6 Digital Strategies for Expanding Your Church’s Easter Outreach

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, Easter is the super bowl for churches and it is one of the best opportunities for you at your church to reach more people. And in this conversation, we're going to unpack six digital outreach strategies that are working for Easter this year. Let's do this. You're listening to the Reach right? Podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow. Well, hey guys, I'm Thomas. [00:00:27] Speaker B: And I'm Ian. [00:00:28] Speaker A: And today we are talking about Easter and digital outreach and some tips for your church to reach more people this Easter. I think it should be a good and timely conversation. This conversation is going live week and a half or so before Easter. So it's time to really put your Easter outreach plans in full motion, if you haven't already. And hopefully we can give you a few tips to help you get over the hump and see your best Easter ever at your church. [00:00:57] Speaker B: Absolutely. That's what we want to do. It's the Super bowl, as they say, for churches and key time where churches see a lot of visitors and why not try to see as many as possible to get them plugged into what your church is doing? [00:01:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that the world has really changed when it comes to the strategies. I mean, I know when I started in ministry, it was getting door hangers on doors and doing every door direct mail. And if you really had a lot of money at your church, you could do something like a billboard or a TV ad before Easter and that kind of stuff. Digital has made advertising and marketing and getting the word out there about your church easier than it's ever been before. And even small churches, they can have massive reach on days like these. So I think it's a really good opportunity. So we have a total of six, I believe, Ian, we want to go through. We can talk about all six of them. And why don't you kick us off with the first tip to help people get more visitors this Easter? [00:01:55] Speaker B: Absolutely would love to, Thomas. And the first one kind of sounds broad, and it is online marketing campaigns. So that means a lot. There's a lot of online marketing you can do. So anything from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you know, obviously it's your church website, of course, live streams, and possibly also considering meta ads, purchasing Facebook, Instagram ads and Google Ads through the Google grant, which is something that we talk a lot about, something that we help churches with day in and day out, which definitely are very effective. I know right now for the churches that we serve for a while now, not just when this podcast is being released we have been already promoting Easter through the Google Ads from the Google grant. Which is, by the way, if you're hearing this for the first time and you're not aware, there is a grant that Google gives churches $10,000 a month in Google Ads. And these ads can definitely not only promote Easter, but target people in your area. So definitely something to be familiar with. [00:03:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Just as a heads up, if you are wondering if you qualify for that Google Ad grant, most churches do. But we have a super simple way that you can check if you're watching this either on our site or you're on YouTube. We'll put a link down in the description where you can learn more about the Google Ad grant. And we have a super simple eligibility checker. It takes about 90 seconds. You put in a few, answer a few questions and it'll let you know whether you're eligible and you can go ahead and get the grant there that way. So that is a great opportunity. I think if I was going to choose just one way to kind of focus my online campaigns, I would probably still lean towards meta ads and specifically doing it with a Facebook event, I think that is probably the best way to do it. So real simply put, you create a Facebook event and you actually use a promotion tool so that you can spend whatever your budget, whatever you want to set up as your budget to reach people in your specific area and of a certain demographic there. So Facebook makes this so easy to do. And you can target areas as small as 1 mile around your church. So if you're in a really populated area, let's say you're in Manhattan or something like that, in New York City, maybe that's kind of the target you want to look at because there's 4 million people live within 1 mile of your church. If you're there or if you're in a rural area, you can make it a 40 miles window for the people that you want to reach. So it really lets you target specifically, and you can do a budget as small as 30 or $50 or something like that, and you will actually have real people that you are able to reach and they will get onto your Facebook event and then you can draw them onto your website and engage with them that way. So all kinds of opportunities for this. If I was going to choose just one, I would probably take a look at those ads through Facebook or through meta is the way I'd look at it. [00:04:56] Speaker B: No, it's good. Well said. [00:04:58] Speaker A: Awesome. The next one goes with that and it's important. Number two, I guess would be focusing on your Easter website content. So if you don't already have this, it is vital that you have an Easter landing page on your church website. So some churches and what we see most often is just a big banner on the homepage of the site, which isn't bad to have that. It's all in an image form and it'll have your service times and all of the things that you're going to be doing there, that kind of information. But you will always be better off if in addition to that, you have a landing page that is dedicated just to the content of what's going to be happening on Easter, what to expect, how a first time visitor, what they should be thinking about, maybe even asking them to plan your visit and having a special gift for them if they do that. The reason for this is because this is where you're going to drive all of the traffic from those ads or the online campaigns that you're working on. So whether it be social media based or Google Ads or whatever it is, they need someplace to go. And if you have an Easter event on Facebook, like we were talking about before, you need to send them onto your site and help them to take some of those next steps to actually