Digital Marketing: Connecting The Church With Its Target Audience

Digital marketing is not new, it’s been around for a while now. It’s become pretty common practice for businesses of all sorts to use Google search, display, social and remarketing campaigns to locate their target audience and usher them through a sales funnel.

Businesses are used to this process because it’s essential to getting sales. It’s how they get someone who’s never heard of their product to wondering how they ever lived without it! For many businesses, if they don’t advertise, they don’t survive.

For most of its history, the church (in general) hasn’t had to advertise. It was a part of the culture, the weekly routine. People just went. 

But we now live in a world where people are less engaged with the church, and therefore, the church needs to be proactive with getting more exposure. And the way churches can get more exposure is to go to the people. And where are the people? They’re on their phones, computers, and tablets (and in that order). And while this is kind of a sad reality, it is indeed the reality. So how do we engage people where they’re at?

Enter digital marketing.

But before you open a new tab and create your Google Ads account or start boosting Facebook posts, let’s pump the brakes a little, take a deep breath, and learn a little bit about digital marketing first.

The goal of this article is simply to inform the church. We’ll follow-up with some “how-to” material in the near future; but first, we simply need to understand what digital marketing is and how it works.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the strategic use of various platforms people are already on, to advertise something. The platforms we’re talking about are usually (but not exclusively) places like search engines (eg: Google, Bing, Yahoo) and Social Media (eg: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). You know those search results at the top of the page that say “ad” next to them? You know those graphics embedded in the blogs you read? You know that product that just popped up on a random page from a search you did last week? These are all examples of digital marketing.

Some are admittedly obnoxious and the church will probably do best to stay away from those sorts. Others are less pushy and actually all about helping people find exactly what they are looking for.

How it works is the advertiser will create an ad campaign, which usually involves graphics, a sales funnel, and a website or landing page to bring people to. 

The goal is to find the right audience for the ad and maximize the conversion rate (the ratio of people who click on the ad with the number of people who purchased the product or service). There’s a LOT more to it than that, but this is the gist.

How Does Digital Marketing Work?

When you put together a regular mailer campaign, you decide on your geographic radius, how many postcards you want to send based on your budget, and you send them.

With digital marketing, it works a little different. And different platforms all work differently too. But for campaigns done on Google Ads, instead of paying per item you send (printing + postage = cost), instead you pay per click. You don’t pay to post the ad and you don’t even pay when someone sees your ad (which is called an impression). You only pay when someone clicks on it.

How Much Does It Cost?

Well, that depends on many factors. But most of it boils down to what you are advertising and how much competition there is. For instance, an insurance company is going to pay around $50-60 dollars per click. A website developer will spend $10-20 per click.

Fortunately for churches, advertising a local event like an Easter service or an outreach event, is usually less than $1 per click. You decide on a budget and the platforms will stay within the bounds of that dollar amount you set.

My most recent campaign advertised two Christmas events and cost an average of 48 cents per click. So we were able to point over a thousand local people to the event landing page on the church website for less than $500 dollars in ads. Not bad.

What Is The Advantage Of Doing Digital Marketing?

There are many attractive features to digital marketing for churches but I’ll name just a few.

Tracking Success

With a digital campaign, there is no mystery behind the campaign’s basic success. With digital campaigns, you know exactly how many people are clicking on your ad and if you’re good with Google Analytics, you know exactly what people are doing once they hit your landing page.

You will want to do more than look at the numbers though. Analytics can tell you a lot, but they don’t tell you how many people actually attended an event. They don’t tell you why someone responded to an ad. For effective metrics, you need to reach out to people to find out why they came.

Lower Costs

If done right, a digital campaign can cost less than alternative marketing solutions. Why? Because there are no physical materials attached to a digital campaign. No posters to print, mailers to send, or signs to create.

Also, as I already mentioned, organizations like churches don’t pay much for different kinds of advertising and can even get their hands on grants that could pay for the entire campaign.

The downside is if you don’t know what you’re doing, you may be spending money on an ineffective campaign. Also, the cost will go up if you need to hire a marketing expert or graphic designer. You can do this in-house, but there is an art to crafting a successful campaign.

Targeting an Audience

This is probably the biggest advantage to digital marketing. Because platforms like Google and Facebook know what people are searching for and clicking on, they have a pretty good idea of what you’re interested in. Yeah, it’s kind of creepy in a “big brother” sort of way but what are you gonna do?

Well, you can leverage that knowledge into helping find your target audience. Do you want to know how many people search for Christmas Eve services in your area? You can do that. Do you want to find how many people search for AA groups in your city? You can do that too.

This is all to say, you can craft a campaign that targets the kind of people you think are most likely to actually be interested in what you’re advertising.

Need Help Getting Started?

At Clearpath, we partner with The Marketing Initiative to handle the creative and strategic ends of your marketing campaign. So if you’d like to discuss getting some help promoting your next big outreach or event, we’d love to talk!