A complete guide to successful church marketing

Building a strong church community takes time and effort. And whether you call it a growth initiative or church marketing, implementing strategies that increase your church’s visibility is a key component of growing your congregation.

With the smart church marketing, you will build your church’s platform and reach a wider audience. 

In this detailed guide we share tips to help you find your audience, define your goals, and improve your church’s visibility. 

Why is church visibility important?

Truth is, you have competition! With so many churches streaming their services, not only are you competing with other churches in your area, you are competing with churches around the country. Plus, there are dozens of other organizations and activities vying for people’s time and attention.

Consistent church marketing helps you reach new people, attract new visitors, let people know what your church offers, and keep your existing members coming back. 

What are your church marketing goals?

Before you plan your church marketing roadmap, it helps to first define your goals. Identifying what you are trying to accomplish before selecting your tactics will save time, energy, and valuable resources.

 Common church marketing goals include: 

1. Attract new visitors and members 

The main purpose of church marketing is to grow your congregation. Part of this is attracting new visitors and converting those visitors into members.  

Every church needs new members to stay strong and healthy. Even if you have a loyal and active congregation, you’re going to have attrition.  Life can change people’s priorities in an instant. Also, growth means more volunteers to build strong programs, and larger budgets for maintenance and to establish additional programs.  

2. Increase attendance–especially in person

Members are great. But active members are better. The more people participate in church activities, the stronger your community will be. Going into the community  can go a long way in encouraging people to attend more services and events, as well as to join committees.

The pandemic impacted attendance too. As you are aware, thousands of people transitioned from attending service in person to watching on a web stream. And while it’s great that everyone now has access to worship wherever they are (especially if they’re unable to leave the house), there is nothing like the feel of worshiping in person with an engaged community. Bringing more people back in person, enhances the experience for everyone in the sanctuary. This is why, for many churches, bringing people back to worship in church has become a huge priority.

3. Reconnect with congregants who haven’t participated lately

Being overly busy or feeling disconnected from faith are very normal parts of life. Sometimes people need a gentle push to remind them that their church community is there for them. Why not give them the nudge they need? 

Your church marketing can serve as a reminder to members who’ve become less active or stopped attending church entirely. You can tell them how much their presence is valued and urge them to return.  

4. Build your brand

Branding isn’t just for companies. And by branding, we mean establishing a commonly understood perception of your church, its values, and what it stands for. 

Your brand is your identity. Maintaining a strong church brand helps you communicate who you are and what makes you unique. 

5. Grow tithes, offerings, and donations 

Just like any other organization, churches have staff to pay, programs to run, and buildings to maintain. When people are reminded  of the purpose  of your programs and the value you provide to the community, they can provide  the support you need.

6. Promote new services

Have you opened a bookstore or expanded your youth ministry? Maybe you’re launching an after school care program or forming a grief support group. Regardless of what you’ve added, your marketing lets the right people know that you have the services they need. 

7. Announce special events

Most churches host a lot of special events. Mother’s Day brunch. A special guest preacher. Maybe a Friday night concert featuring a local Christian band. Whatever your events are, strong marketing will boost attendance.

8. Promote community service activities

Strong promotion can increase attendance at your community service events–and help you attract more volunteers to help. It also demonstrates that your church cares about the community and showcases the community initiatives you support. 

Know what makes your church unique 

If you want to stand out from other churches, it’s important that your messaging convey your church’s unique mission and personality. This is where church ‘branding’ comes into the picture. 

It’s a common misconception that branding is something exclusive to companies, but it isn’t. Branding means far more than just your logo and color palette. Your church’s brand includes every message and piece of marketing you create. It conveys the beliefs, culture, identity, and the distinctive message of your church. 

Cohesive branding is what makes your church recognizable and memorable. 

To some extent, your church brand already exists. But it’s still important to define it in an understandable way that can be applied to every church communication. Start by identifying your church’s core values, and then design a corresponding logo and color palette. This will keep your messaging consistent. People will be able to understand what your church is about and decide if you are the right church home for them.  

Know your ideal member

While we all want our congregations to grow, truth is, not every potential member is a good fit for every church. For some people, their top priority might be a strong youth ministry. For others, it  might be in-depth bible study.   

Knowing who your ideal member is will help you position your marketing material and tone in a way that truly connects with your target member.

If you’d like a better understanding of what your ideal member is looking for and how to reach them, a great place to start is with a survey of your existing community.

