Bryan Citrin is a Business Entrepreneur who has a heart for ministry. First he was a campus missionary with Chi Alpha (https://chialpha.com) on the campus of UCLA. Then he started going on mission trips to Haiti and Vietnam. To pay for it all he started a marketing business. He is in the Two Comma Club with an online marketing company called ClickFunnels which means his company has earned more than a million dollars in revenue from online marketing. Now he owns his own company called LeadFlows.com. He is an expert in both marketing and ministry.
Check out Bryan Citrin’s digital marketing company here: leadflows.com
Forbes Articles from Bryan Citrin:
Four Pillars Every Entrepreneur Should Balance to Help Find Purpose: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2020/10/13/four-pillars-every-entrepreneur-should-balance-to-help-find-purpose/?sh=34c47aeabfc7
Six Ways to Create a Philanthropic Culture in Your Business: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2019/03/29/six-ways-to-create-a-philanthropic-culture-in-your-business/?sh=48a5894c6e69
Article About Ministry in Vietnam: https://news.ag.org/en/News/Refugee-Becomes-Ministry-Pioneer?D=%7B1363B7E2-EDBD-4DD4-B69C-A160FF74CF6C%7D
In order to receive receive resources that will help you raise money for your ministry text the word “Growth” to 918-265-3050.
If you want coaching in starting your ministry, please talk to Evangelism Coach Daniel King.
Transcript:
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:00):
Brian Citron is a minister who has also had articles published by forbes.com. He understands both business and ministry, and he’s an expert in digital marketing. He recently started his own company called lead flows.com. And today he explains why every ministry and church needs to take advantage of the enormous possibilities offered by his amazing software.
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:28):
Well, Jesus said go into all the world and preach the gospel. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Welcome to the evangelism podcast with Dr. Daniel King, where Daniel interviews, full-time evangelists, pastors, missionaries, and normal everyday Christians to discover how they share their faith, their powerful testimonies and amazing stories that will inspire you to reach people with the good news. And now here’s your host missionary and evangelist Daniel King. Welcome to the evangelist
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:06):
Podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus today. I have a very special guest. His name is Brian Citron, and he is a marketing genius. He is a published author with forbes.com. One of the premier business websites in the world. He has been involved in ministry for many, many years, but he also happens to be a marketing genius. And so his specialty is entrepreneurship and doing online marketing. Brian, thank you so much for being with me today.
Bryan Citrin (01:45):
Thanks so much Daniel excited to be here.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (01:47):
So tell me a little bit about why marketing is important for ministries.
Bryan Citrin (01:53):
Marketing is important for ministries because the gospel’s free, but the ministry cost money. And you have to have a way to let people know about your ministry and you have to let them know in relevant matters, how things are going with your ministry. And so it’s crucial that you leverage the latest strategies and tools to the fundraise. Let your donors know what’s been happening, et cetera. On the same way you see big ministries, fundraising, or you see like political campaigns, fundraising the same way your ministry should leverage those tools to make your stuff known. Because the more resources you have coming in, the bigger impact you can make around the world for the gospel.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (02:29):
Now, fundraising has really changed over the years. I remember hearing my dad tell stories about working for or Roberts and back in the day, or Roberts would send out literally millions of letters and my dad would help to stuff the letters and do direct mail marketing. But now a lot of the funds that ministries are able to raise, have moved from getting a letter in the mail, which people tend to look at it and they throw it in the can to, to now a lot of the marketing is happening online and people are sharing their stories online. They’re, they’re communicating with people online, through their cell phones. Everyone carries a cell phone with them everywhere that they go. And so a lot of the ministries that are really effective at raising money now have moved a lot of their, their fundraising from the physical realm into the digital realm. And so Brian, you’ve been very involved in the digital realm as an entrepreneur, as a businessman. What are some of the things that you’ve done in the digital realm to, to help
Bryan Citrin (03:39):
Build businesses? Hey that’s a great question. I first want to say I’m in a Forbes agency council. So I’m looked at as an expert, not just for ministries, but businesses and business leaders. Look to me as an expert in the marketing agency arena for like online marketing.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:56):
Let’s talk a little bit about your credentials for a second here. Several years ago, I remember you showing me a website called click funnels and with click funnels, if you design a website that people go, they, they put in their information and then they start receiving emails and, and different ways of reaching out to people. And the goal is to, to sell a product and then maybe sell another product. First you sell like maybe a $7 digital download. And then later you say, we also have this hundred dollar video that has some more information. And then you say, and by the way, we have a thousand dollar coaching program that you can get in on. And then if you get in on that, then maybe there’s a $10,000 super-duper conference that you can go to. And so that’s why it’s called a click funnel because it’s this funnel that funnels people through from first impressions, all the way down to becoming a an investor basically in, in, in whatever it is that the person selling. So I remember you, you showing that to me and, and then you actually got in the two comma club with click funnels, which this is a really big deal in the digital marketing world. What’s the two comma club
Bryan Citrin (05:17):
The two comma club means that my company has made two commas or over a million dollars from a single sales funnel.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:23):
And you’ve done that helping businesses. This, this was not ministry related. You were doing it more in the business realm. Tell me a little bit about what type of business you were involved in.
