Church Marketing Case Study Portland Community Church

A Comprehensive Digital And Social Strategy

Total Social Media Followers

Total Reach

New Social Media Followers in 2021

The pastoral leadership and board members of Portland Community Church have a mission to attract, inspire and engage people to follow Jesus.

With a beautiful campus, a new worship pastor, and a motivated team, the church started 2021 with a fresh vision to become more of a “hybrid church,” embracing the digital windows and doors into their church.

In Spring of 2021, Fearless Church Marketing’s parent company, Fearless Influence was selected to help develop a comprehensive church marketing plan. The agency also introduced the church to the Unstuck Group to help with the onsite experience, team organization, and infrastructure.

Answering An Important Church Marketing Question: How Do I Improve My Church's Social and Digital Experiences?

When people engage with a church they do so in a number of unique ways. Mobile devices, social media profiles, streaming platforms, these elements all play a vital role in how people make church decisions.

For Portland Community Church we focused on the following elements to improve the visibility of the church’s website and social media:

search engine visbility
the website experience
the streaming experience

Local SEO For Churches - Getting Multiple #1 Keyword Rankings

Google is still the most powerful tool that a church can use to impact visibility. One of the most important pieces of an overall church marketing strategy is search engine optimization (SEO).

Often this is the most overlooked element. It takes time, energy, effort and expertise to do SEO well. Results can take months.

Optimizing a church for a local search result can create a significant challenge, especially when the population of the metro area is over 2 million people and the physical street address is different from the name of the church.

For Portland Community Church we immediately began to clean up their header tags, rewrite their meta descriptions and create new “local” content.

Keywords Ranked Top 3

Rank For Church Oregon

Keywords With An Improved Ranking

Improving The Church Website Experience

The Church Shopping Experience Mirrors How Consumers Buy Products Online

When a family makes the decision to check out a new church, they act much as a customer does when buying a product. They want to know what it will feel like to “buy.” Who are the people? What can I learn from their website? What does their Facebook page look like? YouTube? Instagram?

Creating A Good Experience For Website Visitors

New Buttons
Reprioritized Design
New Page Content

One of the first changes made to the website focused on the homepage area “above the scroll.” This is the most critical digital real estate a church has. This area should clearly communicate the most important information about the church to the website visitor.

For Portland Community Church this meant

a clean design,
an invitation to join the online or in-person experience,
the meeting and service times and clear instructions on how a visitor can watch a livestream.
two new buttons : growth group sign up, and livestream (YouTube).

Average Session Duration

Pages Per Session

Total Website Sessions

YouTube Is The Ideal Church Livestream Platform

The second largest search engine on the planet is YouTube. If this isn’t motivation enough to focus on the platform, there just isn’t a cleaner platform for churches to organize, stream and cross-promote video content.

For Portland Community Church the following elements were developed to help create a branded video content experience:

Branded channel elements: banner, website, social icons
Custom playlists
Video thumbnails
Optimized titles and descriptions
End cards
Channel and video tags

Fearless Influence also helped to develop customized online attendance metrics to gauge the user engagement with each piece of video content and the estimated number of people watching sermons online.

The result is an incredible 52 new channel subscribers!

New YouTube Channel Subscribers

Average Online Attendance

Hours of Content Watched

Church Marketing Strategy, Final Thought: Consistent Branding Is The Key to A Great Church Social Media Experience

Many churches have a mixed bag of branded elements being promoted across their social media channels. This can create quite a challenge for families and other new visitors. And it could prompt some uncomfortable questions:

Is this the same church I just visited last Sunday?
The same one I watched on YouTube?
The same one my kid attended youth group at?

It should be obvious in every social media post, every piece of YouTube content, across all digital and social channels that this is the same church.

One of the most effective tools that churches can develop to ensure that the church is being represented the same way in every channel are social media guidelines.

For Portland Communicy Church, Fearless Influence developed a 10 page guidance document outlining the

fonts,
colors,
marks + logos,
usages,
social signals,
a content calendar,
and posting templates

to be used across their digital and social elements.

When producing these types of documents it is important to interview the key stakeholders in each ministry. The goal of these documents are to empower individuals to create content themselves, and not to create a list of rules.