SHOW NOTES
//VIDEO TUTORIALS ON RUNNING ADS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dymukpfbg4A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGl8B_PO_Ow&t=106s

//ADDING YOUR FACEBOOK PIXEL TO YOUR WEBSITE
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/952192354843755?id=1205376682832142

TIMECODES
00:00-01:04 Introduction
01:04-03:09 The purpose of online advertising
03:09-06:39 TikTok and Google Ads
06:39-07:10 Step 1 - Set up a Business Account on Facebook
07:10-10:19 Step 2 - Gather Content and Determine Time Margin
10:19-10:51 Step 3 - Clarify your win
10:51-11:31 Step 4- Run the Ad
11:31-12:07 Step 5 - 3 Questions: Target, Budget, & Goal
12:07-15:46 Step 6 - Create your Audience (MOST IMPORTANT!!)
15:46-18:15 Step 7 - Time to get creative!
18:15-21:34 When to hit the eject button on a bad ad
21:34-22:43 What is next?
22:43-26:55 How to retarget warmer leads?
26:55-28:42 Go do it!

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:01):
What's up everybody. Welcome to another episode of the hybrid ministry podcast. Your host this morning, Nick Clason, alongside the baby holding Matt Johnson. Good morning, Matt. Are you awake?

Matt Johnson (00:14):
Good morning. I am. Uh, I'm awake. I got the baby in my hands right now. She, uh, she's mom that I have a little bit break. Cause I heard her crying and I went, ran and grab her. So if you hear her, I'm sorry, but she has a pleasure. I hope, she won't cry. She's just gonna grunt a lot.

Nick Clason (00:31):
Just making grunty noises. And even if she does cry, I will do my best to fill the gap, but it's gonna be hard cuz I don't actually know what we're talking about today. This is all you so on, on today's episode, what I actually wanted to do is I wanted to talk to Matt about advertising, digital advertising. How do we do it? How do you set it up and maybe have him walk us through a little bit of what that process looks like. It can get a little bit tricky, a little bit confusing. So before anything like Matt, what are, what is the purpose of online advertising? Can you walk us through some of the examples or some of the reasons why you would even want to run an ad in the first place?

Matt Johnson (01:14):
Yeah, absolutely. So there, when it comes to like Facebook ads or ads in general, um, a lot of people say, oh, the purpose is to like, uh, tell you what my product is. Right? Um, so it's to bring awareness, but there is actually three main purposes for tra uh, your ads, which is awareness, consideration, and conversion. And we can really get into the differences of all those. But honestly, awareness is like, let's bring awareness for, um, you know, whatever we're trying to promote. So in this context would be your church consideration would be, you know, I'm trying to get people to like engage with us, maybe watch video, send traffic to our website, download an app, give us their email, that kinda thing. And then the conversion ad is like, Hey, I want you to buy this shirt or I want you to buy our, you know, maybe your vacation Bible school ticket or whatever that looks like. So those are gonna be a three main ads. And we're talking about ads, we'll talk about how each of those should play into each other and how this creates like this robust system for you.

Nick Clason (02:30):
Okay. So you would recommend doing an ad, like a, like a three tiered three prong, add one for awareness, one for consideration, one for conversion and have them all kind of like work together

Matt Johnson (02:43):
In a perfect marketing plan. Yes. But that's not necessarily what I'm gonna recommend for most people. Like we don't even do that at currently where we're at. So yeah. Um, uh, we mostly run awareness ads what we're trying to do, but then like, okay, we have our vacation Bible school coming up, so let's, you know, get our conversion up for that kinda stuff. But I can, we can go into like how we want those to play off of each other here in a second.

Nick Clason (03:09):
So, so today we're gonna focus particularly and specifically on Facebook. Um, I'm assuming, right?

Matt Johnson (03:17):
Yeah. We can talk a little bit about TikTok and Google, um, which are, those are probably gonna be your three main, you could also do LinkedIn, but most ad functionality is very slim to whatever we talk about. So Facebook is the easiest starting point for everyone here, Google you're, um, ads, which super easy, but that's how you see those Google ads. Like if you search something and it's the top thing, uh, like, oh, uh, for this SEO yeah. Functionality or on a YouTube ad, that's how you're gonna run those and then TikTok or, you know, just a normal ad, but they run almost exactly like a Facebook ad and LinkedIn ads are the same way. And I can know in the difference of like, why you'd wanna use one of those over the other two.

Nick Clason (04:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, well, I here's the thing, I know that there's been a couple different times where I've tried to run an ad. Um, mm-hmm and I'm pretty much an idiot. And you told me about six months ago to run a TikTok ad. So I did, so I started the TikTok ad account. I did all the things, I filmed the video and then I violated some community guideline that I didn't even know. I, I violated. And so they like blacklisted my video and then I was just stuck. And even when I asked you for help, you're like, well, I can't remember what you said, but like I think I reached out to 'em and they didn't answer me um,

Matt Johnson (04:45):
Yeah, it's usually step one is reaching out. Um, TikTok could have, my guess is TikTok is cuz it was a religious ad.

Nick Clason (04:55):
Mm yeah. And well, the point, my point in saying all that is like, I just, I felt so like over my head, like right. I was just waiting into like something I never really waited into. And so it just felt, uh, if it can feel really intimidating. And so yeah, I was hoping that kind of through this, um, we could look at just a step by step ad building framework. Um, but I wanted to start there because right. The idea, I think a lot of churches, if they're like, oh, we should run an ad. Why to get more people here. Right. Um, while that might be an option or a solution to what is about to happen. Um, I think that there needs to be a little bit more of a dynamic and a little bit more of a robust why, um, understanding that there are different avenues to it.

Nick Clason (05:46):
There are the three different, there's the awareness, there's a consideration and there's the conversion. And so the purpose of your ad is important. It's good to define that and know the reason why you're doing it and know mm-hmm, that running an ad and anything like digital marketing online is gonna take time. And so you may not have one week, a hundred people in your church and the next week a thousand people in your church, you're probably gonna have to build to that. And that's where like the, the purpose of ad running is that it, it slowly builds that that brand awareness and equity over time. Um, at least that sounds good to me. And so I'm just saying all that stuff. And so hopefully you agree. And if I said something I shouldn't, you'll just you'll tell me I'm wrong.

Matt Johnson (06:31):
Yeah. Yep. No, you're good. Keep going.

Nick Clason (06:33):
So let's talk about it then. That's all I got. So let's talk about it then let's, uh, dive in. If you are brand new, like you have a Facebook page, um, for your church, um, let's assume that that's the starting spot then. Where do you go?

