Has marketing your church been extra challenging recently?
You are not alone in this as many churches all over the world are facing the same challenge. Church attendance is on the decline, especially with younger individuals.
Despite all the facts on the table, improving your church marketing will help you attract new members. We will show you seven important church marketing strategies that you should try out in this post.
Church Marketing Strategies You Should Try Out
Below are church marketing strategies that will work for both small and large churches.
Be active on social media
Social media has been around for a while yet not many churches have taken advantage of this powerful tool. You can improve church communication and publicity in so many ways through social media. The first thing to do is to set up social media accounts on platforms that your target audience uses the most. Here are a few tips to help you intensify your social media efforts:
- Take photos of your services and post them on your social media platforms. Ensure that you tag your church attendees in these photos so that they can share them as well.
- Shoot short videos and post them online. You can also post snippets of previous messages to encourage your followers.
- Post interactive questions and games and ask your followers their opinion on certain issues.
Build a church website
A website is the center of a church’s online presence. When you have a website, it makes it easy for new members and potential visitors to learn more about your church. The information you put up on your website will help them conclude on whether to join your congregation or not.
What should you include on your church website? Here are a few ideas:
- Homepage – This page is the first thing anyone sees so it welcomes visitors to the website.
- About Us – Here, you provide insight into what your church is about, your vision and mission statements, and how your church started.
- Meet the team – This page tells visitors about those involved in running the church and their background.
- Calendar – Here, you let visitors know about upcoming programs as well as your service times.
- Contact Us – This page contains your contact address, phone, number, email, social media handles, and other means of contact.
- Blog – Share the latest news and articles here so that visitors can read and get enlightened.
Ensure that you work on improving your website rankings by using SEO and also make use of online listings.
Traditional advertising
Making use of digital methods to market your church is great but you cannot neglect traditional advertising methods. While digital methods like social media will work for younger individuals, traditional advertising will attract older folk.
There are several traditional advertising methods such as handing out flyers, billboards, TV, and radio. Such adverts help to promote church growth if you can combine marketing strategies successfully.
Use a church management app
One way to improve church communication and publicity is to make use of a church management app. There are several apps on the market including ChurchPad.
You can use these apps to send out email newsletters, text messages, and schedule social media posts. It is possible to link your ChMS to your website to share resources. Congregants can also use the church app to sign up for different events, sort out digital donations, and handle several other operations.
Get involved in your community
It is easier for people who are just getting to know your church to attend a community event than your services. Getting involved in your community requires you to organize community events occasionally. There are several events that you can organize to attract potential new members to your church. Some of them include:
- Community picnics or barbecue.
- Host sports events.
- Parent’s night out.
- Family movie night
- Community walks or runs for charity.
Organize special programs during holidays
So many individuals were born into the church, however, they have grown to only attend church on special holidays. Obvious special holidays that you can take advantage of include Easter, Christmas, and New Year. You will notice that church attendance is likely to be higher on such days.
Take advantage of such holidays by organizing special programs and sprucing up your worship services. Ensure that you run special publicity for these programs and ask congregants to invite their friends and neighbors.
Word of mouth
You make word of mouth a powerful marketing strategy for your church by encouraging congregants to help out. Tell them the importance of inviting people to church and how to do it by themselves. You can make it easy for them by printing flyers or professional business cards with your church information. As such, they can hand them out to people while engaging in their daily activities.
Conclusion
Attracting new members shouldn’t be so difficult with a dedicated team, the right resources, and the right church marketing strategies. We have shown you some of these strategies in this post. Meanwhile, remember to make use of ChurchPad to improve your church marketing campaigns.