Church Marketing 101 (Complete Beginners Guide 2025)

Summary

Highlights

• Thomas introduces church marketing basics, stressing the importance of starting with understanding your audience. 👥
• Emphasizes the need for a consistent brand - including logos, mission, and vision statements. 🎨
• Discusses the crucial role of an online presence, particularly a community-focused church website. 💻
• Mentions the potential of social media and local SEO in expanding church reach. 📱
• Encourages the use of Google Grants for cost-effective advertising. 💡
• Advises on setting specific, measurable goals to track marketing progress. 📏
• Underlines the importance of staying updated with new marketing trends and being consistent. 🌟

Key Takeaways

• Understanding your audience is crucial for targeted church marketing. 🎯
• Consistency in content creation and marketing efforts leads to better results over time. 📈
• Utilize free resources like Google Grants for effective advertising. 💸
• Focus your church's website on newcomers, not existing members. 🌐
• Leverage short-form vertical videos for maximum engagement and reach. 🎥
• Set measurable goals to accurately track your church marketing success. 📊

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The Introduction chapter begins with the speaker Thomas reflecting on the support that Reacher has provided to hundreds of thousands of pastors through their services, videos, and other content. However, he realizes that they have not yet created a basic, entry-level resource for church marketing. The chapter sets the stage for the forthcoming content where Thomas will outline the fundamentals of starting in church marketing.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Importance of Church Marketing The chapter discusses the importance of church marketing in the modern age. It highlights the shift from people naturally attending local community churches to the need for active marketing strategies. The introduction suggests that the chapter will delve into the reasons why church marketing is now crucial, contrasting with a past where church attendance was largely driven by community ties and tradition. This change is underscored by a Gallup study mentioned in the transcript.
• 02:00 - 05:00: Understanding Your Audience The chapter 'Understanding Your Audience' delves into the evolving perception of churches and clergy in American society. It highlights a significant decline in public trust, noting that only 39% of Americans now express high trust in pastors or clergy. This shift underscores the need for churches to adapt their communication strategies. Church marketing is presented as a pivotal tool in this endeavor, emphasizing the sharing of the gospel to a wider, more general audience as a means to reshape perceptions and extend the church's impact in their communities.
• 05:00 - 07:00: Building Your Church Brand This chapter discusses church marketing and its essential role in reaching a broader audience with the gospel of Jesus Christ. It emphasizes that the primary goal of any church marketing campaign should be to spread the good news and facilitate church growth. The chapter highlights that a church serves as a place for people to grow spiritually and be discipled.
• 07:00 - 09:00: Building an Online Presence The chapter titled 'Building an Online Presence' begins with a focus on the importance of understanding the audience in any marketing campaign. The context is set within church marketing, emphasizing that knowing who you are trying to reach is essential before launching any efforts to connect with people. Without this understanding, efforts may be in vain or misguided. The content reflects on leveraging strategies to win more people for Jesus Christ, which has been a focus of many years of coaching churches on effective methods for doing so.
• 09:00 - 13:00: Content Creation The chapter 'Content Creation' discusses the importance of understanding the specific community God has positioned individuals to reach. It emphasizes that, although the gospel is meant for everyone, churches and individuals may be uniquely equipped to reach certain types of people more effectively than others. The chapter encourages readers to identify and focus on these unique aspects of their ministry to better serve their community.
• 13:00 - 16:00: Advertising and Promotion The chapter titled 'Advertising and Promotion' discusses the importance of understanding your community demographics in order to effectively promote church services. It emphasizes the need for churches to align their service offerings with the needs and preferences of the local population. For instance, if a church is situated in a bilingual community with both English and Spanish speakers, it should consider offering services in both languages to attract a broader audience. Similarly, if a church's congregation is primarily middle-aged with few children, it might struggle to attract families unless it adapts its offerings to be more family-friendly. The chapter urges churches to be mindful of the community's composition to successfully appeal to and engage prospective attendees.
• 16:00 - 18:00: Measuring Success The chapter 'Measuring Success' focuses on understanding the community and congregation in order to tailor messages effectively. It emphasizes the importance of assessing the common characteristics and needs of the community, such as their background, interests, and any specific needs they might have that the church can address. By doing so, the church can craft messages that resonate with various audiences, acknowledging their differences in needs and responses. The chapter suggests that such a targeted approach is essential to engaging effectively with the community.
• 18:00 - 20:00: Best Practices The chapter titled 'Best Practices' emphasizes understanding one's own identity and audience in order to craft effective marketing messaging. It suggests that knowing who you are allows you to tailor your messages to reach the specific people you are meant to serve. After identifying your target audience, the next step is to build your Church's brand. Branding is portrayed as a crucial part of church marketing, with the goal of making your church recognizable to the audience.
• 20:00 - 18:30: Conclusion The chapter emphasizes the importance of building a memorable brand for a church, focusing on its visual identity. It highlights the significance of developing a consistent logo and appearance, which helps in making a lasting impact each time someone interacts with the church. Consistency in design elements, such as color and orientation, plays a crucial role in enhancing memorability and establishing a strong presence.

