Church Marketing – Growing Your Church – Did You Know There Are Thousands Looking For Your Church?

As an active marketing coach at my church, one day I realized that my church was missing a great opportunity to grow using all the tools I use in marketing.

In fact, I think the church is the marketing arm of God and therefore the job of the church is to “give more people to God” and we’re not doing a very good job of actively going out to do that. I found a way to grow your church that not many have figured out. There are hundreds of thousands looking for a church, and most churches don’t even know about it, know where they are, or how to connect with them.

So the first step for me was to find out how many people are actually looking for a church. At the time there were 4,000 people a month looking for a church in the Kansas City area, in about a year it has expanded to over 40,000 a month. So there is an explosion in the number of people looking for a church and churches. they are simply “missing the boat” if they are not trying to connect with those who are truly searching.

My suggestion is to go to Google’s keyword tool and type “___________church” (fill in the blank with your location). Then continue to brainstorm with Google to see how others are searching, _________ Sunday School, ___________ Christian Church, ___________ Methodist Church, ____________ Nondenominational Church, and so on.

In any case, here are some ideas of how many are looking in some of the metropolitan areas across the country.

• atlanta church………….110,000
• boston church……….30,000
• Chicago Church…………165,000
• Cincinnati Church……………….40,500
• Dallas Church………………110,000
• Denver Church……………….74,000
• Detroit Church………………40,500
• Kansas City Church ………… 40,500
• Los Angeles Church……….74,000
• Miami church………………49,500
• New York City church ……… 18,100
• St. Louis Church…………60,400

And that’s the number of people searching on a monthly basis.

A good rule of thumb for marketing is: if you say the things that connect well with your target audience, you SHOULD be able to capture 5-10% of the people you approach. so for most cities that are in the 30,000 to 40,000 area, that means somewhere around 1,500 people.

As I continued to investigate, and was actually speaking to a roomful of ministers the next week, I dug to see how many people were searching within the smaller communities of the city.

• 4,000 people looking for Baptist churches,
• 6,000 people looking for a church within a suburb of only 20,000 people.
• And, for one of the larger churches nearby, there were actually 6,000 people searching for that church by name.

How many of you are missing out on this opportunity to reach more people?

Use this tool to find how many are looking for you in what way.

Or are you a church that has grown, focused inward rather than looking for ways to “market God”?

In any case, for our church, we search engine optimized our website and went from “half full” to “bursting at the seams” in one year.

So we decided that there were other marketing opportunities that we were missing. We are looking for a page optimized for “___________ weddings” (our city). Our church is now fully booked for the next two months with weddings. Of course, everyone who sought us out for “church wedding” is people who are considering joining now.

Marketing is about “building relationships,” not just selling. Therefore, we are using our church website to actively attract people who are looking for help to “ask religion questions”, “family activities”, “Sunday school” and we continue to find new ways.

When it comes to mission work, we have found that we have a global reach from where we were established. We are opening our doors to people looking for churches and religion questions from all over the world, including small groups that are open all over the world. Small groups that quickly become small groups all over the world.

People are looking for churches and you may be passing them up.

Are you?