The Viral

Gospel

by
Chris Matts and
Jared Thurmon
 Copyright © 2020 Chris Matts and Jared Thurmon
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including
photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,
without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain oth-
er noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Book Design by HMDpublishing
 Table of Contents
Introduction 5
The Power of Social Media 7
Christ’s Method of Advertising 11
The Seeker’s Journey 13
Branding 16
Direct Response Ads 18
The Adventist Brand 23
The Great Controversy in Advertising 26
The 4 Stages of Awareness 29
Knowing your Community 32
The Seeker Profile 34
Where is Your Community? 39
Planning Your Campaign 41
Branded Posts 43
Direct Response Ads 46
Compliance 50
Writing to Different Audiences 52
Market Saturation 55
The Psychology of Facebook Ads 58
Branded Social Graphics 60
Direct Response Social Graphics 63
Branded Video Ads 64
Direct Response Video Ads 67
Facebook Pages and Groups 69
Scheduling Posts 70
Organic – Boosting – or Ads? 72
Introduction to Facebook Ads Part 1 74
Facebook Ads Part 2 75
Facebook Ads Part 3 77
Creating Audiences 79
Campaign Structure 84
Messenger Bots 91
Automated Bible Studies 94
Interest Follow Up 98
The 21st Century Evangelistic Series 100
The Power of a Podcast 103
Dealing with Negative Comments 107
Live Event Experiences 109
Conclusion 111
 I ntroduction

Introduction
W e want to welcome you to Advertise Like Jesus, our digital
evangelism course. The primary intent we had when we filmed
the course was to show people how to harness the power of digital
media. But after a few months, we realized some prefer reading the
steps in print—and thus, this book in your hands.
We are going to be sharing many exciting things with you—things we
have been learning over the past few months—so you’re going to want
to study this course all the way through. You are going to look at the
different sections and will want to review them all in order because we
have strategically arranged them that way so that you can get the best
learning experience.
We don't just want you to learn these things—we want you to apply
them, so we've made it very, very simple for you. This is a done-for-you
course, meaning we have already created the ads and different compo-
nents of the campaign. You literally just walk through the steps that
we've put together and then go in and plug them into your campaign,
and get them up and running. Now, you'll be able to generate leads,
Bible study interests for your church, and grow.
We want to tell you a little bit about how we started this course and
came up with this idea. A common friend introduced us. We combined
our respective backgrounds as a senior pastor and digital marketing
professional to consult with each other and understand these princi-
ples. We discussed how this is a very complicated world. We tested all
these elements in a local church and began to see results. We realized,
“You know, rather than just blasting out mailers and not knowing who

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you're going to reach, you can do things like targeting. You can really
know who you're going to reach—ages, genders, demographics.”
We further discussed how to harness these concepts. The local
church, in many parts of the world, has a few problems: It is small and
rural. How do they get the message out? They don’t often have a liberal
budget. However, we began to see results as we applied some of these
tools, but the problem was it had a very steep learning curve. Then, we
thought, “Not a lot of people have the ability to take the time to learn
it. How do we make it easy on them?” That's why we're here.
Many churches would reach out to tap into our expertise, and we
wouldn't even be able to help them because they didn't quite have the
budget to work with us. We were putting our heads together and think-
ing, “How do we bless all the churches in the Adventist community
with something where they can go out and take all the stuff that we've
learned through all the pain and suffering of testing things, the failures,
wasting money, etc.? How do we take our success and now multiply it?
How do we scale it?” And that's how this course came about. We are
really excited and have put a lot of time and effort into this.
Just to give you some context, last year alone, we spent about $20,000
on courses to learn and test what you are about to read. These are
from people in more secular fields of advertising from whom we have
been learning all these different features. We are pouring all of our
combined knowledge in advertising, entrepreneurship, pastoring, and
evangelism into this. We are putting our heads together here so that
we can provide you with the best resource to go out and start winning
souls and growing your church, ultimately, so we can see Jesus come
in our lifetime.
Here we go. You can take notes, but all the chapters are going to
be pretty explanatory. We are going to try to have some fun with this.
Without further ado, let's jump right in.

