“P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It’s Free To Advertise On Facebook” — headline last week
The new age of marketing is great news for college ministry.
Two reasons:
- Advertising is almost completely free
- It’s highly dependent on peer relationships
Every year we spend less and less on traditional advertising.
When I first came on staff with Cru we would spend hundreds of dollars on a single ad in the School Newspaper. Even as recently as 3 years ago we invested thousands on yard signs, facebook ads, and posters around campus.
Now we almost exclusively do free “advertising” on Facebook and peer-to-peer word of mouth.
This graphic does a great job summarizing this new era of Horizontal Marketing. It’s well worth clicking to read the full infographic (graphic via @mcryanmac who tweeted “This has very interesting implications for how evangelism on campus moves forward”).
“Horizonal marketing means creating a remarkable product and story and setting it up to spread from person to person.” – Seth Godin
I want to take a few posts and figure out together what this new era of marketing looks like in College Ministry.
Here’s where we’re headed in the next few posts:
1) What are we marketing?
- Cru (or church or whatever Christian group)
- or Jesus
2) Applying Horizontal Marketing to College Ministry
- Using social media for marketing
- Peer to peer marketing
- How can we make it easier for students to talk about what they’re up to and what they care about?
Let’s get the ball rolling: