Church Digital Marketing

What is Website Advertising for Churches?

Digital marketing for churches is simply advertising products or services through online channels like websites, search engines, social media, email, and mobile apps.

Many churches think digital marketing is just another term for SEO or PPC advertising. While both of those services are used in internet marketing, neither fully explain the depth of a cutting edge online marketing program for churches.

Today's online advertising campaigns often include dozens of website advertising plans, all working in tandem to help your church improve visibility and conversions.

For example, the best church digital marketing plans will include plans to:

• Make your church digital assets (websites, apps, sales funnels) more visible through SEO, social advertising, affiliate advertising, or PPC advertising.
• Increase your church revenue with landing pages, sales funnels, and conversion rate optimization.
• See what visitors do with your digital assets to find out where you can improve, retargeting opportunities, or conversion rates.
• Show the expertise, authority, and trust of your churches through content marketing, video production, link building, review collection, social media proof, and website improvements.
• Build and nurture relationships through email marketing, SMS marketing, and social media management.

Our Church Website Marketing Solutions

Our team of digital marketing experts know the latest digital advertising trends for churches. We've helped more than 100 business industries, such as churches, increase traffic and improve conversions.

SEO Plans for Churches

To bring your website into the first page of search results for competitive phrases you must take a holistic approach to search engine optimization within your church digital marketing campaign. This means reviewing your on-page, off-page, and technical SEO since all three aspects of search engine optimization work together to show value to search engines.

As we bring on new businesses in the church field for website advertising, we commonly discover glitches related to page speed, content quality, and the backlink strength. Technical, on-site, and off-page SEO plans can be employed to address these problems and improve your search engine optimization. To learn more about each of these church SEO campaigns, let's take a closer look:

• Technical search engine optimization includes factors such as site speed, website security, XML sitemaps, website architecture, structured data, Open Graph tags, and broken pages. These impact how Google reads and traverses your content, and how visitors interact with your church website. You typically need the assistance of a web developer to improve technical search engine optimization glitches since they are often related to the platform or theme used on your church website. We employ a team of web developers with expertise in widely-used platforms like Shopify and WordPress.
• Content silos, content writing, internal linking, keyword research, competitive analysis, frequently asked questions, page titles, meta tags, images, and videos are all elements involved in on-page SEO. By improving these components of your on-site SEO, you can enable search engines to gain a deeper understanding of the worth of your content and acknowledge your church as a reputable source on the subject matter. In addition, it will help increase important metrics like "time on site" for your visitors, which shows search engines you provided something of value to the search user. Never underestimate the value and importance of content creation within your church digital marketing plan.
• Off-Site search engine optimization is essentially the state of your backlink profile, which is the number of backlinks and referring domains pointing to your church, the naturalness of your anchor text and link velocity, the authority and relevance of your backlinks, signals from social media channels, and many other factors. By establishing natural backlinks to your website and internal pages, you can communicate to search engines that your website and content are reputable and deserving of recognition from third-party sources.

It's crucial to keep in mind that search engine optimization involves a holistic approach that covers multiple areas, so your church digital marketing strategy shouldn't just focus on one or two aspects. A fast website is important, but if your church has no quality backlinks or useful content, it's unlikely that you'll see it on the first page of search results, except for some uncommon scenarios. The same is true for other scenarios where two areas of SEO have been optimized, but one was neglected. You should evenly distribute your attention to ensure competitors can't bypass your church by simply completing all the required search engine optimization checklist items.

Backlink Building Strategies for Churches

Most churches tend to overlook the importance of creating authoritative links in off-page search engine optimization, which is why it is worth emphasizing this aspect of SEO.

Competitive keywords and long-tail phrases on the first page of search results typically feature large retailers in product-specific searches and long-standing service providers in local search results. Upon further analysis of the exact pages that show up in these search results, you'll typically find that the number of backlinks pointing to those pages far exceeds the number pointing to relevant pages on your church website. That is because search engines use backlinks to determine how authoritative your church site and content are on a particular subject.

To improve your own web pages, you must build quality backlinks to your homepage and interior pages using white-hat search engine optimization backlink building services. It is critical to see this as a long-term endeavor for the website marketing plan of your church. It's important not to get overly excited for a few weeks and build dozens of backlinks, then abandon it for months or years. Instead, you should view this as a long-term commitment for your digital marketing strategy. That lack of commitment will only serve to keep your church off the first page of search results. You need to establish a link-building plan that will provide consistent and steady growth of quality backlinks from relevant websites and social media platforms. Most of all, you need to keep your backlink profile natural by not overdoing exact-match phrases, buying numerous backlinks from private block networks (PBNs), or participating in any black-hat link-building methods.

