Why Digital Marketing is Essential for Your Church’s Outreach Strategy

Most churches make one of two mistakes when it comes to marketing. Either they fail to market their church or message in any way, or they market them ineffectively. During my church planting days, the internet was a non-factor. You would put ads in the newspaper, make flyers, or use direct mail if you were cutting edge. 

Unfortunately, if they make any marketing effort, many churches are still using those approaches. But with the vast majority of the unchurched community reachable almost exclusively online, we need to rethink marketing our churches.

Which brings us to digital marketing. 

Philip Kotler, known as the father of modern marketing, has argued for a revolution in his discipline that he calls Marketing 4.0. The first major marketing shift was from product-driven marketing (1.0) to customer-centric marketing (2.0) and from that to human-centric marketing (3.0). The idea of Marketing 3.0 was to create products, services, and company cultures that embraced and reflected human values.

But the digital revolution calls for an entirely new approach that breaks from all traditional marketing that precede it. Just as the front door of the church has gone digital, so has outreach. While it is easy to have a negative reaction to Instagrammable Bibles, TikTok preachers, or celebrity-fueled “cool” churches, “there is without a doubt a change underway,” notes an article on YPulse, “a shift in how religious organizations and individuals are attempting to win over the next generations. And by being a more constant presence in the space where young people are spending their time (social platforms), these efforts could earn followings—even if they’re just on feeds, and not in pews.”

There are three online outreach headlines: First, your website is still central. Apps serve people digitally, but they are not the way people explore your church. So, you must make your website the anchor of your outreach.

Second, people will make their digital decisions about your church in seconds. This means you must engage them as quickly as possible.

Third, the goal is a click, not a visit. The visit – whether in person or online – follows the click. Or, as I have heard quipped, “Bricks follow clicks.” The target on the wall is to get them to check you out online, most commonly through your website or online campus.

This last statement is worth explaining a bit. You are not trying to use digital marketing to achieve a physical visit. That may sound counterintuitive, but think of it as stair-stepping someone into a particular action.

In various speaking events, I have often demonstrated this idea to people by walking over to a table and asking, “How many of you can do a standing jump and land on top of this?” Few can. But then I bring a chair over to the table and ask, “How many of you could first step onto this chair and then, from the chair, step onto the table?” Almost everyone can do that. Then I make the simple point that when we ask an unchurched person to attend in person as their first step to getting to know us, we are asking them to do a standing jump onto the table. The online invitation should first be to a chair.

So how do you do that?

There is still a place for traditional marketing (for example, mailers to the physical addresses of new residents), but the real penetration will be from digital marketing.

As our church’s marketing director likes to put it, we are meeting our consumers right where they are: online. We are using a mix of mediums that work together to maximize impressions. This involves running a paid search campaign on not only Google but all search engines so that when anyone, anywhere, is searching for us directly, looking for a church, or searching any of the keywords we are using, we will show up at the top of the search page. We run a retargeting display campaign so that anyone who has searched for us or landed on our website will be served future ads as a result of their initial interest.

With traditional radio in decline, we focus on digital radio ads with a mix on Pandora, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and Sirius XM that can be much more targeted than on traditional radio. After doing our research and finding that our target demographic spends most of their time with digital video, specifically YouTube, we invested a good amount of outreach effort in that medium.

We also run a pre-roll campaign with a focus on YouTube to be sure we are in front of the people whose attention we are trying to capture. We do an email marketing campaign a handful of times a year that is sent to everyone who has given us permission to contact them throughout the years, using our own database. We do not purchase email lists, so we know that each person receiving the email communication has some sort of interest in or experience with Meck. 

Finally, we run a social media campaign (which is different from simply boosting a post), primarily on Facebook and Instagram, where we run tests to determine where we have gained the most traction.

With all of these mediums, and with cross-device technology, we are able to be in front of more people, at more times, on more devices. And again, all of these efforts are produced with an unchurched person in mind.

If all of this sounds “big church,” think again. Financially, digital marketing is vastly cheaper than more traditional forms of marketing, whether it’s newspaper ads or direct mail. Further, most sites, such as Google, have online tutorials and easy step-by-step guidelines for getting started. The nomenclature may be intimidating, but the actual practice of marketing digitally is not.

Many of these marketing efforts are less expensive than you might think, but more important, they are good and effective investments.

James Emery White

Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Tanankorn Pilong

Publish Date: July 25, 2024

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on X, Facebook, and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.