Seth Godin has written another blog with a killer application for us. Seth is a marketing guru, and his daily blog often includes insights directly applicable to ministry. Nothing to Ad (not a typo!), October 5, 2023, is such a blog.

He starts off talking about the futility of trying to advance your brand by advertising on social media. I don’t understand the technical details, but the conclusion is this:

The path forward is very different.

Your (current) customers need to bring you your (new) customers.

It’s not ironic but it is edifying to realize that this is EXACTLY how every one of the media companies you’re paying ad money to grew. They grew with word of mouth, not the sorts of ads they’re selling.

Facebook or that influencer–they didn’t grow by running ads and selling subscriptions. They grew when their users felt that it was in their own selfish interests to bring them new users.

As long as your project is built around the misguided myth of “getting the word out” and promoting itself to strangers, you will struggle. Someone always wins the spend-money-on-DTC-promo game, but it probably won’t be you. It’s simply a lottery where one of the spenders hits a magical level of critical mass and becomes buzzy. For the rest of us, there’s only the glorious work of creating a product and a situation that people think is worth talking about. It’s hard, it has dead ends, but it’s the work. – Seth Godin, October 5, 2023, emphases mine

“Your current customers need to bring you new customers.” I.e., word of mouth. I’m not against ad campaigns like He Gets Us. But Jesus laid out a strategy that is more like Seth Godin:

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. (Acts 1.8, ESV)

“My witnesses” sounds like word of mouth, doesn’t it?