seal the deal and help them become someone who might consider going to your church on Easter, to someone that's more committed and actually wants to do that and is going to make it happen. So yeah, really focusing on a great landing page to drive all of those people that are interested, that's going to be really vital in importance. Yeah. [00:06:34] Speaker B: One more thing I would add to that. I've been seeing this as I look at websites day in and day out. Websites that we help churches with and just other ones out there, including my church's website, that right when someone goes to the home page right now, there is like a pop up link to go to that landing page. So you want to make sure it's very visible. Not that you're going to take away from other links and areas. People are going to your website, but it most certainly needs to be visible right from the home page because it's obviously top of mind for folks right now with that coming up. But next one here is digital invitations. Well, again, another broad one. It's funny, you and I were chuckling when we were talking about this podcast. And okay, what do we mean by digital invitations? It used to be that a lot of websites had like an e invite tool and maybe some of them still do, to where it had like a graphic card that is emailed to someone and there still obviously can be room for you to email someone a nice invitation. But I think now we're talking more. This is probably best utilized on social media, right? [00:07:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Or you could just do like a chain letter. Like you could do a church chain letter and say, if you don't forward this to seven people or something, you're. [00:07:47] Speaker B: Not going to heaven, that Jesus is. [00:07:49] Speaker A: Watching you and he's wondering why you won't do that. So you could do that or you could do something. I think that the most obvious way to do digital invitations now is through social media. So you want to be creating lots of content around Easter, especially during kind of that Holy Week time when people are making the decisions. Because let's face it, as much as we in ministry think about Easter in late February, early March, people really aren't in the Easter mindset until maybe Palm Sunday and they start thinking about it. I don't think most people are buying their Easter baskets and those things back in early February or anything. So we are thinking about it. But I think the time to do this is probably that week leading up to right before Easter there. So that's when someone's going to be sending these invites. And so especially, I'd say every day of Holy Week, you want to have some kind of Easter related content that you're putting onto your social media channels. And I think what I would do is I would encourage, on Palm Sunday, I would encourage members of my church to look out for that and consider who you can share some of that kind of content with. So in person, you're going to do kind of the training with your members and make sure they know that our church, it thrives on people sharing their faith. And an easy way to do that is by sharing posts that we put onto social media. Or maybe you tag a friend of yours that you want to bring along to an Easter Sunday service, those kinds of things. So getting your people ready ahead of time and then actually creating content that's very easy to share, I think social media is the place for that and makes a lot of sense. [00:09:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that's it for sure. [00:09:30] Speaker A: Awesome. Next one is Easter activities and making sure you really have those dialed in. Now, this by itself is not a digital outreach strategy, which is what this episode is about, but I think it enhances the digital strategy that your church may have there. Right. So by activities, what we're talking about is things like your Easter egg hunts, or if you're doing a big baptism, or if you guys have family photo booths or whatever you would have at your church there. And we have a whole blog post we can link down in the description that talks about some of the best Easter ideas that we've seen from churches, but making sure you highlight those things in all of your content that you're putting out there before Easter, because this is something that drives a lot of people to come. I know when I was pastoring last, our Easter egg hunt was a big driver and we really were careful to call it a community Easter egg hunt. So we knew that it wasn't like an Easter egg hunt for our church members, which is what most people expect. But because we were a church that met in a community center, we had a community wide Easter egg hunt. And on that Easter, when we had it, we had hundreds of kids that were coming out for our Easter egg hunt when a typical Sunday, we had a few dozen kids in our children's ministry there. So it was a huge opportunity. All kinds of people came out. We had some issues where some of them would show up, like the last ten minutes of service and then just go to the Easter egg hunt at the end. But that was fine. In the end, we were fine with that. [00:11:07] Speaker B: To connect with them and say hey and all that. [00:11:10] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the thought behind it. But these are things that, with your Facebook ads, with your Google Ads, with that Easter landing page, you want to be reinforcing the things that are actually going to happen on Easter Sunday. Because that's kind of like the hook that draws in, especially with families. And we all know that Easter is a great family opportunity to reach people that don't have a church home there. So. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. [00:11:34] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's good. And there's just a few others to rattle off the egg hunt you can never go wrong with, like we said. But you could do an Easter egg decoration contest. That's another thing that has worked well for churches. Make it competitive, prizes for that or whatever, and then decorating Easter baskets ahead of time and all of that give people other ideas to serve or even maybe an Easter dinner that's maybe not always something that works, but still an idea to where. I know Easter dinner is a big time for families often, but could be a potluck thing. Could be something to where if you do get families interested in that ahead of time, could be a good thing for your church for sure. But yeah, a couple of other ideas there. So next one is streaming your service. We say this often, we don't always feel like live streaming is right for every church, and of course you want to produce that well and make sure it is a good fit for your church if it's something you're doing ongoing. But this is a key time where you want to be as visible as possible, get the gospel out to as many people as you can. So we definitely, again, do a good job of it, but we recommend that if you aren't regularly, maybe doing your service live and streaming that live, this would be a key time to do that, at least with the message, not always the worship. Again, we kind of differentiate the two. I know my church being a part of, we've talked of it often, a very large church that has put a lot into the worship service and everything we do stream the whole thing. But for a lot of churches, it may just be your message going live for sure during that time. [00:13:18] Speaker A: Yeah, again, so live streaming, this is one we say with a caveat. I don't think that most churches are able to execute this well enough that it makes sense. But for those that are, if you're the kind of church that really has invested in this area and you have a team that can support you with it, I think this is the best day to be doing a live stream because people are going to be more likely to be watching today or that Easter Sunday than any other day. That being said, you do have to count the cost with that in that this is also one of the best days for someone to come in person. Live streaming an Easter egg hunt isn't as exciting as actually being in an Easter egg hunt if you're five years old, to be able to watch other kids find eggs, that sounds not that fun. So it's one of those things that you have to weigh the cost on that. So I still think the vast majority of churches probably shouldn't do that. But for the few that probably can execute it well, it might make sense. Something to consider there. [00:14:16] Speaker B: That's good. [00:14:17] Speaker A: All right, last one is really honing in on your follow up and engagement. So this is part of the digital outreach strategy. It's planning what happens after Easter, before Easter. And I would really recommend, and I think this is where so many churches drop the ball, is that we have all of these new visitors that are coming in on Easter. Number one, it starts with planning on how are you going to get their information, how are you going to connect with these people in service? People are every day becoming more and more reluctant to give information and their personal contact info out to anybody because they don't want to wind up getting called or emailed or worst of all, a home visit. If you're asking for addresses that terrifies people now. So they're reluctant towards that. So you need to find strategies to incentivize that to help them get over that hump. And so we've done whole episodes about visitor gifts and things that you can give to people that help them get over that hump and say, okay, yeah, I'll give you my email address. You're going to give me a gift. It really seems like an exchange. In other places, they'd call that an ethical bribe, if you will. Like where you're kind of telling them, I'm going to give you something, you're going to give me your contact information, but that really is the lifeblood of your follow up process. And then you really need to have a plan that you're going to fulfill. So I would recommend before Easter that you really think through what that plan is. And it's probably a few emails that maybe one that happens at the latest. You want to do it on Monday, right after Easter and thank them for coming. Maybe something to connect with them and ask how you could pray with them in a different email, a highlight of what's happening the following week in another email. So you probably want to have something like that. Perhaps if you get phone numbers, you might want to have a text message plan where you're going to be able to send them a message and just thank them again for coming. I think if you can have that sent from the person that spoke on Easter. So usually the lead pastor, that really carries a lot of weight and people will feel like that's something that actually is touching to them. Just don't make it feel like it's a generic chain letter from the senior pastor where it just says, hey, friend, thank you so much for showing up. So try to make it personal. So be honest. Say, hey, this is Thomas here from First Baptist. And I heard that you were here with us for the first time, and I just wanted to personally thank you for that. It means a lot. If I could do anything at all for you or pray for you, just let me know. A text like that, I think that would go a long way. So start to plan your follow up before Easter Sunday. That's the main point here. Yeah, it is. [00:16:53] Speaker B: And I think we've always jokingly in church life for years now, we joke about the CNES, the people that only come during Christmas and Easter. [00:17:03] Speaker A: Right. [00:17:04] Speaker B: And so if people are more likely to just kind of go out the back door from your Easter service. That's why having follow up and engagement is so critical, because they're even more likely to not come back when they're visiting only on Christmas Eve or Easter. And as we always say, right, Thomas? We always usually end these with some sort of a call to action, like for someone to respond and do something. So that's what this is. It's to allow people, if they were blessed by your message over Easter, they're encouraged. Allow them to take a next step at your church. [00:17:40] Speaker A: That's it. Yeah. Good stuff. I hope this has been helpful. I hope you guys have a fantastic Easter this year. And if you're watching this after Easter, I hope it was a fantastic Easter. Hey, here's what you can do for us. I'd love to hear some of the marketing and outreach things that your church does. And if you're watching this after Easter, I want to hear how it worked. Let us know. Let's share some of that community knowledge here. I think it'll just help. Put that down in the comments down below. Drop us a comment on what's working for your church, what you do for outreach around Easter. Let us know. Guys, thanks so much for being a part of the Reachwrite family. If you're watching on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and we'll see you next time. [00:18:19] Speaker B: See ya.