Making a Difference with Marketing

I chose "Making a Difference" for my blog title years ago because when I started The A Group, my intent was to help churches, ministries and businesses to make a difference in the lives of people in their communities and around the globe. And we have. Over the past 9 years we have helped our clients to become better and more effective at what they do. Last week I was reminded again that we are still making a difference.



Pastor Bruce Frank of Biltmore Baptist Church in Asheville, NC, spoke to the Groupers (that's what we call anyone on the The A Group team) on Friday about the impact our Easter marketing had on his church. We often hear of the percentage of increase in attendance during our media campaigns, total growth numbers over last year's attendance, and conversions. Those are great ways to measure the return on investment for the people we serve, and we love hearing good news. Pastor Frank's story was different. Yes, they had a very successful Easter with two thousand more people than last year, but he was excited to talk to us about a single person.

Right before Easter, one of Biltmore's members saw a man sitting alone at a restaurant and used one of the mini invites (business card-size invitations) we had designed and produced to invite the man to the Easter services. What she did not know, was that the man had planned on committing suicide after finishing his meal. That was his "last meal" according to his account. Her invitation gave him another option. He kept the bullet he brought along to the restaurant in his pocket and decided to give the church a try. He chose Hope on Easter and gave his life over to Jesus Christ. Last week Joe was baptized at the weekend church service and shared his story publicly with the entire congreation.

I know that our markting piece did not change Joe's life. God is the only one who can do that. But it made easier for a single lady to invite a stranger to come to church where his life was saved, literally twice.

What tools have you used to break the ice or make an invitation to someone you did not know well?

Churches and the Dangers of Line Extension

I have always banked on the notion that you cannot grow a strong church with a side-door strategy, and this week I was reminded of that first hand. Side doors are everything else a church does besides preach the gospel and help grow people in their faith. Somehow along the way church leaders have decided that music concerts, recreation, cafeterias, schools, bookstores and even quilting groups were church-worthy pursuits and a proliferation of side-door ministries began to show up in large churches.


What I experienced recently as I visited a great church last week reinforced my theory. What started as an outreach ministry of the church years ago, suddenly began to take a life of its own and became a huge resource and energy drain--so much so that the very thing that drove it into existence, evangelism, is no longer the focus.

I appreciate Thom Rainer's book Simple Church and its efforts to help churches do what they can do best: reach people for Christ, help them grow in their faith and equip them for ministry. When other things, albeit good things, get added into this mix, the main thing seems to weaken with the passing of time. In marketing we call this phenomenon: line extension.

Xerox learned the line extension lesson years ago when it decided that since it was so popular in its copier business, it should go into the computer business. Their logic was simple: We are the best selling copier maker in the world, since a copier is a machine and so is the computer, the people who bough our copiers will also buy our computers. Well, it did not work. People did not want to buy their computers from their copier maker. Several years into the PC venture and several millions of dollars later, Xerox finally got it: people want to buy copiers from us and nothing else. I hope churches are learning that lesson.

Difficult financial times forces us to look very strategically at where our resources go. I hope more churches are taking a hard look at all the expenditures outside of the core business of being the church and focus their effort on the main thing.

Is your church guilty of line extension?

How I Sold My House in Three Days (in a sucky market)

Last week we closed on the sale of our house. We lived there for almost 11 years. Here’s what’s interesting about the sale of our house: we put the house in the market on a Thursday, had an open house on Sunday, and had a full-price offer within a week, and closed in 6 weeks. Oh, and we did it without a Realtor. I know my experience is not typical in this market, but here’s how I did.


It’s Got to Look Good
First of all, my house was in good shape. No, it was in an amazing shape for a 25 year-old-house (that's the kind of endorsement you want from your wife after 25 years of marriage). In the past decade, we remodeled most everything about the house. New roof, new landscaping, Bathrooms with travertine counter tops, glass bowls, multiple showerheads. Our kitchen was my favorite room. Since I love to cook, we put in a 48 inch Wolf range with six gas burners, a grill and two ovens. The Subzero fridge was paneled to match the custom cabinets that included a warming drawer as well as Fisher and Paykel double drawer dishwasher. Ok, enough, I’m making myself regretful here.


No Excuse for Bad Photos
I took pictures of the house with a good camera and wide-angle lens. Rooms look twice as big as in real life with a wide-angle lens. Just make sure you don’t use the lens on your mother in law. The fall out is tremendous. I’m just sayin’. Make sure you have great pictures. You might have a ton of traffic on your ad but if you’re pictures are lame, people won’t give you a second look. (on another though, what does that say about your profile pictures? Ok, that’s for another blog post)


Go Online and Go for It
We listed our house on several online services like Zillow.com, craigslist.com, forsalebyowner.com. I spent about $300 on ads on some of these sites and uploaded my best pictures along with key words that are always associated with the area I live and the benefits of my house: best schools system in Tennessee, great house for entertaining, amazing upgrades, gourmet kitchen (interestingly, a lot of people love to upgrade their kitchens so they can have a nicer place to heat up their frozen fish sticks). We also created a microsite for the house that showcased it better than other online services.

There’s No Love Without the MLS
You can put your house everywhere on the web, but without a MLS (multiple Listing Service) listing, it’ virtually impossible to generate traffic. I believe that the MLS is key to real traffic. But in order to be on the directory, you need to work with a licensed Realtor. I did some research and found myigloo.com. They will list your house on the MLS for about $375. However, you have to fill out a ton of paper work that includes the size of each room, your property lines, taxes, and your weight history for the time you owned the house--well, just about.

Buyers Realtor Gets In the Deal
Even though we did not have a Realtor representing us, we knew that if we didn’t give a commission to the buyers’ Realtor, our house would, somehow, not make into the buyers’ list of properties to tour. That proved to be wise.

Priced to Sell
Now this next step was the most critical: pricing. How to reach the right price is both an art as well as a science. We looked at the prices of houses being sold in our neighborhood—well, those who were sold in the past year—and their price per sf. We looked at houses in our area that have been on the market unsold for a while, some of them for over a year. We also looked at the upgrades we made compared to those houses that were not moving and felt good about the curb appeal our house had. We settled on a price that was very competitive and realized that even though our per-square-foot asking price was on the high end, so was all the extras our home had to offer. Again we knew that we had an extra 3% we didn’t have to pay at closing to a realtor. That’s a significant amount of money.

We put our house on the MLS on a Thursday, had an open house on Sunday and had an offer on Monday. Some may say we didn’t ask enough and that we left money on the table. Well, while that might be true, we knew the pain and suffering some of our friends were going through selling their home, not to mention the expense of keeping up with two mortgages and expenses. We knew that the longer the house stayed on the market, the more difficult it became to sell. We had already closed on a new house at the end of January. Needless to say, we were very motivated to sell.

At the end, I'm thankful to God that we had a very short sale and everything went very smoothly. Last thursday we closed on the sale.

What has been your experience in selling real estate in this market?