Businesses around the world market themselves for profit. Even non-profits market themselves to build brand awareness and achieve specific goals.

What about churches?

Can you market a church?

What does church marketing even look like?

Let’s take a good, hard look at the concept of church marketing and church communications. From considering the ethics of marketing ministries to assessing the benefits and challenges that come from promotional activity in a religious setting, we’ll examine what it means to market a church and how you can use the power of marketing to ethically and effectively promote your ministry.

Ready to dive in? Let’s do this.

What Is Church Marketing?

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. What does “church marketing” even mean? When marketing usually comes up, it’s in relation to a television commercial or an online ad. But a church service?

Let’s consider the word marketing. The American Marketing Association defines the term “marketing”as :

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

A couple of quick things here. First, marketing isn’t just selling something for money. Depending on the context and stage you’re talking about, marketing can be an activity, a custom, or a process. It also involves creativity, communication, and an exchange that brings value to the recipient.

The communication element is a big one here. In fact, you’ll see a lot of people use the term “church communications” in the place of church marketing. Don’t be fooled, though. For all intents and purposes, church communications and church marketing are the same thing.

What is that exactly? Here is digifora’s definition of church marketing:

Church marketing refers to the conscious and planned promotion of a church (or similar faith-based organizations) as a way of communicating a valuable message to a specific group.

Note that church marketing is not:

• For profit.
• Misleading.
• Cold-hearted.

When your church reaches a specific group, either inside or outside of your building, you are engaging in church marketing and communications.

The Benefits of Church Marketing and Communications

What are the benefits of creating and communicating your church’s messages to the right crowd? There are quite a few, actually. For instance, church marketing can:

• Increase engagement from your church and encourage greater retention within your congregation.
• Help with understanding, improve fundraising efforts for major church initiatives, and keep everyone on the same page through clearer communication.
• Develop greater awareness and a positive relationship with your surrounding local community.
• Enhance attendance by improving awareness and understanding of key things, like your church’s beliefs, childcare structure, and service times.
• Make it easier to staff events and optimize attendee turnout.

There are many ways proper church marketing can help your congregation and local community thrive. It can also help your church grow.

Despite the power of healthy church communications, there is a stigma that holds many church leaders back from tapping into this effective ministry tool. For 11 years now, we’ve heard people bring up the same concern over and over again: the ethics of church marketing.

Is Marketing a Church Okay?

The question that lies at the root of any church promotion is whether it’s okay to actively promote a church using business techniques (which we’ll talk about more in a bit). The truth is, this is a nuanced question and an important one to address with your church leadership team.

On the one hand, the simple truth is that, well, you’re already marketing your church whether you realize it or not. If you’re engaging in outreach of any kind, you’re marketing.

If your pastor encourages your attendees to bring a friend or family member to an Easter service, they’re using word-of-mouth marketing. If they send an email out reminding people about an event or a new sermon series, they’re using digital marketing. If they create a podcast, a sermon archive, or a blog for the church website, these are all direct or indirect ways to market a church.

On the other hand, there are certain boundaries and implicit restrictions that come with promoting a faith-based organization. For example, an obvious difference is that Christian marketing doesn’t revolve around profit.

Healthy churches are non-profit organizations seeking to build the kingdom of God. At their heart, they are fulfilling Jesus’ own marketing-like Great Commission to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” As Christians, we’re called to effectively communicate the Good News of the Gospel. Marketing can be a part of that process.

That said, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus also clarifies (Matthew 7:21-23) that not everyone who acts like a Christian will enter paradise. This is important. It indicates that you can do all the right things and still be on the wrong path.

When churches engage in promotional activity, it’s important that they use marketing and communication as a way to work toward their God-given mission as an organization.

Those are the essential parameters that come with the territory of a non-profit, faith-based church marketing strategy. They make things more restricted, unique, and, in many ways, creative and exciting.

Engaging in Mission-Driven Marketing

If church marketing is part of the process of growing a church, but you want to engage in it in a God-honoring way, what does that look like? In a church setting, marketing organizes your promotional efforts (both existing and future) and effectively communicates them to the right people.

In other words, it shouldn’t change the things you’re doing as a church. It should simply communicate those things clearly and to the right people.

Good marketing should align with and amplify the mission and goals you already have as a church — not the other way around.

Just to be clear, those goals can vary widely depending on the circumstances. A church plant might use marketing to build awareness in the local community. An established church can use marketing to bring people’s attention to a missions trip or community outreach event. A growing church could use effective church communication to fundraise for a new building or a similar initiative.

When used well, church marketing helps you stay focused and effectively moves you toward your mission. Rather than change what you’re doing, it clarifies it by:

Giving you better communication tools and techniques. Sharpening your message and communicating it so your intended audience can understand what you’re doing and what you’re working toward. Defining your church’s missional goals and unifying your staff around the expression of and meaning behind your church’s announcements and public messages.