Matt Johnson (06:50):
Yeah. So the thing is you gotta set up a business account on Facebook. So you go, if you type in business.facebook.com, you can set up your ads account and that's how you're gonna set up your ads account. But before anyone listening to this runs an ad, I want you to ask yourself two questions. How much content do I have and what is my margin of time? And the reason I say that is cuz when we start talking about ads and how to really do ads, well, you're gonna a lot of time and a lot. It's really just ad, which is what

Nick Clason (07:27):
Like a one single ad one campaign. Yeah,

Matt Johnson (07:30):
Yeah. Which our church used to do all the time. But our conversion numbers on that where we're like 14 for, or, you know, uh, $6 for a lead. If I'm on that's bad. If I'm, yeah. If I'm over $4 a lead, I feel like a failure. Um, cause it's a waste of money honestly. And like we got our ads now to 39 cents a lead, so wow. Uh, which, you know, like that's very rare that you hit that. And honestly, we got really lucky and it's all got in that, but like that's the, but it took a lot of time, a lot of new content, a lot of new strategy for that. So if you're just like, Hey, I just wanna run one ad kind of targeted here. I have this much money. My recommendation was to would to be just to boost some posts on Facebook, which you can do that directly in your post that you create. There's like the boost button. And it's just gonna send that out to all your current followers to the front of their page. And you put that same money there and you'll have a higher conversion on that right now. So let's just start with that caveat before we jump down this pipeline. But now let's say I have the time,

Nick Clason (08:34):
Let, stop you for a second. Let's say like, let's talk about types of content. Like what do you mean by that? What are we looking for? Types of content wise to crazy question you say, make sure you have some, what is it like, maybe someone's sitting here thinking like, I, I might have some, but it depends. I'm not, I'm not exactly sure.

Matt Johnson (08:52):
Okay. So that's, we, we can really dive into that, but I would say if you don't have three pieces of unique content, don't run an ad. So, okay. We are currently running awareness ads for our church and we have nine pieces of video going out right now,

Nick Clason (09:08):
All at the same time. So

Matt Johnson (09:09):
All at the same time and they're all targeting different things and they're all being way differently, which, uh, we can kind of get into the nitty gritty of some. I can get into the nitty gritty of that. It's like actually showing how to set up an ad. I'll recommend some like videos you can watch to actually walk through that. Um, but I really cause it's hard on a podcast for me to explain, okay, you go here, press the plus button. You're like, what the heck are we talking about right now? So, um, but yeah, so have some unique content. So like a big example of this is like when we were trying to sell lead the cause at dare to share, we'd run nine videos, nine graphics and uh, um, like actual like, you know, a color background with words on it and then just nine photos. So just normal photos. Wow. I mean, that's, I mean, that's a different way to like, that's a lot of content to get, you know, a lot of people to sign up and sell out those events, which would work. So play that. So like I would recommend get one video, one photo and one graphic and that's gonna really help you start to experiment with this.

Nick Clason (10:14):
Okay. All right. Great. So that's, that's some of the content examples then what mm-hmm

Matt Johnson (10:19):
okay. So you have your content, you need to know what you're trying to promote. Okay. So you're trying to get people to come to church. Are you trying to get people to download your ebook? Are you trying to get people to register for alpha? Are you trying to get people to, um, you know, buy a shirt own? Yeah. Clarify your win.

Matt Johnson (10:40):
You need to know that cuz that's gonna depict. If you do an awareness campaign, a consideration campaign or a conversion campaign, and that's something you gotta define before you even start building, you know, your ads. So what's just start with the brand awareness, like an awareness campaign. So I want people just to know about my church and let's just for this example, say our church is life, church, not the actual life church, but we're just some subsid area of a life church in the middle of no. Okay. So we want people to be aware of life church. All right. So I'm gonna set up an awareness campaign with brand awareness life, church, and then the goal of that ad. So you're gonna have to choose like, okay, what is, what, um, what is like my target? What is my budget? And then you're gonna go, what is the goal? So pick your budget. I always do a daily budget when I do an ad and I always recommend start out about $10 a day. Okay. And you turn it off when you're ready to turn it off. So you don't need to spin

Nick Clason (11:45):
So you can run it. You can run it in perpetuity. You're saying mm-hmm if you can just keep running it mm-hmm okay.

Matt Johnson (11:53):
I

Nick Clason (11:53):
$10 a day to throw at it.

Matt Johnson (11:55):
Yeah. And then we turn off our ads. Once the conversion goes below what I want it to. So okay. When the ROI starts out, weighing it. So you'll go through and your name, your ad you'll schedule it out. But the big, next step is creating your audience.

Matt Johnson (12:11):
This is the most important part of your ad. So before you run your ad, you need to decide who am I targeting here? So, all right. We are, let's say we are life. Church is located in Phoenix, Arizona. I'm gonna target Phoenix, Arizona then. So you start with, okay, we're gonna target get Phoenix, Arizona. You're gonna pick the age. You're gonna pick like, uh, so let's say, okay, we wanna this let's say we're promoting something that's for young adults. So we would probably choose 18 to, you know, 40 year olds to come to this event. So I would target them specifically and Phoenix, Arizona. And then you can start like looking up interest and behaviors for them. So this is something that's recently just changed in Facebook in the last couple of months is you used to be able to like, uh, type in, oh, okay.

Matt Johnson (13:04):
Bible study in there. You can find people that have, you know, liked Bible study or Christian or whatever. So you could type in religious stuff. Facebook doesn't allow that anymore. So you're gonna have to get creative. So this is how, what we started doing, um, at dare to share. And then currently here we started thinking, all right, who, what do our people like around here? So one thing we started tar targeting was like coffee lovers. Okay. Um, is we know youth pastors love coffee. Uh, we started targeting here. This is a really funny one. Nick. I don't know if you can do it now. I'd have to double check with the new update, but we targeted skinny jeans so we started, you know, targeting people that were, were skinny jeans. Um, and you just gotta find the things that their interest in the behaviors that they all have in common as you're running the ad. So let's say Phoenix. Okay. We wanna target people that like maybe, uh, I'm trying to think of like, if there's any personalities that they even let do anymore, like they've changed it a lot. Uh, like you used to be able to like target over, Hey, you liked Lee Stroble.

Matt Johnson (14:11):
So let's do Lee stro, but you know what I just thought of what might be. Oh,

Nick Clason (14:23):
I'm sorry. Hello, Eleanor. Welcome to the podcast. We should add her as a, a host.

Matt Johnson (14:30):
A host. Yeah. Yeah. She, I think she she's pooping right now. Oh, oh. What? The life? Um,

Nick Clason (14:36):
That happens to me sometimes.

Matt Johnson (14:37):
Anyway. know. Uh, so let's say, uh, you think of a TV show that your congregation has all talked about or whatever. Like you can look it up for that TV. So, um, so you can like, you know, do detail targeting on that. Um, great. And then you'll do like, okay, let's how are we gonna place it? I always do like how Facebook would place it, cuz Facebook's algorithm is gonna weigh how it thinks it should. Um, and then you'll go to your next step. So does that all make sense so far before we move on to what's next?

Nick Clason (15:13):
Yeah. Yep. Sound good. So you're segmenting down your audience. Okay. You're choosing them. You're getting nitty gritty specific about what they are.

Matt Johnson (15:22):
Yep. Yep, exactly.

Nick Clason (15:24):
And then, um, do you need to go change a diaper so that we so that she does, so that you're good with that? Or do or can you keep plowing through

Matt Johnson (15:33):
Yes, I will. I will go change the diaper real quick. Okay. And Nick, you do some filler

Nick Clason (15:40):
Great off, off, I'll be right back off. He goes off our, our podcast marketing expert goes all right, great. So after some technical difficulties, Matt, what comes next?

