and advertise felt needs because that just brings in crisis situations and we are not equipped to take in more than a certain number of families and situations to give them the proper pastoral care.” And so they want to throttle that back. Whether you agree or that or whatever the situation is, that isn’t, that’s a legitimate concern is that if you’re overwhelmed that you’re not going to be able to meet those demands.
Katie Allred: But raising teenagers being a felt need I don’t feel like is a crisis. It’s definitely, I think something that any parent is probably going to Google at some point. And then how great is it that the church, the local church is the number one answer on Google for you to find out more about how you can raise your teenager.
Kenny Jahng: Absolutely. But I think it’s just this, it’s this acknowledgement empathetically of what your audience is going through. Another line on that Gateway Church page, which I think is great is, you’re raising a teenager and things are getting tough, so you could use some guidance, support and information. Or, there’s no question that parenting can be both incredibly rewarding and incredibly challenging. Perhaps you could use some encouragement. Maybe you’d like to find someone that you can pray, celebrate, or even cry with. Maybe you’re wondering what the Bible says about parenting. And so this is a hook for that specific audience and you’re going to put that not on your homepage because your homepage, you want to talk to many different selections of your audience, but this is a way to speak to a very specific slice of the community that you want to attract. That’s why we use landing pages.
Katie Allred: For sure. What kind of objectives do you think you should plan or expect for AdWords traffic? Now you’ve got the Google ad grant, you’ve got money to spend, what kind of objectives do you think you should have?
Kenny Jahng: Well, I think the first thing is click through rates. I think that’s probably something that you want to make sure that you’re measuring.
Katie Allred: Focus on.
Kenny Jahng: Because that landing page is going to basically get people’s attention. You’re going to hold them, you’re going to look at bounce rates and make sure that your bounce rates are low. If you’re targeting your ads and targeted traffic well. But then click rates, click through rates are something I think you really need to be paying attention to.
Katie Allred: Right. And what about a quality score? What can you tell me about that?
Kenny Jahng: The quality score is something that what happens is as advertising has proliferated, and more and more people are on the Google ad grant system and you’re getting $10,000 of budget every month, it’s easy to start to just drive clicks without drive ads to get clicks to a page without it being relevant. And Google wants to protect, not you the advertiser, but they want to protect the user, the searcher. And so they start to institute this thing called a quality score. Quality scores are something that actually measures the relevance of the page that you’re advertising, not your ad. Not the ad, but the actually the page that you’re sending people through to after they click through from Google. And there’s basically three, I think main factors that I know that that determine the quality score.
Kenny Jahng: One is the click through rate. Second is the ad relevance to the actual search term. And third one is the landing page experience. Are they staying there? Google measures if you click through from an ad, go to a landing page and if you quickly click back because that signals to Google, you searched for something, you clicked on an ad because of a promise of what the ad was promising. You went to the landing page and if you clicked back immediately it’s because you didn’t find what you’re looking for. If you stay there or never go back to Google, Google I think just assumes that, hey, we did a great job of matchmaking. You searched for something. We gave you an ad or a URL to click on. You clicked through and you didn’t come back for another search. That means you’re probably happy with what that landing page offered you at that time.
Kenny Jahng: And so quality score is something, it makes sense to actually spend time on really delivering good on your promise of what you offered in the ads that you put in the AdWords program. And here’s another trick, Katie. When you’re using finite dollars, if you have a higher quality score, you might end up paying less on a pay per click bid for an ad than the advertiser that’s right above or below you.
Katie Allred: Really?
Kenny Jahng: They reward you for high quality scores.
Katie Allred: That’s wild.
Katie Allred: Today, Missional Marketing is offering two free tools to boost your church’s online presence. The first is going to be a form so you can find out if your church is eligible for a Google ad grant. This is a free grant that literally offers thousands of dollars. It’s actually $10,000 every month in free Google advertising. The second is a tool that analyzes the keywords that score throughout your entire church website.
Kenny Jahng: Missional marketing is serious. These guys are helping churches grow through online strategies and so they’re offering both of these tools free and to all of our podcast listeners here for the Church Communications podcast. To access these powerful tools, all you have to go to is missionalmarketing.com/grant. That’s missionalmarketing.com/grant.
Kenny Jahng: Yeah, so, but it just makes sense. It’s kind of cool that someone like Google can figure that out. That basically says if you’re going to promise something to my Google users and then we send our Google users to your website, if you’re going to give them what they wanted, then we’ll reward you. And if you’re going to take shortcuts and not really serve them well. Then you’re going to pay for it in dollars. And so I love that quality score thing is something that’s, for me, it’s a great leap down.
