5 Ways to Reach More People for Easter | Bart & Jason

Bart Blair: Hey, welcome to season 3, episode 23 of the Missional Marketing Podcast. I’m Bart Blair, joined as always, well, almost always the CEO of Missional Marketing, Jason Hamrock. And we do this podcast just about every week, and our goal is to help your church grow by leveraging digital marketing and effective communications. We just want to equip you to do better at what you do so that you can reach more people in your community and lead them to Jesus. At the end of the day, it’s all about leading people to Jesus. I’m not wrong there, am I Jason?

Jason Hamrock: Amen.

Bart Blair: You just gave me an amen. So preach it, brother, I’m preaching it. All right. Today, Jason and I are going to have what I think will be a fairly succinct and straightforward conversation about ways that you can reach more people this Easter season in your church. Because once again, Easter is all about Jesus, it’s all about leading people to Jesus, and so we’re going to share with you five very specific tips, five ways that you can reach more people for Easter.

Bart Blair: Now, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you before we get into the content, if you listen to our podcast on a regular basis, you’ve heard this all before. We may sound like a broken record sometimes because we’re pretty much telling you to do the same things all the time. Maybe we share it in a different way, but we just want it to be fresh on your mind as you’ve flipped the calendar into 2023. We’re looking ahead at Easter, which is at the time that we’re recording this like less than 90 days away. And so you as a church, as a leadership team, you ought to be in the throes of planning your Easter. And so from a marketing and a communications perspective, we want to give you some tips, some tools, and some tricks that you can use to reach more people this Easter. So without any further ado, Jason, why don’t you talk a little bit about the first thing that churches need to do to reach more people for Easter this year?

Jason Hamrock: Well, and I’ll tell you, let’s just add on to that, because these five things, they apply to anything that you have big going at your church, Easter, Christmas, a new big conference, or an event you’re having on, so just keep that in mind. The very first thing and the reason why this is number one on the list is because I find most churches just forget about it, yet it’s probably the biggest and best thing you can do that’s free. Are you ready for this one? Your Google Business Profile, it used to be called Google My Business, you have one because every business has one that Google knows about and they know about almost all of them, and you have an opportunity to actually promote your event on your Google Business Profile. So you need to figure out who the owner is of that profile, and there’s a little thing that says Promote my business. You click on that and it’s like a little, there are three options, and you click on promote my event. You can add all the details to that, to that little posting. Once you post that, oh, it gets really, really exciting because not only just does it show up on your Google Business Profile, but do you know what it does? It throws your calendar event and all kinds of other calendar events going on around your community. That’s free. That’s free. So you get tons and tons of exposure about your Easter event, and if somebody clicks on that, they’re headed over to your Google Business Profile. They can click on your website, they can learn all about you, and that didn’t cost you, it cost you 10 minutes at the most. You should do that for every event you have, that’s the first thing.

Bart Blair: Yeah, the short-term benefit is that your events will show up in directories and in local searches when people are searching for events. Try this out, if you’re at your desk right now, if you’re in your car driving, don’t do this. But if you’re at your desk right now, Google family events near me, or music events near me, or Easter events near me, and Google will provide you an actual list of events that are in your local area. Now you can add local schema markup and structure data to your website to promote your events, but it’s a whole lot easier just to add it to your Google Business Profile and some of the other things that we’re going to share with you today.

Bart Blair: Secondly, though, I want to mention too, Jason, because you mentioned that every event on your church’s calendar that’s got sort of an outreach focus to it ought to be promoted in your Google Business Profile. What this actually does when you’re actively using your Google Business Profile, Google will actually reward you with more local SE juice in general, and you’ll show up higher in those local search rankings when people are searching for a church. So you get the short-term benefit of your event showing up in those local event and directory listings, and the long-term benefit is that Google sees that you’re willing to play in their sandbox, and if you’re willing to play in their sandbox, they will reward you for that. So the first way that your church can leverage your digital presence to reach more people for Easter is by posting your Easter event, your services, or any other events that you have going on around Easter on your Google Business Profile. What’s number two Mr. Hamcrock?

