3 Common Objections to Marketing Your Church | Jason & Bart

Hey, welcome to season 3 episode 15 of the Missional Marketing Podcast. I am Bart Blair, joined by the CEO of Mission Marketing, Jason Hamrock, and we’re here to help your church grow by leveraging digital marketing and effective communications. That’s why we do this podcast, and that’s why we’re doing this specific episode of this podcast. We haven’t done this, just the two of us in a while, but you are in for a treat today. Jason, are you well today?

I’m doing great, Bart. And like you just said, this topic we’re going to discover and unpack is incredibly important to the church. And if you’re listening to this, you are going to learn a thing or two. I’m excited.

All right. So before we get into the topic of our conversation today, we want to remind you that if you’re not subscribed where you’re listening to the podcast on whatever your favorite podcasting app is, that you subscribe, and if you’re watching on our YouTube channel, make sure that you not only subscribe but you ring the bell so that you get notified when future episodes are available. We try to create an episode, produce an episode every week, dropping them on Fridays, and most of the time we hit that mark. And our goal, as I said before, is really just to help you as a church communicator, whether you’re a solo pastor doing the church communications or you’re the communications director or you’re a volunteer in your church, just try to help your church get better at communications and marketing, we want to help you get better. And so we appreciate you tuning in to the show, we know you have lots and lots of podcast options and we are thankful that you have made our podcast a priority, at least in this moment today. So subscribe, leave us a rating, and review, we’d really appreciate that.

Let’s get on to today’s topic of conversation. Today, Jason and I are going to talk about the three most common objections to marketing your church. The three most common objections to marketing your church. Now, Jason, you’ve probably heard a few objections in your days as a marketer about marketing, have you not?

Oh my goodness gracious, I’ve even heard that we don’t use that term around here, it’s almost like it’s a four-letter word, right? It just has a bad rap, this word marketing. And it’s understandable, I mean, there are people who object to it and all that stuff. And then I’ll get the pushback like, hey, hey, hey, we’re a church, we’re not a business. But the reality is if you have a location, a physical location, you kind of operate like a business, right? You probably have some kind of payroll, and certainly, you’ve got to pay your bills, and you have to pay a mortgage, I mean, there are principles that you have to act and operate like a real business. And so those apply to the church, budget, banking, insurance, you got it. Right? So that’s pretty important, so I do get a lot of pushback on, not a lot, but I get some pushback on like, well, we don’t really do marketing, it’s never been in the DNA of our church. And so that’s what I want to discuss today. And Bart, you found a really great quote on the definition of church marketing, why don’t you inform us on what that is?

Yeah, I literally just finished reading a book, I believe the author’s name is John Skerrick, I’m not sure how you pronounce it, I’ll be happy to link to it in the show notes here. But he wrote this definition of marketing, which I thought was very, very helpful, he says, “Church marketing is the action of spreading or promoting the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the use of various types of communication, media, or strategies to capture attention, engage, educate and persuade people to action.” Now, that’s a mouthful, I’m going to say it one more time, it’s a mouthful, but the most important thing is the last part of it. Church marketing is the action of spreading or promoting the Gospel of Jesus through the use of various types of communication, media, or strategies to capture attention, engage, educate, and persuade people to take action. That’s what we want, right? The most important thing, if we just simplified that, we can simply say that church marketing is the action of spreading and promoting the Gospel of Jesus to persuade people to take action, that’s what we really want them to do.

We want them to take action. And so, you know, even though you may not agree with the word marketing, if your pastor gets on stage on Sunday and talks about the Gospel, he’s marketing.

That is a marketing job. Yeah.