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 T he P ower of S ocial M edia

The Power of
Social Media
L et us start off sharing with you why social media is important—
why we think it's an important method for getting the word out
today—and how you can actually use it to win souls. It’s important to
use social media now because that's where people are, but it's not the
end-all-be-all. Many people probably hesitate, especially those who are
helping make decisions or come up with ideas in reaching new con-
verts. Some may say, “Evangelism happens in person, right? This is
not evangelism. This, in fact, may be a waste of time or a distraction.”
We see many people don't understand social media because they
think it's not genuine or people on social media are not serious. Many
believe most are watching cat videos and other strange things on social
media. Nevertheless, we know social media is a worthwhile platform
for saving souls because there are simply a lot of people there. And
if Jesus was alive today, we would like to think He would go where
the people were. That's what He did. He was always where the people
were.
In this case, the people are on social media. It's a community where
people are interacting; billions and billions of them are using these
different platforms today. Therefore, if you want to get in front of the
people, you have to be where they are.
What helped us understand this better was this is where we get peo-
ple's attention. It's not where we end the process. It's not about tak-
ing people through some Bible studies or digitally baptizing them and

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ushering them into the kingdom of heaven. Instead, this is the way
you can get people's attention and share information with them. Then,
you have to connect them with real people. That's the process through
which we're going to walk with you.
That was a paradigm shift for us because otherwise, people think this
just stays in the digital world. This is just the hook; it just gets people's
attention. However, without their attention, you can never drive them
down the path of making eternal decisions.
That is why we want to be where the people are. We know Jesus
would be where the people were; that's just how He does it. It is all
about building relationships, which needs to start somewhere, so this
is just a place for that relationship to start.
With that said, where are the people? They are all over the place.
There are a lot of different places online where you can reach people.
Social media is, by far, one of the easiest and cheapest avenues through
which to reach people. One of the really interesting things we've found
is that there are tons and tons of people online, searching for different
things to which we can speak, especially as Adventists. You can use
different tools like Google to show you some of these search results
based on the different keywords people are typing on their computers.
We actually did that and found there are almost 600,000 people on
Google, in the US alone, searching for different things like “the end
times,” “Bible prophecy,” “the second coming of Christ,” “why does
God allow suffering,” and other matters to which we have answers.
One of the things we want to weave into this session is a word of
encouragement: There are many people out there who don't believe
the harvest is ripe. They have gone out and poured a lot of money and
time into evangelism. We have done door-knocking and canvassing;
this marketing is by no means going to take the place of those things.
If anything, it will supplement and enhance the experience of those
things. We are really convinced that by using online advertising for
evangelism, the harvest truly is ripe.
The amount of response in just a short amount of time is remark-
able. We tested, in 48 hours, some of the ads you're going to literally be
able to use. We will probably say this statistic a lot: 48 hours with $75,

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 T he P ower of S ocial M edia

and we got 31 people who opted for Bible studies, with 22 of them
completing Lesson 1.
We reported this to the church at the time. These numbers consti-
tuted our pitch, and the members came alive. This is really happening!
Real humans want a Bible study from your local church. It can awaken
many people who question if this message is still relevant. Oh, it's very
relevant; people are looking for it. Nevertheless, you are also going to
find the haters, and we're going to talk about them later in this course,
but overall, we want people to feel encouraged.
One of the reasons why we are so excited about this course is it gives
individuals the ability to do evangelism wherever they are. You can tru-
ly use social media to achieve Total Member Involvement. You don't
really have to have permission—we'll just say it that way. Go out and
start your digital ministry. You don't even need permission from your
church. You can be an individual; you can be at church. You don't have
to go to another entity and start using its platform as a way to reach
people. You can start a YouTube channel today; you can start your own
Facebook page, Instagram account, whatever it is; you can put money
behind it, create good content, and start reaching people.
We will talk about the evolution of this type of enterprise because
some people may be thinking, “Oh, nobody's going to buy into why
we're going all-in and spending maybe hundreds or thousands on social
media.” The bottom line is there's nothing new under the sun. People
are just people at the end of the day, and what has happened over the
course of time is technology has changed. As technology changes, the
way people communicate changes as well. We know that pretty much
since the beginning of time, people have been communicating through
the written word, right? That was about it. You write something down
and send it off. That is basically how you communicated with people.
However, you then move into the printing press. Now you have
written communication en masse. From there, you have telecommuni-
cation, where people can communicate over the telephone; then you
have radio, TV, the Internet, and then you have search engines and
social media. As technology advances, we can now communicate with
those people with this new technology, and it's all about drawing the
attention of the person with whom we’re communicating.

