My Monday morning was drastically improved after watching this new viral video from Coca-Cola. Maybe some of you have already watched it since it was added about a week ago. Already the video has over 1 million views. Way to go Coke, this is an extremely creative way of marketing, and an inspiration. Where will happiness strike next? Happy Monday!

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In my final series of posts explaining how Pequea Church marketed the start of our Church on Wednesday services I thought I would outline the ways we showed the world (or at least our immediate community) that we had something to offer! Something new that we did was worked out an agreement to display a billboard for 2 months along a major road near our church. The billboard asks the question and delivers an answer when someone visits our website.

Knowing that a billboard is just one way of spreading the word, we also mailed out our “Currents” magazine to nearly 9,000 homes in our area, targeting the area around the billboard. The front of our Currents magazine matches the design of the billboard and each page highlights a potential attender who might be interested in attending church on Wednesday. The people appearing in the Currents are from our church community and included a police officer, nurses, and a waitress. You can download a copy and read the Currents by clicking here.

Each year Pequea Church also holds a stand at our local community fair. Now, to some a fair might sound crazy, but for our area the week of the fair is the talk of the community. Hundreds of local businesses set up shop to advertise and give away pens, bags, balloons, coupons and more. Our stand will be draped with a church on Wednesday banner, and will host the popular stacking cups game. We will give away cups with church on Wednesday info as well as business cards, and postcard handouts to flood the area with “Church on Wednesday”.

We also successfully landed stories in our local community advertiser newspaper as well as got a full article in our local daily newspaper, along with pictures of our pastoral team and church community holding the banner reading “wednesdaychurch.com“.

One of the most important people to resource is your existing church community. You must not overlook your best sales people. Your congregation “gets” you, and should be excited about what you have to offer. We gave our church bumper magnets to put on their cars pointing people to wednesdaychurch.com, gave them copies of the Currents, business cards, and postcards to distribute to friends, family, and neighbors. We talk about it in our messages, and in our announcements. We attempt to create buzz.

As I hope you have seen through this series of posts, when you’re creating a marketing campaign it is important to plan ahead. It’s not alway’s possible to work far ahead but in our latest campaign there will be no excuses on not making the community aware. If this service is not meant to happen on Wednesday night we will recognize that we missed the mark and that the need is just not there. Our hope and prayer is that people come to Christ by hearing the good news of Jesus Christ.

When Pequea Church decided to launch a service on Wednesday night we knew we had to get peoples attention by thinking differently. In our community Church on Wednesday was not something new. In fact we had even had a fall program for children. When deciding upon a marketing campaign it is essential to do research and understand your audience. You need to determine the appeal factor. For example we don’t market a weekend youth conference as a time for you to grow spiritually, pray daily, and have times of communion. — While all that stuff might happen, which is great, it is not what today’s teenagers are appealed to. If you ran an ad for that type of conference you are going to get the same types of kids over and over, not the ones that really need to come to a weekend conference. To get the fringe kids you promote that it will be a weekend away, games, friends, water slides etc. When the kids are already in the environment they will be more open to praying, communion, and growing spiritually. – I think you get the idea.

With Church on Wednesday we determined that the largest appeal factor is the day “Wednesday”. We know that people in our area are busy, or work on Sunday mornings. We know that no other churches in our immediate area are holding services other then Sunday mornings. This affirmed that “Wednesday” was the sweet spot. The word Wednesday is not something new, it’s not hard to pronounce like our name (Pequea), but it is ordinary. What is not ordinary is churches holding “church” on Wednesday. Now I should note for readers unfamiliar with our community we are located in what many call a “bible belt”. They are used to having children’s clubs on Wednesday nights, and familiar with the word Church.

All that to say in order to keep it simple we created a campaign centered around a website. We purchased the domain names churchonwednesday.com and wednesdaychurch.com. Our primary thrust was towards www.WednesdayChurch.com but we wanted to take out the possibility that people would forget the domain name and purchased them both. The website is a landing page for information specific to church on Wednesday. It’s simple, easy to understand, and connected to our main church website. Everything we designed for this campaign was simple, asking the question “Church on Wednesday?” and promoting the website www.WednesdayChurch.com.

I will give you a taste of our other marketing ideas in my next post!

Over 6 months ago Pequea Church decided that we would begin to offer the same worship service we offer on Sunday mornings on Wednesday nights. Over a few blog posts I will outline the steps we took to make “Church on Wednesday” happen.

The decision to hold church on Wednesday started out of our desire as a church to reach more people for Christ. On a lot of Sunday mornings our current facility is out of space. We also recognized a need that was not being met in our community – a church that offered a service at a time other then Sunday morning, let alone not on a weekend. We recognize that Sunday morning’s just don’t work for everyone in our community. We have people that work on Sunday mornings, people who go away, sporting events, and shared custody situations. I am not hear to say that the church should be focused on making it convenient to come to church, BUT we need do need to recognize our culture and individual communities in which God has placed us.

At Pequea Church our Wednesday nights will include a community meal. This will allow families to come to church together and eat a low cost high quality meal, no prep time and no clean up needed for Mom’s and Dad’s alike! This will also encourage relationships among our church body that just can’t happen unless if you sit around and eat a meal together! Our meal will be served each week starting at 5:45 p.m.

Our Church on Wednesday service will begin each week at 6:45 p.m. The service will run for 1 hour and will match our previous Sunday’s service. The worship songs will be the same, the preaching and service elements will all mirror our services on Sunday mornings. We will offer programming for our children, where they will hear about Jesus and worship with their peers!

In the next few posts I will outline the communication and marketing strategy that we used to promote “Church on Wednesday” to our community!