Catholic Content Marketing

Every Catholic ministry, apostolate, and non-profit has a unique story to tell. Youth ministries have unique insights into the faith life of young people. Young adult ministries have unique knowledge that comes from ministering to young adults. Charities have unique perspectives on the life of the Church in developing countries and the amazing and remarkable things that are happening there. Missionaries have stories only they can tell to the rest of the world. Mothers and Fathers have direct knowledge of the challenges and rewards of faith and family life.

Your Story is Valuable

All of these stories have an intrinsic value. If anything, the Web has made that more clear. We already knew that people want stories to share and to consume and to tell. We’ve been doing it since people were sitting around fires and writing on cave walls. We can see on the Web in general, how people love to read and consume stories and then to share them and talk about them. This should be even more true for Catholics.

We not only want, we need to hear how faith is alive in the Church. We all need hope. We all want to have our faith supercharged. We all desperately want to be inspired. Remember how we are all one body? The eye wants to know what the foot is feeling. The hand wants to know what the eye is seeing. The tongue wants to know what the head is thinking (sorry St. Paul). Social media makes it possible to share our unique stories. There is more to Catholic web-content then political nastiness and commentary on hot-button issues.

Content is Advertising

But here is the really unfortunate thing for Catholics. On the Web, publishing is publicity. Telling stories is advertising. Putting great content out there for people to share is marketing. If you’re telling a good story, people will share it. When you’re blogging, you are building awareness. When you publish online, you are making yourself more visible. Telling great stories is how you grow. It’s how you get new donors, new converts, new customers, and new retreatants. And it’s much less expensive then traditional publishing. There are no trees to cut down, delivery trucks to distribute your content or middle men and gatekeepers to mess with.

What’s unfortunate is that Catholic groups don’t realize they are sitting on a gold mine. They don’t realize the publicity and awareness that could be created with their stories.  They don’t realize the marketing power of the stories they are keeping to themselves. One of the basic rules of business is that you must differentiate yourself from the competition. It’s called the unique sales proposition (USP). For Catholics who want to build awareness and expand through the Web, you need a unique point of view (UPV).

Your unique point of view comes from what is unique about your business or ministry.  Do you give retreats to young adults? Well you have a unique point of view that comes from your unique experience of seeing first-hand and dealing with the spiritual life of young people. Do you give aid to the Church in developing countries? Only you can see and tell the unique stories of the Church going on there. There is a gold mine in your apostolate, just dig around and find it.

Everybody Wins

Once you have these stories, you now have a social object with which to enter the social media conversation. These unique stories artfully told and properly executed, will bring exposure and awareness to your ministry or business. Your content will have an intrinsic value for the body of Christ, and it will have powerful marketing functions built in that will unfold naturally as people encounter and share it.

It’s a win-win situation. The faithful get the compelling content that they crave, and as they share it you get exposure and the chance to begin a profitable (both literally and figuratively) relationship with a newly growing audience.