Because so much of their core philosophy is about reaching people at Christ?s Church of the Valley, they didn?t do much of a huge marketing push for their Easter services. They did a few strategic things to get people excited about inviting their friends. But beyond that, they relied on the general buzz that grew from their congregation?knowing that Easter was going to be a big weekend.
Every year, before Easter, they talk about the event pretty heavily two weeks leading up to the big weekend. They usually allow for a two-week window prior to any big weekend so their congregation has enough time to let their friends, family, and co-workers know about the event.
The CCV team arms their congregation with the service times and invite cards in the bulletins. They promote it heavily in their announcement portion of the service and tell their congregations how and when to use the invite cards.
They also start a bit of social media promotion via Facebook and Twitter to their congregation to give things they can share with the people they want to invite. They know their own people are the best form of promotion, so they rely heavily on the congregation to spread the word about the upcoming services.
Easter Ads
Besides empowering their congregation, they don?t do much?no billboards and only minor advertising. And the only form of advertising they do is in the way of online and social media.
Their social media team was very intentional about what they did this year for Easter. They always work a week or two out from each event and decide intentional things they?ll post about leading up to the event. They use Sprout Social to schedule their posts and hit their congregation at peak times?when the majority of them are active online.
They had a hashtag?#ccvfighter?that they promoted pretty heavily in the series leading up to the big Easter services. They promoted the hashtag via Facebook and Twitter to help create the buzz.
They normally create a mini-site for the Easter services. But this year they only had a dedicated page on their site for the Easter events. The URLs on the invite cards and on all their promotions (www.ccveaster.com) went directly to that dedicated page that featured their graphic, a summary of the service, campus locations, and service times for each campus. They used that as the catch all?directing everyone to that one page.
CCV was obviously effective in their ?campaign?. They saw a 30-40% jump in attendance (40,000 people were there) and are expecting 43-45,000 next year.