Jason Hamrock: I like this one, I just was talking to a church the other day, and a year ago we had the same conversation and they have this amazing event called The Easter Egg Drop, right? All of us have probably been a part of that with little kids, right? You go to some Easter egg hunt, or they drop eggs or whatever, and thousands and thousands and thousands of people will come onto your campus, which is great, I love that. So in this call, he said, hey, we recognize last year we did this thing and had a ton of people and then they all left and we didn’t know who they were.

Bart Blair: Mm-hmm.

Jason Hamrock: And I said, yeah, you should have done something about that, this is what you should have done. And so this year had the same conversation, and he goes, Jason, we’re on this side of Easter, what do we need to do to try to collect some names and emails and information about the people who are going to come to our campus for an egg drop? And I said, it’s easy, make them register. He goes, all right, well, how do we do that? I go, well, I don’t think I would send people to your website to register, adding their name, email, maybe even a cell phone, how many kids they’re going to bring, because that’s a little bit intimidating because they don’t know you. What I recommend is something like Eventbrite, right? People are more conditioned to use Eventbrite, it’s a lower barrier, and they trust it. They may not trust your website, but you can still grab that data. So I always encourage you to use something like Eventbrite, because now you’re capturing their name, their email, their cell phone, and maybe ask how many kids are going to have, so you get some kind of an idea. That is an amazing tool that allows you to collect names and emails. There’s more benefit to it, do you want to talk about the more benefit you get from it?

Bart Blair: Yeah, for sure. I mean, not too different than the local search benefit that you have when you add your events to your Google Business Profile. But guess what? If you post on Eventbrite, and another one that’s very similar is called AllEvents, people tend to be a little less familiar with AllEvents, but I do see it popping up more and more now. But when you post your events there, you will again show up in those local searches. If you search Easter activities near me in Google, and then you start scrolling through those events, you’ll see that a lot of them are listed in Eventbrite and AllEvents, which automatically puts local schema markup and structured data on your event page in AllEvents, which is how Google pulls that information, so you’ll show up in more searches. I think too, a lot of people when they’re just looking for stuff to do, they go to those websites just to look for stuff to do for their family, and they can search by category, they can search by date range, they can search by free or paid. So if you’ve got a free event that you’ve posted in Eventbrite, number one, it’s free to you. But secondly, people are actively scouring those websites, searching those websites to find events and activities that are in their area that they can bring their family to.

Jason Hamrock: I have one follow-up to what you said about the registration, but I’ll let you go ahead. Did you have a thought?

Jason Hamrock: Yeah, again, there are two points to this. Number one is you use Eventbrite as your advertising tool, that’s free. But second, and almost probably just as important, you actually collect a name, an email, and a cell phone of the people who are walking onto your property and then going home, right? So now you can follow up with them. I would do that every single time.

Bart Blair: Okay. Let’s take this to another level, though, because this is actually a deficiency I see with a lot of churches. I actually was responding to an email this morning about a certain type of ad campaign, and this communications director at this church was asking me for actual data. So how many people ran a campaign like this that actually saw somebody go through this process and actually show up at their church? And I’m like, you know, I wish I could tell you, but the reality is, is that most churches do a very, very poor job or have a very difficult time tracking that kind of data. Here’s the deal, if you ask people to RSVP on Eventbrite for AllEvents, you can build an email sequence in Eventbrite to remind them of the event, and in that email sequence, include having them bring their ticket and present it to your welcome center or to your ticket booth or what have you, and enter it into a drawing to win an iPad or an Amazon gift card or something of that nature. Because now you’ve done two things, not only have you collected their email address and their name so that you can build an email nurture campaign, invite them to future events, whatever it is you’re going to do, but you can actually verify that they showed up because they showed up with their ticket and they gave it to you so that you could put it in their drawing to win the prize. That’s the goal, it’s one thing to have 1000 people register for your event on Eventbrite, it’s another thing to know actually who showed up. When the tickets are free, there’s no barrier to entry, a lot of people might register for tickets or RSVP, but they might not actually show up. So take that extra step and email them once they’ve RSVP’d, remind them to bring their tickets, and give them a very specific place to do that. Collect those tickets so that you can verify that those people actually showed up.

Jason Hamrock: Yep. Yep. It’s a funnel, right? It’s a funnel. You’re trying to connect people at the very top, and then funnel them down to where they might be sitting in a seat someday.