Katie Allred: Helps us both out. Yeah, for sure. Why do you think felt need landing pages are so important? They’re so powerful for improving your Google ad grant experience and performance.
Kenny Jahng: Well, look, there’s a couple different audiences out on the web that we talk about that are relevant to your homepage or to your church’s website. You have the, we talked about these. First, there are people who are already connected with your church. They already visit your website to get the latest information about events. They’re involved with the church. And then there’s that second tier people who don’t know about your church yet, but who are actively searching for a church. They’re already, they’re looking for quotes churches near me or churches in Sacramento or that kind of thing. They’re already, they’re task oriented. There is a much larger audience that are searching just for the felt needs. And they typically don’t have the keyword church in them. They don’t have ministry in them. they’re not looking for a church per se.
Kenny Jahng: They’re just looking for answers or resources or something to help them with their needs, their wants right now. And so that’s why these felt needs position. If you have ads that are actually featuring the felt needs, it really positions yourself to take advantage of all of those people out there organically searching those questions or problems that they have. Does prayer work? Will God forgive me? Christian dating. There’s tons of stuff that you can actually go after and then try to map relevantly back to the ministries that your church is offering.
Katie Allred: Yeah, and what I love too about landing pages is that they’re so specific. They’re so specific to a felt need. You may not want to make your entire website this specific to these felt needs. It can junk up your website really quick. You don’t want your website to just be filled with this. I think a lot of times churches go overboard and they start creating all these felt need web pages. But what I love about these landing pages is that they’re not super connected to your website directly but they can get people connected to your website. They can get people connected to your church in a more effortless manner.
Kenny Jahng: Absolutely. When you have landing pages that don’t match intent, that’s a problem. Or whether you have just general pages on your website that don’t match the intent, that’s a problem. And so that’s why landing pages can really serve a very specific audience and the call to action can be very specific to that audience. And we know how you can measure the effect of this by instituting conversion goals. It’s just a really cool thing. Again, someone might be searching for, does prayer work, in Google. They literally might be searching, does prayer work? Your Google ad that you got free through the search ad grant might feature, does prayer work? That might go to a felt need page that talks about prayer and if prayer works. That call to action on that page might be request a prayer, an actual prayer right there by someone, and then they might actually then click through that button, which is that conversion goal.
Kenny Jahng: And then they go to your church’s page for the prayer request form. Or it might be a messenger ad that opens up and goes to your chat. Those are those types of things that you want to do. There’s tons of felt needs. There’s maybe 5,000, 6,000, seven there’s this almost unlimited number of keywords that are extremely relevant to a given ministry or church, the average church and we’re talking things like obvious things. Christian parenting, like we talked about. Bible and the family, the meaning of life, questions about Jesus. But there’s tons of other things that I think your church can actually start to go after like how to discipline a child, how to raise special needs children. If your church has a special needs ministry, sermons for kids, groups for my teenagers to find friends.
Katie Allred: Or even videos for kids.
Kenny Jahng: These types of things that I think would be relevant for a church to start thinking about.
Katie Allred: Right. And too, we talked earlier just briefly about should these landing pages be living on your primary website? And something that I think Missional Marketing brings up really well in the PDF that you’ll be getting for free is that it should be a sub domain instead of a sub directory. A sub domain looks like help.mychurch.org rather than mychurch.org/help. And so it’s a whole nother website. It’s a separate website from your own. Of course you can link, but it’s a separate website. It’s important. There’s actually five reasons why it’s important. It’s faster and it’s easier to add newly required pages as new add keyword campaigns to Google ad grant. And so that’s easier. The page rollouts are designed to minimize the bounce rates and they’re not restricted by your main website design.
Kenny Jahng: Right. You can have like a WordPress theme on your church’s website and if you throw up a landing page, typically it’s going to follow that theme. Unless you have a landing page theme page. By putting on a sub domain, you can have a completely different flexible design.
Katie Allred: Now if you’re using the Divi Builder you’re using Divi for the theme, the WordPress theme, there’s actually a way that you can set up landing pages and I would just recommend still setting up a separate one. I think Divi’s great for setting up landing pages. It’s so affordable. We have a website, you can go to churchcommunications.com/divi and that’s our affiliate link. If you want to buy it, you can get it for a lifetime for $250 which is I think fantastic for what you’re getting. But you can choose. When you set up the page, you can just go and select page template and then it’s blank page and it’s not a blank page, but what it’s doing is it’s removing the header and the footer. And so you can design whatever you want to using the Divi Builder and you’re going to make a landing page using this blank page template in Divi.
