Boost signups for your church's course through a Facebook advert video
A screenshot from the video on our YouTube account - P.S. it’s not all about sex!
The Marriage Course video production for a Derby church’s Facebook advert
Introduction
Alongside promo videos, we also design and produce videos for Facebook adverts, including churches across the UK, whether for courses or seasons like Christmas, helping them reach their audience in an engaging way.
This was a short, punchy video for a paid Facebook advert, promoting The Marriage Course, run by St Werburgh’s church in Derby during the COVID-19 lockdown, as a physical course was not possible.
It was a joint effort with local Derby social media management company, Status Social, who ran the advert via Facebook Ad Manager, while we provided the video and facilitated the signup mechanisms.
The video element of the Facebook advert was highly optimised for social media, front-loading the key elements and information to capture attention and encourage signups for The Marriage Course that the church was running.
We are a brand studio based in Torquay, South Devon, offering branding, website design & brand video to creative businesses across the UK - find out more about our brand video services for businesses.
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Production notes
From Rachael
The key with this video was getting impact in a very short space of time
On average you have about three seconds on Facebook to persuade someone to watch more in their newsfeed before they click away
To that end, we used bold, striking text at the beginning and highly dynamic visuals to front load the video and build towards the call to action
The Marriage Course provides an excellent online toolbox area for general publicity with incredibly high quality materials, but at the time there was nothing in the short and direct niche we were looking for
Our solution was to use The Marriage Course’s brand fonts and colours and a sympathetic soundtrack, which sounded like it could belong on their video, resulting in a motion graphic advert
We worked with Phil from St Werburgh’s to incorporate the core themes of the course, as well to convey what the course would cover
Hosts Nicky and Sila Lee from The Marriage Course were happy with the end result too!
Also of note
Behind the Facebook advert, we setup and ran the course sign-up and management mechanism for St Werburgh’s via ChurchSuite, a popular church management system
We also designed and setup the main landing and sign up page for the course
When participants signed up for the course, ChurchSuite handled the data automatically, including branded responses which we designed
ChurchSuite is a robust and high-functional online system, but to date its Planning module does not natively support a multi-date course (e.g., one event over a eight week period) with rolling sign-ups (e.g., people starting the course over different dates)
We anticipated this by creating a spreadsheet with the matrix of rolling start dates and scheduled e-mails from within the system to match participants with the right correspondence
To give St Werburgh’s maximum value too, we also facilitated a training and handover so that the church was equipped to handle future courses in-house
Landing page - click to enlarge
Sign up page - click to enlarge
How it performed
Status Social compiled the results of the Facebook adverts in a blog entry on the project, and here are the key metrics.
They were seen more than 125,000 times
42,200 people saw the ads an average of three times each
The ads generated 654 clicks through to the landing page with 591 from unique accounts
The ads video was watched nearly 22,000 times
The average cost-per-click was 42p with the cheapest as low as 28p
You can see the original video on the St. Werburgh’s Facebook page here.
The bottom line
One of the most striking things about the campaign was that it generated a total of 119 couples signed up for the course
This was an increase of 2,875%, which is a huge amount
It’s a clear demonstrate of the persuasive power of video combined with the reach of social media
Crucially, it comes from centring the campaign on a clear sense of the audience and messaging
Short, punchy, dynamic videos on social media can work for you and your business - they capture people’s attention, put you in the spotlight and can generate business
If you have a coherent strategy and plan for social media, you can generate business leads and win sales with this content
What they said
Phil Mann from St Werburgh’s was very happy with the video and said:
“Thanks once again for all you have done to make this possible, we couldn’t have done it without you.”
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