Yeah, everything you do, you’re persuading to take action. And so here, let me just, do you want to know who the GOAT of marketing is, the greatest of all time? Is Jesus, he’s the GOAT, he was amazing, right? He was a storyteller, he told parables, and he performed miracles, all with the goal of capturing some attention, educating people about who God is and what he has for you, and getting people to take action. Follow me, right? I mean, he was the best at it. And so, you also found, Bart, and I’m really excited about this, you also found like two methods. So secular, like the business world, right, have they really become masters at this concept of marketing? And so, Bart, you found a couple of ways that you, in fact, you just shared with me that whenever you watch commercials these days, you are now thinking about these two different strategies that corporations, when they run advertisements on TV, there are two different ways. Do you want to go into that?

Yeah, for sure. It really has changed the way that I watch advertising on television. You know, there is some advertising that is simply image marketing, and a lot of image marketing is really just trying to make you aware of a certain company and to maybe kind of feel something, but maybe their goal isn’t to actually get you to take action. But marketers that do a great job of getting people to take action are leaning into one of two different areas, one is either a fear of loss or a desire of gain. So if I can get you to fear some sort of loss or some sort of FOMO, if you don’t act now, then you’re more likely to act. Or if I present something to you that is just so impossible to pass up, this desire of gain, then you’re more likely to take action.

And I’ll give you some examples. I don’t know if you remember this, but it was a big advertising campaign, maybe like in the 90s and the early 2000s, it was an American Express campaign. American Express uses the slogan, Don’t Leave Home without it. But they used to have these ads, in fact, I had an acting teacher who was one of the bad guys in an American Express ad where people go on vacation, and I still remember the commercial my friend was in. This family’s on the beach, and there are these two guys throwing Frisbees, and one of the Frisbees lands right next to somebody’s purse, and the guy goes over and he picks up the Frisbee and he reaches down and pulls a wallet out of the purse. Right? It was strategic, right, he threw the Frisbee at the purse just so he could go steal the wallet out of the purse. And of course, what American Express was trying to do was to make you feel this fear of loss. If I go on a vacation and I don’t have an American Express and I lose my wallet, I’m hooped, right? And so what they want you to do is they want you to make sure that when you travel, you’ve got American Express Traveler’s checks.

Don’t leave home without it.

Exactly. If you watch TV these days, you see the Allstate mayhem commercials, right? And what’s the whole idea there, it’s that if you have a cut-rate car insurance, mayhem happens and you’re going to lose, right? It’s this fear of loss that they’re trying to capitalize on. Yeah, a couple that go in the other direction is this desire of gain. And the one that stood out to me when I was sort of reading this concept was Red Bull. Red Bull gives you wings, right, there’s a benefit, there’s this gain that you have when you are a Red Bull drinker, right? You get the buzz, you get the caffeine or whatever it is, and it gives you wings. And of course, this desire of gain is capitalized on by Apple with virtually every iPhone release that they do, right? Every iPhone ad is designed to make you realize that your life can be so much better if you’ll just go and drop $1500 on the newest iPhone now, right, it’s that desire of gain. And those are the ones that sort of stand out to me. But, Jason, you and I were talking about this earlier, about the GOAT, the greatest of all time when it comes to marketing, and that was Jesus. And, you know, these marketing campaigns that Jesus came up with were pretty masterful because they capitalized on both.

I think He knew what He was talking about, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

This is true, this is Jesus talking about the fear of loss and the desire of gain, in the best, most popular verse on planet Earth, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” You gain everything, or you fear loss.

Yeah, or you lose.

And he was able to wrap that up in one verse. And then there’s another one, really close to it, right? It’s John 3:36, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.” Again, Jesus was able to, he’s the GOAT marketer. He was able to put both of those, the fear of loss and the desire of gains, together. Which then makes me want to ask a couple of questions about this, right? So you got to kind of ask these questions, and you wrote these questions out, and I love these questions. Do my methods of marketing honor Jesus? This is where the rubber hits the road because you might say, well, we don’t market, we’re not into that. Okay, well, then how are you going to grow? Because if it’s honoring Jesus, it can’t be bad, it can’t be bad. So do my methods of marketing honor Jesus? And do my marketing methods bring people closer to Him or push people away? Unpack that a little bit for us, Bart.

