Carol was cleaning out a bookcase, and came across a book she must have bought when it first came out back in 1993: Guerilla Marketing Excellence: The Fifty Golden Rules for Small-Business Success, by Jay Conrad Levinson. Perhaps you remember Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing books, a series of books written for people in businesses who didn’t have huge advertising and marketing budgets.

As I leafed through this book, I realized how much Carol and I learned from the Guerilla Marketing books. We started reading these books when I was a salesman and Carol was self-employed. From these books, we learned that you have to be in advertising for the long haul because results don’t come right away. We learned how to market through social networks. We learned that you can’t rely on just one form of advertising because people need to see your message in several different forms. We learned that you have to be scrupulously honest to get past the basic mistrust people have for advertising.

Rereading this book helped me remember something else: Marketing for church is very different than marketing for a small business. Churches don’t have promotions or sales or profit margins. Churches don’t have a customer base (we have people who are committed to church). Churches don’t have a product or a service to sell (we’re a convenanted community in which we transform our lives). And I also realized that marketing and advertising have changed in the past fifteen years — for instance, telemarketing is dead while Web sites are hot.

Yet as I read through Guerilla Marketing Excellence, I was struck by how much of the book was still timely, and how much of it was actually relevant to churches. So over the next couple of weeks, I thought I’d post some gleanings from this book — and maybe get you thinking about how you could do Guerilla Church Marketing yourself.

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Style vs. substance, Guerilla Marketing’s golden rule #15:

Emphasize the meat and potatoes of your offering rather than the plate upon which they’re served….

It is apparent that there is room in marketing for both style and substance. But the guerilla marketer sees to it that both are obvious and that the product or service always has the starring role.

This is a fundamental rule that sometimes gets forgotten in the church world. In my church, we like to put advertisements in the newspaper with this week’s sermon title. But I have yet to meet anyone who joined a Unitarian Universalist church because they saw a cool sermon title in a newspaper ad. We’re not even emphasizing the plate, we’re emphasizing the napkin.

But people do come to church because they have questions about the meaning of life, they come because they want to be transformed, they come because they know they could be better people than they are now. That’s our “meat and potatoes” (or rice and beans if you’re vegan). So why don’t we say that in our advertisements? What might that sound like?…

“If you want to transform your life, we’ll help you ask the tough questions. We help each other become the people we want to be.”

I’ll bet you can come up with something better. How do we emphasize the meat and potatoes, instead of the plate?

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What people really buy, Guerilla Marketing’s golden rule #3:

Gear your marketing to people already in the market, and know what they really buy other than instant gratification….

People do not buy because marketing is glitzy but because marketing strikes a chord in the mind of the prospect that makes that person want the advantages of what you are selling. Marketing does not work because it sells products or services but because it helps people realize the merits of owning the products or services.

To put this in church terms, we are not providing instant gratification. We are not trying to sell people on our “products” or our “services.” You come to church because your life will be transformed for the better if you do.

In churches, we are apt to advertise things like concerts, lectures, sermon titles, and programs. Those things fall into the category of instant gratification. Instead of coming to one sermon or lecture, we want people to stick around for at least three months of regular attendance at worship, because only then will they understand how church can change them. That’s what we need to communicate in our marketing: how our church will change them.

This may be why the most effective form of advertising for churches is word-of-mouth. Better than 80% of newcomers come to a church because they heard about it through a friend or neighbor. A friend or neighbor can show how church can change your life, in a way that a newspaper ad or a sermon title simply cannot.

I’ll bet you can expand on this further. How can we tell potential new members how church will transform them?

Next installment: “The Designated Guerilla”.