Matt Johnson (15:51):
Yeah. So, uh, the next thing after you get your audience, you decide everything you're gonna do your ads. So you start naming your ads and this is where you make all your content. You set up your ads as image videos, carousel, collections, cetera. Um, and this is really where I want you the listener to get creative here. Okay. So this is where a copy. So all the words you write are gonna be super important. Um, cause you can do five variations of everything you write. And I say, do five variations, cuz Facebook will choose like their algorithm, which one's converting the best. That will become your number one. But so you don't wanna just do one variation there cause you're not getting Facebook any time to like learn. And this is also where you'll add in your other ad sets. So you can start doing, uh, the other videos.

Matt Johnson (16:49):
You maybe have other photos, graphic, whatever that looks like. So, and then we create five pieces of copy, five titles for each and get fun here. Like this is really where you should be testing out. Uh, okay, what are people gonna search or think, or what's gonna hook with them. So, um, and it's funny when I do this because I'll get so many messages from people around the church, like, Hey, uh, why am I seeing this version? And I was like, well, it's clearly, that's what your likes have. Uh, you know what Facebook has thought that you liked the most. And clearly it worked cuz you're texting me about it. Yeah. And you know, the other hunt, 99 things that go out a week, you didn't notice at all. So like that's so, um, yeah. Have fun with emojis in there. Fun titles, be funny, serious vision casting, whatever that looks like for your church. This is the time that you can start to really do it.

Nick Clason (17:47):
Okay. So build out. But, but when you do that, when you launch it, try to do that with a variety of different types of content, do some video, some static, post some graphic posts and is what you're doing is you're just kind of sending all of them out to Facebook to see which one performs the highest or are you letting all of them run? And then let's just say, this is your first time. Like what is a terrible like conversion? Like when is it like, okay or what's I guess maybe not even a conversion, but what is the sound? The alarms like hit the Jack button, don't run this ad anymore. It's a waste of your time, a waste of your money. Um, and what, when should they, like, this is the thing. And now with that, you should start over because it's not going well.

Matt Johnson (18:31):
Yeah. So, uh, Facebook will do something called free Facebook learning. So I wanna be clear like once you like post an ad, it's gonna take a couple, it usually takes about a day or two before the will start running. So just be that don't freak out. Yeah. Don't freak out and also triple check all your copy and all that stuff. Cause if you change anything, it goes back into Facebook learning. So you're like, oh crap, I did this or whatever. It's gonna have to go back and learn again. Uh, when it comes to hitting a jet, uh, that's really on you of what your budget is and your like what your goals are. But like I said, if we're over $4 on a person for a conversion, I hit check on it.

Matt Johnson (19:12):
OK. Um, honestly it's usually if it's above $2 for us at our current church, just cause you know, money is, uh, something that you have to be cognitive of. So yeah. Um, if we're under $2 on our ad conversion, then great. Like we will, uh, keep writing that ad and I'll pour gas on it is what I tell the that's taking off. Let's put another, you know, 500 towards it until it starts to not as well. And then when it stops converting, well you can, let's the, title's try the copy let's even, or the colors, the background. And then you get to the point where it's like, okay, this ads run its course and you take that audience so you can take that cold list and the audience you learn from and advertise with, to them for something whatever's next for you.

Nick Clason (20:01):
Mm. Okay. So let's pretend like for you and, and us, we've been, we're running ads now for a while. Mm-hmm uh, is $2 something that like you build up to, or is that like a pretty standard practice? Like even if you're brand new, um, you wanna try and shoot to be under $2?

Matt Johnson (20:20):
Uh, I would say shoot for under $4 right now. Like everyone try to shoot

Nick Clason (20:28):
Four and then maybe as you, as you do more of this and as you become more familiar with it, you might, you might be able to whittle that down. You're saying

Matt Johnson (20:38):
Y yep. Yeah, definitely.

Nick Clason (20:40):
Okay. So, so the, the, the experience and the more familiarity and the more volume that you do with it, like will hopefully help, help drive that down. So I just wanna be clear that people are like that $2. That's your benchmark, but you've been doing this and yeah, you're pretty advanced on it. So it's, it's, you know, that's not a starting spot necessarily.

Matt Johnson (21:03):
No. I mean, there's sometimes that like this for this audience, you know, I keep it her $4 or $2, but like, let's say you have a 300, 500 product. If you're converting at $10 a person at that point, like the ROI outweighs it, you know? So it really depends on the product. Sure. But, um, if you're running free ads for awareness and just trying to get people to go to your website, if you're over $4, like don't get eject there, you know?

Nick Clason (21:34):
Okay. So you're just kinda watching the dashboard. Now you're watching the conversion rate. You're seeing which one is converting. What, if anything is next?

Matt Johnson (21:47):
Yeah. So that, uh, really will, um, come down to what your strategy is honestly. So, uh, right now we run a monthly awareness campaign at our church. Um, and what I do is like, we wanna just build up our audience on our Facebook ads. And as we're about to launch our summer ebook, we'll retarget, all those people that might have watched our awareness ad with the conversion ad or an engagement ad now. Um, OK. So it's a good way to like get in your pipeline. So I would recommend like, Hey, run ads for, you know, a couple months before Christmas, even, and then like target everyone for Christmas time or trunk or treat or whatever that looks like for you. Like you have some options there. Um, and also like, okay, go ahead. Do you,

Nick Clason (22:38):
Do you, uh, go back into like, say ad number one and everyone who's become an audience member of ad, number one, do you say target this ad to them? Or like, how does that work? And I get it, I'm sounding like, I don't know what I'm doing, cuz I don't. So

Matt Johnson (22:55):
When you're staying

Nick Clason (22:56):
Retarget, what do you do? How do you actually like go to those people?

Matt Johnson (23:00):
So it's really built off your Facebook pixel, um, which that's becoming a, you know, a little bit of a issue with new privacy laws, but you know, right, right now you can still kind of use it and it's retargeting people as you're creating your audience, you can like say target my Facebook pixel through this time or whatever, which should, if it's an awareness campaign and they're going to whatever you're trying to do. It's like if they're, if you are doing awareness campaign and the whole point was for them to go to your website, mm-hmm or to just click on your Facebook page, your Facebook pixel will read that if you put your Facebook pixel in your website, you have it. If you haven't, I'll give you, we'll put a resource in the show notes about how you can do that. Super easy takes 30 seconds to do.

Matt Johnson (23:45):
Um, you can retarget those people, uh, cuz they would be a warmer lead for you. So you're targeting people that have essentially seen your ad at that point. Um, another thing um, you can do is like target people that have watched a video for a certain length. So, uh, that's why videos are really good. And we did a lot of that at dare to share like, okay, this person watched the video, we wanna only target people. I've watched this video for 30 seconds. OK. So we've run ads that were like, um, you know, 15 minutes long cuz we wanted people to watch as much as they could. So we target 'em different and Netflix does this sometimes and it's kinda rare. I haven't seen it in a little bit, but they used to run ads of full episodes of a show. Wow. On YouTube. So before YouTube, a video would start on YouTube, you could watch a full episode of like an example right now it's really big as the scene man. So like maybe sand man's episode, one would pay, play as a full episode and then Netflix can just retarget you over and over. Cause you watch an hour of their content. So they know this person's hooked.

Nick Clason (24:53):
Yeah. that

Matt Johnson (24:54):
Gotta get subscribe. So you can do that too. So you can get really creative with this stuff.