A good litmus test for the success of any church marketing plan is to look back after the fact and gauge if it helped or hindered you in engaging in your church’s mission or achieving its goals. If you were able to execute your vision with greater clarity and effectiveness, you can rest assured you’re using your promotional tools well.

Church Communications Channels

So what does church marketing look like? You don’t see churches running ads during the Sunday night football game, right? We’ve hinted at a few of the ways promoting your church can manifest in traditional word-of-mouth marketing and similar activities. Heck, putting a sign out in front of your church is a form of marketing.

But you can go further than that — especially online. For instance, you can engage in creative church marketing across the online landscape, including:

• Social media: From Instagram and TikTok updates to livestreams on Facebook to threads on X, there are many ways to let people know about your church and what’s happening at any given moment.
• YouTube: Optimized YouTube videos can help you promote church events through both pre-recorded clips and full-feature live service content.
• Website content: Your church website can house transcripts, images, and blog posts — all of which can help with online SEO as people in your local area search for a church to visit.
• Email: Newsletters and email updates can help you market events and information to an audience of opt-in subscribers primed and ready to hear what you have to say.

These are just a handful of the most common marketing channels online. The Internet landscape is always changing, and new marketing opportunities and tools are perpetually popping up.

The key is to build a marketing strategy that uses the right balance of church promotional products. For instance, you can run social media accounts, use YouTube for live-streaming, and create a church newsletter at the same time.

Digifora has helped our church clients with all of these things, each with different goals in mind. For instance, when we help a church with YouTube optimization, we want them to get search traffic from potential new visitors through their online videos.

In contrast, emails help with communications with established audiences and attendees. For instance, a few years ago, we helped a growing multi-site church in Knoxville amplify and maximize its internal messaging through consistent, information-filled newsletters.

You also want to avoid overdoing it. If you create a church social profile on a dozen social media sites, you better have the bandwidth and creative firepower to keep them all stocked with content and engaged with each audience.

The way you use each communication channel should be deliberate and specific to your larger church marketing strategy.

Church Marketing Strategies

Okay, so your church can use specific marketing channels and tools, but how do these factor into a larger strategy? How do you weave everything together into a plan that makes sense for your ministry?

Strategy in marketing is a beautiful combination of data and nuance. It is simultaneously artistic and calculated. It requires rigid planning and adaptable execution. This is why working with an experienced third-party agency like digifora to build a digital marketing strategy can be a game-changer.

In our experience, we’ve found that every church has a different “secret sauce” that adds up to marketing success. This depends on a range of factors. Here are just a few to consider:

• Your mission and values: What is your church’s specific God-given calling? Are you focused on theological teaching? Kids ministry? Community? Missions?
• The age and stage of your ministry:** Are you a church plant? Are you multisite? Somewhere in between?
• Your audience: Churches serve everyone, but ministries and initiatives can be specific. Is your church primarily communicating with its congregation? The local community? Certain generations or age groups?
• Short and long-term goals: Where do you see your ministry in five years? 10? What is God calling you to do in that time?

Digifora’s “Four D’s” approach starts with “Discover” — a step aimed at refocusing on objectives, building a clear vision, and creating a roadmap. This is the critical first step in creating a marketing strategy that works for your church.

Another factor in building a good strategy is considering current trends. For instance, in 2024, many churches used Facebook and YouTube ads to spread awareness. Direct mailers (in targeted pushes) were also popular. Google Ad Grants also remain a popular non-profit option — As a side note, digifora, as is the case with many agencies, doesn’t actually help set these grants up. However, we can help spend the grant in the right areas if your organization is approved.

Your strategy comes together when you consider your church marketing resources, your objectives, your audience, and the tools you have available. This gives you a much better sense of organization and direction as you communicate with various groups associated with your ministry.

The Challenge of Church Communications and Marketing (and How to Do It Right)

So far, we’ve painted a rosy picture of church marketing. Done right, it is a powerful way to promote a church and help it effectively make an impact. But that doesn’t mean marketing a ministry is easy. Here are a few common challenges you’ll face when creating and executing a ministry marketing strategy.

The Profit (No, Not Prophet) Issue

There are several challenges that come with marketing and communications in a faith-based setting. Let’s start with the obvious one: you’re a non-profit. It’s hard to promote something that deliberately doesn’t make a profit. Even though money is involved, you’re not a business. You can’t boil your goals down to dollars and cents.

Church mission is more organic, intangible, and human-oriented. You’re helping to shepherd the church of a God who flipped tables and drove out businessmen when they turned his sanctuary into a marketplace.

This means you have to be careful as you navigate a natural tension between high-minded goals and practical methods to achieve them, which leads us to the next challenging factor: mindset and motivation.

Heart and Mindset Motivations Over Results

Church leaders must follow God. Full stop. This is the number one factor that will make or break your church. And you know what? Sometimes, God’s plan doesn’t look so great from a worldly viewpoint. A church might go through a period of financial struggle or minimal growth before reaching a turning point. God might be leading you through that wilderness experience right now.