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

We have all likely heard stories from grandparents where they used to
sit around the radio and just listen to things as if it was like a TV. They
sat around the radio, received all their information, entertainment, and
whatnot through the radio. Then the television comes along and totally
kills it. The attention shifts from radio to the TV, and now people are
spending a lot more time around their television, staring at the screen,
and then advertisers come along and start broadcasting ads.
Basically, advertisers ruin everything, oftentimes. As technology
changes, we see the attention shifting, so we've got to start putting
money there; we've got to start putting our ads out there. Now the
attention is on social media. Technology is going to keep advancing,
so it's not always even going to stay here. As technology advances, we
want to be where the people are—where they're engaged in commu-
nication.
To be honest with you, as the Adventist church, looking back at our
history, we've been pioneering a lot of these things. Ellen White spoke
a lot about the printing press and using that as a scalable means of
communication. We've been pioneers in radio and then TV ministry,
but for some reason or another, we just haven't caught up with this
whole online movement and means of communication. That's a big
reason why we've created this course.
The printing press especially fascinated us. It literally took a message
and made it the same. Everyone is getting the same message. Obvi-
ously, the Bible is the ultimate bastion of standing the test of time.
Someone who wants to know about the mark of the beast or whether
Sabbath is Saturday or Sunday can go find that information, and that's
amazing. Now we can literally harness this capability to determine
who's looking for this exact information and deliver it to them.
You couldn't do that with the radio. You couldn't type in, “I want to
know about this.” Now, it's almost this two-way communication that
gets people's attention. We are pretty excited to be online evangelists.
There's a lot of potential. There's a big reason why we should be using
these different forms of technology to communicate today. Hopefully,
by now, you are convinced, but if you're not convinced, we'll convince
you with a few more sessions, so just keep “tuning in,” i.e. reading.

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 C hrist ’ s M ethod of A dvertising

Christ’s Method of
Advertising
O ne of our partners in this venture spent thousands of dollars
over the past few years on different courses, learning, from all
these different marketing experts and gurus, how to advertise and be-
come an expert in the field himself. He became an Adventist just three-
and-a-half years ago. After joining the church, he started reading Ellen
White's writings, as well as the Bible, and found that Jesus is the Master
Marketer. Please read the quote from The Ministry of Healing (page 143)
about Christ's method alone, which we will paraphrase below. This
is the only way to do it. There's really no other way. If you want true
success, you have to follow His method.
What's interesting is we are looking at this in the context of adver-
tising. There's something here that's pretty cool: Christ’s method alone
will give true success in reaching the people. “The Savior mingled with
men as one who desired their good. He showed His sympathy for
them, ministered to their needs, and won their confidence.” You can
see it in sequence: He mingled with them; He ministered to them; He
showed His sympathy; and as a result of this, He won their confidence.
In sales, we call this “building rapport”—building a relationship with
your consumer.
Before you try to get them to buy something or attend your events—
this is something with which we really struggle in the church because
we are typically just trying to get the public to attend our events. We
are often in closing mode, never building any rapport, so our “cost per
acquisition”— another marketing term—reflects gross inefficiency. It

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costs us $500 to get one person to attend our events, and it's because
we are always going for the close with a cold audience.
Jesus was a master at warming up his audience and building a rela-
tionship with them before He asked them to do anything. The result
of this—if we do all this: “Then He bade them, ‘Follow me.’” He went
for the close at the right time. We have a promise here, don’t we? And
the key phrase in the next sentence in The Ministry of Healing says – all
of this was “accompanied by the power of persuasion.”
Let’s talk about this really quickly. Many times, people get confused
by the word “persuasion.” They think it's not good to persuade people,
but there is a difference between persuasion and manipulation. When
one tries to persuade a person to do something, it's because it can ben-
efit that person. It may or may not also benefit the persuader. Manip-
ulation has to do with getting a person to do something that does not
benefit them at all. The manipulator is driven by personal gain only.
In the context of following Christ’s example, the power of persua-
sion is the power of prayer—the power of the love of God. There's a
promise here that this work will not be in vain. Christ’s method is how
you do it.
To all who have been spending all this money on evangelism, send-
ing out mailers, etc., we want to clarify that we are not mocking mailers.
We can use them with the right strategy. However, what we're going
to talk about in this course is how you become a master at building
relationships at scale with thousands and thousands of people in your
community so that when you go for the close—send out those mail-
ers and use other forms of advertisements to get people to attend
your event—they are more receptive, and you're not spending as much
money as you have been. This works!

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 T he S eeker ’ s J ourney

The Seeker’s
Journey
L et’s talk about the customer journey map. This is our favorite part.
As you think through this, we are creating a map to take people
from one place to another. We know getting someone from point A
(e.g., being an atheist) all the way to point B (e.g., being an Adven-
tist soul-winning evangelist) doesn't just happen in one conversation.
We wish it was that easy—it would cost a lot less money—but no, it
doesn't work that way.
Obviously, we know there's a process in getting people to become a
baptized, Adventist soul-winner. And we need to start thinking about
that through the prism of Christ's method of evangelism and using
that in an online context. Therefore, we are going to talk a little bit
more about relational things.
It is good to identify where people are on this journey and assume
everyone is probably at Stage 1 because they don't know you. So, we
will walk through how to identify that these people are probably at the
“stranger” stage.
We will use a combination of marketing terms and pastoral terms for
these things. In the beginning, we were generally trying to build aware-
ness. In most cases, people may have never met you before. Therefore,
you want to build awareness so that you can start building rapport.
With this first step, you're getting them to engage. You exist. In Step
Two, they like you. Then it moves all the way up to them trusting and
respecting you, so now you're making a call to action. You're getting