Nick Clason (24:58):
Mm interesting. Okay. But so then that audience just kind of like builds in that Facebook, the business Facebook like add place and you're just saying, okay, uh, send this ad to someone who watched a video for longer than 30 seconds or send this ad to person who engaged with our ad at such and such level. And you're doing that for, you know, so if you run a bunch of awareness adds, what you're saying is you can do a bunch of awareness ads and then once you get to Christmas, once you get to VBS, once you get to like your big event that you're actually trying to then go from like a awareness to like a conversion, you can start to specifically target those people be because in marketing words, they're warmer, they've engaged with you longer or at least at some level through previous ads. Okay.

Matt Johnson (25:48):
Yep. So a good example of this is like right now we're running an awareness ad. My goal is not like conversion rate on anything yet. Like how much it cost. It's just how many results people are we getting like to play our ad a week. And our goal is about 10,000 a week and we're hitting about 10,000 people. Every seven days are looking at our ads. And now that we're about to launch our fall ebook, we're gonna just retarget all those people that might have, you know, done a through play on our stuff to download the fall ebook.

Nick Clason (26:18):
OK. OK.

Matt Johnson (26:19):
So they're

Nick Clason (26:20):
Interesting.

Matt Johnson (26:21):
We're building trust. So the, I whole idea of your ad is to build trust with them and not to go back to the days of like commercials where it's okay. I'm just trying to get you to buy this product or whatever. Right. Like build trust with your audience. So give them a reason to wanna keep seeing your stuff.

Nick Clason (26:38):
Yeah. Yeah. Well it's like what we were talking about right. At the beginning, right? Like this isn't going from a a hundred people to a thousand people. You're trying to like yeah. Be a good mentor show, show them that your church is trustworthy and all that type of stuff. So. Yep. All right. Great. Um, anything else? Like that's a, that's uh, how to get it going, how to get it set up all those types of things. My audio cut out in the middle for half of it. So you were just flying solo and you didn't even know no.

Matt Johnson (27:06):
What are we missing?

Nick Clason (27:09):
Changing diaper. We had a very productive morning. Yeah. What's the last little bit of thing that, that the people need to know anything.

Matt Johnson (27:17):
Um, like go set up some ads for $10 a day, try a week out or whatever. Um, just go test it, watch some videos we'll put so a bunch of stuff in the show notes for you. And I also wanna be clear, like ads are changing constantly. Just like everything else that we've talked about. Like, you know, this is this week, next week. This could all just drastically change. Cause you know, Facebook just decides, Hey, this is what we wanna do now. You know? Or Google decides, oh, we're not doing it that way anymore. We're not gonna weigh our, uh, our Google ads as high. We're gonna go back to YouTube ads being weighed higher. There's always, you never know. So just keep that in mind too. So I'll even put into some resources that you can check in. Like what's most updated stuff for ads. So, uh, love it. We'll have a lot of, lot of stuff. This is definitely more techy and more of the technical side of everything we talk about on here. It's not philosophical at all. Yeah. So anyone can do it. You just gotta have patience and go test it out.

Nick Clason (28:18):
Yep. Love it. All right guys. That's it for today then? Uh, like and subscribe, give us a, uh, rating. If you found this helpful, please share it with a friend hybrid ministry.xyz online at hybrid ministry on Twitter and we will catch you next time.

Matt Johnson (28:38):
Bye guys.

SHOWNOTES
HUBSPOT ARTICLE REFERENCED:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/short-form-video-trends?utm_campaign=Marketing%252520Blog%252520-%252520Daily%252520Emails&utm_medium=email&utm_content=219842216&utm_source=hs_email

TIMECODES
00:00-02:26 Intro and Short Form Video Trends
02:26-03:56 Why Short Form is the most effective
03:56-07:16 What htis means for church services
07:16-11:08 How churches can use trendy content
11:08-14:04 Brand Challenges
14:04-17:46 Use of Influencers
17:46-24:06 Product Teasers
24:06-26:38 User Generated Content
26:38-29:57 Behind the Brand Videos
29:57-34:13 More Educational Videos
34:13-37:31 What plaforms should we use besides TikTOk and Reels?
37:31-38:29 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:01):
What is up everybody. Welcome to episode eight of the hybrid ministry podcast with me as always on these glorious mornings, Matt Johnson sipping his coffee. Matt, what type of coffee are you drinking this morning?

Matt Johnson (00:17):
Uh, I am drinking a local light roast from around here that supports, um, kid cancer whenever you buy it. So, wow,

Nick Clason (00:28):
Dude, you're such, you're such a good citizen of the world.

Matt Johnson (00:33):
Don't know about that, but you know, I love good cause

Nick Clason (00:36):
Is it, is it hot or ice this morning?

Matt Johnson (00:39):
It's hot this morning cuz I was in a rush. So I just, you know, grinded up my beans and threw it in the Keurig real quick.

Nick Clason (00:45):
Nice. Um, well I don't, I don't know if mine supports anything, but I roasted it yesterday in my garage. So there you go. There's that I guess

Matt Johnson (00:55):
Supports you.

Nick Clason (00:56):
Yeah, it does.

Matt Johnson (00:58):

Nick Clason (00:59):
And I, so I, we were at summer camp two weeks ago and I roasted a gigantic batch. Um, and I brought it to camp and I thought I was gonna be safe, but then all the leaders wanted to try my, my freshly roasted coffee, which is fine. I wanted to, you know, I wanted to share with the people, but that's the yesterday was the first time I'd roasted since camp, cuz I I'd just, you know, it was my birthday in between there. So I got a couple bags of coffee. So I've been been using that. So here we go. No one cares, but that's, that's the low down on my coffee situation.

Matt Johnson (01:30):
I love your coffee situation.

Nick Clason (01:32):
well today, uh, we wanted to talk about short form video trends because we haven't talked about short form video enough, right?

Matt Johnson (01:44):
Nope. Not even close.

Nick Clason (01:45):
No. Well, and even though we have it's, it is everything right now on social media and on the internet. And so we wanted to, um, we have, there's a, a HubSpot article that came out a couple of weeks or months ago and I wanted I'll link that in the show notes. So you guys can check that out hybrid ministry.xyz, but also, uh, I wanted to go through that and then kind of bring some of the, bring some of our like church ideas kind of into that. So mm-hmm so that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Um, so let's just dive into it. You ready?

Matt Johnson (02:24):
I'm ready.

Nick Clason (02:25):
Let's do it. So, uh, the first thing is that 85% of marketers say that short form video are the most effective format of video on social media. Well actually mm-hmm, not even video most

Matt Johnson (02:40):
Effective just general

Nick Clason (02:41):
Format on social media, 85%. That's crazy. Mm-hmm what are those other 15% even trying to say? Do you know

Matt Johnson (02:50):
Um, the other 15% aren't being seen I'll tell you that, um, I've even seen people that are doing static images as videos now. So that's kind, that's just kinda the world we're in.

Nick Clason (03:03):
So they literally post like a JPEG and turn it into a video.

