5 Church Marketing Tools You Can’t Live Without
The Essentials for Marketing Your Church
So, you’re finally convinced that church marketing isn’t evil and that you ought to be doing more to get the word out about your church. Great! Now what?
We’ll cover the ins and outs of church marketing strategy in another post. Before we get there, though, we need to fill your toolbox with the basic tools every church needs to get started in marketing. Below, we’ll focus more on categories along with plenty of links so that you can explore which specific option will work best for your church.
Without further ado, here are the top 5 types of tools you’ll need to market your church:
A Website Builder
The core of any good church marketing strategy is a visually appealing and easy-to-use website. Your site is your home base. All your marketing efforts ought to direct people to it so that they can learn the basics about who you are and when/where to find you.
Thankfully, you don’t need to know a thing about code to get your church’s site up and running. Nor do you have to pay a web developer tens of thousands of dollars to do it.
Platforms such as Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress make it quick and easy to build a church website that will showcase your congregation and encourage folks to visit. Their user-friendly interfaces practically do the work of web design for you.
There are free options out there, but expect to pay about $25 a month for a site that looks professional and provides the basic features (blogging, contact forms, church calendar, giving, etc.) that visitors expect to find on a church website.
An Image/Video Editor
The internet is an incredibly visual medium. Images and videos attract more attention than text alone—especially on social media. But even analog marketing (newspaper ads, billboards, etc.) has always benefited from crisp photography and eye-catching design.
Visuals are crucial, but apps like Photoshop are expensive and difficult to learn. You could pay somebody to do all your visual and design work for you, but most small to medium churches can’t afford to keep a graphic designer and/or video editor on staff.
Thankfully, there are plenty of lightweight tools out there that make it easy to create graphics, edit photos, and put together beautiful video content. Many of them are free and come loaded with templates to help you generate social-media-friendly content.
Graphic Design Tools:
Video Tools:
Both:
An Email Marketing Platform
We all have a love/hate relationship with email. But, the fact remains that email marketing is an effective means for churches to get in touch with a broad base of people in one fell swoop—whether that’s your current membership, potential visitors, or both.
Apple Mail, Gmail, and Outlook are all great for sending and receiving emails, but they’re extremely limited in terms of designing and disseminating marketing emails. That’s why you need a dedicated email marketing solution that will allow you to design email marketing pieces for your church and send them out to large numbers of people.
MailChimp, Aweber, and Constant Contact are three of the most popular email marketing platforms for churches. MailChimp heads the list with a free plan that will accommodate up to 2,000 contacts. Each platform allows you to store email addresses easily and use templates to quickly send out visually appealing emails.
A Simple Content Calendar
A good church marketing strategy will make use of multiple forms of content and distribute them across several different media to reach your target audience.
Church newsletters, pastoral letters, sermon audio/video, church picnic photos, written testimonials—these are just a few of the many content pieces that can be polished and sent out over the internet, printed on a postcard, or stuffed into an envelope.
That’s a lot of content to keep up with. How can you track it all and ensure that you’re providing a consistent drip of marketing content with your congregation and the community around it? We have two words for you: content calendar.
A content calendar is simply a plan for the what, when, and where of your marketing distribution. As much as we’d love to point you to a high-tech solution, the best “apps” for this are a regular ol’ spiral-bound calendar, a spreadsheet, or a Word document.
A Social Media Manager
These days, you cannot execute an effective church marketing strategy without deploying social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube are just a few of the social networks that churches commonly turn to in order to attract attention.
Keeping up with all those networks and accounts can quickly turn into a full-time job, distracting ministers and lay leaders from the important work of ministry.
How do you keep from getting sucked into that time trap?
Social media managers like social.bee and Buffer allow you to connect your various accounts and schedule your posts. In conjunction with your content calendar, a social media manager allows you to set aside an hour or two each month to set things up, and then you can sit back as the software takes care of everything from there.
Note: Social media managers are helpful in ensuring a steady stream of content goes out to all your channels. But don’t forget the social aspect of social media. If you fully automate your accounts, people will tune you out just like any other bot. It’s important to get on your accounts once in a while (especially on Facebook and Twitter) and engage with other human beings.
BONUS: A Church Matchmaker
Palmly takes the guesswork out of marketing by learning enough about your ministry to match you with people who are looking for a church like yours.
The process is simple: just answer a few questions, and our AI will take it from there. All you’ll have to do is sit back and get ready to greet your new visitors.
Conclusion
Social networking has exploded over the past decade or so, transforming the face of modern advertising. Church marketing will only continue to grow and morph as technology advances, but the fundamentals won’t be so quick to change.
While the specific names and brands mentioned above will change over time, the basic tools will remain. You’ll always need a website. Visual content will only continue to grow in popularity. Email isn’t going away anytime soon. You’ll always need a plan for your content and a way to manage your social media without letting it manage you.