Bryan Citrin (05:34):
Sure, sure. So I own chiropractic advertising.com and both my parents and my uncle are chiropractors. So we’ve been focusing in the healthcare niche and we’ve been creating online marketing campaigns for these chiropractors and charging them a lot of money to build out these whole campaigns, where we run their ads online, targeting new patients. We create online websites for them, landing pages. We create online scheduling and a bunch of backend texts, automation, voicemail, automation, email automation, all this stuff, all in the healthcare space.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:03):
Now why do chiropractors pay you a lot of money?
Bryan Citrin (06:08):
Chiropractors paying me a lot of money because I make them a lot of money.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:10):
So they’re, they’re not just paying you because they like you, you are making the money with these systems. You are helping them to, to get more customers, to make more money in their business. And so it’s worthwhile. They give you a dollar, they get back $5 or $10.
Bryan Citrin (06:27):
I remember one chiropractor. He told me that I made him an additional 40 plus thousand dollars in his first, like 40 days over half of that was paid up front. He made me a testimonial video, six months later saying that he made over $175,000. And I know that over a hundred thousand was paid upfront.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (06:49):
I think this is so valuable because ministries need money and they can use the digital space in order to do fundraising. And you’ve been very successful in helping businesses, but you also have a huge heart for ministry. So you spent a lot of time as a missionary to the campus of UCLA over in California, you’ve also gone a bunch of missing strips to, to Haiti, to, to Vietnam. And so you are very much called to be a minister, and you’ve seen ways that ministries can adapt this technology that you’ve learned about for the ministry. Tell, tell me about some of those ways that people can use the technology.
Bryan Citrin (07:37):
Sure. everybody, you should have a database of your, your donors and your potential donors. Every single ministry needs to have a database. That’s your most valuable asset names, numbers, and emails of people that believe in you that either getting ministry updates, maybe they’re getting devotionals, or maybe they’re your process. You’re reaching out to them for, you know, solicitation for mission trips. So you need to have that database, but you need to be actively engaging that list. So you need to be sending out emails to this list. Of course. And that’s a lot of people are saying emails, but what a lot of people are not doing is they’re not seeing out text messages. And the problem is a lot of emails. They go to spam filters, but there’s actually a way to send out mass text messages at scale. And it makes it look like you’re personally texting them, but really it’s like a VIP ministry line that you can text them. And then when they respond, you can have a go to your cell phone automatically and texts back and forth with this private VIP line through our app or from like the app on the mobile desktop or on the phone. And they’re really, you know, scale out your your ability to cultivate relationships.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (08:43):
Okay? So this is not just one solution. This is a bunch of different things that ministry should be doing. So in that paragraph that you mentioned there, you mentioned email marketing. You mentioned having a database with all the different names and addresses and, and, and emails and phone numbers of, of the donors. You mentioned texting, and you mentioned apps. Now I know a lot of different resources are available out there. And sometimes you could go to five or six different companies to figure out how to do all this. So one company would, would do funnels and then another company would do an email than another company would do text messages, but you’ve been developing a resource that brings all of these different applications together into one place.
Bryan Citrin (09:45):
Absolutely. So when I first started my digital marketing company, you’d mentioned ClickFunnels. I use ClickFunnels, I use like five or six or seven other programs. I had to have a program for call tracking. I had had a program for automated two-way texting. I had to have a program for making outbound calls. I had to have a program that connected things together. I had to have a program for sending emails. I think I mentioned the funnels already. I had to have a program for sending voicemail drops to people. I had that all these different things connected, and then it was like an another software to be the glue connect, everything together. You had to have another program for online forums. It was crazy and it was just like, everything
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:24):
Is different programs, cost you X number of dollars a month.
Bryan Citrin (10:27):
And I was paying every month and I’m paying for all this software to make it all work together. But now, you know, I have this software and I actually just wrote an article on Forbes about this about how you can leverage all this, all the software and how you can even consolidate software. So like, I, I recently wrote this article in beginning of December, it got published, it says four important habits. Every marketing entrepreneur should implement them in leveraging software. And one of the things we talk about is try to consolidate all your software into one spot. So it’s easy. And so we’ve actually consolidate all the software into one spot and create a simple solution that ministries can use to cultivate and deepen relationships with their donors. So they can not only, you know, get prayer requests out to their donors, but are also able to give them ministry updates, et cetera.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:19):
So tell me what the name of your, your software,
Bryan Citrin (11:23):
Where is the name of the software is lead flows.com.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:26):
So what, what is, what does that mean? What’s a lead flow?
Bryan Citrin (11:28):
Lead flow is a term that I came up with. And I like to say that you don’t need a funnel. You need a lead flow. And I like to say is it’s the entire process a a, somebody goes through as you cultivate and nurture that individual from the time you first meet them to the time whenever they’re purchasing your services to the time when you’re actually con actually cultivating that relationship into like a higher levels of giving higher levels of like engagement with your organization, with your ministry or business. So is this something that the only big ministries could you,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:03):
Or is this something that someone who’s called to go as a missionary to Africa, that they would be able to use to raise money?