Matt Johnson (03:08):
Yeah. So they'll like, you know, fade in the text or whatever. And you're like, this is literally just a static image with text that fades in

Nick Clason (03:15):
all all to be seen by short form video. Is that just because the algorithms have changed? Is that because of the popularity of TikTok? Is that like what what's behind that? Do you feel,

Matt Johnson (03:27):
Uh, it's a hundred percent TikTok. Um, you can see every big, uh, organization has been trying to mimic TikTok. You saw it with Instagram, with reels, YouTube was shorts, um, Facebook with their promotion of just video in general. So it immediately, once TikTok blew up the way it did. Cause it's been a long time since we've seen a social media channel grow as quickly as TikTok did. Yeah. Everyone had to get back on board with it.

Nick Clason (03:56):
Yeah. It says there's a quote in here that says the growth of social media is causing the human tension span to become shorter and shorter. So leveraging the power of short form video content will give you a leg up on the competition and help you engage your audience. And so mm-hmm, what, like, do you feel like that is a threat to, uh, the traditional in room church gathering 35 minute sermon model

Matt Johnson (04:27):
A hundred percent. Yeah. That's something that I don't think we're talking enough about as a church. Um, instead of actually, you know, trying to cater to this, you know, new generation, uh, millennial, gen Z gen alpha that are their short, their attention spans are shortening we've I've noticed church sermons are getting longer or um, oh, we'll just have more production into it, you know, more lights, more action. But um, if you're live experience, isn't on par with, uh, you know, like a big live concert almost at this point or short, you're not gonna be able to capitalize on it. So just an unfortunate world we are in right now. But uh, I think there's some creative solutions that we could figure out and that some of these tasks out there can help us figure out.

Nick Clason (05:13):
Yeah. How, how do like where's the line though? You know, like where's the line on, like we need to cater to them versus like, you know, preaching, biblical content is still meaningful and important and we should still do that as well. You know what I mean? Like when I feel like that probably just has to happen at every church's, uh, like value level, they just have to have that conversation and be like, well, this is what the world is seeing, but this is where like we're gonna stake our claim or whatever, you know? Cause I do think we can get into a slippery slope there and just be like, well, sermons are gone, you know? And I dunno that we're trying to, I dunno that we're trying to say that either. You know what I mean? I think that we should be, be cognizant of where that, where that line is.

Matt Johnson (05:59):
I think the big thing that people, and this is a way bigger tangent than what we had planned on, but

Nick Clason (06:05):
For sure, I didn't even know we were going this way.

Matt Johnson (06:08):
I think a big thing that we're at to figure out as, uh, as churches is just what, what is that next iteration of the sermon that we can figure out? So I don't think we need, you should at all straight away from biblical teaching and biblical truth. And if you're shying away from talking about Jesus at your church, I strongly feel like you're failing as a church. Like yeah, people wanna hear about Jesus when they're at church, they wanna hear about the Bible, it's the way you deliver it. So I just think we have to start kind of figuring out what, uh, your sermon 2.0 would be like, and I do not have a solution for that at all. Um, you know, someone will figure it out and they'll blow up and we'll all go and then everyone will copy them for the next 10 years. So

Nick Clason (06:55):
Yeah, but in the meantime, like there are solutions to the, the hybrid kind of side of it, right? The, what happens, what happens Monday through Saturday, the days you're not in the auditorium the days you're not at church and that's really where kind of this article comes in. So mm-hmm, uh, they say that this, this article also has another stat, says 63% of marketers say that trendy content related to cultural moments and news stories generate the most video engagement. So that's really what that's saying. If I'm understanding that statistic correctly is just that like things that are relevant tend to perform the most. Like if it copies a, if it copies a trend or if it copies a dance or if it copies a, a song that, or, you know, a sound that's going viral, like those are the ones that perform better on average

Matt Johnson (07:48):
Mm-hmm . Yep. Yep. Definitely. So that's something you gotta keep in mind too. So that is the majority still. It's not like the, um, it's not like 75% though. 63%. That's a still, that's a pretty good percentage of people that, of your content that should be probably more trendy relevant rather than just original stuff that you're trying to get relevant.

Nick Clason (08:11):
Yeah. And that's gonna require someone to kind of have their finger on the pulse of that. You're not just going to like pull open TikTok and like no trends.

Matt Johnson (08:21):
Uh, yeah. And that's, that's gonna be the biggest challenge. Yeah. Mm-hmm

Nick Clason (08:25):
Yeah. So who is that person? And there's probably, there's probably a young person in your church that, that does know that, you know, whoever you are listening to this, whether that's you or you're in leadership at your church, like that's a, that's a, there's a person out there that you can probably delegate that to, or at least tap into their knowledge. Cuz I actually, you know, this is the, here's a great case study for this. So I post on TikTok all the time, uh, at our church and I was posting and um, these students of mine were like, you should do this. And I was like, no, no. I was like, this is what's working on our TikTok. And I'd like, told them this thing. They're like, what? I can't remember. They basically like, no you're wrong. We just need to do this thing. And I was like, whatever, I didn't have, like, I didn't have a plan for like my next post anyway. So I was like, that's fine, whatever. We'll just do it. And so we did it and it was by that night it was the number one video on our TikTok channel

Matt Johnson (09:25):
and they

Nick Clason (09:27):
Were like freaking out about it. They're like sending me screenshots. I'd like, Nick, this is the number one video on our to channel. And I was like, yeah, I'm an idiot. You guys are smarter

Matt Johnson (09:37):
Than me. when it comes to having yeah. When it comes to having the finger on the pulse of trends, your students are gonna be the people that know what's going on.

Nick Clason (09:46):
Yeah. Which I posted something on our Twitter the other day and there's like, you know, TikTok ideas, like short form video ideas. And one of them basically is like, ask your youth group smiley face.

Matt Johnson (09:57):
Yep.

Nick Clason (09:58):
Just go to them, like stop putting some 35 year old in charge of, of TikTok. Like go ask the 15 year olds who are spending all hours of all days on it. They will bring you the trends. They'll bring you the ideas and

Matt Johnson (10:12):
Exactly

Nick Clason (10:12):
Crap, dude. They'll probably even like do it for you if you want 'em to like

Matt Johnson (10:16):
Yeah. Which is actually one topics we talk about. Yep.

Nick Clason (10:20):
And, and that's what man, we talk about that, or that's been talked about in like the growing young study by four youth Institute, Kara Powell, all those people, they talk about this idea of key chain leadership, like give, give the, the students who have, uh, some level of authority and responsibility within their church are more inclined to stick with their faith. Mm-hmm so if you give them some sort of ownership of it, you know, but oftentimes I think we just shy away from that because they could make us look bad or they could do something that we don't know or trust, but you know, that's a, it should, church should be a safe place for them to express that and, and try things and fail and, and all those things. So.

Matt Johnson (11:05):
Yep. Exactly.

Nick Clason (11:06):
Yeah. All right. So, um, let's look at these six ideas. Um, and we're gonna talk about, we're gonna talk about six short form video trends to look out for. Uh, the first one is brand challenges. So Matt talk about what a brand challenge is for just a second, so that us, uh, layman and idiots know what that even means.

Matt Johnson (11:32):
Yeah. So a brand challenge, um, is essentially taking the viral content idea. So if you, if you're li if you're listening to this and you have no idea how TikTok works TikTok, you can actually search stuff by like dances songs and sounds, um, which is what makes it stick out from a lot of the other social media platforms. So it's not like based off of hashtags or actually trying to search, or you can search things off of filters. Like that's like the world of TikTok. So you can search actually based off of the content. So as a brand, you could create like a brand challenge sound. So let's go back to, um, a couple years ago in the ice bucket challenge. Okay. And how big that got before the world of TikTok. Now think if your brand could actually mimic the success of the ice bucket challenge on TikTok and how big that could actually get.

