Pastor, Christmas-and-Easter-only marketing is costing you the other 50 weeks.

When I ran an agency, I could set my calendar by the phone calls. Six weeks before Easter and four weeks before Christmas, the phone rang off the hook. The rest of the year? Quiet. That pattern is the myth in a nutshell: marketing is a seasonal purchase, like poinsettias. It costs churches more money, teaches them nothing, and leaves fifty weeks of harvest untouched.

Evangelism doesn’t run on your calendar

Start with the theology, because that’s where this decision actually lives. People get saved every Sunday. People need Jesus in February. The moment of desperation — the diagnosis, the separation, the layoff, the 2 a.m. panic — does not schedule itself around your growth windows.

You don’t know when your ad or your content will cross someone’s screen at exactly the moment they think I need God, and then I’m going to plan a visit this Sunday. Why would we limit our presence to two weekends and hope everybody’s crisis lines up?

There has never been a better day to advertise your church than today. There has never been a better time to make content inviting people to your church than right now.

The economics are working against you too

Here’s the part nobody tells pastors. Every church in your city is spending on ads during Easter. Every church is spending during Christmas. So in those two windows, ad auctions get crowded and your dollar buys less — fewer impressions, higher cost per result, worse placement.

You’re competing against everyone else in the algorithm, in the two weeks when everyone else showed up with cash. There are sharks in the water and you jumped in wearing a chum necklace.

The churches that run consistently all year are swimming in that same water every single day. Their audiences are warm, their creative is tested, their pixels have data, and their costs are lower before the season even starts. When Easter comes, they’re not buying awareness at peak prices — they already have it.

You learn nothing from a once-a-year buy

This is the cost I care about most. Say you drop $10,000 into an Easter campaign. You’re going to have a good Easter — you were always going to have a good Easter, because it’s Easter. Maybe the marketing made it better.

But what did you learn? Nothing you can use. You don’t know which hook held attention past three seconds, which format your community responds to, which audience converts, what your real cost per plan-a-visit is, or which staff member’s face outperformed the graphic. One campaign a year is one data point a year.

The learning happens in the month-to-month. Run consistently and within a quarter you’ll know what resonates and what doesn’t — and by the time the growth window arrives, you’re pouring fuel on creative you already know works. That’s the difference between a budget and a bet. I break the measurement down in what church marketing actually costs.

The geofence problem I see a hundred times a year

Every Easter I do something I probably shouldn’t admit to: I screenshot every church ad that reaches me from a church more than twenty miles outside my city. Last Easter I collected about a hundred of them.

A church in New York, advertising to me in Florida. A church in Oregon, paying to reach a guy who cannot possibly attend. Because I’m nice, I message every one of them: hey, make sure your geofence is on — your Easter ad is running in Florida and you’re seven states away. It’s a twenty-six hour drive; I’d love to come, but.

Those churches didn’t waste money because they’re foolish. They wasted it because they handed the ad account to someone who’d never run one, once a year, under deadline pressure, and nobody checked.

If you delegate it, resource it

I’m all for giving a young leader a shot — that’s how I got mine. But delegation without equipping is just dumping. Before someone runs a dollar of church money:

• Have them get the Google Ads certification. It’s free.
• Have them get the Meta certification. Also free.
• Have them verify the geofence on every campaign, and check it yourself the first few times.
• Give them twelve months, not one Easter, so they can actually learn the account.

These platforms give away serious training for nothing. There is no excuse for an uncertified volunteer running a five-figure buy alone.

Success doesn’t end the need to market

I flew into Phoenix a while back to consult with a church of about 3,000. The whole trip, my phone served me ads from three or four different churches — all young church planters, hungry, doing it right. And I could name ten megachurches in that metro who should have had an ad running and didn’t.

Success makes churches think they’ve outgrown marketing. But how did you get here? There was marketing under all of it — mailers two decades ago, newspaper ads before that, whatever the era offered.

The guy who built Wrigley’s got asked why the biggest gum company on earth keeps spending millions when nobody can catch them. His answer: because people need to chew gum tomorrow. Being at the top is not a reason to turn it off. The harvest is still right outside your door.

Fifty weeks of harvest

Grow-window spending is good. It’s just not where you stop. Fund the monthly line, fund the windows on top of it, geofence everything, and give whoever runs it a full year to get good.

Because the harvest is still outside your door on a random Tuesday in September — and on that Tuesday, most of your competition isn’t even in the water.