How to Promote for Holy Week MASTERCLASS - Ep.183

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

What is going on, everyone? Happy holy week. It's a beautiful week, the most important week of the year. And it's also a busy week. If you're once if you are a priest and you're listening to this, um, and you're listening to it this week, I applaud you. You have time to go over this. It's funny. I um one of the things I do with my clients, I'll do like a check-in every week in one of the parishes. Uh, I have a check-in call with the the pastor, and I texted him, it's it's Monday, mind you. Like, and for him and I, we just kind of figure it out as the week goes on what's the best time. So I text him, I said, Hey, what time do you want to do our check-in call on three this afternoon? And he goes, I might have 10 to 15 minutes later this week, but next week would probably be better. It's is he's booked from Monday to uh Easter Sunday. So that's about that about sums up the pre-schedule during Holy Week. Um, but hopefully you get a chance to listen to this after you have some time to yourself and you things have calmed down a little. This episode is going to be all about how to promote Holy Week. I just got done running like five campaigns for Holy Week. And so I got this down. I know it works, so do this. The I'll go over the three main pillars of mark of promoting for Holy Week. The third one, just a heads up, it is a bit more nerdy in the weeds, advanced marketing, but it really works. So if you can learn it, or you can hire someone to take care of it for you, like set up the automations and stuff. Um, between you and me, you could probably hire someone on Fiverr for gosh, 50 bucks to set it all up if you wanted. Or you can have me do it as a client. Um, but just get it taken care of because it really works. All right, so how to promote for Holy Week. Holy Weeks is a really unique instance where a ton of people show up. We know this because not just people like us go to mass, but the creasers come too. So you have just this massive influx of people. And we know that that affects the it's it's like um from what I can tell, the revenue, surplus revenue coming in for a parish isn't consistent week over week. It's kind of changes. And Easter is one of those times where it really goes up. And we use the parishes use a lot of the money they get from Easter to kind of pay for things throughout the year. So it's actually a pretty important time, not just liturgically, but also operationally for the parish. So it's important we promote this pretty well. So there's three ways to promote. Number one is the bulletin. Should be obvious, but I want to explain the pros, the, the, the, the pearls of how to do this well. All right. When you promote an event in the bulletin, you always want to have an easy way for them to take action on the thing you're promoting. This is something that most parishes miss in the bulletin. They just post something like Bible study, Sundays at two. And then that's it. But you gotta put yourself in the shoes of the parishioner. Okay. It's Sunday at two, but they didn't tell me to do anything. What you want them to, what you want to do in the promote, in the ad in the bulletin, is say very clearly what you want them to do so that they remember to show up. So a great one for any event like that is scan the QR code to get the calendar invite. And what you do is you have a QR code right below the Bible study Sundays at two. And when they scan it, it opens up a Google Calendar invite. And now all they have to do is click save. And now Bible Studies at two are on their calendar, and you embed reminder notifications as well in the event, so that 24 hours before Sunday Bible study, they get a reminder. If you don't do things like that, what happens is parishioners read the butt the bulletin at mass and they read and scan and read and read, and then mass starts, they put it aside, and nothing gets done. You you have to get people to do the baby steps so they show up to the things. Remember, you got, especially at Easter, you got what, 500 people showing up? If they just read everything and then put the bulletin next to the door when they leave and they didn't take any action, they might remember it Sundays at two, but they're so busy. You got the wife, the kids are sick, you gotta go here and there, you got work. They forget about it. But people live by their calendar. So really important. What does this have to do with Holy Week? Well, what does every parish bulletin do? It posts Holy Week in the bulletin. What you want to do is have a QR code that says put all these events in your calendar. So there's four main events during the Pascal Trituum. There's Mass of the Lord's Supper, Good Friday service, sometimes a living stations, and the Easter vigil. Those are the four things. Um, I mean, it might vary depend parish to parish, and then there's the Sunday masses and stuff. But let's say you wanted those four events filled to the brim. Well, what you do is when you