Matt Johnson (12:32):
Uh, so it's really taking this idea of, Hey, we're challenging you to, uh, you do something, whatever that looks like. So a great way you could do this as a church is we wanna challenge you to, uh, talk to God five times this week. Um, or, Hey, we wanna challenge you to pray twice this week. Like you can come up with some spiritual challenges that people can do, or you can come up with some church challenge or like more outreachy challenges. So like, um, we wanna challenge you to, you know, see with Jesus' eyes five times this week and help somebody on the street. Um, so it's like starting to be more cognitive, uh, to help people be more cognitive of like their day to day. Uh, another good example of this is like Colgate for mother's day. They did like this huge make mom smile challenge, which was really a challenge to just post photos of your mom or a video of your mom on TikTok.

Matt Johnson (13:34):
And it was for mother's day in Colgate, you know, make mom smile, get white teeth. I don't know, but it was really just a way to get people to post their mom and everyone's gonna post their mom. So, or you could come up with a challenge like who you're praying for this week, post a photo of who you're praying for this week or a video of who you're praying for this week or a video of who you're bringing to youth ministry this week. I'm not gonna see these challenges are gonna go viral. Like, you know, um, the ice bucket challenge, but they could go viral in your church. And that's really the, all that you need right now.

Nick Clason (14:04):
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, wow. I got super echoy. I had to move cuz my kids came down the basement. Yeah,

Matt Johnson (14:13):
You got real echoy. Sorry.

Nick Clason (14:16):
Um, the next one it talks about, it talks about influencer ads. So mm-hmm, um, obviously we're a church. We're not trying to be influencers mm-hmm but what, like what would be something that we could do in the church with, with that idea?

Matt Johnson (14:36):
Yeah. So influencer marketing is always going to give you a higher ROI, always. Um, yeah. That's just because think about the people you trust and how you take, you know, what they say higher than others. So, good example of this in the church world is, you know, Lee Stroble is a massive influencer for the Christian community or Dave Ramsey. Um, so if you like got buy-in from them, you're probably more likely going to like purchase whatever, you know, these stro or Dave Ramsey's talking about. Um, now in your world, let's say we're at a church of, you know, let's say really small church just planted. I have 80 people at my church. You're probably not gonna be able to get a Lee Stroble to talk about your church. I mean, if you got Lee stro, talk about your church, that's a big deal.

Nick Clason (15:29):
Well, and I mean, what's that thing, that cameo thing you could do that

Matt Johnson (15:33):
You could do a cameo. Yeah. But uh, usually Lee Strobel, cuz you know, I've worked with him, his, uh, the asking price could be a little high for his ads and that's because he is Le Strobel. Yeah. Um, and he did a lot of stuff for favors for us though. Cause he is a really nice guy, but like we also like getting him just speaking, you know, it costs money. I mean he's worth it, whatever. Um, so how can you do influencer marketing in your church? Well, your pastor can be considered an influencer. Um, he, I mean, obviously he's probably the big influencer on your campus. Uh, so you start using him in a more strategic option to like promote stuff. You could also, if you really wanna get creative, find these people that you would call influencers in your church. So let's say this is gonna sound real bad, Nick, and you can push back all you want.

Matt Johnson (16:28):
Cause this is definitely like going to a weird space with your youth group. But as a youth leader, I, um, you could definitely find the popular kid yeah. And get the popular kid to, you know, start pushing stuff on like be your influencer for you. Um, yeah. Yeah. Now we don't wanna play favorites or anything like that obviously. But at the same time, if you know, like, Hey, if I got, let's say Abigail, for instance, to like get on board for this, I know she would get like 12 other people to get on board for this. That's a good use for influencer marketing. So think of influencer marketing on a small scale at your church that could grow into a bigger scale and just make that short term, uh, short form video. Like that's the key to all this. So

Nick Clason (17:13):
Yeah. I don't think like, like we've said, I don't think our goal is to become, get famous people or whatever. Right. But no, but you're right. If, if your senior pass, especially if your senior pastor is not a part of your social media channels too often, like when you post him, that's going to, that's gonna have that effect, you know? Yep. If you are the senior pastor you're listening to this and you are the primary person running things on digital and social, like then there is, you're not gonna have that same influencer or effect because you're the primary face on there. You know what I mean? Yep. So you gotta exactly. Who else are you gonna put out there? All right. The next thing we talk about is, uh, product teasers. So, um, this is talking about, you know, it says anywhere from six to 60 seconds, um, where you're teasing something that's coming. I think this one is one that works perfectly within the church. Mm-hmm you know what I mean? Yep.

Matt Johnson (18:03):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's like think of a traditional commercial is usually a product teaser, so

Nick Clason (18:10):
Yeah, exactly. And so one of the things we did, um, all gosh for probably like 5, 4, 4, 5 months, uh, on our TikTok was just the teaser, uh, round signing up for summer camp. So we did all kinds of stuff that was promoting the idea of summer camp, giving a sneak peek to summer camp. Um, you know, funny videos about summer camp, but it was all about some upcoming event. And that was obviously within the realm of our student ministry. Mm-hmm . And so if you're running this for a church, you have not only summer camp coming up, but you have vacation Bible school and you have the adult Bible study starting and you have financial peace university on its way, and you have the missions trip, uh, domestic and international and you, so you have a million things and that's, that's probably more, the challenge is trying to figure out what or how to promote everything, but product product teasing is something that can become very easy to do. You know what I mean? Uh, in the church world.

Matt Johnson (19:14):
So mm-hmm yep, absolutely.

Nick Clason (19:16):
So real quick, before we jump to the next one, uh, as someone who does marketing in the church, Matt, what is your like preferred model for knowing what to promote and how often, and do you have like a, do you have like a framework built? Do you have like a, a rule of thumb? That's good, good practice for that because you know, if you're in the seat, you're in the kids' ministry wants their announcement and the student ministry wants their announcement and the women's ministry wants their announcement and the seniors ministry wants their announcement who gets the announcement.

Matt Johnson (19:52):
Great question. So step one is making, um, the various ministries kind of work together and work backwards. So the rule of thumb on any given Sunday for us is three announcements. And that is just because we know three decisions is as many as people can do before they start feeling overwhelmed. So if I give you four decisions, that fourth decision is gonna take less precedent than the other three. So that's step one is get the ministries to like, not launch five things on the same weekend, which we all wanna do. I, we all wanna do it, but don't do it. It's just two the next week. It's fine. Um, secondly is, uh, yeah, we, we have built, uh, an SOP, a standard operating procedure to really define what takes precedent over everything. So, um, what gets on social media is gonna be different than what gets in our email for the week, which will be different than what's on stage, which will be different than what the pastor talks about.

