I Spoke With the #1 Protestant Church Marketer - Ep. 184

I spoke with Brady from Church Candy, the largest marketing agency for protestant churches in the United States. In this epsiode I explain the insights I learned from the call.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Hello, happy Wednesday. Hope everyone is ready for the Pascal Trituum. It starts tomorrow, I think. I'm assuming Thursday, Friday, Saturday is the trituum. Maybe. Yeah, yeah, because uh Easter starts Saturday night. That makes sense. Hope everyone goes to their liturgies and their masses. Um, I think Michaela's singing at the Mass tomorrow. And I don't know if she's singing for Easter as well, but I know we're going to all this stuff, so it should be a very, very wonderful next three days. I'm excited. Um, I want to tell you guys about an interesting phone call I had recently, and it was with the largest Protestant church marketing company in the United States. So they run advertisements to help Protestant churches grow. And the owner, this is who I hopped on a phone call with, they have 500 Protestant churches they're helping. So really interesting phone call, really valuable phone call for reference, so everyone knows they're helping zero Catholic churches. They plan to not help Catholic churches. Um, just a I don't know, maybe contextual piece of information. So obviously I'm bigger than him on social media, and so when I DM'd him, I said, Hey, I like your stuff. Obviously, like you were in similar boats. I'd love to hop on a phone call and chat and maybe do a podcast episode. I think he responded because I'm bigger, and he's like, Yeah, let's do it. That sounds great. Um, so we hopped on a phone call and I just chatted with him. These things can be really helpful. And I told him pretty bluntly, I'm like, hey, happy to share marketing info. I don't I'll never help a Protestant church as of right now, and I don't think you'll ever help a Catholic church. So I don't think we're gonna step on it um each other's toes. We can just help each other. So I asked him, I said, 500 Protestant churches. Like, what are you doing? What's the secret? He's been in the game for like five, six years, I think. And he said, it's pretty simple. We basically run one main advertisement for them. We run an ad that says, Hey, if you're nervous about going to church, put in your phone number below, and someone from our church will reach out to you, introduce themselves before the service, and sit next to you during the service so you feel welcomed. I was like, Well, that's it. And he's like, That's it. We just run that, we get them in the door, and that's how you grow the church. I was like, that's so interesting. It makes sense. Um, especially for Protestants, I feel like that's a very, you know, hey, what's going on? And they're very they're very good at greeting and uh all of that. So yeah, I was like, that's so interesting. He asked me what I do. I'm not really helping grow churches right now. I mean, I kind of am. I'm helping nurture the what would you call the parishioners already, get them to come to events and stuff. But the more I thought about this after the phone call, we chatted for a little longer, talked about some other stuff, but that was the key from the call. The longer I thought about it, the more I kind of realized we should try that with Catholic churches. Maybe not as maybe not as salesy and as marketing y as a Protestant might, but something that's like a nice picture of a church or a priest at Mass. And it says something like, if you wanted to come, like if you want to come to Mass, but you're a little nervous, or maybe you haven't been in a while, like put in your info below and we'll walk with you. Like we'll be there with you so you feel comfortable. And then yeah, they put in their info, and then someone from the parish can just reach out and be like, hey, yeah, this is great that you want to come to Mass. My name's John. I can meet up with you before the 7 a.m. And yeah, I'm happy to sit next to you or something. I don't know. But the the concept is there. Um, I think it would crush. So I I like to focus on proven tactics for you guys in this podcast, but this was just an exciting call and I wanted to share it. I'd be very surprised if this doesn't work. Uh, it's already proven to work in the religious context for this guy's the largest Protestant marketing company is doing it. So um, so yeah, I I haven't proven this yet, but I'm going to try it. And what I really want to try personally is running the ad to 18 to 35-year-olds in the area and just hit that hard and get all the young adults in the vicinity of a parish who are on the fence and have kind of been thinking about Christ to come to mass. I think it would lit. I'll keep you posted on how it goes. But it's a very interesting phone call. It was funny too. Yeah, he'll probably never listen to this. Um, but he's it's just there's just a Protestant thing about the depth of um understanding of the of just the theology. Because he was like, hey man, I'm just happy. Like, if anyone comes to church, I don't know if Catholics are the same. Like, you don't care, right? As long as someone goes to church, you don't care what church. It's just like, yeah. So anyway, uh, back to marketing. It's I don't know. How do you not know? How do you not know the other beliefs when you're in the game, when you're in the business of religion? That sounds bad, business of religion, but you know what I mean. Our life is to like uh work in the religious circles. Anyway, it was a good call. He uh knows his stuff, it was a cool nugget. Um, yeah. Anyway, I thought that was interesting. What an interesting concept to share. That the number one way, and what kind of the bread and butter you would call it, that he's doing for his churches is that advertising campaign. So as Bruce Lee said, take what uh what uh what is it? It's really good. It's like adopt what is useful, discard what is useless, and add your own. So we'll take this strategy, we'll see how we can adapt it to the Catholic faith, see if it works. How many churches would benefit from having like 20 to 30 young adults showing up to mass? So helpful. Like additional young adults, so helpful. All you gotta do, the only thing that I can't control is having someone on the other end, someone having someone at the parish that can, when the phone when the phone number comes through, to give them a call and be like, hey, what's up? So yeah. Anyway, that's my word, word of wisdom that I gleaned from oh my gosh, I forgot his name. Brady. From Brady at churchcandymarketing.com. Very good guy. We'll do a podcast episode coming up here in a couple weeks. And I'll post that on here and we'll do like a deep dive, I think. I think it'll be really valuable. So yeah, that's the tidbit for today. I hope it's valuable. Hey, if you run a if you work in a parish, you do stewardship or marketing, or maybe you're the pastor. You want to give it a shot, hop into meta ads manager, give it a shot, go for it. Uh, in the meantime, I'll run the campaigns for my clients. I will keep you all posted. But good chance it'll work. I don't how could it not work? Like, it might cost extra, you know, it might cost a lot of money to get someone, but it would get someone. There are people who are on the fence about Christ and kind of considering going to church. So anyway, all right, I'm rambling. Hope this is valuable. If it was, drop a like. I'll see you all in the next episode. God bless and have a blessed holy week.