post the Holy Week in the bulletin, the QR code next to it says scan to get the main liturgies on your calendar. Scan to get the calendar invites for the liturgies. They scan, calendar invite pops up, they press save, boom, it's on the calendar. The reminders will come through. That's what you want from the bulletin. If you take nothing away from the bulletin, just always remember that it's engagement, not information. We don't need to provide information to parishioners because we have a website. They can always get informed, quote unquote, by scrolling through the website. And now everyone knows if you want to figure something out about a parish, you just go to the website. So take the unique opportunity of someone sitting and reading a bulletin in silence as an opportunity for engagement. All right, so that's number one, bulletin QR code. Number two is Facebook and Instagram stories. Notice how I didn't say Facebook and Instagram posts. Two reasons for this. Number one, well, I'll just speak in terms of Facebook because it's easier, but just know Facebook and Instagram are basically the same platform and they're owned by the same company. So when you post a post on Facebook, Facebook does not want to be treated as like a digital bulletin. It wants to be treated as a social platform. So it loves pictures of smiling faces and group photos and events and stuff like that. What it does not like is static JPEG images of like announcements. It does not like that. And so even if someone sees it, very few people are gonna see it. Facebook is not gonna push it to the people who follow the page. So the other reason you don't want to do this is because harking back to pillar number one, there's not an easy way for people to put it on their calendar. Okay, they're scrolling on their phone, they see the holy week schedule. Cool, they saw it, they keep scrolling. Nothing got done, no baby steps were taken. So, what's the point? It's just a post. What you do instead is take the post and put it on your stories. Stories are kind of unique because they have what are called stickers. Stickers are little things you can do with the story to make it more engaging. And one of the stickers is a button, like a link. So, what you can do is when you post on the story, you can have a little link that says add to calendar. So when they're scrolling on the story, they see the holy week schedule and they're like, Oh, uh, holy week schedule, and then a button, add to calendar. Oh, I should probably add this to my calendar. They click it, Google calendar invite pops up, they click save, boom, it's on the calendar. Good good rule of thumb with like any advertising, these these little buttons like I'm talking about, or the QR code, these are called calls to action. I'm calling them to do an action, and it's usually a very easy action. Good rule of thumb in marketing. If your ad doesn't have a CTA, a call to action, it's a bad ad. Don't don't run it. You have to fix something. So post on your stories with a button link so they can add it to their calendar. And you can do this with all four events and have the calendar invite send all four, or if you really want people showing up to I don't know, there's all kinds of things during holy week, like um helping set up for the Easter visual. Maybe you really need a lot of help. Well, you post that on your story, help set up for the Easter visual Saturday, 9 a.m. That's not it. You include the button, it says add to calendar. Click it, add it to their calendar. And then they have the address and they get the calendar reminder because Google does calendar reminders. And Google does really cool calendar reminders where it does push notifications. So instead of like an email that says like reminder, go help. You know, no one, a lot of people don't check their email, you can have it do push notifications, which is like a little, yeah, like a notification, which is way more red than email. Okay, that's number two. And then pillar number three is um running advertisements. So when it comes to Holy Week, we don't really need to convince people that Easter is something you want to go to. Most Catholics know if there's ever a mass to attend, it's it's the Easter Mass, the Easter vigil. All we really have to do is get people to become aware of it and to put it in their calendar. So that's what we're going to do with the advertisements. Advertisements are different than just regular posting because they in that they cost money. Um you ever wondered why Facebook is the sixth largest company in the world, but it's completely free to use, you might say, how's that possible? Advertisements. You can pay Facebook money to force people to see a post. For example, when I run ads, I force, I give them money, I say, send this to Catholic priests. I want Catholic priests to see my content. Um, and it'll do that, but for a cost. And so for parishes, presumably, you want to send the posts to local Catholics, Catholics within a 10-mile radius. So the other cool thing about an ad is it