Yeah, if we’re going to say that the number one objection, or at least the first objection that we hear from people as to why they don’t market their church, is because marketing is a business practice. That’s essentially what we’re getting at here, that marketing is a business practice and therefore we shouldn’t do marketing. I think that there is some truth in the sense that we don’t necessarily want to bring business practices into the church just because they are business practices, but I think that evangelism in and of itself is a practice of marketing and outreach. When you and I talk to churches all the time, I actually substitute the word marketing for outreach, because outreach is essentially what we’re trying to do. But if you are going to pull the trigger and you’re going to market your church in a way that reaches people who are far from God, to try to attract them into your community so that you can introduce them to Jesus, those are the two questions that you really should be asking. Do the methods that I’m using of marketing, do they honor Jesus, and do my marketing methods bring people closer to him or push people away? Because if what you’re doing to market your church, or whatever it is that you’re doing, is pushing people away, clearly that’s not going to honor Jesus.

And if you’re standing on the corner of the street with a big sign and a bull horn and you’re just yelling at people going, you’re going to hell, that’s probably not honoring Jesus. I’m just saying, that’s just my bias on that one. But if you’re actually engaging with somebody, sharing, talking to them so that they take some action, that to me, is the difference between those two, in my opinion.

I’m going to go on a limb and I’m just going to assume that the bullhorn guy on the street corner is probably not listening to our podcast. But hey…

Probably not.

I might be surprised, but if you are a bullhorn guy, go ahead and leave us a comment, and leave us a rating.

Let’s talk about it.

We’d be happy to follow up with you. Okay, the number one objection or the first objection that we wanted to talk about was that we don’t do marketing because marketing is a business practice. We hope that you will see that you can work your way through that. And like I said, even if the word marketing is a swear word in your church, just switch it to outreach because outreach can’t be it, it’s actually what you’re supposed to be doing. Jason, let’s talk about the second objection that we often hear when churches are considering marketing.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of times I’ll talk to churches because they’ve reached out to us because they tried it and it didn’t work, honestly. And it’s probably because they didn’t know what they were doing, right? So either their campaign that they tried, maybe they tried something digital, maybe they tried to run like a Facebook campaign or a Google campaign, probably Facebook, because, you know, it’s pretty easy to do Facebook campaigns. But, you know, it was poorly timed, right, or poorly executed. They just didn’t have all the things going right, they maybe built the wrong audience, they had the wrong imagery because the imagery really does matter for engagement, or maybe they just didn’t have the complete objectives on exactly what they were wanting to do with the ad. Right? And you wanted to evoke some emotion in that ad and you wanted the user to engage, to click, and get over to your website so there could be some engagement. And you’re going, hey, we spent money on this thing and nobody showed up. Well, okay, that doesn’t mean marketing is bad, it might just be the user and the way that you put it all together.

Yeah, let me jump on that for a second, because I think, you know, you hit on a couple of things there. Sometimes the timing isn’t right, maybe you ran the campaign too long or you didn’t run it short enough. Or maybe you didn’t use the right medium to execute what you really wanted to, I mean, you can do mailers, you can do billboards, you can do social campaigns, you can do search campaigns, there are a lot of different ways that you can do it. Maybe you didn’t use quite the right tools to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. You know, when we meet with churches, one of the first things that you and I ask, and we coach our coaches to ask this question is, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? How do you define the win? If we’re going to run this ad campaign for you, I need to know what you actually want to come away with. And if we know that the long-term play is, to quote my friend and boss, Jason Hamrock, the ultimate goal is cheeks and seats, right, the ultimate goal is we want to move people towards an incarnational relationship with our church family so that we can introduce them to Jesus and disciple them, that’s the ultimate goal. But sometimes an ad campaign is a step in getting people towards incarnational engagement, showing up at your church service, but one ad campaign in and of itself is probably not going to accomplish that. I mean, we know churches that have done this, unless you’re giving away big screen TVs at your church service…Those ads will work, people will actually come to church if you’re giving stuff away. But ultimately, what we’re really trying to do is attract people with and through the Gospel and who we are. So, you know, sometimes it’s just leaning into an expert who knows how to build the right campaigns, put them on the right platforms, time them properly, but also help you understand what the objectives are. Because if you say, well, we tried advertising and it just didn’t work, what were you trying to accomplish? Because if you can’t clarify what you were really trying to accomplish, it’s really hard to know exactly whether or not it worked.

