3 Pillars of a Marketing Campaign

Over the years, marketing (and advertising) has become less of a “dirty word” in the church world. Many church leaders have come to realize that marketing is really just the process of making something known, and why wouldn’t we want to make our church’s ministry known in our communities? After all, making Jesus known throughout the world is the cornerstone of our Gospel calling.

Have you ever stopped to think about what makes up a good marketing campaign? If marketing is an activity that we agree is important to church growth, it is worth a quick study in how to create a good marketing campaign. Below are three pillars of a campaign and some additional aspects to consider. I will focus primarily on digital marketing campaigns, but most of these principles will apply to traditional marketing as well.

Before we get into the pillars, it is worth noting the various types of digital marketing available to us at the time of writing, and some distinctions among them. The first distinction is organic marketing vs paid marketing. Organic is marketing done without ad spend. These campaigns might still cost you — in compensation to personnel to execute them, in time (especially if you’re doing the work yourself), in stock assets or graphic design, etc — but you do not pay the platform for the impressions you receive. Obviously, paid marketing is the opposite, where you do purchase impressions. An example of organic marketing is posting an image or reel to your social media timeline. Or, in the analog world, an example would be someone handing out flyers to invite their neighbors to church. An example of paid marketing in the digital world is Facebook ads. An example of paid marketing in the analog world would be purchasing a billboard.

It’s also helpful to understand the difference between the two types of digital paid advertising: Search vs Display. Search advertising (or “search marketing”) is where you pay for impressions based on someone searching for a key word or key phrase associated with your organization. For example, perhaps you pay Google to show your church listing as the first result in the search results page when someone searches for “church in Lincoln, NE.” Display marketing is where you pay for impressions to display your ad based on a variety of data points of your desired audience, whether that person takes any action or not. For example, you might pay to ask Meta (parent of Instagram and Facebook) to drop your ad into the newsfeed of all 22-28 year old women who live within 8 miles of your church’s location.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both of these types of advertising. With search ads, you benefit when someone is searching for you. A plumber is a good example. They want to show up when someone’s pipes have burst and they are in need of someone in an emergency. It probably doesn’t do them a lot of good (other than general brand awareness) to show up in someone’s newsfeed during non-emergency times.

Or, take for example a high-end furniture store. They probably want to appear in a newsfeed when their target audience is mindlessly scrolling more than they want to show up in a search result (although, they might also want to show up when someone is searching for “outdoor patio furniture,” as an example).

With search ads, you wait for the client to come to you (i.e. when they are searching). With display ads, you go to them (based on the data set they fit in).

Both search and display ads can be useful for churches. As mentioned above, you probably want to show up when someone searches for a church in your area. You probably also want to appear in someone’s newsfeed when they’re scrolling social media as an escape to whatever problems they are dealing with from their day.

With that in mind, let’s look at the three pillars of a good marketing campaign:

• Audience
• Offer
• Ad Composition

Audience

The first pillar of a marketing campaign is audience targeting. If you don’t put your message in front of the right audience, your marketing is going to likely fall flat.

With search marketing, you target your audience through keywords they’re likely to be searching. Whereas with display marketing you’re targeting by demographics and location. With either, it’s important to do the hard work of properly creating your desired audience persona.

The steps to creating your audience persona could be its own article, but here’s a quick overview. There are two key “graphics” you can use to figure out your audience: demographics and psychographics.

Demographics include things like:

• Age
• Gender
• Ethnic Background
• Economic Status
• Education
• Group Memberships
• Geography

Psychographics helps identify people based on psychological characteristics such as:

• Values
• Desires
• Goals
• Interests
• Lifestyle Choices

By wading deep into the problems your audience faces, their challenges, and the things that bring them joy — along with basic demographics — you can put together an audience persona that should make campaign targeting more successful. You can use details from your audience persona for technical targeting, for writing copy, and for selecting the image or video you use in your campaigns, etc.

In addition to forming your audience persona, there are other audience considerations when building a marketing campaign. For example, you can export a list of your current database and create a “custom audience” to use for campaign targeting. Sophisticated campaign platforms, such as Google and Meta, can even use your custom audience to create a lookalike audience — people with similar characteristics and data points to people who are already engaged with you.

You can also use “retargeting” tactics to create marketing campaigns to people who have engaged with your previous marketing campaigns, website, Facebook page, and other online channels.

Creating an audience persona, and leveraging that persona in the technical aspects of targeting an audience for a marketing campaign is a complex undertaking. However, the effort is worth the return. By getting your campaign in front of the right people, you have a high likelihood of making your church and ministries more known in your community.