We utilize numerous white-hat church link building techniques in our online marketing services, including:

• Utilizing the “Skyscraper Technique” to build a bigger, better version of a ranked content article from a competitive church.
• Writing in-depth articles to have featured on third-party websites as a guest post, which includes a link back to your church website.
• Reaching out to high-authority websites related to churches to suggest content improvements to existing articles that may have become outdated, or didn't cover a specific topic relevant to you.
• Adding your website to industry-specific directories by scanning competitors to see their most valuable business listings and NAP citations (Name, Address, Phone).

Online Reputation Management (ORM) Campaigns for Churches

Your online reputation is an important trust factor search engines use to determine rank positions, and your target audience uses it to make purchasing decisions. This is true for all types of purchases and decision-making, ranging from the selection of a local service provider, the purchase of a product on an ecommerce store, and even the selection of churches. People love reading about the positive experiences, and sometimes even more about negative experiences, that others had with your church.

For nearby service companies, we can help you develop a review generation program within your internet marketing to increase the rate at which past community members leave reviews for your church. This often involves collecting reviews on Google My Business, UpCity, Yellow Pages, Angi, Yelp, and other online review collection websites.

If you run an ecommerce-focused church, we can help with the collection of product reviews and company reviews. For an ecommerce business, it is important to collect reviews for both the quality of your products and the customer service experience of your church. Online shoppers want to know the product they are purchasing is of sufficient quality or utility, but they also need to know you will be there to fulfill the order and answer questions after the sale.

For the reputation of professional service providers, such as doctors or attorneys, we can help establish protocols within your internet advertising plan for the collection of testimonials to ensure prospects always see a positive image of your churches. This includes review generation, reputation monitoring, online reputation repair, survey campaigns, and social growth. In some cases, even SEO can be used to help curate the best possible first-page results for the online reputation of your church.

The risk of ignoring your online reputation is the loss of long-term business, which often isn't noticed until significant damage has been accumulated. Take control of your online reputation today to ensure you always put forth a better image than your competition.

Content Marketing Tactics for Churches

Most churches use content marketing as a means of attracting, engaging, and retaining a high-interest audience by creating and sharing relevant blog articles, instructional videos, case studies, white papers, and other digital media. This digital marketing approach helps establish your church as an industry thought leader, while also helping you dominate organic search results and the attention span of your target audience.

When your target community members begin to identify your church as the source of valuable advice or guidance you will find it is easier to guide them through your sales funnel. We help church digital marketing customers put together the right content marketing service for their church.

It is important to identify your target audience before starting a content marketing campaign. This will help you understand the best media format for the content, whether that be informative blog posts, detailed case studies, informal whitepapers, best-in-class listicles, or drip email campaigns. It will also help you determine the best delivery method, which can be from social media, search results, or some other medium.

We often help implement content marketing tactics for churches that involve blog content, infographics, podcasts, videos, email campaigns, whitepapers, case studies, surveys, webinars, checklists, listicles, and lead magnets. We particularly like using the case study method because it is a powerful tool for showing expertise as a leading online advertising service provider. These are all effective ways to market content if you implement them correctly for your church.

Social Media Advertising Tactics for Churches

The use of social ads in digital marketing involves PPC advertising being run on social platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. These social media channels offer a quick and effective method for connecting to your target audience by allowing you to select interests, behaviors, and demographics. However, the downside can be the added cost of setting up the campaigns, creating landing pages, building out sales funnels, and performing conversion rate optimization to ensure the paid advertising function as a proper lead generation or sales generation tool for your church.

By leveraging the data sources of social media platforms, churches can hyper-target their audiences to deliver personalized content based on demographics, behaviors, interests, and other factors. While this is an enormous opportunity for most established churches, it can be an expensive lesson for businesses that aren't ready to take full advantage of social ads.

We help churches build out the necessary sales funnels and lead generation tools to make the most of their social media ads. In addition, we suggest creating plans for conversion optimization and retargeting as part of our internet advertising plans, as both plans can enhance the return on ad spend for your campaigns. Let's not forget to mention the freshness of your ad creatives. When running church social media advertising plans, you must be mindful of ad decay and ad fatigue to prevent your campaigns from becoming stagnant and suffering from degraded performance.

Search Engine Advertising Strategies for Churches

The use of search engine ads in internet marketing involves paid ads being run on search engines like Google and Bing. You will find that Google Ads and Bing Ads offer a quick and effective method for connecting your church to an engaged audience that is actively searching for your products or services. The downside is the cost of setting up an effective and scalable paid advertising campaign for your church, which often involves the creation of landing pages or sales funnels that are optimized for conversion opportunities.