Yeah, Yeah. And so let’s pivot because you might be asking, what does a good campaign look like? And here are a few of them, I would say there are probably some more but because we have this podcast, we only have a limited time, so we can’t go too deep into this. But here are just four of them off the top of my head that I think you really want to pay attention to. First of all, timing’s everything, you know, you don’t start your Christmas campaign in July.

Correct?

Duh, right? I mean, come on now. Right? So you want to be timely about this, and when you’re advertising, you can’t be like, hey, a week out, we’re going to start. People, that’s too late for things, right? You need to give people well advance notice, maybe 30 days, 20 days before your thing, to give them time to process and see it multiple times. And by the way, marketing, it’s the old adage that like seven touchpoints, right, kind of a thing for them to realize, oh, that’s really going on, I want to engage with that.

So timing is everything, the right audience is incredibly important, right? To be kind of weird, you would never create like a family Christmas activity kit, which we have going on right now at Christmastime, and promote that to seniors or people that are empty nesters that don’t have kids, you want to promote that to younger families, right, I mean that just makes sense. So you’ve got to make sure you’re hitting the right audience with your message.

The third one would be, the benefit. Oh, this is huge, what’s the benefit? And the things like, you know, Red Bull gives you wings, right? What’s the benefit for why you, the user, should click on my ad and engage, get to my landing page, and actually make plans to show up to my event? There’s got to be a lot of connection points there, and you can’t just haphazardly fall into that, you’ve got to strategize and put it together. It’s not hard, sometimes, but you’ve got to put some effort into it. And so to me, if you miss that point, you’re really in big trouble.

And certainly, the most clear thing is the call to action. Often I go to church websites, and the first thing I see, and this just, it pains me, the first thing I see is the mission statement of the church. Now we think, hey, if somebody’s checking out our church, they’re going to want to know what our mission statement is, they’re going to want to know what we’re about before they even think about attending. And the answer is, no, they don’t, they don’t really care about your mission statement. They don’t. I mean, you do…

The people that the other churches in town that are considering leaving their church because they’re mad about something, they want to know, but the people that you’re trying to reach for Jesus, they don’t care.

They want to know what’s the benefit. They want to know they’re invited first and foremost, and then what’s in it for me and my family? If I come to your church, is there something for my kids? Because honestly, my kids, I want to make sure I don’t let them down. Right? So you’ve got to really be careful about what you, like on your landing page or your website, whatever that looks like, you’ve got to be really intentional about that, those calls to action. That is so critically important that you have a clear call to action that leads to them taking the next step, which might be showing up to the church, but maybe it’s just like watching you online. Do I like this pastor? Then they might want to learn more about your ministries. It might be three or four or five or six months or twelve months before they actually show up on the doorstep of the church, and they may go, yeah, this is my home church. It’s my first time on campus, but I’ve been watching for months now and I love you guys, this is my home church. So you’re clear, you have to have a really clear call to action, it really, really matters about what your website looks like. But, you know, that’s something that I would say that good a good marketing campaign will encompass those four.

