2: The HUB and How To Choose Your Church Landing Page
One of the first steps you need to take on your journey to better Church Online Findability is to decide on your HUB, which will be your church landing page.
HUBSPOT is a company that has driven the idea of your main website landing page as the HUB.
They are probably the best at explaining and teaching what is called INBOUND MARKETING. This is where your use all of your outside marketing efforts to lead inbound back to your church landing page HUB.
If you are interested in expanding your understanding of inbound marketing I would suggest that you visit HUBSPOT and sign up for their email list. They will regularly send you free training and inbound marketing resources.
Usually when you think of a hub you think of all activity starting there and flowing OUT.
That is basically true with the kind of hub we are trying to create for our churches. You will still send the content you create on your website out to as many of your external channels as possible.
However, a better description for a church HUB is the place online where we direct all of our outward efforts BACK toward. They should ALL lead back somehow to your church landing page HUB.
Our HUB should be the ONE WEBSITE landing page that nearly ALL of our outward church promotion efforts eventually find.
This means that nearly all of our Social Media, Google Business Page, Local Business Directories, Google and Facebook Ads and offline Church promotion and marketing efforts should all lead back to our website.
That does not mean that everything has to lead back to the home page. Your Google and Facebook Ads should have their own unique landing pages, but should still probably be a part of your existing website.
You may post a podcast sermon on social media, which will most likely mean you will post that actual podcast blog post link from your website instead of your home page.
That is fine. The point is that nearly EVERYTHING offline and online that is not on your website should lead back to some part of your website. Many times this will be your main church landing page.
Why is it important to have only ONE HUB?
You really only need this one reason for pushing people to one HUB.
Reason for ONE Hub: Having only one website and primary church landing pages where you drive everyone toward online makes it easy to maintain and to keep it updated with current information.
Once you start putting this process in motion, you are going to create a lot of accounts and place your information on many different sites online.
We will begin the process by creating a Local Promotion Resource Document where you can keep track of your accounts and login. But that does not mean it would be easy to update all of those sites if you needed to change something.
The best thing you can do for your church on these external accounts is to keep the information engaging, but also very basic. Anything that requires regular updates or potential changes should be reserved for your main website HUB.
You can still place event information that has an expiration date on social media for promotion and that kind of thing. But the date will expire and people will realize that it is over.
However, when it comes to your main church information, keep it simple. This is especially true if you KNOW that a piece of information may change even temporarily in the future.
One of the biggest examples of where this becomes challenging is in your Church Service Times.
Local Business Directories like your Google Business and Bing Places listings have a place for you to select hours of operation and open description areas where you could place your Church Service Times.
But if you are like most churches you change Service Times as often as you change the water in the Baptism Tank [which is hopefully VERY regularly at least for the baptism tank].
These Service Time and even Church Location changes are especially frequent with Church Plants and rapidly growing Churches. You do NOT want to have to login to all of these accounts, find where you entered the Service Times and make the changes every time yours changes.
Plus, when there is a Service Time change for just one Sunday such as a holiday, special service or weather event, you cannot change them all. People will find them, and then have they wrong information even if it is just for that weekend.
There is nothing more frustrating to a new potential visitor than getting there 45 minutes late because they found an outdated Service Time online right?
One other thing to consider.
When you create accounts on external sites like Local Business Directories it helps your church.
But, you also need to know that lesser known directory sites suck that information onto their pages using that info. You will not even know where those are, and will probably never be able to change them.
They don’t always update either when you update the information. So be strategic in what you place online so that you do not have outdated information leading potential new visitors to the wrong information.
What is the Solution?
Do not put your Service Times on external accounts unless you know you will be able to change them easily and remember where you placed them. Just put your correct Service Times on your main website HUB or main church landing pages, then drive every external site back to your HUB for the correct information.
What are exceptions to having only ONE Hub?
Of course, there may be situations where you do not want to direct people back to your main website.
You may be doing a push to have people in your community connect to your Facebook page. That is fine as long as your Facebook page is designed to lead people back to your HUB.
Many churches create unique websites for specific sermon series or community outreaches. That is fine as long as that website you create also leads people back to your main HUB.
Google and Facebook Ads are much better utilized and approved when they lead back to unique landing pages focused on the content and purpose of the ad. That is fine as long as the pages lead back to your HUB at some point in the process.
The best approach for Ad Landing Pages is most likely to create a page on your existing site so that all of your other navigation and content is still accessible to the person who connects to you through the Ad.
In some cases, you may want people to opt in to an email list to receive specific information. You may only want to have that information on that page instead of your main navigation so they stay focused and opt in. In that situation, you would just make sure the content they download or sign up for leads back to your Main Hub.
The point is that even if you do need to focus on something external, ALWAYS find a way to lead back to your main website HUB.
What should your website HUB be?
Most of the time you should choose your main WEBSITE as the HUB that you drive all external traffic and promotional efforts toward. Whether you direct people to your main website address or subpages within your site, it should all lead back to that one place.
An exception to this might be a new Church Plant that has not yet created a website. In that situation, you could use your Google Business page or Facebook page as a temporary HUB. But, when you do create your actual website you should have a good record of where online you placed the temporary website so that all of your temporary information can be updated quickly and easily.
If you do not yet have a website, your current website is not mobile ready or responsive, or you are just wanting to update your current site… check out the link below for an affordable solution or contact Jeremy Phillips at FindingYourChurch.com at getfound@findingyourchurch.com for a Custom Church Website Quote.
What should your website HUB be? Your main website. Stick with it and drive nearly ALL online and offline traffic back to it.
Affordable Do It Yourself Website Design Solution