We help churches of all sizes build out the necessary landing pages and funnels to boost leads and drive revenue, which makes paid advertising a cost-effective digital advertising strategy. For any search engine marketing campaign, we recommend creating a plan for retargeting and conversion rate optimization to improve your return on investment.

Developing Sales Funnels for Churches

A sales funnel, or purchase funnel, is the visual representation of journeys taken by community members with your church. The illustration of a sales funnel, which is often referred to as a marketing funnel or revenue funnel, looks just like a physical funnel you'd use to pour a liquid into a container. The top of the funnel is always larger because it illustrates the large number of potential community members that might interact with your church. The funnel narrows at the bottom to represent the various exit points within the sales process. Naturally, the bottom of the funnel is the smallest part because it represents the number of people who converted through the generation of a lead or the sale of a product.

The development of a sales funnel for churches is more difficult than the explanation of its concepts. For example, some of the most successful sales funnels produce millions of dollars of value each day for their owners. To develop a conversion funnel that produces value for your church, you must put thought into the goal of the sales funnel and the type of sales funnel you want to implement.

There are numerous types of sales funnels, including automated webinar funnels, lead magnet funnels, self-liquidating funnels, automated webinar funnels, lead magnet funnels, premium customer funnels, and dozens of others to consider for your church. When you work with one of our church-focused online marketing professionals, you will have an experienced digital marketer to bounce ideas off to help you determine the best type of revenue funnel for your church. Alternatively, if you don't have an interest in being involved in the process, we can research more about your church to determine the best funnels to explore and test within your website advertising service.

Conversion Rate Optimization for Churches

There is almost no reason to neglect conversion rate optimization within church digital advertising services. This is a critical aspect of any type of internet advertising for churches since it directly impacts the ability of the marketing service to provide value for the church paying for the marketing service.

Boosting conversion rates can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Before you pursue a CRO strategy for your church, it is important to understand what it is, how it works, and how to evaluate the service. This is a time-intensive process that involves plenty of iterative research and testing. What makes it most difficult is the CRO plans that work for one church might not work for another church.

The most common church CRO strategies include reducing form fields on contact forms, testing different call-to-action phrases, creating appealing headlines, implementing a sense of urgency, fixing mobile website issues, improving website speed, adding exit-intent popups, defining value for the visitor, and adding trust and social proof signals.

True conversion rate optimization for churches can become much more complex. To really dive into CRO, we must fully understand your business offer, your competitors, the strengths and weaknesses of your value proposition, how visitors are currently interacting with your digital assets, the online reputation of your churches, and many other factors.

Email Marketing Tactics for Churches

You can use email marketing within a digital plan to generate brand awareness, build website traffic, boost sales and revenue, bring awareness to your social media profiles, engage past churches, and gain valuable information about your target audience.

We help our digital marketing church customers use Mail Chimp, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact within their email marketing services. These are robust email marketing tools to create subscriber lists, segment your audience, and even develop email marketing drip campaigns.

The most important part of email marketing is developing a plan to increase your subscribers. We help email marketing church clients build and nurture their email marketing lists by implementing email collection opportunities within affiliate programs, lead magnets, exit-intent popups, checkout processes, lead magnets, exit-intent popups, and numerous other methods.

Lead Generation for Churches

For local area service providers, the most important part of an inbound marketing program is lead generation. Not everything can be sold on the internet. For a lot of products and services, a phone conversation or in-person conversation is needed to close the sale. For these types of business industries, lead gen plans are going to be critical.

There are many types of lead generation tactics to consider, all of which have been tried and implemented by our digital marketing team, for churches and other professionals, at some point in the past. The most common lead gen strategies for churches include the creation of helpful content, retargeting past website visitors, nurturing past contacts with email marketing, engaging visitors with live chat, developing free tools for visitors to use, creating referral programs and affiliate programs, creating video content that can be shared online, setting up free webinars for visitors to attend, or offering helpful downloadable content in a lead magnet.

For most church internet marketing campaigns where lead generation is a primary goal, our team will develop and implement one or more lead gen tactics in your digital assets to test what works best for your church.

Video Marketing for Churches

As a complete website marketing company for churches, we have our own in-house video production and video marketing department. This has been extremely helpful for church content marketing plans that required creative video assets. More importantly, we've used our video production department for the creation of video ads on YouTube and video marketing within Facebook Ads campaigns. There are many good applications for video production within your internet marketing plan for your church. You can use videos to demonstrate unique products, teach new concepts, and improve visitor duration. You can also implement videos within online marketing services to bring life to paid campaigns.