Yeah, I think you’re right, Jason. The call to action is really huge. You know, as we are recording this, we are about to start building hundreds of Christmas and Christmas Eve campaigns for churches. And I mean, we can preach it until we’re blue in the face, but 9 out of 10, maybe 99 out of 100 landing pages that we will be directing ads to for the churches that we work with and that we love, they will not have any call to action on their Christmas Eve landing page, it will merely be an online brochure for what’s happening on Christmas Eve in their church. And so with no call to action, you’re not giving a person any real impetus to engage with you on your website. And like I said, you came up with some great ideas there, maybe part of it is to watch online, or maybe it is to RSVP, or maybe it is to preregister your kids, or maybe it’s to download some kind of activity kit or something, anything, some kind of call to action that engages them and that moves them on that pathway towards making a decision about whether or not your church is a good fit for them. Most of the time when a church says, we tried marketing before and it didn’t really work, it’s not because you didn’t get the eyes on your website or the eyes on your ads or you didn’t get the clicks, it’s because you didn’t have that one specific thing that you were asking the audience to do, that call to action, and so you don’t know how to measure it. You know, you had a 1000 new visitors to your website because you run that ad campaign, but you don’t know if any of those people actually showed up on Sunday morning because there was no intermediary call to action between clicking on the ad and actually showing up. So I could preach, and we could probably have an entire episode on calls to action, maybe we can do that someday.

Okay, so the first objection is we don’t do marketing because it’s a business thing and the church isn’t a business. The second one is, hey, we tried marketing before and it just didn’t work for us. And Jason, you know what, this is one, you get on the phone with me and I’m the pastor and you’re like, Mr. Pastor, you really need to do some marketing. And I say, but Jason, Jason, you just don’t know, we just can’t afford it, we just can’t afford it. How do you respond to me when I say I can’t afford it?

Oh my goodness. Yeah, well, you know, I’d go, okay, all right. Well, first of all, Pastor, with all due respect, you can’t not afford to do it because you’re thinking the wrong way, Pastor. I’m not thinking that you need to spend thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign, and go to your elder board and say, I need more money, you know, that’s not what we’re talking about here. I’m going to cover the first point, I’m going to let Bart cover the second point. This is, and I say this to almost every single church, that the most important component of your marketing strategy are your own people, period, they should be on fire for Jesus and for your church. And it’s your job as the leader to motivate them, to rile them up, to get them excited about not only just inviting, but bringing their friends, family, coworkers, enemies, mothers-in-law, whatever might be. Right? That’s your job is to get them to do their job, that’s biblical, go, and tell. It’s not the pastor’s job to grow the church, right? And this is plan A, this is it, Jesus said, this is my plan, there ain’t no Plan B, it’s you. So I kind of get going on that one a little bit because, you know, I think we totally miss out on getting our people engaged, getting them excited, and doing whatever you need to do to get them to bring and invite.

A little tangent just popped into my head. I had a call the other day with a pastor, and we were talking about just engaging. And I asked and I said, hey, how many times did you call your congregation during COVID? You know, they couldn’t meet. He goes, oh, we called them at least twice, sometimes three times. I go, okay, when was the last time? He goes, oh, geez, I don’t remember the last time, I mean, well, why did you stop? Well, we got busy. We got in person, and then we just stopped. Why? That’s how you rally up your troops, right, you’ve got to connect with them, not only on Sunday from the pulpit or from the stage, but why not call them, right? Why not engage in your people? Your people are your best asset to grow your church, and that can be free, or you can give them some tools, some printed cards with…My favorite thing that I used to do, is we’d print a card and it would be like a three-by-five and it’s perforated right down the middle, so it’s a mirror image of each other. Like whatever you’re inviting them to, Christmas Eve, they’re identical. And I’d say, hey, Pastor, I need to get on stage and I need you to literally rip that in half. And this one goes on your fridge for your family, and this one goes to somebody you want to invite to church. So I’m not asking you to invite 50 people, I’m just asking everybody to invite one, so it’s that simple. So to me, that’s the best way, and it literally can be free, is you use your own people.