comes with built-in CTAs. So, very similar to what we did with the bulletin or with the stories, the button just says add the calendar or sign up, and the ad says, hey, don't miss a holy week liturgy. Tap here to get the liturgies on your calendar. So if you're doing all three of those, there's a good chance all the Catholics in the area are gonna become very aware of Holy Week and it's gonna be on their calendar. That's really the goal. Everything is just driven to just get things on their calendar. Because what's the alternative? Like, you know how busy people are. I live by my calendar. The person listening to this, you probably do. We all do, because it's a busy life. And so often, if it's on their calendar, people just show up, especially if they get in the reminders and stuff, and it's easy to show up. It's like Google even has that thing now where it says like leave in 15 minutes to make it to your next appointment, because it calculates based on the address of the event when you have to leave by. Like it's super helpful. So we just want all of the marketing driven to just get the events on people's calendar. Um, okay, so that's the high level. Hope that made sense. The reason I said number three is kind of advanced is because you have to build an ads manager for the church. You have to set up an automation to where once they put in their email, they get sent a Google Calendar invite. And so there is backend stuff that needs to be done. Um, but it's pretty basic. You could get a Fiverr, a guy from Pakistan to do it for 50 bucks. Um, okay. That's the high level. I honestly I think that's pretty much it. Um I do want to explain like the different audiences we're grabbing. So there are people that just read the bulletin, there are people that look at the Facebook page, people that look at the Instagram page, and then there's people that maybe don't look at any of those, but they are Catholic in the area, and maybe this is their introduction to come to Mass, or they're like, I haven't been in two years, I'm gonna go to the Easter Mass. And so, yeah, the first one, the bulletin, grabs everyone who's already an active parishioner. We want to grab those people, so that's good. The second one, posting on the Facebook and Instagram stories, grabs whoever, whoever are following the pages. They might be going to mass every Sunday, they might not, they might be, I don't know, visiting. They used to live in town and they're visiting again and they see it, you know. Who knows? It just grabs another group of people. And then the third group just goes to every Catholic in the area. It's kind of a catch-all. So you might get people that have never been to Mass or haven't been in years. So it's a very good way, these three pillars, to kind of cover all your bases. But even if you kind of miss the tactics I just explained, what's important is to remember like the concepts here, which is when you have Holy Week, drive all promotions to getting the events on people's calendar so they actually show up. And that maybe concept number two is always include an easy way for them to get it on their calendar. If it's going in the bulletin, there should be a QR code. If you're posting on social media, there should be a button for them to add it to their calendar. This is hopefully very helpful. I did this. It's uh the Monday of Holy Week. So we don't know what the turnout is for all the campaigns I ran, but I can tell you how many people RSVP'd. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people signed up through the ads. So I'm sure all of the parishes I'm helping are gonna have a great turnout. Now, you can use this just for Holy Week, but you can also use this framework for any other live event. If you have a bake sale, same concept. If you have a young adult event, like this is basically a masterclass on how to promote for in-person Catholic events. So I hope I hope this is helpful. Um, I don't think a lot of parishes are doing this, and I can tell you, um the advertisements get very, very good responses, like crazy numbers. I'm spending like$100 on a campaign, which if you ever run advertisements, it is an expensive game to play. I used to spend like to get a fitness consult on my calendar, it used to cost like four or five hundred dollars. Just crazy expensive. Now it's kind of average. And then I'm doing this, and it's costing like 60 cents to get someone to RSVP and put all the Holy Week liturgies in their calendar. So that tells us this is a market that hasn't been saturated with advertisements, and people are like excited to see the posts. So it's working. So I recommend you try these three pillars for your parish. Um, let me know how it goes. Message me on Instagram, I'd be curious. Um, but overall, let's let's use this to bring more people to mass. So I hope this is valuable. I hope it brings many more people to the parish and you're able to give many more sacraments to people. Um, if it was valuable, drop a like and I'll see you all in the next episode. Thank you. God bless.