6 Strategies to Expand Your Church Through Digital Marketing
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Growing a church in the digital age presents numerous opportunities that previous generations couldn’t have imagined. Specifically, there are Internet-based church growth marketing techniques that can consistently increase your congregation over time.
Effective marketing is crucial for attracting new worshippers. Consider this: there are approximately 400,000 churches in the United States alone. Sadly, many are closing their doors due to a lack of innovative methods to expand their congregations, such as online church marketing.
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Each of the following strategies may resonate differently depending on denominational and faith considerations, so it’s important for church leadership to carefully evaluate each before implementation. Here are a few internet-powered ideas to help grow your church:
1. Start a Facebook Page
Many churches have been cautious about embracing social media marketing, yet with over one billion active users on Facebook alone, there's little reason to doubt its effectiveness as a platform for spreading your message.
One of the key advantages is that a Facebook page is essentially free. Encouraging your members to join and share updates can amplify awareness of your church's activities among their networks. Additionally, you can easily repost content from your website, increasing the likelihood that visitors will find your website through your Facebook presence.
Facebook offers a powerful platform to highlight missions trips, community outreach events, and religious celebrations. Embracing online platforms allows you to engage where people are increasingly spending their time — online.
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2. Offer Sermons as Podcasts or Videos
When people can’t make it to church on Sundays, they may feel alienated from the rest of the flock. Help them stay in the loop by offering your sermons online in the form of a podcast.
Your podcasts do not have to be professionally edited or recorded. Just make sure that your sermons and services are clear, with as little audio feedback as possible. You can add them to your website, or even distribute them through a service like iTunes to further extend your reach.
If a podcast seems too technical, start a YouTube page and have a parishioner record your services with a video camera or even a steadily-held smartphone. You can then upload the service and encourage people to visit your YouTube channel to see it (or share the video on Facebook!).
3. Start an Email-Based Newsletter
Part of your church's growth marketing strategy should include weekly email newsletters sent to all congregation members and anyone else who has subscribed. This is an excellent way to keep people engaged and ensure your church remains top-of-mind.
In these newsletters, you have the opportunity to showcase various aspects of your church that you believe others would find interesting. This could range from special services like Easter, Christmas, or Ash Wednesday, to community events such as bake sales or food drives. You can also include highlights of Biblical passages or share transcripts of recent sermons.
Assigning someone on your team to oversee the writing and layout of these newsletters is crucial, but the effort is worthwhile. Subscribers who opt-in to receive newsletters are highly engaged with your church's activities. Moreover, analytics provided by email marketing platforms allow you to track how many recipients are opening your newsletters each week, providing valuable insights into your outreach effectiveness.
4. Encourage Parishioners to Tweet and Post During Services
This topic can be controversial within many churches, yet it’s important to consider in the context of online church marketing. While it may initially seem counterintuitive to allow worshippers to use their smartphones during a service, their positive tweets and posts about their experiences can have a significant impact.
Seeing congregants using their phones in the pews might feel unusual at first, but if they are genuinely engaged and sharing the pastor or leader’s message, it can be incredibly influential. You can even suggest hashtags, such as #BibleLessons or a custom hashtag for your church, which others seeking spiritual guidance online may discover.
If you’re still hesitant about permitting such activity during worship, you can encourage attendees to share their thoughts and reflections via social media after the service concludes.
5. Start a Blog
If your church has a website (and it should!), consider starting a blog to highlight positive developments. Empower younger parishioners, such as members of a teen-based youth group, to contribute content for the blog. This involvement not only gives them a meaningful role in ministry but also allows them to express themselves.
A significant advantage of maintaining a blog is that the content you publish has a strong potential to appear in search engine results. This can make it easier for people in your community to discover your church when they search for information or spiritual guidance online, potentially expanding your congregation.
A word of caution: always ensure that a church leader reviews blog posts before publication to maintain correct grammar and language standards.
5. Start a Blog
Mission trips can be costly, and most churches have to raise funds to send members to far-away countries. Crowdfunding sites can be an excellent way to raise monies, as well as make the public aware of what your church is doing.
Encourage all missionaries to create pages of their own and then publicize them on their personal social media accounts. If the people who provide donations are willing to give their personal information, make sure to get their names and email addresses to add to the church’s mailing list!
6. Ask Missionaries to Use Crowdfunding to Raise Money
Mission trips can incur significant expenses, requiring many churches to raise funds for sending members abroad. Crowdfunding platforms offer an effective means to gather funds while also promoting the church’s mission activities.
Encourage all missionaries to establish individual pages and promote them through their personal social media profiles. For donors willing to share their information, ensure to collect their names and email addresses to include them in the church’s mailing list.
Grow Your Congregation with Digital Marketing
Churches everywhere need to grow continually to thrive across generations. Leveraging available online resources allows churches to market themselves effectively, attracting new parishioners and expanding their community year after year.
There are numerous strategies to attract worshippers to your church. Explore our email marketing page to discover how this method can benefit your church, or read our blog post featuring case studies from successful churches using online marketing strategies.
We trust you've gained valuable insights into using online marketing to broaden your church's reach. If you have questions about implementing these methods or want to explore how an Internet marketing firm like MacroHype can assist in expanding your online presence.
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