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If you've been around the Fishhook crew lately, you've probably heard us talk about inbound marketing. It's a new movement for reaching people where they are and getting out your message.

We've felt the Spirit move for the last year, pushing us to help the church reach more people with the message of God's love. Over and over again, we're seeing that inbound marketing can help! 

So what is inbound marketing? To explain, here is a quote from HubSpot, the leader in inbound marketing: "Sharing is caring and inbound is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more." 

The ultimate goal of inbound is to "turn strangers into customers and promoters of your business." Wow! Sounds a lot like the church to us! Replace the word "customers" with believers and "your business" with the Gospel, and it starts to make more sense. 

Inbound focuses on four major factors to help move a stranger to a promoter. 

(Thanks HubSpot!) 

Sherwood Oaks Christian Church is currently partnering with Fishhook to develop an inbound strategy for their church. Roger Clark, Executive Pastor at Sherwood Oaks, feels, "If the church was as strategic about a systematic process of nurturing leads, to conversions, to advocates as inbound marketers, the world would be won for Jesus."   

In case you've missed our copious tweets, silly Instagram photos or the other blog post we wrote, we are at the inbound marketing conference in Boston! At one of the many sessions we attended, Andrew Quinn, Director of Training and Development at HubSpot, said in order to shape the learning of your audience, you have to "go fishing where the fish are." (Sounds like he could be on the Fishhook payroll!)  

Here's how he thinks you can, "Catch More": 

1. Develop a deep understanding of your customer.
2. Disrupt their point of view (not their lives) and challenge their assumptions.
3. Teach them how to move forward.
4. Prescribe their action step.

This is inbound marketing. This is also the mission of the church. 

If you're still not convinced, here are our top 3 reasons why we think the church needs inbound marketing: 

1. The church needs to be intentional about reaching people online. Inbound gives you that intentionality in a step by step strategy.
2. We are now competing with an actual person. It used to be that we were competing with other organizations or lifestyle choices to get a person's attention. Now, we are competing with people's own thoughts and opinions that they expand by searching online.
3. It gives you the biggest platform you've ever had to teach the Gospel.

The Inbound conference is showing us that the business world is trying to figure this out. They are trying to reach people, where they are and how they want to be reached. This has always been the church's goal, and Fishhook envisions inbound marketing as a key to making that goal a reality. 

If you want to find more information about this conversation, follow #INBOUND14 on Twitta. (Please read in a Boston accent.)