Define Your Audience

One of the preliminary questions that I ask when developing a marketing campaign for an organization is, "Who is your targeted audience?"  If this question is asked to a secular corporation, 9 times out of 10, they, immediately, are able to identify their targeted market.  Unfortunately, however, this is not true with churches.  With the general exception of recent church plants, most seasoned churches are lost when trying to identify the audience they are trying to reach.  Newer church plants are started to reach a specific people group - the target audience is the reason for the plant itself.  In other words, if the audience didn't exist to begin with, the church plant would have never been established.  Older churches have the aging mindset, "To simply exist will attract visitors."  And, I do mean "aging" - not derogatory, but classification under an old marketing model. These seasoned churches are now diminishing in congregation size and community impact to newer, more rapid growing churches.  This is especially true concerning the protestant churches that were planted, beginning with the years of the Industrial Revolution up to the mid-1900s, in the North-Central and New England states.  As factory development continued to rise, missionary agencies such as the Southern Baptist Convention, sent missionaries to these northern states with hopes of converting Irish Catholics. Today the northern protestant churches are loosing its membership due to various factors such as increases in migration to southern states, the Catholic church fighting to regain appeal, loss of community amongst believers (largely due to the Internet-accessible church), older members are dying, or, simply, individuals losing an overall interest in religion. More...