Bart Blair: Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, those things are things that volunteers in your church can do. I’m just going to mention that because I know if you’re a staff member, you’re listening to this and you’re going, I’m already overwhelmed, that’s just one more thing for me to have to do. You know what? Those are things that volunteers can manage. So use volunteers where you can, let them use their God-given gifts, talents, and abilities to help move the needle in your church, it doesn’t have to be all you just paid staff. That was number two, posting events to Eventbrite or AllEvents.

Bart Blair: Let’s go to the third of the five things that we’re going to talk about that will help you leverage your digital presence to reach more people for Jesus this year at Easter. What’s the third one, Jason?

Jason Hamrock: Well, you know email is still incredibly powerful. It’s one of the best ways to connect with people because I don’t know about you, Bart, but I have several email accounts and my life revolves around email. I don’t like it, but it just is the fact that that’s how you connect with me. And so utilizing your email list is like a no-brainer, right, duh? And as you do these things that we just talked about, like Eventbrite, you’re adding more emails to your list and so you want to take advantage of that.

Jason Hamrock: And I actually have a church I just talked to this morning that’s, they’re over in Kentucky. And so smart of him because he’s collecting emails through different campaigns that we’re running with him, and he’s not just inviting them to church, he’s actually sending them very helpful emails around like felt need content, right? So he’s maintaining a relationship with them, and he is getting really good open rates like 50% to 55% open rate, which is pretty good on a cold list that we’ve acquired through different things that we run for him. And even probably better than that, his unsubscribe rate is extremely low. So anytime he sends out an email, he just gets a handful of people who unsubscribe, which is great. And so I want to use your email list, right, to communicate and invite people, obviously, you want to do that, and have them share it, they can pass it on and they can share it with other people. So there are probably two different kinds of email lists we’re talking about here, and maybe you have another one, but I’m thinking about your congregation, to send them emails to have them invite their friends and family and neighbors and coworkers. But then you have your other list that you’ve acquired, that’s a little bit more of a lead generator list where you’re trying to just keep the communication going with them and hoping they show up, but you’ve got to be really intentional about that. There are some things you can do, so, Bart, talk about the different ideas in terms of sequences that you should think about.

Bart Blair: Yeah, you know, I think it was Carey Nieuwhof that I heard say this years ago related to his blog post and the emails that he sends out, and he made some reference to the fact that he says before I hit send on any email, I always ask myself the question, am I adding value? Am I adding value by sending this email? I think as churches, we need to ask that question more often. Because an invitation to church, or an invitation to an event, is not always adding value. Now the event itself and the church service, the worship experience itself is the benefit, but the email is not. So what I like to do is think through the emails that you send both to your own internal ring one audience, and those that are part of these nurture lists that you’ve built through some of the ad campaigns and lead generation that you’ve done, and think about how the emails that you’re writing, that you’re putting together and sending, how are they adding value? So I love the idea of thinking about Easter, we’re 90 days, 87 days away at the time that we’re recording this. You know, when you get five weeks, six weeks out from Easter, could you actually have like a five or six-week, ten-email sequence that actually disciples people and their hearts towards Easter? Rather than simply just putting your Easter services as a line item in your general weekly email that goes out, that has all the other events and activities crammed in between youth camp and summer camp and divorce care and grief share and all the other things, Yeah, you’re going to promote it in your regular weekly newsletter, but could you actually create an email sequence that actually disciples people towards Easter, reminding them of the importance of Easter and actually helping prepare them for what God is going to do in your church and in their hearts at Easter. You can share through devotionals, you can share personal testimonies and stories, and you can create teasers for the content that you might be preaching or teaching, or doing on Easter Sunday. But I just challenge you to ask that question, whether that’s that nurture campaign that you’re building or it’s the internal email that you’re sending, am I adding value?

Bart Blair: One of the things we organizationally are working towards, and we’re going to do a podcast episode about this in the upcoming weeks, I think I mentioned this in a previous episode, and that is story-based emails. We’re going to get one of our teammates, Maddie Hall, on our team because she’s working with our communications consultant team to work with churches to help them build an email process that is more storytelling rather than just being a digital bulletin. And so I just want to challenge you to think about that as you prepare for Easter using these email lists, there’s a lot of power in it, people will read it, and the more value you’re adding in those emails, the higher your open rate, the higher your click-through rate, and the more engaged people will be.

