Whether you’re promoting specific events or want to market your church to bring more people in, make the most of your church’s time and budget by promoting smarter, making your advertising efforts work harder for you and growing your church congregation.
If you haven’t already got a church logo, a logo is great for building a stunning, impressionable brand and image for your church. You can either design your own or there are places like thelogocompany.net where you can get a professional logo created for you.
OK, let’s take a look at 3 ways you can get your church known:
- Advertise Your Church With a Good Website
In ‘How to Design a Church Website – The Human-Friendly Way we looked at the necessity of having a website in today’s online age. Did you know, for example that 8 out of 10 church visitors first visit your church website before they will ever step foot in your church? 75% of first-time guests have already formed an impression of your church based on your website. A website is no longer an optional extra. Advertising your church with a website gives you an effective platform to showcase your ministry and give a great first impression.
You no longer have to have a degree in IT to create a simple yet powerful site. Church Themes have hundreds of easily customizable templates to choose from that have been designed specifically for churches.
- It’s FREE – The basic system of WordPress is free and included in your hosting. It’s ready with a few clicks.
- Professional Church Website Themes – There are many theme companies out that that specialize in creating WordPress Themes for church websites. They are clean, professional, and they meet the needs of churches. One thing to note, WordPress is free, but themes do cost. Don’t worry, they are not that expensive.
- 1,000′s of Plugins – If your church website needs a feature, chances are someone out there has already created it in the form of a plugin. In fact, there are many plugins just for churches. Need online sermons? There’s a plugin. Need a church calendar? Plugins have you covered. Another thing to note is that most plugins are free. But, if you want customer support, they do charge.
- WordPress Has Great Support – From the actual WordPress site, to online blogs, there are tons of free resources out there to help you with your WordPress website. If you’ve ever had a problem, so have others, and they have documented how they overcame their problem for you to learn.
Designing your church website can be a daunting task but it doesn’t have to be! It’s never been easier to build and create your very own ministry site using the ChurchTheme website builder.
Once you have your website up and running and firing on all cylinders, be sure to add your website address to all of your promotional materials, letterheads, stationary and email signatures. If you have a church building then you have the opportunity to make a sign and put it up. One church I know is paying for the flowers on a public roundabout, what a great place to have a church website address!
- Harness the Power of Social Media
Love it or despise it, social media is here to stay – 50% of church guests under the age of 40 will check out your church’s reputation with their friends on social media.
I’m not saying a pastor should be spending hours each day on the likes of Twitter or Reddit but focusing your efforts on just one or two social networking sites can increase your church in front of people you would not have any contact with.
I think it’s worth mentioning at this point that before any promotion, determining your target audience is vital. If you’re targeting the over 60’s stick with newspaper advertising. Yes it’s an expensive way to advertise but your target market read their local paper.
There are hundreds of social media sites out there and as a pastor I wouldn’t recommend spending hours each day on the likes of Twitter or Reddit but if you’re targeting students or young professionals then I would recommend having a least a Facebook page.
A Church Facebook page means you can keep people informed about upcoming events, share photos and create a real sense of community. Your congregation can tag your church in statuses and photos.
What really excites me about Facebook is the potential to reach so many people at no cost whatsoever. I mean, we always say ‘friendship evangelism is the best form of evangelism’ don’t we?
Well, what if everyone in your church invited all of their Facebook friends to your next outreach event? It’s not hard to reach over 2,000 people within a few minutes. I’m sure not every single perosn you invited would turn up but at the very least it’s getting your church name out there. You want people to think ‘Oh it’s that church again, there’s always something happening there’!
Check out ‘How to Advertise Your Church on Facebook (for free)‘, for a step by step video guide on how to create a Church Facebook Page.
- Advertise Your Church with Promo Flyers
OK, so this third promotional method is definitely the least technological of the three, but it can still be an effective and fun way to get the word out.
You want your church logo, address and times to be clear. Point out the benefits of your church like an awesome kidz church, showing pictures of young families and so on. Your target audience will determine the look of your advertising. Whether you are hosting a travelling evangelist, offering an arts and crafts community class, inviting people to your Sunday morning service, your flyers must have a single, specific message.
Organize your team of volunteers. Set a date, time and location to perform the outreach. Choose an outreach date that is within a week or so of the event. Perform the outreach by handing out the flyers to people on the street, knocking on doors in the community or posting the flyers in public places such as coffee shop notice boards.
An effective way to invite people to church is by making your Sunday morning services an event by having monthly themes where you talk about marriage, relationships, raising children, handling finances etc. For more on making Sunday morning an event see ‘How to Grow Your Church Attendance – Keep People Guessing‘. You could have a flyer for each monthly theme.
High quality and affordable flyers are available from Vista print who have easy design templates so you can get your church name on flyers, pens, magnet, calendars, T-shirts, you name it, they probably do them. As of April 2014 Vista print are also having an offer where you can get 250 free business cards and you just pay the standard postage fee. You can also take a look at my recent post ‘Design & Order Your Own Free Business Cards‘.
So there you have, there’s lots more of church growth strategies of course but here’s my 3 simple church promotion ideas to advertise your church with little or no cost. I encourage you to take action and get the word out.
The above article, “3 Simple Church Advertising Ideas to Promote Your Church” was written by Author Unknown. The article was excerpted from www.growchurch.net web site. July 2016.
The material is copyrighted and should not be reprinted under any other name or author. However, this material may be freely used for personal study or research purposes.
This article may not be written by an Apostolic author, but it contains many excellent principles and concepts that can be adapted to most churches. As the old saying goes, “Eat the meat. Throw away the bones.”
