Church Marketing Sucks

Like most churches, we typically do some external advertising around Easter. But as we sat around a table talking about how to reach our target audience, we realized something pretty key.

Most people already know that Easter is coming. We’re a church. No one needs us to let them know that we’re having Easter services. It’s the world’s biggest no-brainer.

Here’s where we started:

Audience

The somewhat-churched, the open-to-church, the desperate seekers, the two-timers (Easter and Christmas), the casual churchgoers. Anyone who is a little bit familiar with Christianity and what this time of year means.

Demographics

25-55 years old. Male and female. Culturally diverse. Tech-savvy. Baby Busters (1965-1980), Gen X (1975-1985), Gen Y/Millennials (1978-1990). Suburban and first-ring urban commuters. Public transit users.

Method

Focus on public transportation advertising opportunities. Engage current attenders in an invitation initiative that aligns with external ads and will continue past the Easter season.

Create a website (foundatchurch.com) that generates content from attenders’ social media engagement with a specific hashtag (#foundatchurch). External ads promote the website.

What Have You Found at Church?

So instead of blabbing on billboards and direct mail pieces about how fantastic our Easter services would be, we made the decision to simply ask people who’ve experienced God change their life through attending church to tell others: What have you found at church?

Our graphic designer Kellie Cornell designed an incredible range of ads for us to use on social media and in external channels.

We launched with a video and caption on Instagram and Facebook:

What have you found at church? Wisdom? Friendship? Acceptance? Whatever you’ve found, post it from your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts using #foundatchurch. Your stories tell the stories of Eagle Brook Church and show others what they can find here, too!

Throughout the month of March, your #foundatchurch posts will show up at foundatchurch.com. Take a look, share your story and, together, let’s tell others of Jesus’ incredible love.

The following weekend, we passed out invite cards after services at every campus, and aired this video before services (specifically, at :41 in).

The Reaction

During the first week, attenders started posting what they had found at church and we saw great engagement. It was very exciting to watch it take off!

In recent years, we have seen great return on investment when advertising through public transit channels. People love seeing their church out in the community, interacting with people from all walks of life.

Attenders often take photos of Eagle Brook Church (EBC) ads on buses and share them on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. It’s been a great way to get attenders to talk about their church within their social media communities.

How To Target Your Message

For these reasons, we decided to focus more heavily than we previously have on targeting suburban and first-ring urban commuters with this campaign.

By targeting suburban and first-ring urban commuters who utilize public transit, we have the unique ability to specifically speak to people who live near our campuses without using direct mail or digital billboards.

Direct mail has historically proven to have a very poor ROI and digital billboards can be very expensive with possibly low impressions depending on preferred ad space availability.

Buses with EBC advertisements were specifically assigned to run from transit center garages through our campus communities, through both downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul, back to suburban park-and-rides and neighborhood stops.

Riders become familiar with the ads as they see them repeatedly for five weeks on their buses. Pedestrians, many of whom are suburban car-commuters, become familiar with the ads as buses pass by downtown.

Those waiting at bus shelters will become familiar with poster ads, connecting them visually with the bus tails and the interior bus ads. Ten transit shelter ads also rotated throughout downtown Minneapolis over the course of the four weeks leading up to Easter.

How To Focus Your Message

Additionally, we made the strategic decision to not give ourselves away completely in the design of these ads. We wanted the stories to speak more loudly than our name.

So on all of the bus shelter ads, we used the foundatchurch.com URL vs eaglebrookchurch.com. Due to legal requirements, we were required to include Eagle Brook Church on the bus tail and interior ads, but we were allowed to keep it small so that it didn’t distract from the core message of the ads.

Our hope is that as people see the ads repeatedly, they’ll become curious about who is behind them and investigate by going to foundatchurch.com.

After scrolling down and reading stories about what people have found at church, they will then discover that the whole thing is rooted at Eagle Brook Church.

Our desire was to point people to Jesus first, then to church, then hopefully our church.

We are really excited to watch this campaign evolve past the Easter season and to see how our attenders continue to use this campaign to share about their church and their God on social media.

Update:

Eagle Brook had about 43,000 people at their Easter services—which spanned 42 services at six different locations. Those numbers are roughly double their normal attendance.

Learn more about the Found at Church campaign with this report Andrea created for the church’s leadership team. Not only does it offer more details on the campaign, but it’s a great example of how to report to your leadership (of course this is the first time Andrea has created such a report and now realizes she’s set the bar too high).

• Eagle Brook Spring 2015 Marketing Campaign (PDF, 921 KB)