On a recent podcast, I talked about how you might use chatbots in your marketing for a ministry.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, as I was scanning my feed on Facebook I ran across an ad from the LDS church.
The add read “having trouble reading the Bible? Send us your information and we will send you a free bible. Someone will come to your door and explain the Word of God to you.”
Now, I am not going to get into my views on the LDS church, I just want to take a moment and examine their marketing. I have a very strong feeling that they were using a chatbot to interact with their prospects and collect leeds for them to follow up on.
This is a perfect example of what we as the church should be doing to reach the lost and the hurting. We have a calling and a mandate from our Lord, to preach the good news, and while we cannot gather in worship in some states, why can’t we pivot, and use the tech to reach out to those who are on their mobile devices all the time?
We should be spreading the message of hope until it isn’t welcome anymore on the digital streets that is the social networks.
Here is an example of how that might work.
Let’s say you have a new podcast, blog, or video. You set up a messenger sequence that asks people how you can best help them, or how you can pray for them. You then ask for their name and e-mail integrated with your autoresponder of course, and thus you are able to add them to your e-mail list. Now you have two points of contact, your messenger list, and your e-mail list. Ask for their phone number, and you have three points, you can do things like silent voice mail drops, SMS marketing, all with the gain of letting them know when you are life, preaching the word of God, or you have done a new podcast so on.
And it all started with a simple messenger bot.
The point to all of this is simple, find a way to build your ministries’ audience, and then leverage FB adds, with messenger bots, so you can start to build trust with that audience. You might even use GO targeting to point them to your church or ministry if that ministry is locally based.
We as the church must start taking action to reach more people. What choice do we have otherwise?
I want to know what you think, do you want me to write more articles like this?
Should I offer more how-to content on different subjects?
Please reach out and let me know.
God bless,
Teresa Blaes