Ask questions like:

• How did you find our ministry? 
• What convinced you to join our congregation?
• What were you seeking in a ministry prior to finding us?
• What was your first impression of our ministry?
• What aspect of our ministry or your experience here encouraged you to return?

Outreach approaches to consider:

Now that your marketing goals are defined, it’s time to select the marketing approaches that will help you connect with potential members. . 

Marketing approaches you can use to build your church community include: 

1) Attendee experience

Whether your goal is keeping existing members active or attracting new members, email, social media, and other communication tactics mean little if you aren’t aren’t delivering a great experience. From the second someone walks through your church doors, you have to keep people engaged and make them feel welcome. This applies to both members and visitors.

Speaking of visitors, being a new face in a sanctuary full of members can be an intimidating experience so it’s important to welcome newcomers and have someone available to answer their questions. If they feel at home, they are more likely to select you as their church home.

2) Visual appeal

Your church marketing needs to be strategic–and part of your strategy should be good design. The way your church is presented on your website, flyers, and social media feeds will impact how you are perceived just as much as your words. So make sure that all communications, online and in-person, are consistent with your church’s brand and mission. 

You can use PosterMyWall’s diverse template gallery to create, post and send professional designs like this:

Additional tools like Brand Kits help you maintain consistency across all of your marketing and communications content. Brand Kits store your logo, brand colors, and fonts together so they’re easy to incorporate into every marketing design. 

3) Free directory listings

It’s important to be easy-to-discover – both in your community and online. Free online and print directory listings can be a big help in helping people find you.

Be sure to create a listing on all relevant directory/review sites including Google My Business, Yelp, and Trip Advisor. There are also church-centric directory sites such as The Gospel Coalition’s Church Directory. There are even regional directories such as The Joy FM directory of churches in Georgia.

Google Maps is included in this category. In addition to being a great navigation tool, it’s also a registry which includes additional details about your church including a link to your website, your pinned location, contact details, and even reviews. Through Google Maps, people who are looking for a church in a certain area – may discover your. 

4) Events 

Hosting events is a great way to bring people together and build community. It’s also a great way to attract new members. Everything from prayer groups to youth concerts are opportunities to grow your membership. So be sure your posters, flyers, social media posts, and emails are attractive, entice people to come, and encourage people to invite their friends. 

PosterMyWall offers thousands of customizable church designs –as well as designs for pretty much every purpose you can think of. Starting with a professionally designed template makes it fast and easy to create attractive marketing materials–without hiring outside help. 

Post and share your designs everywhere you can both in the physical and digital worlds to achieve maximum attendance. 

5) In sanctuary screens

Use your screens to support announcements and promote upcoming events – from your Spring family barbecue to your weekly women’s prayer group. The visual reinforcement of your messages–both before and during service announcements –helps people to notice and remember what’s coming up. Great visuals can even make your events and activities even more enticing. 

If you’re streaming your services, your promotional visuals do double duty by reaching  everyone watching online as well. 

Use PosterMyWall’s auto resize to quickly adjust your promotional images and videos to fit whatever formats you need. This saves time and ensures that you’re communicating consistently across your screens, social media, email, and flyers.

6) Digital streaming

The pandemic pushed many churches to stream their services.  And even now that the pandemic is over, many churches continue their Sunday streams–both to reach members who can’t attend in person and as a way to reach new audiences. For the first time, it’s possible for churches to build large memberships of people who live outside of their region–and even across the country. 

7) Digital marketing

Digital marketing refers to both free and paid online marketing channels and tools you can use to bring attention to your church. This includes:

• Websites
• Social media
• Email marketing and newsletters
• SEO
• SEM
• SMS
• Online advertising

We’ll get into greater detail about each of these later in this guide.  

Always be mindful of your audience when selecting marketing channels. You don’t have to be everywhere, so choose based on your resources and where you’re most likely to reach your audience.

If you’re not sure which channels are the best fit, ask your current members where they spend their time online–and which services they use. You are likely to find more of the right audience in those same places. 

8)Websites

A well designed website gives you an online home people can use to learn more about you, your beliefs, and your programs. The fonts, colors, and photos all help people to understand what sort of experience and community your church provides–before they even step in the door. 

Many people who are looking for new church homes use websites to evaluate churches and decide which churches they’d like to visit in person. That’s why it’s important that your church’s website looks good, communicates the values you stand for, and demonstrates what makes your congregation unique. 