Yeah, word-of-mouth marketing, right? Word-of-mouth marketing. And of course, there’s a whole other podcast in making sure that you are creating a worship experience or ministry engagement that makes your church family excited and wants to invite. But yeah, you’re right. Okay, so here’s the deal, you said this to me when I said, Jason, I can’t afford to market my church. And you said, you can’t afford not to. The reason you can’t afford not to is that, you know, we as church leaders, our churches, we’re not competing with the other churches in town. We’re competing with everything that the world, meaning the enemy, who actually still has dominion over this world, is feeding to the people in our community about what their priorities in life need to be. So they’re bombarded constantly with advertising related to anything and everything that’s supposed to make their lives better but ultimately moves them further and further away from Jesus. And marketing is designed to make other things that are not God, your God. And so we, as the local church, we have to employ some of the same methods and some of the same strategies and use some of the same platforms to get the attention of our community on things that are really going to help them.

This actually happened today, I can’t remember I’m in several, I think it’s the church communications group. And if the person who did this in the church community communications group is actually listening to this podcast, send me an email and I’ll send you a Starbucks gift card for being able to use this as an example. But someone put in the… This is not marketing, but this is just kind of a concept. They put in a post in the church communications group, my church has been using Twitter, and we’re getting some pushback from people in our church saying we shouldn’t be using Twitter because of all of the ugly stuff that’s going on in Twitter. I’m summarizing basically what they said. Then they asked the question, what does your church do? And I honestly didn’t read all of the responses to that, but my gut reaction, and I actually replied, and I responded, and I commented, I don’t usually do that, but I did. I’m like, if you don’t bring the Gospel to Twitter, who will?

Yep.

If the church gets off Twitter, if the church gets off Facebook, if the church gets off of Instagram and off of TikTok, then they are, I mean, they are cesspools to begin with, did I say that out loud? I did. They are cesspools to begin with, but if we as the church don’t bring the Gospel to those platforms, then who else will? It has to be us.

Light into darkness.

Right? Light into darkness. So, we as the local church, we’ve got to use some of the same methods and some of the same strategies for employing marketing so that we can get into the spaces where people are. Jesus said, go into all the world, well, the world is on the Internet. And so using Internet marketing, using mailbox marketing, using billboard marketing, I mean, yeah, we have pretty strong opinions about some of those things, just from a cost and a stewardship standpoint, we believe that digital marketing is the best bang for your buck. But there are times when doing print marketing and other things are useful. You know, I would say this, we’re going to wrap things up here in just a minute because there’s gotten to be a pretty long episode because you and I are both so passionate about this. But, you know, if you don’t, as a pastor, you don’t have to have a ton of money. But like the day that we’re recording this, we’re recording this on November 8th, I’ll just date it, it’s November 8th. If I took 20 bucks a week from my budget, and I set aside $20 a week every week from now until this week, next year, how much money could I spend on my Christmas campaign in 2023? I’d have a 1000 bucks, a thousand dollars. Or hey, $25 a week from now until May, and you’ve got $500 to spend on your VBS campaign to promote VBS online in your community. A $500 ad campaign, a $1000 ad campaign, would do wonders for your church in terms of promoting in the community who you are and what you’re doing, as long as you’re following the best practices in the market.

So here are a few things, if your church has never budgeted for advertising or for marketing, or for…I bet you budgeted for outreach, but you never considered budgeting for marketing, here are some things to consider. Number one, talk to a marketing professional to explore all the different ways that you can do advertising. Get yourself educated, learn how different platforms work, what the cost is, and learn how you can do promotions. And there is some stuff that you can do for free.

For free.

So talk to somebody who can help you do that. We, of course, can help you do that.

Yeah, I would say also you might want to consider, if you can’t do a whole year, just consider one. Think about 2023 and go, okay, what’s that event that would be really attractional for an unchurched or de-churched person, that would be a really easy entry point to come to church? Not like, you know, learn the Old Testament, like we’re going to have an event around the Old Testament. No, no, no, no, no, maybe it’s like a family picnic, or maybe it’s a 4th of July thing you’re going to do. Just pick one, though, and start small. Just kind of pick one you’re going to do for some kind of a ministry or an event in 2023, that would be a great place to start.