Jason Hamrock: Yeah, love it. You know, I think I’d just echo what you just said, it’s not about just pushing out your service times, that’s kind of self-serving for yourself. We’re just trying to, we want a lot more cheeks in the seats, well of course you do, but that doesn’t provide value to the person. So what if you send an email that said, hey, we have this cool activity kit for your family, right? Go have fun with it and share it around, oh, and by the way, Easter’s coming up and these are the service times, click here to learn more. That’s way more value for your user than just a reminder, Easter’s coming up. Well, duh, we know that, it’s April 8th, I think it is, right? So we already know that, and you’re wasting my time by looking at this email. I’m not probably going to look at your emails anymore, right, because you’re just wasting my time. So you got to really think through that, and that’ll help you actually grow your list.

Bart Blair: Is it actually April 8th? We better verify that. I’m checking my calendar right now because, you know, we want to make sure we’re not, no, it’s April 9th. So you just gave everybody a heart attack because they just lost a day.

Jason Hamrock: Okay, so Saturday. Okay. I’m sorry because most churches have a Saturday and Sunday service, so April 8th, and April 9th, my bad.

Bart Blair: Everybody’s like, oh, I got one less day than I thought I had. No, it’s all good, it’s April 9th. Okay, all right, number three of our list of five, was to use your email list. My notes actually here on our notes say, duh. Okay, I’ll just leave it at that. All right, Jason, what’s number four? This might also be a duh, but let’s extrapolate on number four.

Jason Hamrock: I stand on this one, and I preach it all the time to the churches that I get to talk with, and that is our own people. Our own people. I’d actually probably put, next to using your Google Business Profile, which not a lot of churches use, which is free, your second one, it probably should be second, but we put it down here at number four is, your own people. That’s your best resource to help grow your church. Who should be the most excited about your church other than the elders and lead pastor and staff? It’s your people, right? They go to your church and so you want to utilize them and you want to equip them and you want to train them. You want to use them to bring and invite their neighbors, in-laws, coworkers, or whatever because they have influence. And it’s kind of a true truism that if you invite somebody, they’re more likely to come with you. We know the odds if you don’t invite them, they’re not coming with you, right? Duh. But if you invite them, you at least have a good chance of them showing up, or at least give them a handout card. I love this medium, there’s nothing wrong with printing handout cards.

Jason Hamrock: In fact, at the church I used to work with, what often we would have is we would print a handout card that was mirrored, it was a mirrored image, and it was a perf right down the middle. So that you basically would break that in two, it’s identical, but you break it in two. And then this one, this one goes on your fridge for you and your family, and this one goes to that one person, not twenty, that one person you’re going to invite to church. If your congregation would do that, you literally would double the amount of invitations you have of your own people. If you think about that, that’s huge.

Jason Hamrock: Now, here’s the deal, don’t do it just at Easter and Christmas, it’s all about conditioning and training. This is what we’re mandated to do, go, share, tell, that’s my job, that’s your job, if you’re a Christ follower, that’s your job, we got that mandate from him. So we’re just talking about a tool you can put in your people’s hands that they can easily go and do that. And I know a lot of churches do that, but I think sometimes we lose the value of really what that means, even if 10% of your congregation does that, you’re going to have you’re going to burst at the seams with a lot of new people at Easter time. So it’s probably my favorite thing, and they are cheap, they’re very, very cheap.

Bart Blair: Yeah, printing cards these days is very cheap, and they don’t even have to be like big fancy cards, just like a business card, or a two-inch by two-inch square with a QR code on it that leads to your amazing landing page. We’re going to talk about landing pages in just a moment. I think the personal invitation, Jason, when I was pastoring my last church, we would do cards for different events or teaching series or what have you, and my script was the same every time. Today, when you came in, you got a card promoting Easter. That card was not actually for you, that card is for someone that you know that I don’t know. You are connected to a lot of people who need to hear the good news about Jesus, they need a safe place where they can explore God, faith, and the Bible, they need a place where they can get their spiritual questions answered. We think we’ve got a pretty good thing going here, you do, which is why you’re here. So go share it with somebody, invite somebody to come, we promise not to do anything to embarrass you when you bring your friends. So invite your friends. So the fourth point, so that we can move on to number five, the fourth point was to use your own people, and the subtext to that is to equip them, print a card, print an invitation, put something in their hand that they can use to invite people to your church this Easter. What’s number five?