Church Marketing 101 (Complete Beginners Guide 2025) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 well over the past several years here at Reacher we have helped literally hundreds of thousands of pastors through our services our videos and all the content we put out there but it occurred to me recently that we've never done a basic entrylevel Church marketing 101 resource for people just like you so in this video we're going to break down exactly what I would do if I was just getting started in church marketing let's do this well hey guys I'm Thomas I'm the
• 00:30 - 01:00 founder of reach right and we put out new content like this multiple times every week so if you're a pastor a church leader or just into this kind of information we would love it if you would hit that subscribe button now let's kick this off and before we get too deep I want to talk about the why why is church marketing important it used to be that people just went to the church that was in their local community and they would know where it was and they grew up going into those buildings but those days are long behind us in fact a recent study from Gallup found
• 01:00 - 01:30 that only 39% of Americans have a high level of trust for pastors or clergy in their lives so what that tells us is the Once most trusted institution in America the local church that perception has totally changed amongst people in our communities and one of the tools we can use to change that perception and make it impact in our communities is church marketing now when I think about church marketing what we're really talking about is we're sharing the gospel in a broad sense sense to a general audience
• 01:30 - 02:00 Church marketing is getting the word out about our churches and the gospel and the message of Jesus Christ to a broad audience and that's really what we're here to help people do the goal of any church marketing campaign needs to start and end with the primary goal of reaching more people with the good news of Jesus Christ and in turn that typically will lead to church growth your church is a place where people can grow and be discipled and then turn into
• 02:00 - 02:30 other people that are winning more people for Jesus Christ so it's something that we have been doing four years coaching churches on exactly how to do this now that we have that out of the way let's start off with the first step that your church needs to take whenever you start considering Church marketing and that first step is really understanding your audience you need to know who you're trying to reach in any marketing campaign before you start actually reaching people otherwise you're just putting all your efforts into something that you hope will work
• 02:30 - 03:00 so take the time to really understand who it is in your community that God has positioned you to be able to reach now I want to get this out of the way there's always going to be some push back and maybe you're thinking it right now well God has called us to reach everybody in our community it doesn't matter we don't have a certain type that we want to reach everybody's welcome to hear the gospel but I would argue and I hope you can see this too that your church is probably uniquely positioned to reach a certain kind of person better than anybody else let me give you a for
• 03:00 - 03:30 instance if your church is in a community where there are lots of English speakers and Spanish speakers but you offer services that are only in English chances are you're not going to be the best Church to reach the Spanish-speaking population in your community there this is also true if your church is reaching primarily middle-aged people and you don't have a lot of children in your children's ministry well chances are you're not going to be the best church for families with lots of children to come and visit take a look at the people that are around your church take a look at the
• 03:30 - 04:00 people that are in your congregation take a look at the community around you what do the people look like what do they have in common are they have a certain background do they like certain activities are there needs in your community that maybe your church is uniquely positioned to be able to help meet these are the kinds of questions you want to wrestle with and once you've done that you can really start to tailor your message to very specific audiences they have different needs and respond to different messages and will come to different events and you need to act accordingly when it comes to your
• 04:00 - 04:30 marketing messaging and again this is not to say that you're stuck in that place but it's just best for you to know who you are so that you can act accordingly and make sure your messaging is tailor made for the exact people that God has made you to reach so once you've asked some of those questions about your audience and who you're trying to reach that's when you can start on the second step and that's building your Church's brand branding is so important because as you start in church marketing one of the goals is to have people see your church
• 04:30 - 05:00 over and over and over again and make that instant memorable impact each time people have an encounter with your church the way you do that is with a brand so what does building a brand look like well there's two primary components to it the first one is what most people think of when they think of a brand and that's developing your Church's logo look and feel having a logo established and something that you use consistant that has the same look the same colors the same orientation every time someone sees it makes you more memorable and the
• 05:00 - 05:30 second one is kind of like it is you need to build out your mission your vision statements and core values because people will be seeing this messaging over and over again I would think of your logo as more intended for people that are not yet a part of your church and then your mission vision and core values those are more for people that are already a part of your church so really the goal for you in this part of the process is to get a logo and color palette and style created and get your church statements off figured out
• 05:30 - 06:00 and then just stick with them really consistency is the most important part here don't get so caught up in making sure everything's perfect because more often than that I found that that keeps people from taking that next step and actually reaching people with the good news so don't get hamstrung but absolutely building your church brand is of the utmost importance step number three is building an online presence now it goes without saying and I'm sure you already realize this but your online presence is now really just as important
