In the three years our church has experimented with marketing, we’ve discovered we can translate basic marketing theory into our church situation. Some information we’ve gleaned from business marketing principles, but most comes out of trial and error. Here are seven homegrown maxims for marketing your church:
Lower your expectations. As pastor, I had to get over looking for huge crowds after we placed an ad. Although we do expect our marketing efforts to produce something, we’ve revised our measure of success.
Raise your budget. While our church has yet to allocate 10 percent of our budget to marketing expenses, we’re headed in that direction. We take advantage of all the inexpensive marketing opportunities we can, but even the least expensive projects take money. We’re moving our church consciousness toward viewing marketing expenses as an integral part of our evangelistic ministry.
Schedule your efforts. We’ve developed a general marketing calendar, concentrating our efforts at peak times. In our community, Christmas and Easter are prime occasions to invite our neighbors to attend special worship or music celebrations. Softball and basketball seasons give us the opportunity to target neighborhood athletes. Summer is a wonderful time to advertise programs for children and teenagers. By scheduling our marketing events annually, we maintain consistency and use our marketing budget more carefully.
Consider the image you want to project. I recently turned down an appearance on a local religious TV program because I didn’t want our church associated with the poor quality of that production. We’ve also decided not to advertise on billboards; the local billboard company has a bad reputation from local ordinance violations. We don’t need that kind of image.
Emphasize benefits, not just features. For too long we highlighted what programs we offered, such as 11:00 worship, special activities, youth groups. Those are only tools. People want to know what the activities have to do with them.
Now we stress the benefits people receive from association with our church-inspiration, information, relationships, encouragement. When brochures and advertising tell people what they have to gain, they’re more likely to come to find it.
Use a variety of media. A marketing executive told me recently that organizational credibility comes in exposures of four. The more media in which people see your message, the more likely they are to believe you.
Measure your results. Churches can’t measure their marketing by increased sales or profits. But church marketing can be measured. For us the bottom line is new visitors in worship. If our strategies produce first-timers, then those strategies are successful. If not, we learn from our experience and alter our plan.
Two excellent sources of more information about church marketing are Steve Dunkin’s Church Advertising: A Practical Guide (Abingdon) and George Barna’s Marketing the Church (NavPress). For marketing know-how of a more technical nature, browse the business section of your local bookstore.
– Charles Warnock III
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