Bryan Citrin (12:11):
Every ministry needs to use this. And I think that even smaller ministries need these even more because they have less resources and less staff, the manly do these actions, because what this, what lead flows does is it does a lot of things that once before maybe they had a dedicated staff member doing all these individual tasks, but this can literally automate the whole process that makes it easier for the person who’s over in Africa to engage with their donor base and engage with with their prayer partners, et cetera.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:41):
Like, let’s talk about sending out text messages. Like if you were to be in Africa and I’ve sent out text messages from Africa, it costs me like a dollar, a text or something to send out. But with lead flows, what you could do is you could load up a text. And since it’s in the cloud, you’d be able to access the website from Africa. You set it up to send out a text, and then instead of paying a dollar, a text from Africa, you’d only be paying a few cents per text here in America. And you could send that one texts like, Hey, check out this video from the crusade I did last night. And it would go out to all 150 of your friends, and they’d be able to watch a video of what you did.
Bryan Citrin (13:30):
Absolutely. And what’s so exciting about it is you can utilize something called merge tags, and I’m sure you’ve seen it. If you’re not like familiar with marketing terms, you open up an email. It says, hi, Daniel. You know, I’m so excited that you’re able to join us for whatever it is he’s talking about. And you’re addressing the person by name. So this software has the ability to sound this text and have these merged tags that you can customize a text message for each person that’s getting it. So it could be like, Hey, Daniel, I’m going to Africa right now. And we use this skews crusade check out this video. I just, I fill in for it. And literally they think that you’re sending them the text messages, but really, you know, it says, hi Daniel. Hi Brian. Hi Steve. Hi, Mary I Sally. And you’re personalizing it on a mass scale. Yes. And there’s, and there’s other personalization you can do with that as well. And you can be really micro in terms of how you actually personalize these text messages. What are some
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (14:20):
Other ways that you think ministries could use lead flows?
Bryan Citrin (14:25):
One thing that’s really valuable, especially if a minister is speaking you can actually have like a Texas subscribe. So for example, if you’re speaking at a church, you could say, Hey texts prior to this, this phone number. And then we’re going to send you this form we can put in your prayer request, or you could say, Hey, I have this free book on X, Y, and Z text this number, and we’re going to send you this out. And so you can use that to generate leads. It can create websites. So like me and I, friend of mine, we created a website that I showed you for this, this online conference we did on teaching entrepreneurship and in kind of entrepreneur entrepreneurship mixed with, with ministry. And we, we built the whole thing on lead flows. So we built the, the, the registration page and lead flows.
Bryan Citrin (15:10):
We built a shopping cart on lead flows and everything. And we got over 300 people. This is the register for this and a weekend using paid advertising. So you could literally use this to create like a registration form for a conference you’re doing online. And then we utilize lead flows to send out text messages, emails, telling people whenever we’re about to actually launch that the zoom. And I think the first let me launched it. We had 85 people on their lives. And so about 25% of the people who registered actually showed up live. And part of the reasons why we got so many people there live was we were able to text them and email them in a real time when we were actually launching the zoom, but the link,
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (15:48):
Okay, I’m a little skeptical, but I want to see if this really works. And so you said you you’ve set up a way to demonstrate this in real time right now. And so if, if you will pull out your phone and text this number, text (918) 265-3050 in text, the word growth. So just write in the word growth and then text it to (918) 265-3050. Brian is going to send you free of charge links to some of the Forbes articles that he’s written that will help you be better at fundraising. And then he’s also going to send you information about lead flows, dot com. And so you’ll get to see how the whole system works and how he, he, he uses it. So right now, (918) 265-3050 texts, the word growth. And Brian will basically put you as one of the leads in his flow in, and you can get in the flow with Brian. Thanks so much, Daniel. Thanks for being on the evangelism podcast. I encourage you to think about digital marketing for your ministry. It’s very important, and it will help you to do what God has called you to do in a greater way. Go ahead.
Bryan Citrin (17:12):
All the major ministries out there are actually running all on advertising to the raise money for their ministry. I mean, they’re doing it at my, at my COO. He actually used to run the online marketing for a very large ministry that you’ve probably heard of. I’m not going to mention names. They had, like you say, he’s managing like a team of like 80 people doing all these crazy aggressive fundraising online managing hundreds of thousand dollars because they’re getting the return, the fund, their ministry. And so you don’t have to have a ton of money to even leverage online marketing. You can start small, start slow, but once you learn different concepts, and once you developed the ability to grow your list and legalize technology like lead flows, you should totally be able to scale up your, your non-profit your ministry that really fulfill a calling that God has for you.
Evangelism Coach Daniel King (18:04):
Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Brian. Thanks. Thanks for listening today to this interview with Brian Citron, could you do me a favor, go to Apple iTunes, find the evangelism podcast with Daniel King and subscribe, and while you’re there, leave us a great review. So the other people who have a passion for evangelism can find this podcast. Thank you so much. And God bless you
Evangelism Podcast Host (18:33):
For more information about how to share your faith or to financially support our worldwide evangelistic outreaches. Visit King ministries.com. Again, that’s King ministries.com.
