I reckon church plants often struggle to get loads of unbelivers and newcomers at Easter in the first few years because people are often not aware you exist. Your church plant is not t'he church they're not going to' bacause they don't know you. Andy Kerr from MBM Rooty Hill posted a cracker idea of inviting the neighbourhood to your church through using facebook's algorithms and some simple technology.
See below.
Cheers
Scott
How To: Easter Facebook Ads
Many of you have probably seen the video that MBM put together for Easter this year (https://www.facebook.com/mbmrootyhill/videos/10155152197879687/). We have seen some incredible results so far and the ad has only been live for a few hours. It has reached over 3000 people, and so far only cost us $9. From the paid ad (not people sharing it) we have had 16 people click to our website for more info.
I would love to see everyone promoting there Easter service on Facebook… so here is how to do it. It will seriously only take you 20-30mins of your time.
1. Grab your smartphone and go to the front of your church. You don't need a fancy camera. We live in a culture that filled with selfies, instagram/ snapchat stories and facebook live. Quality video doesn't matter anymore. We only used an external microphone because we had one with us at the time and the school over the road was at recess so there was a lot of noise from them.
2. Invite the visitors in your area. Don't speak about your series, who is speaking etc. Don't use any christianise Do acknowledge that it can be difficult to visit somewhere new. Do acknowledge that you would love to see them. Remember: short (30 seconds) and warm/ friendly/ smiling
3. Fire up Manage Adverts on facebook. Click on the tiny triangle on the right of the top bar. Do not post like normal and then boost it (Happy to explain why if you want to know). If you haven't done ads before you might need to set up some stuff the advert manager first before you make your ad.
4. Create Ad: We want our ads to point to our church website, to a page that has our easter service times (http://mbm.org.au/easter is our one). We want to do this because it helps people to engage with us. Clicking on a website causes them to pause their scrolling on facebook. On our website they get to see what we are like through photos etc. So our marketing objective (facebook lingo) for this ad is “Traffic”
5. From there creating the ad is very straight forward. This was how I set up ours and I recommend you do the same. I set our placement to facebook only (turned off instagram and messenger). I set it up to just run Wednesday – Saturday this week (and will repeat it next week leading up to Easter). I set the budget at $15 per day ($60 total).
I then set it up to appear for everyone that either lives or has been in Rooty Hill and the surrounding 17km (I would have preferred 10km but 17 is the minimum). I also said not to target those that already like our facebook page. And left everything else default. From there I uploaded the video and wrote the text and hit submit.
It is super simple and facebook is giving priority to video at the moment so lets make the most of it and see our communities join us for church this easter and hear of the incredible news of Jesus.