Matt Johnson (20:56):
And this is all weighed depending on the, um, the outreach draw of it. So, um, social and email, we have decided that email is for internal. So if this is more of internal event, so rooted, rooted is not gonna be something that you invite friends to really that are not part of the church, cuz rooted is gonna make you go deep in small groups. That should just be our newsletter and um, probably our host spot. And why I say that for the host spot for that is because, uh, that's a great way to get people that are in the church that probably have not done rooted. And they're new to go, okay, go do this to take next step with Parkview. Um, uh, the set, the next thing. So then social like alpha is great for social media because that's an external thing. So I can run, you know, ads behind that and get people to come to that.

Matt Johnson (21:59):
And then, uh, like if it's something that's gonna really affect everyone and that's a big deal that goes to the pastor to talk about in his spot. So let's say we have like family weekend coming up our next gen weekend. That's something that should probably be talked about by the pastor when the most captive audience is there. If that's something that we have said as a church, like that's hu ways higher than everything else. So you really just gotta define who your target is for everything that you're trying to promote. And then you can kind of figure out where they fit in your puzzle piece of all the digital platforms you have. Um, what's

Nick Clason (22:36):
The, what's the biggest, like, can you think of a time, like the number one time that you had like multiple people vying for, for something like, and how did you filter through that?

Matt Johnson (22:47):
Oh, I mean, it happens all the time at where we're at now and it's because everyone thinks their stuff is super important urgent. And the big thing is just sitting down with everyone and explaining their target and actually getting their purpose. And once they start realizing, oh yeah, mine is internal. Mine's really only for preschoolers. It's like, okay, then we should target preschoolers. Like this should not be, you know, an all church thing, um, necessarily it could be depending on what the event is, but 99% of the time, it's not going to be, um, now at a smaller church and maybe you have less going on. That's okay to like talk about all this stuff with your congregation and be like, yeah, I do have a friend that has a preschooler and I've talked about God with them and they might be interested to come, but like, that's great. That's a great avenue for that. But when you have eight different type of group functionalities, plus five kids things, plus your student things, plus your, um, mission things on top of, uh, we have mass baptism weekend or whatever, like you gotta really start kinda weighing what is actually gonna get you the most bang for your, your most bang for your buck, quote, unquote,

Nick Clason (23:56):
Bang for your,

Matt Johnson (23:58):
I was saying quote with buck unquote quote.

Nick Clason (24:04):
All right, great. Those just like a quick deviation, but uh, okay. So the next thing here in this article is more user generated content. All right. So what's that. And how can churches use it?

Matt Johnson (24:18):
User generated content is literally just getting your users to create content for you. So, um,

Nick Clason (24:25):
That feels like churches could do pretty

Matt Johnson (24:28):
Easily, oh, a hundred percent. You should be doing it. And user generated content has actually been shown. I haven't seen the most recent studies, so don't quote me on this, but it was, uh, shown to be one of the highest ways for conversion rate. And that's because you're trusting someone that, you know, you so it's. So if you think about it in the hierarchy of like influencer marketing commercials and then user generated content user generated, content's gonna have the highest conversion because Nick, if you tell me about something, I'm gonna trust that more than if Lee Stroble tells me about something, which I trust Leero more than, uh, my I'm watching a Dodgers game and there's a commercial that comes on. So if you think about that

Nick Clason (25:10):
H baseball, right?

Matt Johnson (25:13):
Cause baseball is good. Nick, it's good for the heart, especially when you have a team that wins a lot. So if you think about that hierarchy, that like, okay. Yeah. It's building that trust user generated content is gonna weigh higher.

Nick Clason (25:28):
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, how, how, how, like, how could churches go about capturing user generated content?

Matt Johnson (25:38):
Um, great way is, do you have some kids you trust, well, have them run your Instagram or TikTok for the day? Um, yeah. You're at camp. Uh, have your students do be like, Hey, I want you guys to promote camp today, take the camera or the GoPro with you and you guys just go crazy. Like you have some options there there's a lot, like it CR this is where you can get whoever you want to be as creative as they possibly can within the context of whatever your, uh, your guidelines are at your church.

Nick Clason (26:09):
Yeah. Well, I'm thinking too, man, you could even do, uh, like what's it called? Like takeovers on Instagram stories. Mm-hmm, you know, um, little things like that. Give, give people like a kind of a glimpse a day in the life, all that type of stuff. Uh, I did that one year at camp where a different person took over Instagram for the day, you know, and they just, they got access to our student mystery account for the day. So, all right. Uh, sweet. The next one is more behind the brands videos. So this one's like a, this one's like a, I don't know, like kinda like a behind the scenes one, but it says mm-hmm, , uh, a sprout social study said that 70% of consumers say they feel more connected to brands who, uh, whose CEO is active on social media platform. So that goes to that senior pastor thing.

Nick Clason (27:02):
Um, but what are, what are some of the behind the scenes? Like, you know, we that's, that one feels like a super easy one for churches. Like people see what you want them to see on a Sunday morning or whatever, but where, but given them a glimpse into the office or the staff meeting or the prayer meeting, or a tour of like a, a place that normal people don't get to see those types of things, I feel like are super a, you know, have such a chance to blow up for people to just get excited about it.

Matt Johnson (27:36):
Yep. Yeah. And it's super easy. Like do walk around the office and say, Hey, here's Doreen. I want you to know about her and meet her and give your testimony or whatever. Or here's our meeting room or here's our staff meeting today, or here's our prayer time today, like build that stuff or take a photo of it and post it. And we have personally seen this be some of our, uh, highest, uh, converting slash liked and engaged stuff that we have done. And this is something we've recently just added to our world. So, um, getting, and it's so easy, Nick, it's so easy. Like you just walk up to someone with your phone and you film them for 30 seconds and then get couple hundreds on it.

Nick Clason (28:13):
Yeah. Yeah. Super easy. So, you know, you can even add that it's like a once a week, like a actually, uh, you've passed a friend of mine. He used to do this thing called, uh, what's behind that door. And it was just like a series that he would do. And he'd like explore different closets basically in the church, you know? And he had a little bumper with it and he would just do it. It was honestly, it was very TikTok esque before TikTok. He was just posting on his Instagram, like feed, but that was basically what he was doing. And then I remember one, he did like a super funny one. where he like went up into the attic and he planted this like baby doll. And so he like shown the flashlight and the attic on the baby doll. And then it just showed him like freaking out, like running away and then just standing there, like stunned at the end.

Nick Clason (29:01):
And that's how it ended like this, the perfect TikTok archetype, but he was doing it like before, before talk's time, even, you know? But I love that. Just little things like that that are just fun. What's behind that door, you know, what's that closet. Have you ever, have you ever wondered what this is? Like, there's, there's a million probably things in your church like that, and it's stupid stuff. Right? Like you hide it for the weekend, but people, people eat that stuff up, man. If they're like, this is our Christmas storage closet, for whatever reason, they're like, ah, it's amazing. Like I think because there's like a vulnerability there, they just feel like a greater sense of connection to your church. Yep. Because of that, like, oh yeah. I, I got to see where they have the Christmas trees, like who cares, but people do

Matt Johnson (29:47):
They do. And um, it's easy. like, that's all I could say. It's easy. Just do it.