• 06:00 - 06:30 as the physical presence of your church your physical presence is only going to be used in the best cases for maybe a dozen hours per week or so whereas your online presence it'll be available literally 24/7 when we talk about online presence we're talking about first and foremost your Church's website this is the number one place that people will encounter you and have their first impression of who you are as a church that's where they'll learn about who you are as a church and who you're able to reach and what kind of Ministries you
• 06:30 - 07:00 offer and what you believe and when to show up and how to give their lives to Jesus and all those steps so all of that typically now happens on your Church's website so establishing an effective website should be your first priority as a church marketer if I were to give you one piece of advice of how to build a great website for your church it would be to focus your website on people that are not yet a part of your church this is a fundamental mistake that I see churches of all sizes making every
• 07:00 - 07:30 single day they make the priority of their website the members of their church and not the community that they're trying to serve the goal of your website is to introduce people that may not yet be familiar with your church to what your church is all about so make it about them use imagery that would speak to people that are not yet a part of your church use language that people that are not a part of your church would understand keep them the focus and you'll have an effective website after you have your website established then you can start to look at getting your social media media presence built out my
• 07:30 - 08:00 advice to you here is to start slowly when it comes to social media resist the temptation to start profiles on every single available social media channel the main thing we need to realize is that you're not going to be able to be great at every single Channel without a few staff people dedicated fulltime to making content for these kinds of channels so in the beginning you want to choose a Channel or two and really start to build out your profile on these channels make a point of going into your
• 08:00 - 08:30 Facebook profile or Instagram profile and filling out every single question that you can about your church do this on your YouTube channel and your Tik Tok profile whichever ones you choose fill it out completely and then those channels will typically take you more seriously and reward you with more reach if you spend the time to do that work one of the most overlooked things that a lot of churches Miss is really thinking about local SEO or search engine optimization what the is is this is what
• 08:30 - 09:00 comes up when people put in searches like churches near me you don't actually need to invest huge amounts of money to do local SEO in most cases especially when you're just starting out churches can do some of these things on their own so you want to take a deep dive into that I won't spend a lot of time in this video because we've done several other videos that go in really deep on some of the specifics of how to do Church SEO so you can find some of those on our Channel we hope we help you out now once you've built an online presence The Next
• 09:00 - 09:30 Step moves more towards content creation think of content creation as what do I put onto the online presence that I've already built it's one thing to have a Facebook page or a Tik Tok account or a website but if you're not putting new fresh content on that all the time it will become totally invisible we have an enormous opportunity when it comes to video content and I'm talking specifically about short form vertical videos these are things like Tik toks
• 09:30 - 10:00 reals on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube shorts these four channels really represent one of the greatest opportunities I believe in history to get the gospel message of Jesus Christ in front of lots of lots of people and here's one of the great things about these short form vertical videos I'm talking about is that churches were already doing this every single week almost every church we talk to is already filming their sermons and they're usually putting those online really all that's left to do is to edit
• 10:00 - 10:30 them down and make them more engaging even if you decide just to do one video a week you can put it onto four different channels again Tik Tok Instagram Facebook YouTube and you have the potential to reach literally millions of people so while vertical video is going to be the center piece of your strategy there are many other avenues to explore such as blog writing or putting your sermons on long form channels like YouTube you can look at doing weekly newsletters to your church or creating events on platforms like
• 10:30 - 11:00 Facebook and getting word out there about things going on at your church that way there are so many different Avenues choose maybe one other and just keep your focus really narrow especially as you're just starting out so we've discussed the opportunity that content creation has next we probably want to look a little bit deeper and talk more specifically about advertising and promotion when we talk about advertising it usually means spending dollars to get the message in front of more people and there's two primary channels for that
• 11:00 - 11:30 and here's a little secret one of them actually doesn't really cost you dollars I'll tell you more about that in a second Google ads and Facebook ads Facebook ads are a fantastic opportunity to reach large amounts of people I think where they do the best is when it comes to events that your church puts on that your community is invited to I pastored a church in Madison Wisconsin where we would consistently every year run ads for our Halloween Time party that we would have at our church every single year and we literally saw hundreds of
• 11:30 - 12:00 people every year respond and show up to our Halloween event because of ads that we put on to Facebook and here's what's great we spent like $40 every year on that the second opportunity and the one I was talking about before that should cost you something but actually doesn't is doing Google ads when I say Google ads what I mean are when someone does a search for any topic typically you'll see a few ads that come up at the very top they'll have the term add or sponsored right next to them and then