Jason Hamrock: I do a lot of consulting, and so churches will hire me for an hour every couple of weeks, and we talk strategy. And I’m reminded of a church that I just recently met with over in Ohio, and we were talking about this strategy. And we came off of Christmas and now we’re looking at Easter, and I said, you know, when we talked about all the things they’re doing, they got really lost into all the different traditional ways, billboards, and direct mail pieces, and newspaper and radio and digital. And I said, yeah, that’s all great, but you’ve got to understand there’s a strategy behind this thing. And here’s the strategy, again, I’m going to kind of go back and this is the last one, number five. First of all, you’ve got to have a great event, you’ve got to have a really good, solid Easter experience. So if I bring my friends, I’m not embarrassed, I don’t want to be embarrassed, because then I look bad. You know, my friends are, like, thanks for bringing me to this, this is a joke. So obviously you’ve got to make sure you have all the cylinders rocking and rolling, right? And then you’re saying to your congregation, we need you to go invite and bring. And this is the kicker, this is number five, we’re going to support you by also doing some advertising so that if your friends get that invitation, they might also see it on Facebook, on Instagram, in the Google Display Network, maybe on YouTube, so the fifth one is doing some paid advertising.

Jason Hamrock: We’ve talked about the free resources in Google, right? And take advantage of that, it’s free, using Eventbrite, it’s free. We’ve talked about doing emails, which is awesome. And we’ve talked about invite cards, your own people, you support all that with digital ads. I am a huge fan of using digital ads, and of course, it takes money, yeah, I get it, it’s advertising or it’s promotions or it’s outreach. If you don’t like the word marketing or advertising, use the word outreach, okay, that’s fine to make the pastor happy. But I’m a huge fan of it.

Jason Hamrock: Now, let’s break that down a little bit. What’s the pecking order? What would I recommend if somebody says to me, Jason, we want to run a campaign, what do you think is the order to advertise, I would say number one, Google Display Network. That to me, Google Display Network, if you run those campaigns in the display network, I’m not joking, you’re going to hit 50% males and 50% females, and you’re going to probably hit your target audience of about mid-twenties to mid-40-year-olds are going to click on 50, 60, 70% of those ads, it happens all the time.

Bart Blair: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what’s the Google Display Network? You keep saying this like everybody. No, seriously, let’s break that down. What is the Google Display Network, and how does it differ from Google search ads?

Jason Hamrock: Thank you. The Google Display Network is a network of websites, games, apps, literally thousands and hundreds of thousands of these games, apps, and websites that say, hey, Google, we’re okay with you displaying an ad on our website. We want to be a part of your network. So if you go to ESPN to check out sports, you’ll see advertisements from like Nissan or Target, that’s the display network. You can geo-target and display your ad about your Easter services in the display network. And Google is going to throw all those out on different websites, games, apps, and it’s great, people click on that and now they’re on your website, right? And so when you pay Google, Google ends up paying that website $0.50 or whatever the bid is because they place that ad on their website, the website allowed Google to place that ad. So that’s the Google Display Network. That’s different from Google Search, Google Search is I’m over in Google and I’m searching for like churches near me, or how to bake a cake, right? I’m in Google search, I’m searching in Google, and I’m looking for something. So running paid advertising, I think the Display Network is great, I call that interruptive because we’re interrupting people.

Jason Hamrock: The second one would be Facebook ads because most people are on Facebook. Now, those clicks do come mostly from females, a little bit older, but I love having both. If you’re going to do a campaign, do both, do the display network and do Facebook, which also can bleed into Instagram. And then if you’ve got extra money, then run a paid campaign in Google search, and don’t use keywords like Easter services near me. Maybe, but most people are just typing in like churches near me because, hey, I’m going to look for a church around me because I want to go to Easter. I know it’s coming up, and I used to go, and I want to go back. So I probably would run a campaign around churches near me in Google search. But I’m telling you, if you really want to get a ton of impressions, and you want to get some really good clicks to your Easter landing page, Google Display Network, it’s going to hit your target audience, that’s my favorite.