Why You Should Invest in Website Marketing for Your Church

If you run an church that depends on selling a product or service, at some point, you will contemplate some type of marketing to boost revenue. There are various justifications to weigh website advertising against other, more traditional, marketing approaches for your church. Let's go over some of the great reasons to implement our digital marketing plan within your church:

• Digital marketing for churches is often more affordable than other forms of marketing because it can be started at a low amount and scaled as success is measured.
• By utilizing useful analytics tools such as Google Analytics, you can obtain more comprehensive data on the number of visitors who engaged with your brand, the duration of their engagement with your marketing efforts, and whether they returned to your site in the days, weeks, or months following their initial interaction.
• These days, individuals are consistently utilizing their phones, tablets, and desktop computers. Why not select a marketing style and channel that can track your target audience wherever they go?
• Unlike print marketing, billboard ads, television commercials, and radio ads, internet advertising is significantly more flexible because it can be updated much more easily.
• Online marketing for churches provides the best capacity for user engagement. Good luck getting people to comment, like, or share any non-digital advertisements you run for your churches.

How to Develop a Online Marketing Program for Churches

To kickoff your online advertising campaign for your church, it's vital to develop a plan that includes measurable business goals. Ensuring that everyone involved in the website advertising service understands the ultimate goal is crucial in order to avoid spending time on ideas that will not have a positive effect on your church.

1.) Identify your target audience

With a clear set of business goals in place for your churches, you can move on to identifying a target audience. Knowing your target audience is crucial. This helps you tailor your church digital marketing efforts to platforms your audience engages in and that you use messaging that resonates with your target audience.

2.) Find out what your audience needs

With your business goals and target customer established, you can now make an informed decision about the needs and search intent of your audience. By doing so, you can ensure that your churches concentrate on the correct keywords for your digital advertising, and that your content marketing plans align with the demands of your audience.

3.) Start the slower services right away

If you plan to use search engine optimization as part of your church digital strategy, prioritize it above all else. The slowest moving online advertising strategy for churches, and even other industries, is search engine optimization. The improvements you make to your website, your content, and your backlinks can take weeks or months for search engines to fully recognize and have an impact on your placements.

4.) Build out quality landing pages or funnels

This is a great time to consider PPC advertising for your church website, or other digital assets. It's crucial to create a landing page or sales funnel before sending paid traffic to your service page, home page, or product page. Many churches that have high bounce rates and low conversion rates with paid advertising campaigns make the mistake of directing traffic to a page that isn't optimized to convert an unfamiliar audience. Effective lead generation for churches often involves the use of splash pages and sales funnels to guide visitors towards the desired marketing outcome.

5.) Create automated email sequences for retargeting

Now that plans are in place for bringing traffic to your church, you should consider how to best interact with those visitors after they leave your website. Not everyone who visits your website, landing page, or sales funnel will convert on the first visit. You should consider options to build an email marketing list, offer SMS alerts for new offers, or set up tracking pixels to retarget recent visitors to your website.

6.) Make testing a regular process

With all of these digital marketing strategies set up for your church, you can move into the testing and optimization phase. Here, you must regularly measure the effectiveness of your church-focused campaigns, identify areas of improvement, and even experiment with new ideas you find in case studies or white papers. Your church digital advertising service should always be in a state of conversion rate optimization across all aspects.

Why Choose WebCitz for Your Church Internet Advertising

Our team is eager to become your online marketing partner! There are several things to keep in mind when exploring online advertising agencies that cater to churches. With more than 18 years of experience, you know you can trust the website advertising plans and strategies we suggest for your church. These are frequently the very digital advertising techniques that we utilize for our own lead generation and conversion rate optimization services. Our website's internet advertising plan is likely what brought you here today.

The crucial factor, however, is that you have trust in our online advertising agency as the suitable choice for your church. We recommend our digital advertisers for your church for the following reasons:

• We have accumulated over 18 years of experience, having been in business since 2004.
• Our primary source for leads from churches is our own digital marketing strategies.
• You have have found our website after performing an online search for a service we offer, such as "top church internet marketing."
• We do not outsource church internet advertising plans since we have our own marketing team.
• Our team members are readily available during business hours and will likely answer your call within a few rings.
• Our team has considerable expertise in Shopify and WordPress for any website advertising plans that require website tweaks.

When the time comes to look for a leading internet marketing agency, we hope that you'll consider our online marketers for the job. Please don't hesitate to get in touch with our friendly team at the online advertising agency if you have any further queries or would like to discuss anything further.

800-796-8263 Email Us