The answer might seem incredibly obvious, but stop and think about it carefully for a just a moment. Who really does visit your church website?
If you’re not seeing much engagement, online donations or an increase in members, your site might not be attracting the right audience. The key is to build your site’s content so it attracts visitors who are a good match for your church.
Don’t worry if you’re not reaching the right people just yet. With a few tweaks and a little research, you’ll help the right people find your church’s website.
Identify Your Target Audience
The most important step to getting the right visitors to your church website is to identify your target audience. Ideally, the answer to this would be “everyone.” However, you have to be a little pickier. Your site’s target audience should mesh with your church’s website goals. For instance, if your goal is more members, you’d want to appeal to people who already have a spiritual background who may be looking for a new church.
If boosting current member engagement is the main strategy, you’d want more focused content that appeals to your members. We’ve covered a few questions to stop and ask yourself to help you better identify your unique audience.
Compare With Analytics
Now that you have an audience in mind, it’s time to see where people are coming from and how they engage with your site. For instance, if your site is all about local traffic, but you’re only getting visitors from 300 miles away, you may need some content tweaks. Analytics tools help you learn in-depth details about your site visitors, including where they originated from, such as social media, search engines or other blogs.
Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, gives you numerous ways to track details and engagement. If you’re new to analytics, Google offers free courses to help you get the most from analytics data.
Study Engagement
Analytics also show you if the content you’re creating is engaging enough to keep visitors on your site. For instance, when someone visits a blog post from a link on Facebook, do they immediately leave after the first few sentences? If so, this is a sign you’re either attracting the wrong audience or the content isn’t engaging enough.
Study where engagement is highest and see what’s different. Perhaps it’s a specific ad, maybe one certain volunteer wrote that particular copy or the content is relevant to a specific audience. This is where you start to revamp your strategy to attract the right audience.
Review Your Content Strategy
Now, take a close look at your content strategy. What’s your goal? Is there a common thread? For instance, our content focuses on helping to grow your church, mainly by using a church website and technology. It’s interspersed with helpful tips for church leaders as well, but still focused on growth and engagement.
Your content should have a clear focus. Do you want to help boost online tithing? Your content should focus on your church efforts, results, community needs, personal stories, what the Bible says about helping others and similar topics.
Naturally, your site’s content doesn’t have to have a single goal. If you’re trying to reach the unchurched, you’d have broader content that helps tie faith into issues the unchurched might be facing.
Look Over Marketing
The next step is to look over your marketing content. For instance, if you want more local site visitors, you need to ensure your marketing is localized. For instance, you’d use geo-targeting for Facebook ads and ensure your church’s location is listed on ads, social profiles, business profiles and other areas.
Your marketing copy should mirror the goals for your church website. Otherwise, you won’t attract your target audience and site engagement will be low.
Gather Feedback
Finally, gather feedback from your members and site visitors. Encourage them to tell you what they like and don’t like. While some feedback will be nit-picky items like wanting a certain font, others will let you know why certain blog posts or pages don’t fit the church’s ultimate goals. Use this feedback to help you better understand who visits your church website and how you can improve it.
Need help attracting your target audience? Let us help you create a strategy that brings the right people to your church’s site.
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