Do you really need your own website versus just a Facebook Page? We think so. Having your own website gives you complete control over design and the type and amount of content you post. 

9)Email marketing and newsletters

Email marketing is a highly effective tool since it reaches an audience that has actively opted in to receive your communications. 

Use your newsletter to share announcements, news, updates on church programs, invite people to events, and share meaningful scripture quotes. Just don’t send too much information or send information too often. If you send too much information at once, people won’t scroll to the bottom and will miss important announcements. If you send too often, they may stop opening your emails altogether.

Key elements of a strong newsletter: 

• A solid subject line that encourages people to open the email.
• An attractive email design that reflects your church brand. 
• Valuable information that your subscribers appreciate receiving.
• A call (or calls) to action that encourages them to sign-up or show-up. 

If you’d like to expand your list of subscribers beyond your current membership, you can nudge people to sign up for your newsletter by embedding a sign up form on your church website. It’s pretty straightforward and can be set up in minutes using PosterMyWall’s email marketing platform. You can also add a link from your newsletter to your email sign-up form – and encourage your members to share them with their friends. Another option is to use a scannable QR code. 

10) Social media

Social media is a natural place to reach your audience with event promotions, reminders, and links to your streams. Especially since most of them are spending time there already!

Instead of taking on more social platforms than you have the resources to support, focus on the platforms most frequently used by your audience. Start with one or two platforms, gauge your performance, and then consider expanding to more platforms. 

With PosterMyWall Premium, you can post your designs and videos directly to platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. It even lets you add captions to your posts and optimizes image sizes for each platform.

You can also use PosterMyWall’s Content Planner to plan and track all of your social posts and emails/newsletters in one place.

11) Search Engine Optimization 

Search engine optimization means creating and organizing your content in ways that help it rank higher when someone makes a relevant query on Google, or any other search engine.

SEO can get pretty complicated, but there are some simple things you can do to help people find you online. The most important thing is to integrate keywords into your content. 

Keywords are the words or phrases relevant to your church that people use most often. When you include them in your content, you tip the search results in your favor.

How do you pick the right keywords? There are tools you can use to measure keyword volume, but the easiest way is to select strong keywords is to think like a potential church member looking for an answer – then use those words and phrases as your keywords. 

The simplest keywords are often the most valuable ones.   

If you are looking for a local audience, use your location as part of your keyword phrase. For instance, a church in Atlanta, Georgia, might use “Family-focused church in Atlanta, Georgia” as one of its keywords.

12) SEM

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is a paid tactic where a church or business pays for advertisements that appear on search engine result pages.

The way SEM works for church marketing is that churches place bids on their keywords. Based on the bids, the church’s ads appear at the top of the search results as sponsored content. It’s a simple but highly effective marketing strategy because it directs people who are already looking for a church home to your website. 

13) SMS

Sometimes all people need is a gentle reminder. SMS –or texting–.is a great way to  remind members about special services, events, and even if you just miss seeing them in church. 

The same rules apply here as for email. Only send to people who have given you permission and don’t send too often to avoid being a nuisance (and getting blocked.) 

14) Facebook and Instagram ads

If you’re already creating content for Facebook and Instagram, it’s really easy and inexpensive to experiment with advertising. It’s a fairly straightforward process that is easy to understand after you play with it a little.

Start by selecting an existing post or by creating a new one. (Video works great here.) Then “boost” the post so it will appear as a sponsored post on new contacts’ feeds.

Facebook and Instagram allow you to set a budget, so you can start by investing very little, even just a few dollars, in your posts to experiment. Then you can adjust your spend based on your results. You can also target your audience by limiting who your ad is shown to by maximum distance from your church or demographic factors such as age and interest in Christian studies.

15) TikTok

TikTok is a relatively new social media platform. It’s a very Gen-Z-centric realm – so it’s a must if that’s part of your target audience. 

Brief, informative videos tend to perform well, and the great thing about TikTok is that viewers prefer organic content. The more natural, the better. 

Create a TikTok account for your church and share short videos that your audience will find valuable. This could be a highlight from your last event, snippet of a sermon, or a bible verse of the day. 

16) Review sites

Some people look at reviews for churches–the same way they would for restaurants or stores. 