Katie Allred: Super easy to do. You don’t have to buy some special landing page software. There’s tons of landing page softwares out there. Unbounced is a big one. Clickfunnels. You can buy, there’s so many, you don’t have to spend a ton of money to do this. Spend, buy the lifetime license it Divi, and then just do, use the blank page so that you can utilize it the best you can. And just set it up on a sub domain like I said.
Katie Allred: Okay. The next tip is the Google analytics data associated with the Google ad grant and search campaigns will be viewable from the same account if you use a separate sub domain. It helps you actually track the analytics data just a little easier. The sub domain serves as a transition between the Google ad and your church’s main domain so you know where you’re sending your traffic. And then it’s significantly easier to use the content from similar pages that have been written for other churches and their felt need sub domains. This is going to really help you to minimize the church’s costs for creating such a high volume of content.
Kenny Jahng: Yeah, I know. You can look at a resource. Missional Marketing, those guys, I know they have all these predesigned pages that you can use on a sub domain and they’ve been optimized over time to boost performance, whether using ad grants or just regular Google search, et cetera. I think if you’re using a sub domain, it basically is a cost savings because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel or reformat stuff if you’re going to borrow from other pages and ministries that you see that are having some success and they’re sharing their data with you. Yeah, absolutely. Those are great, great, great reasons Katie.
Katie Allred: All right.
Kenny Jahng: Hopefully we gave a little bit of a tour of that. We talked about felt needs, we talked about why they are the hook. We talked about using landing pages and the opportunity to really talk to very specific audiences and reel them in, transition them into your page. And then we talked about Google grants today and I hope that you explore the ability to utilize that resource because Google basically has been offering this to all 501C or most 501C3 organizations out there. If you are qualified to use it, I would really hope that you are able to take advantage of this resource. It is incredible. And in fact, one of the nonprofits that I’ve worked with in the past, actually two, have qualified for the next tier, that’s actually $480,000 a year worth of free Google ad budget.
Katie Allred: Wow.
Kenny Jahng: Really it’s really serious stuff that you can use to drive traffic. Anyway, there you go.
Katie Allred: That’s awesome.
Kenny Jahng: Felt needs, landing pages, Google grants, how we’re seeing them used together. Again, there’s this cheat sheet that we’ve pulled together with the guys at Missional Marketing. how can we get that Katie?
Katie Allred: missionalmarketing.com/grant so really easy. Just missionalmarketing.com/grant.
Kenny Jahng: Okay, perfect. That wraps up our time today. Katie, what are we going to talk about next week? I think this is one of my favorite topics.
Katie Allred: Yeah, I was about to say, I feel like you’re the most excited about retargeting. Retargeting, how can you use retargeting to help your church grow your church?
Kenny Jahng: Yeah, that’s this is one of those like what do you call it, Mario Kart when you, it’s a turbo boost. It’s something that everybody should be trying to use and it’s fun to use and it’s something that if your leadership doesn’t know about it and you start to use it, you’re just going to look like a rockstar. It’s almost guaranteed. Let’s talk about that next time. In the meantime, Katie, can you just shout out, how do people get in connected with us online socially? People don’t know that we have stuff going on outside of our Facebook group. You should go to the Facebook group, Church Communications. 21,000 people in there right now. What other places can people check out?
Katie Allred: Although there are people who are finding this podcast who didn’t know we had a Facebook group, so that has been interesting. They swap of people who are like, oh I found the podcast but listening to that I had no idea you had a Facebook group. We have all these things. The Facebook group is how we got started. churchcommunications.com/group if you want to find out more about the group. You can go to churchcommunications.com and just look through our resources, read our blog. you can go to churchcommunications.com/podcast to learn more about this podcast. If you would, we would love for you to leave us some comments and wherever you’re listening or viewing this, if you’re watching it through video, either YouTube or a Facebook page or a group, if you are listening to this via podcast, after you are done driving, what we would love for you to do is to review us on whatever you’re listening to us on because reviews help us get seen by more people and we would love to help more churches. If you are a church leader and you’re listening to this man, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a five star review.
Kenny Jahng: Awesome. Well that wraps up today’s show Katie. Really appreciate you being the copilot as we journey down this path. And yes, I’m going to be, I’m going to have my party hat next time on when we talk about retargeting, so until next time.
Katie Allred: Looking forward to it.
Kenny Jahng: Until next time I’m Kenny Jahng and Katie Allred for the Church Communications podcast. We’ll check out here next week for retargeting and more.
Katie Allred: Improve your church’s online presence today by checking out two free powerful tools from Missional Marketing. Both tools are available to our Church Communication podcast listeners. All you have to do is go to missionalmarketing.com/grant. Again, that is missionalmarketing.com/grant.