The challenge with marketing is that you need to balance the utility of church marketing with the guidance of God. We said it before, and we’ll say it again. Marketing has to be a tool you use to achieve God’s calling. It can’t become a factor of your church that supersedes or distracts from what God is doing.

This makes maintaining the right mindset, moral considerations, and ethical priorities a critical part of healthy church marketing.

Professional Support

Priorities in the church are different from the rest of the world. Many of the people you’re working with share the same calling, but they may not have a lot of other training, credentials, or other professional elements to back up their willingness to chip in.

Part of this challenge goes back to profit. When a CEO hires a marketer, they’re both working toward the same end goal: the business’s bottom line, pure and simple. A marketer in a church setting must also be aware of the bottom line while also being willing to bend to other notably different, less monetarily focused goals of a ministry.

Most church teams are also heavily dependent on volunteers. Even if these volunteers bring professional marketing experience to the table, they may be inconsistent in their availability. Assembling a competent, consistent team that can create and stick to a solid strategy (and adapt when needed) is difficult in that kind of volunteer-driven environment.

Working With a Christian Marketing Agency

One of the best ways to address the challenge of marketing a church is to work with an outside freelancer, firm, or agency. That said, you want to consider which of these options is the best for your church.

A freelancer is helpful if you have a very limited budget or there are specific things you need to outsource. In most cases, though, bringing in an agency can provide more comprehensive and effective marketing support.

Even then, you want to be careful who you work with. If you don’t vet an agency well, you can end up with shoddy or even negative repercussions from marketing initiatives.

Here’s an example of a Reddit thread where a bunch of marketers, including atheists, share their thoughts on church marketing. In many cases, they approach it with the same perspective as any other business, which is a recipe for disaster.

Some of the advice is solid in theory. The conversation is laced with the right marketing terms and strategies. But it’s missing the essential element of faith-based nuance that we’ve been talking about at length in this resource.

If you want an agency to truly take your church communications to the next level, you need to work with a group committed to Christian marketing. That doesn’t mean they have to be exclusively committed to that swim lane. Our team at digifora works with a variety of clients.

However, our Bible-believing marketers are committed to providing a unique level of precision and insights into our church marketing advice. Part of the reasons our founders created digifora in the first place was to provide experienced marketing support that churches can afford and trust.

When we build a church marketing strategy, we draw from a wide selection of marketing services, ranging from consulting and creative to media buying and content management — all of which we consider through a church lens. This breadth of services allows us to select the right channels and marketing assets and then tailor them to the specific, mission-driven goals of each church we work with. How Much Should My Church Spend on Marketing? Before we wrap things up, let’s talk about one more common question: how much should your church spend on marketing?

This is a common question across all organizations at the moment. In the for-profit world, ad-spend is rising, and companies are focusing on revenue-rich areas. While it’s nice to know that marketing costs are rising in general, that doesn’t help a church allocate marketing budgets — or even set them in the first place.

Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule when it comes to church marketing money, either. At least not on an individual church basis. This is due to a vast discrepancy in circumstances. A church plant with a bi-vocational pastor likely won’t be taking out $10,000 in YouTube ads (although, again, looking into the Google non-profit program is a good idea there). A multi-site church with dozens of initiatives would have a very different approach to its strategy.

While a universal number is hard to land on, there are several factors that you should consider when setting a church marketing budget:

Assess what you already have: Do you have a website? Social channels? An email list? Are these optimized and functioning to full effect? Start by getting the most out of what you’re already paying for and investing in. Look for low-hanging fruit: Things like email lists and website content are cost-effective ways to keep your costs low. Get a strategy in place: A church marketing strategy gives you a clear idea of what you can do and what it would cost. Again, working with an experienced marketing consultant can make a world of difference here. Consider scalable solutions: Something like paid ads is infinitely scalable. Try using them for a specific event, knowing that you can always scale your spend in the future.

Every church has different needs, resources, and ways to market themselves. This makes every budget unique. The one thing you don’t want to do is designate money without a clear plan in place.

Sparking Church Growth Through Marketing and Communications

If you have a church, you want to market it — and that requires a communications strategy. Taking the time to assess your mission-driven objectives and how you can properly market them to the right people provides a greater sense of organization and purpose behind your church’s actions.

Done right, marketing doesn’t replace or change those actions. It amplifies them and makes them more effective.

God is doing specific things with your church right now, in-person and online. What are his goals for your ministry? What resources has he given you to accomplish them? How can marketing play a role in your mission-driven purpose?

If you need support marketing your church, digifora’s team of faith-filled, veteran marketers can help. We can provide an experienced lifeline that extends from initial consulting right through to content creation, media management, and data analysis.

Don’t let your church muddle through its communication struggles any longer. Let’s talk!