Make sure your church’s review show you at your best by encouraging members to post on popular review sites such as: 

• Google reviews 
• Yelp
• Foursquare
• Facebook review groups  

17) Partnerships with businesses and other churches

Collaboration and partnerships can help you gain visibility within your community. Consider working with another church or volunteer organization to host an event or support a relevant cause, such as a local school or to raise money to support after school care programs. You might try working with local businesses as well. Your cause will benefit from the attention gained when your partner organizations promote your church’s event to their audience. Plus, it reinforces your position as a community leader.

18) Flyers and posters

Physical posters and flyers may be old school–but they can still deliver results. You can reach people within your church by mounting posters on the walls, or sending kids home from Sunday school with flyers to remind their parents about upcoming programs. You can also post in local store windows and on community bulletin boards. 

Some churches even hand out fliers at community events.

Create eye-catching posters and flyers using PosterMyWall’s huge template library. You’ll get professional quality designs, which will capture your audience’s attention. Send a file to your local print shop or print your own copies. Whatever works best for you.

Then use PosterMyWall’s one-click resize to adapt your graphic to use on your website, social media page, and newsletter. 

19) Local Influencer marketing 

Influencers are public figures who have influence over the behaviors and beliefs of other people –especially on social media. 

While most people think of influencers as being celebrities or people with thousands of followers–that doesn’t have to be the case. There are also many local influencers who may not have national followings–but are well-known by your ideal member or in your local market. These may be people in local government, people who lead local charities, TV or radio personalities, musicians, or even local athletes.

Approach influencers whose values match yours–and whose followers include the same people that you are trying to reach. 

A collaboration could be pretty much anything. Invite an influencer to speak about a local issue, join you at one of your events as a volunteer or attendee, or to perform at a fundraiser. 

20) Referrals  

Your best ambassadors are the people who love your church most–your members. Remind your congregation regularly that you need their help. Ask them to share your social media posts with their friends, invite friends to events, and forward your newsletters to their extended families.

21) Social proof

Social proof is when a third party –such as one of your members– tells others about the great experience they had at your church. An example of this is a shared testimonial from a church member. 

Social proof works because people are more likely to trust the opinion of someone they know than something an organization says about itself.

Share your social proof by:

• Posting customer testimonials on your social media accounts and website 
• Resharing organic content about your church
• Encouraging your members to give word of mouth recommendations 

Some churches create opportunities for members to create testimonials right in church– especially immediately after an event. This way, the attendee is still energized by the event–and that energy will come through in their testimonial.

To capture “in-the-moment” testimonials, set up a video camera or audio recording equipment right outside of the sanctuary or an event. As people exit, invite them to talk about their experience. Then turn the content into video or audio bites you can post, share, email, and add to your website.

22) Direct mail

Snail mail isn’t completely dead. Many people really enjoy it when something other than junk mail arrives in  their mailbox! 

Consider sending postcards promoting events to your loyal church members. Or little thank you cards to acknowledge their support. Everyone loves a personalized thank you note. 

Analyze your campaigns to keep learning

Every piece of content you create is an opportunity to learn and improve future content . All you have to do is analyze what works (and what doesn’t) –then apply what you’ve learned to subsequent promotions. Do this and the results generated by your marketing efforts will improve over time. 

Here’s how to measure your results–then apply what you’ve learned:

1) Data Collection

Collect data on how well each marketing effort performs. 

Review:

• Click through rates (How many people actually clicked on your posts, emails, or ads?)
• Action rates (How many clicks led to an increase in attendees, sign-ups, or visitors?)
• Engagement rates (How many people are engaged with your online content?)

Social media insights give you these numbers automatically, but if you want more detailed insight, try Google Analytics.  

2) Fine tune your marketing strategies

Once you have reviewed the results of your marketing communications, you can identify what went well, and what can be done better in the future. 

Identify which tactics, channels, and campaigns delivered the best results, then try to duplicate your success. If a particular message worked well, brainstorm on how you might apply it to other outreach initiatives. It may take some trial and error but it will pay off.

Conclusion

We hope you’ll try some of these church marketing techniques and that we’ve given you new ideas you can implement right away.

 Lean into your creativity to develop original content that conveys your church’s unique personality. And never stop experimenting. You never know what’s going to produce results until you try. 

The one thing we do know is that the better your efforts are in conveying what makes your church special, the better your marketing communications  will perform.

If you’d like to read more about church marketing, here are some blog posts you might find useful:

• Make your ministry stand out with these 20 church social media post ideas
• How email templates can make your church marketing a success
• Church marketing strategies to grow your congregation