Getting Started with an Effective Media Plan

If you don’t put the concepts of this post into practice, your church’s media will never stand out and will always blend in with all the other marketing noise out there.

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We’ve gone over some principles of media, guided you on how to be a better designer, and shown you how to utilize the power of video. But here’s a staggering truth. You can do everything we’ve gone over, but if you don’t put the concepts of this post into practice, your church’s media will never stand out and will always blend in with the all the other marketing noise out there. Today, we show you how to get started with a strategy that will take your media to the next level and ultimately increase His name through your church.

Have you ever been guilty of having a really great idea only to see it fall through the cracks and never become reality? I know I have, and I think if we are honest, we all have. You’ve heard it said that failing the plan is planning to fail, and the same is true about your church’s creative media. Though quality graphics and professional videos are great, the single most important aspect of taking your media to the next level is having a plan and sticking to it.

Though quality graphics and professional videos are great, the single most important aspect of taking your media to the next level is having a plan and sticking to it.

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We’ve developed a free resource to help churches develop a plan like this with our Church Creative Marketing Strategy Guide. If you don’t already have it, you can download your free copy here. Now, we’re only going to have time in this video to go over the first step, but that will be enough to get you on the right track to developing a successful creative marketing campaign.

First, we need to decide if this campaign will be promoting an event or a project. What’s the difference? An event is pretty obvious. It’s a scheduled item on your calendar such as Easter, Christmas, or another special day that 9 times out 10 is going to happen whether you are ready for it or not.

Projects are different in that they are not specifically associated with a date on the calendar so their due date can be more open-ended or ongoing. An example of a project would be a discipleship program. Yes it may have specific event dates associated such as meeting times but overall, it’s an ongoing program or project that needs to be marketed consistently in order to succeed.

Determining if your target audience is your congregation or your community will be a big factor in deciding how much time and resource needs to be put into a marketing campaign.

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After you’ve determined the category of your campaign, you need to decide if your target audience is your community or your congregation. Will you primarily be reaching people outside of your church through outreach or will you be directing your promotional efforts to those already in your church? This will be a big factor in deciding how much time and resource needs to be put into a marketing campaign.

For example, if you’ve got an event coming up such as a church-wide fellowship or activity that’s geared more for those already in your church, many times, your marketing efforts can be limited to simply creating awareness amongst your congregation while they are at church each week. They are already going to be there, so it only makes since to promote the event during this time. Mentioning it during your services or adding it to your weekly bulletin may be the extent of your marketing. Maybe you also make an effort to promote the event via a church email list or a group on Facebook.

It only makes sense to dedicate the majority of your church’s marketing efforts and resources to external events and projects.

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However, for a big outreach day like Easter, you’ll want to go above and beyond these baseline promotional methods to get the word out to your community about your event. It only makes sense to dedicate the majority of your church’s marketing efforts and resources to external events and projects. Not to say that internal campaigns are unimportant, but I think we can all agree that reaching out to those who need Christ and the church is the main mission of the church. Therefore, we need to be especially creative in our marketing when targeting our community which leads us to the next step, outlining our promotional needs.

In the world of marketing, there are countless specific avenues for advertising. Our guide obviously doesn’t list each and every method, but based on past campaigns we’ve worked on, these are some of the most popular channels for promoting your campaign.

We don’t have time to dive into every single promotional outlet mentioned, but I encourage you to take the time to research each method and consider implementing them if you believe they’ll be effective for your campaign. You’ll also notice that we just covered the first page of our guide. The rest of it will walk you through additional steps on ensuring the success of your marketing campaigns.

Over the course of the past few articles, we’ve shown you how you can take your church’s media to the next level so that it stands out from other marketing attempts and makes a lasting impression on others. You’ve probably realized that all of this is easier said than done. Though it’s going to take work on your part, know this, you can do it, and Must Increase is here to help.

In addition to our free resources such as the video series and the creative marketing guide, we also offer services to help you take your church’s media to the next level. If you’re like most church leaders, overseeing the media department is just one of the many hats you wear. We developed CreativeTeamPro so that church leaders like you can have a team of creative professionals in your corner working for you and ensuring that your church media stands out from all the other marketing noise out there.

CreativeTeamPro offers four unique creative services – Welcome Videos, Graphic Design, Video Shorts, and Creative Director. You can choose just one of these services or bundle any combination of them together. And the more you bundle, the more you save. All these services are available for a flat monthly rate with no hidden fees and contracts so you can make adjustments such as adding or removing services to your plan at any time. Don’t let the undertaking of your church creative needs overwhelm you. Let us help you take your organization’s creative content to the next level with CreativeTeamPro.

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to share it on Twitter or Facebook. You’ll also enjoy the Must Increase Podcastavailable on iTunesSpotifyGoogle or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you have any thoughts or feedback about what we went over in this post, we’d love to hear from you in the comments section below. Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next time as we continue on our mission to increase His name through your church.