Offer

In marketing campaign speak, an “offer” is the thing you are presenting to your audience to encourage them to engage with you. In business terms, there are two types of offers: a lead magnet/generator which is used to entice or incentivize someone to give you their contact info in exchange for something of value; and a core offer which is the main product or service you offer them.

Similarly, churches have an offer for their marketing campaigns. Of course, the main “offer” is the Gospel, often delivered through an invitation to a church service. Other offers might include an invitation to an event, a resource to help parents, a marriage resource, or something else useful to your audience.

Most church leaders don’t think deeply enough about how to position their offer. Sure, a church has a mission and vision statement, but have you truly thought about how the offer intersects with the real-life felt needs of your audience? Do people in your community who are struggling every day with finances, for example, care about how you “exist to make disciples?” A better offer for this audience member might be an ad promoting a Financial Peace University course. The point is, when considering your offer it is important to think about what will cause your audience persona to take action. When it comes to a marketing campaign, offer construction and positioning is a critical piece of the strategy.

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Ad Composition 

The third pillar of a marketing campaign is the ad composition (often referred to as the “Creative”). This includes your image or video, along with the text copy for display ads, and your text copy with keywords for search ads. Since these are the pieces of your campaign that the audience interacts with, it’s important to get these right.

Image/Video

The first thing people see when they interact with your display ad is the image or video. The most effective image and video types change regularly, so rather than give specific details of what you should use, I’ll recommend that you allocate enough time and budget to the campaign to be able to split test various options.

There are, however, a few principles that seem to persist over time as effective techniques for display ads. Images and videos with faces tend to over perform compared to images with graphics. Images without a lot of text typically perform better. In general, you want to make images or video look as much like a normal newsfeed post image as possible. It’s helpful if the image or video can encapsulate a story. When people see it, you want them to stop scrolling and subconsciously ask, “what’s going on there?” Sometimes a meme is effective as well.

Search ads are less dependent on the success of the image and more reliant on the effectiveness of keywords. When a search ad does display an image, it’s often more in the size of a thumbnail. In such instances, it’s important to pay attention to general best practices for thumbnail images (they should be visible at small sizes, they should include minimal amounts of detail, etc.).

Text Copy

Once someone’s attention is captured by your image or video, they often turn to read the text copy. It’s critical that that text captures people’s attention and either tells a story using an effective story arc/narrative framework, or engages them in a problem gap.

We recommend studying Donald Miller’s Building A Storybrand framework or Ray Edward’s P.A.S.T.O.R. framework. Both of these teach how to leverage the time-tested, tried and true methods for writing copy that moves people to action. 

Don’t skip over good copywriting. It doesn’t matter if you have the right audience with the right image and budget if the copy doesn’t move them to action.

A few other tips:

• Don’t be afraid of long form copy, especially when the offer requires some explanation or nuance. While people who are not interested in what you have to say will likely not read long form, studies have shown that people who are interested will take time to read longer passages of text.
• Learn how to write for digital mediums. Use headings, bullet points, and lots of short paragraphs to make the copy easy to scan and read quickly.

Keywords

As mentioned above, keyword targeting is the most important aspect of search advertising. Keyword research and execution is an artform all on its own, beyond the scope of this article. However, suffice it to say if you are spending money on search ads, you should take the time to learn how to properly target the search terms of the audience.

A Word About Budget

I didn’t list “budget” as one of the pillars of a marketing campaign because you can run an effective campaign whether spending a couple hundred dollars or spending a million dollars, assuming the three pillars above are correct. Having said that, budget is an important consideration in any ad campaign. You must be willing to allocate enough money to the campaign for it to be effective or you will waste the little bit you do spend. The way the platform algorithms work requires enough funds and time for a “learning phase” to take place.

Beyond ad spend budget paid directly to the ad platforms, consider adding budget to your campaign to hire an expert to help run it. Learning how to read metrics, knowing how to properly make adjustments or scale a campaign that is working, and understanding rules that help keep the ad account from getting disabled are all aspects of running a campaign that a marketing expert can help with.

Final Thoughts

Marketing and advertising are important activities for churches. Modern church leaders don’t just tolerate the idea of marketing campaigns as a method for church growth; instead, they relish the chance to leverage opportunities that marketing platforms provide as a way to spread the word about the Word. Learning to strategically think about the three key pillars of a marketing campaign will hopefully help your church to run better campaigns and successfully reach more people.

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