Nick Clason (29:53):
Yeah. Yeah. There's really no reason not to. All right. The last one that this, uh, HubSpot article has here is more explainer or educational videos. And I feel like this is the one that the church can just go absolutely crazy on

Matt Johnson (30:06):
Mm-hmm

Nick Clason (30:07):
Mm-hmm so here's what I wanna do. I wanna do a little game. You ready? I didn't even tell you about this. Mm-hmm and it's coming to my brain right now for the very first time. Love it. So I want us to make a list and we're just gonna bounce back and forth. And the person who, uh, runs out of ideas first loses you ready?

Matt Johnson (30:25):
A list of

Nick Clason (30:26):
A list of educational or explainer videos. Okay. So like things that churches could do, um, great. And I'll start, then you go then back to me, then you, does that make sense? We're gonna ping pong it back and forth.

Matt Johnson (30:39):
Yep.

Nick Clason (30:40):
All right. So, um, you could do a, how to pray video,

Matt Johnson (30:47):
Man. That was on my mind. You could do a how to share your faith video.

Nick Clason (30:51):
Mm that's a good one. You could do how to read your Bible video.

Matt Johnson (30:55):
You could do how to share your testimony video.

Nick Clason (30:58):
that? I don't know. That seems very close to the first one. You said, uh, you

Matt Johnson (31:03):
Could do test. Well, I guess how do you share Jesus and how do you do your testimony? I guess

Nick Clason (31:10):
You could do, uh, you could explain like a deep theological truth, like the holy spirit or something like that.

Matt Johnson (31:19):
Oh yeah. That's good. Uh, one of my favorite types of videos is, uh, like dumbing down, complicated Bibles mm-hmm or, you know, so like, uh, talk about Leviticus that makes sense for people or numbers, you know?

Nick Clason (31:37):
Yeah. Yeah. That's like the Bible project. Yep. Um, you could do. Yeah. What was I gonna say? I had something, uh, uh, maybe I'm gonna lose here. Uh, you could do, uh, nah, I, I think I lost man. You win. Congratulations. Um, thanks. Yeah, but you see, like we could have gone a lot longer, but I'm an idiot. Oh,

Matt Johnson (32:01):
Definitely. Well, you had it. It's it's early, everybody.

Nick Clason (32:05):
That's so early. And this is my fourth room that I'm in now. Cuz I, my kids took the only room that didn't echo and now I'm sitting in a bedroom closet. That's just like the echoes of all the echoes. But I was thinking you could, yeah, you could do Bible content. Oh, this is what I was gonna say. You could do, like you could share, uh, unknown stories of the Bible you could share. I love that. Um, you know, like the weird, like the Balo and the Baylor story, or you could share like the, the name and diving in the, in the Jordan river, like you could just, you could pull some of the, the silly verses out, you know, and explain them. You could, there's just, there's a million different ways you could do overviews of, of new Testament, old Testament who wrote the book, why that's important, how to do hermeneutics, how do homo Lytics, like, there's just, there's things that at any given time, you, if you're a pastor, like, you know, is important, but you have to leave those things like on the chopping room floor yeah.

Nick Clason (33:06):
Of your sermon. And like you can pull some of those things out. You could even do like a deeper dive from your sermon of something that you did study in your research, but you chose not to include it for time sake or for whatever purpose, but you could just say, Hey, Hey, here's something that I, I researched last week in light of the sermon on acts chapter two and boom, you got a 62nd video explaining that. And those types of things I see on TikTok all day long. Not, not necessarily like spiritually though. I do see some of those, but I just mean like in general, those like quick hitter, 62nd, you know, explainer videos. And I think that this is what, this is what probably most churches probably are gonna lean towards. Um, at least naturally cuz that's we're in the content creation business, you know?

Matt Johnson (33:55):
Yep.

Nick Clason (33:56):
So there it is guys. Uh, like I said, I will, um, I will post a link to this article in the show notes, feel free to check it out hybrid ministry.xyz. Um, or however else you, uh, do it, Matt, I have a question for you

Matt Johnson (34:12):
Ask, go away.

Nick Clason (34:13):
It's talking about down here later on in this article, best platforms for short form video, it's got TikTok number one, Instagram reels, number two. YouTube shorts. Number three. Yeah. Do, are we messing with YouTube shorts these days?

Matt Johnson (34:28):
Um, uh, uh, depends on the day. You know, YouTube is actually out is weighing long form content higher again, so, okay. Um, if you can create some YouTube shorts, that's great. If someone gets stuck in the YouTube shorts, that's usually a good thing. The big thing about shorts is, uh, they need to create a shorts app. If they create a shorts app, I think you would probably have more success there. Um, right now it's hidden in the YouTube app. Um, I think it's only a matter of time before they do make a shorts app. Uh,

Nick Clason (35:05):
So maybe when they do that, it's time to time to make that matter a little more.

Matt Johnson (35:09):
Yeah. And I'm was gonna say, when it comes to Google, I really don't buy into their stuff quickly cuz the second it doesn't do what they want to do. They just kill it. So , I mean there's a whole website dedicated to like projects killed by Google. You can literally look it up. Um, and I'm telling you like it's literally called killed by google.com and you would just be mind blown by the amount of stuff they test before they kill it. So YouTube shorts is there for now, but I mean, YouTube go was a thing at one point and YouTube originals was a thing. Remember Google

Nick Clason (35:44):
Plus,

Matt Johnson (35:45):
Remember Google plus plus. Yeah like there's a lot there. So I would, if shorts does not become its own app, I, I would say it's probably gonna get killed sooner or later.

Nick Clason (35:55):
There's a lot of stuff on this website, bro.

Matt Johnson (35:57):
I told you, man. It, well,

Nick Clason (35:59):
We'll throw it in the notes too. Yeah. Um,

Matt Johnson (36:02):
It's just a fun website.

Nick Clason (36:04):
Yeah, it is fun. And then there's uh, there's some other apps that this HubSpot article is referencing like some trier hippo Magisto lately.ai and whiskey. Are any of those worth churches investing any their time in at this point, would you say

Matt Johnson (36:22):
It depends on your margin? So like trier is very song based, even more song based for, um, the TikTok. So if you have like a awesome worship band and you're not in trier, like maybe you should look into it. Um, and then the other stuff that's on you like hippo, Mao, um, lately a lot of this stuff is more of, uh, how to leverage short form content more rather than a platform that you would host short form content on. So like HIPAA video might be a good resource for you to look into if you wanna really maximize your like CTAs and your, um, auto like automation for video and conversion and stuff. So, um, but for hosting stuff like YouTube reels and TikTok, uh, TikTok are gonna be number one. And the, like I said, you look into it, but it's just like be real that's out right now. There's these, these smaller social platforms that are like captivating their audiences, but I nothing has blown up like TikTok since literally Instagram and Instagram took a long time to blow up. I don't think people remember that.

Nick Clason (37:30):
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Sweet. Well, I just saw those and I was like, Hey, these are like literally trier hippo Magista lately in w never even heard of any of those. So this is where

Matt Johnson (37:41):
This is. They're more of a tool podcast.

Nick Clason (37:43):
Tell us these things. So,

Matt Johnson (37:45):
Yep, absolutely.

Nick Clason (37:46):
All right, man. Well that is it for today. Appreciate, appreciate your talking. Appreciate you watching me go from room to room, room, room to room to find spot to record, uh, but excited to continue to be on this journey with y'all feel free to subscribe. Give us a rating. We'd love to hear from you at hybridministry.xyz and we'll talk soon.