Yeah, work with an advertising professional or an agency to ensure that you’re designing your campaigns in a way that’s going to ultimately help you meet your objectives. If you’re working with someone who doesn’t ask you first what your goal is, or what do you want to accomplish with this campaign, then go ask somebody else to help you because you don’t want something out-of-the-box, you want something customized to accomplish what you want. Obviously, the more money you have, the more customization you can do, but you need to work with somebody who will want to help you accomplish your goals with your campaigns.

Yeah, a lot of times I will work with the church and they’ll ask me, hey Jason, my budget’s coming up and I have to submit my budget, what do you recommend? I go, well, I don’t recommend you go $20,000 for digital ads. That’s not enough, right, I mean, you’re your executive pastor, lead pastor, or certainly, your elder board would be going, what’s that going to be about? Right? I would actually break it down and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, these are the events we want to cover and promote, and this is the budget I want to put for it. And you could start small, but I would say that you want to start budgeting for it now, and actually have a game plan for, you know, there’s two things you’re going to probably want to promote Christmas and Easter, okay, check, check. Right? But you probably have a few other ones, maybe it’s back to school, VBS, you mentioned, or maybe it’s a mother’s Day thing, a lot of churches will promote like at the movies, they do an at-the-movie sermon series, or some kind of a parenting series, or marriage series, those are great to promote, but you’ve got to think about it and plan for it. And even if you don’t know all the details, at least just earmark, say I’m going to spend a few hundred or $500 on this, and a few hundred, you know, I mean, it adds up, but you have to plan for it. But you’ve got to really put some effort in thinking into it, so that your elder board, which is usually comprised of business owners and leaders, will go, okay, I understand what you’re wanting to do here, all right, we’ll approve that because you’ve thought through what that plan looks like.

Yeah. Okay, so we would be remiss if we did not finish this podcast episode with a call to action for you. Because this is basically, look, let’s call it what it is, this has been one great big advertisement for Missional Marketing, ah, yes and no.

No, it’s not.

No, it’s not. We do want you to lean on us if we can help you, we know that there are other agencies and other places you can go, but we are here for you. So, number one, if you’re a church leader and you know you need to do something, but you’re not really sure where to start, call us. You can go to our website, go to missionalmarketing.com, and click the Contact Us tab, and you can schedule an appointment with Jason or with myself, or one of our other capable coaches. Number two, if you’re a church staff member and you need to help your leaders understand the benefits of marketing, you need just to help put together maybe a presentation for them so that you can help educate them. Call us, schedule an appointment with Jason or Bart, and we will help you accomplish that. And number three, finally, if you think you know what to do but you aren’t sure how to budget it, we can help you with that. We actually help a lot of the churches that we partner with kind of review their budget every year as they’re going into budgeting season, and we want to help, you put together an annual plan and a budget that’s going to support the plan that you want to accomplish. And look, meeting with us is totally free, we will meet with you once, and we will talk through with you what your challenges are, and what your pain points are, to help you determine what some goals and objectives can be because we really are here to help you. And by the way, if you haven’t listened to previous episodes of this podcast on all kinds of other marketing ideas and marketing initiatives, and if you’re not ready to call us yet, just listen to some of the archived episodes of this podcast, or read some of the stuff on our blog on our website, there’s tons of free content there that’ll help you. Jason, any parting words?

No, but, well, just, you know, I want to encourage you to stop and think about this, marketing is something you do in your nature, if you are a Christ follower, you’re a marketer because you should be sharing your faith and just exposing the Gospel to those who don’t know. That’s marketing, it’s biblical marketing, so we’re not talking about secular marketing, we’re talking about biblical marketing. So I just encourage you to really think through that, and again, reach out. Even if you want to discuss that, and talk about it, maybe you don’t want to talk about the budget, you want to talk about just how do I help my team better understand this. I would love to have some, I have a lot more things I could share with you, but I’d love to go into more detail with that on a call. So just reach out, call us, that’s the call to action.