• 12:00 - 12:30 you'll know that this is something that someone paid to put on the top of a Google search so why doesn't this cost money well Google gives a grant to nonprofits that's worth $10,000 every single month in free ads they don't give you cash don't make that mistake they give you credit on their platform to what comes out to about $330 every single day to use to advertise and tell people about your church and the good news about Jesus
• 12:30 - 13:00 Christ if there is one opportunity in the church today that not enough churches take advantage of it has to be this Google Grant almost every church WIll qualify for this so if you qualify which again most churches will you need to take advantage of this down in the description I'm going to put a link to an eligibility Checker where you can answer three or four quick questions it'll tell you whether your church is eligible or not so you absolutely want to take advantage of that and once you do you'll have access to $10,000 every month on the Google ad platform so
• 13:00 - 13:30 now that you've built your online presence and you're maybe supplementing that with some ads on Facebook and using the Google Grant well the next step to Market your church effectively is to actually measure your success as you start out it's very important that you set clear and here's the key word measurable goals for what you want to see your church marketing campaign accomplish and I emphasize that term measurable because I see so many churches making that mistake of keeping things very G generals we just want to see more growth and we want to see more
• 13:30 - 14:00 hits on our website and we want to see more people decide to follow Jesus I want to encourage you to just put a number on it say that hey next year we want to see a hundred new families visit our church for the first time say in the next 3 months we want to see our Facebook followers grow by 20% be very specific with what those numbers are we really encourage churches to measure just about anything you can think of but the key things you're going to try to measure fall into one of two categories attendance and engagement attendance is
• 14:00 - 14:30 something that your church probably measures already you probably know how many people typically come on a Sunday and how many people typically go to small groups and how many people are involved there engagement is a little bit different Engagement online it means things like how many likes and shares and comments how many subscribers these kinds of numbers are the things you're going to be looking at that signify that your campaign is headed in the right direction and while it doesn't always immediately lead to new people showing up on Sundays I can't think of a lot of
• 14:30 - 15:00 churches that build a really strong presence that doesn't translate into some kind of an impact that's happening at the physical Church location and avoid the temptation to just ballpark these numbers actually count them write them down and look at it month over month and year over year and you will see growth over time because really this isn't about helping us feel better about ourselves it's about how to make better decisions going forward when it comes to where we're going to spend our time marketing our church and after you've done some of that measurement I want to
• 15:00 - 15:30 leave you with a few best practices frankly there are things that will help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls that I see new church marketers fall into the first one is to keep the communication within your church leadership open and transparent you need to be having open conversations with your pastors your church leaders and those around you about what's working what you're doing and really fighting to get people on board with this when it comes to marketing I know that this is probably going to rub some people the wrong way because that's not the way
• 15:30 - 16:00 we've always done it as a church and those are famous words in churches if you haven't heard that already so you're going to ruffle some feathers people will probably be upset with you keep Communication open and honest and as long as your leaders are on your side typically you'll be able to Rise Above The Fray and have a successful marketing campaign and here's another piece of advice and this one honestly might be the most important the key to church marketing is staying consistent choose a plan and stay with it and don't let
• 16:00 - 16:30 anything take you off course if you decide that we want to post on Tik Tok twice a week make sure you post on Tik Tok twice a week don't try it for 3 weeks and say hey that didn't work and let's move on to the next thing if you're going to start anything in marketing commit to doing it for an absolute minimum of 6 months these things tend to take time to get started and then they tend to snowball but I can almost assure you that your first video will not be the one that goes viral it might be your 998th video that goes
• 16:30 - 17:00 viral and in a lot of cases it's your 154th the point is that with church marketing it's a long consistent process that actually gets results here at re we've been blogging for 6 years now and in the beginning nobody ever read our blog and then two or three people would read a post and and after a while we'd have 15 or 20 fast forward to today we're seeing 3,000 people every day getting on to our blog that we write for church leaders and there's all kinds of
• 17:00 - 17:30 content they're interacting with on there but if we had stopped after that fourth or fifth post we never would have got to this place the same thing goes for your Facebook account and your Tik Tok videos and going on YouTube we've seen that snowball faster than anything the results are always in consistency so my encouragement to you is to pick a plan write it down and stay consistent with it no matter what write it down and do it actually execute it and don't get caught up in the fact that almost nobody is seeing these initial posts that
• 17:30 - 18:00 you're doing out there the results will come over time if you focus on quality and consistency and finally I want to say this always keep an eye out on new trends Trends are really where Church marketing is at because if you jump on a trend early enough you have an enormous potential for some of the best returns so you want to keep your eye on what other churches are doing what the best marketers are doing and here at reite we want to be a great resource for this so if you you haven't already it would mean
• 18:00 - 18:30 a lot to me if you would hit that subscribe button if you've made it this far hopefully we've earned that subscription if it has been helpful that would mean a lot to me if you would hit that subscribe button thanks guys for watching and we'll see you next time