Bart Blair: Yeah, I just I’m going to just bounce off of that really quickly, just to clarify the difference or the reason you might prefer Display over Facebook and Instagram. The reason I prefer Google Display over Facebook and Instagram is the diversity of the audience on the Google Display Network. When we look at campaign results, we’re doing this right now, we’re meeting with dozens, hundreds, of churches right now to review the Christmas campaigns. If they ran an ad campaign in both Facebook, and Instagram, as well as the Google Display Network, the audience on Facebook is typically 80 to 85% female, it’s typically 75 or 80%, 45, or 50, or older, so it’s middle-aged women. So look, if you’re promoting a women’s conference, promote your women’s conference on Facebook. If you’re promoting Moms or Grandma’s ministries, Facebook is where you want to be. If you’re trying to reach the broadest cross-section in your community, Google Display Network is going to be it because you will see it’s evenly split amongst all age groups and male-female demographics, so that’s why I like Google Display. I also will throw this caveat in there, when churches run ad campaigns with us, we found a lot of success when they have video components through the Google Display Network, being able to push those videos into YouTube, which is like, that’s like advertising on TV. You know, I mean, back in the day, it was really cost-prohibitive for churches to advertise on TV. Today, if you run a Google Display Network campaign and you have a video component, we can push those ads into YouTube. So you get the best of both worlds, and you get your video shown on YouTube.

Jason Hamrock: Yeah, Yeah. I’ll speak to one other thing, and then I’ll let you wrap up with the landing page. When it comes to Facebook, though, a really popular and powerful thing and Google hasn’t ruled this out yet, I’m hoping they do. But in Facebook, you can create a lead generator, right? And so, which is amazing, you can offer somebody something of value in exchange for their name and email that’s already populated on their Facebook profile. So the user doesn’t have to type in, they just have to click. They click a few times and they get through it, and then you capture that name and that email that’s from their Facebook profile. And now they’re sitting on your Easter landing page, downloading something of value that you offered like a kit or something like that. I’m a huge fan of that because you capture names and emails, and then what you can do is you can turn around and do a retargeting or remarketing campaign and hit those exact people. And so I am a big fan of Facebook’s platform for how they have allowed you to capture leads, I hope Google rolls that out sometime because they all know who we are, they’ve got your email and they know who you are. It’s just right now we can do it with Facebook, so I’m a big fan of that lead generation thing. But this is great advertising, it’s great impressions, but once they click, they land on your landing page. Do you want to talk a little bit about landing pages?

Bart Blair: Yeah, landing pages, unfortunately, tend to be a bit of an afterthought for a lot of churches when it comes to their advertising campaigns. If you’re running an Easter campaign or something that specific for an event or activity, we don’t want to send that traffic to your home page. Even if your home page might have the information about your Easter services on it, we want a unique page built for that specific event. In this case, we’ll call it Easter, and you want to have an all-encompassing page that shares service times, service locations, things I need to know about kids, links to, maybe preregister my kids. If you’re running a lead generator of some sort, Jason mentioned kits, we call these kits. We have these PDFs that we use that have recipes and crafts and Bible quizzes and things in them, or maybe you use a pastor’s previous sermon to create an e-book or a devotional or something like that, all kinds of different things that you can use as lead generators, you would have the link for that on that landing page. If it’s an event like an Easter egg hunt or the Easter egg drop and you want people to register, you include a link back over to your Eventbrite page. And again, that might seem counterintuitive because they’re like, well, hey, we can collect it in CCB, or we can collect it in Planning Center, or we can collect it in Rock or whatever database or church management software we’re using. The reason I hesitate to do that is because if I’m an unchurched, or de-churched, or not sure I trust church person, I’m more likely to give my name and my email address to Eventbrite than I am to the church, especially if I can see it’s going into a church’s database. I think the same thing is true with these lead-generating campaigns that we run in Facebook and Instagram, which is that the user probably doesn’t perceive that they’re giving their name and their email address to the church. They perceive that they’re giving it to Facebook and Instagram because they click on the ad, and a window pops up, and if I’m not mistaken, it auto-populates their name and their email address because they’re logged into their Facebook and Instagram accounts. So in their mind, it’s going to Facebook and Instagram, but you as the church get that information, which is gold and the ability then to nurture a relationship there.

Bart Blair: So as you’re thinking through whether it’s Google Display ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, or even Google Search ads, you want to have an appropriate landing page that sells your event. A lot of churches get focused on the ad copy and the ad content selling the event, we actually don’t need to sell the event with the ad, we need to get a click with the ad, and we need your landing page to sell the event. Sometimes some of the poorest performing ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram are the ones that are over-branded to the church’s event, they want to have their graphic and their logo and all the stuff in the ads, whereas what people tend to click on is pictures of people that look like them. So if we can focus our ads on being, hey, these are people who look like me and they look happier than I look, or they look like they’re doing something fun, or maybe they look like they’re going through something that I’m going through, and I click on that ad, I end up on the landing page, and then the landing page sells it. I love videos on a landing page, a short 60 or 90-second invitation from the pastor or from the staff, explaining to people what the experience is going to be like, and what they need to do to register if there’s a need to register. Am I missing anything, Jason? I just love a good landing page.

Jason Hamrock: I think other than that, I just love the idea of just thinking about calls to action, and if you want, add some gated content on there. You know, it’s kind of like, you have to think about the season, Easter is a little bit…You know, but you might want to put like, do you know who Jesus really is, or how to be a Christian link, or how to talk to my kids about the Easter story link, right? Some things that people might want to investigate because it’s around Easter, that you might want to have some more forethought about instead of just making it a dump on an event. I would also look at, if you look at Christmas, like, Christmas is a tough season for a lot of people. A lot of people, they kind of grieve through Christmas, right? So on your Christmas landing page, you could have more things about that. Like topics that might surround the event, if it’s back to school, like, you have some kind of a thing. You just have to think through what it is I’m going to offer in addition to our event, because I’m trying to help this user understand we care about them, and we have more for them. We don’t want something from them, we have something for them. And you got to kind of look at, I would expand my thinking when I’m going, okay, how are we going to build this page and what that’s going to look like? And I think the biggest thing though, you said this, and I’ll say it again and we probably win this down is I want to see photos. I mean, this is my, if somebody clicks on an ad, they land on that landing page, that Easter landing page, that’s the home page to them. Do you understand that? It’s the home page, it’s the first interaction on your website with them. So think through that, don’t make it just a couple of lines with service times and that’s it, that’s pretty boring, add a photo. Think through everything Bart just said, plus make sure I see a lot of great, exciting, happy people, I want to be a part of that, and almost do a FOMO, if you’re not here. Right? You’re going to miss out if you don’t engage and you don’t come to this Easter service, or this egg drop, or whatever it is you’re doing. Make it exciting, don’t just make it the facts, who, what, where, when, why? Yeah, every church does that, be different.

Bart Blair: All right, I’m going to recap the five things that we just talked about that can help you reach more people for Jesus this Easter. One, post your event on your Google Business Profile. Two, post your event in Eventbrite or on AllEvents. Three, use your email list, be creative, and use it effectively. Number four, print an invite card, and equip the people in your church to be bringers to be inviters. And number five, consider running some paid ads, but don’t just run ads at random, have a strategy behind what you’re trying to do, what you’re calling people to respond to as you lead them to your church website.

Bart Blair: Hey, this episode is dropping like mid-January, the clock is ticking towards Easter. If you need to talk to somebody about helping you with any of these components, particularly the ads, Jason or I would love an opportunity to meet with you. We’ll just meet with you for an hour, and talk through our process with you, no charge to you. We love an opportunity to help your church run your advertising. But hey, maybe you just need a little bit of coaching and a little bit of encouragement, and we’re happy to do that with you. Click over to our website MissionalMarketing.com, and hit the contact link and you can schedule a call with Jason or me or one of our other amazing and capable coaches.

Bart Blair: We appreciate you tuning in to this podcast, and if you made it all the way here to the end, we love you even more. If you’re not subscribed, wherever you’re listening, make sure that you do that. If you’re watching our YouTube channel, make sure that you both subscribe and also ring the bell so that you get notified when we have new episodes coming out, which we aim for every single Friday. And if you haven’t ever left us a rating or a review, which is a really good chance that you haven’t because we don’t really have that many ratings and reviews, we would love for you to leave a rating, and review. We’d like a five-star review, but hey, even if you want to leave a one or two-star review, we just love a little bit of feedback. Let us know if this podcast is helping you, we hope that it is, and if it is, we also hope that you’re sharing it with other people that you know who might be able to benefit from it. Jason, thanks so much for hanging out with me today.

Jason Hamrock: Glad to be here, Bart. Take care.