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

them to make a decision, and they're receptive to it because you are

someone who they like, trust, and respect. You are more of a friend;
you mingled; you listened. Now, you're turning the corner and starting
to win some confidence.
Once you get them to make some type of decision, whether this is
doing Bible studies or attending your church, evangelistic series, health
program, or cooking school, you want to give them so much value
at that experience, so they get excited. You want to get them excited
because when you do, they're in a state where they're primed to make
more decisions you want them to make. You can start making more
calls to action, and they're going to be more willing to do what you
want them to do.
In sales and marketing, when we do this, we get someone to buy
something that's really affordable. We give them a really good expe-
rience and start to get them excited. Then, we can start selling them
more expensive things so that we can make money off of them. How-
ever, in the case of discipleship, we're not selling them things.
Let's jump on that point. In the beginning stages, you're spending a
lot of money advertising, getting the word out there about who you
are and the events you're holding. You're bringing in guest speakers. A
lot of times, this is where public evangelism may come, as well as all
these different events upon which you spend all this money. However,
the return, if we were looking at a financial return, is they become soul
winners. They go tell their friends and support the movement, and the
process starts over.
This is different lingo but the same exact concept. Again, Jesus is
the greatest marketer of all time. When Chris came into the church, he
had a sales background, so he saw sales funnels and all these different
strategies. Then he came into the church, saw the cycle of evangelism
and discipleship, and concluded these are one in the same.
In this course, we are not going to cover the whole journey. There is
a backend part where you're discipling and nurturing people once they
become baptized members and then soul winners. We are not going
to talk about that stuff as much in this course. We are going to talk
about getting people to make decisions so they'll start coming to your

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 T he S eeker ’ s J ourney

church events. You are not spending as much money on advertising

to get people to go to your evangelistic series, cooking classes, health
programs, etc.
We are going to be focusing on how to do these things in a scalable
way online, specifically using Facebook advertising, social media, and
marketing to build relationships with people and get them to like, trust,
and respect you so that when you invite them to a cooking school,
health program, or evangelistic series. They're willing to come. That is
what we are going to discuss, and we are excited.

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

Branding
T his is one of our favorite topics: branding. This is, in essence,
what people think of you; this is your reputation; this is your
character. When it comes to starting this first step in the journey of in-
troducing ourselves to the world around us, specifically the community
online, we will discuss what that looks like.
Branding is super important. We have reiterated the fact that Christ
spent a lot of time ministering to people, mingling with them, and
winning their confidence, right? Ellen White mentioned Jesus spent
more time healing people than He did preaching. In essence, we could
say Jesus was a master at branding. He was a master at getting people to
think what He wanted them to think about Him. Therefore, you need
to take control of your story and get people to think about what you
want them to think about you. Let us provide an example—because
sometimes it's rather difficult to understand this—specifically, of some
Sabbath-keepers who sell camera equipment:
This is a brief history of B&H, everyone's favorite photo and
video store. The year was 1973. The Mets went to the World Se-
ries. The first cell phone call was made, and Blimie and Herman
opened a specialty photography shop at 17 Warren Street, New
York City.
They had a simple philosophy: Be honest. Treat people well and
they will come back.… Also, free candy, and it worked. Over the
next 20 years, we expanded and moved to West 17th Street, then
34th Street and 9th Avenue, and added more products: lighting,
binoculars, telescopes, audio, video, tripods computers, printers,
mobile, televisions, projectors, drones, and even more free candy.

16
 B randing

Now it's three stores and over 400,000 products and over a thou-
sand employees. We take millions of orders online and ship to
179 countries and counting. You can talk to us in person, on the
phone, or online. Check out our checkout baskets. Also check
out our checkout numbers. Also check out the flare on [the
agent’s] vest.
And everyone's favorite part: our conveyor belt. The benefit of
the conveyor belt is you don't have to worry about the product
or schlep it around anymore until checkout.
Nice! These are the owners. They still come to work every day.…
This is our warehouse. This is Yaccov and Levi fighting over
lighting kits. B&H is not a chain. B&H is open every day, except
Saturdays, of course. Now you know almost the whole story. We
are B&H.
From this history, you can see very clearly that they did not ask you
one time to buy something from them. All they did was tell their story
and got you to think about what they wanted you to think about them.
They subtly persuaded you to remember them. Now, when you're in
the electronics market and ready to make a purchasing decision, you
think of B&H, right? When you go to buy a camera or other device,
you're going to start thinking of B&H as the solution to the problem
you have.
This is very different from direct-response advertising, and we will
talk about that shortly.

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

Direct
Response Ads
Y ou have now built up a reputation in your community. The people
know, “Wow, these Adventists are the longest-living Americans.
Did you know this about them? I didn't know this about them. And
they're not all vegetarians.” They know a little bit, at least to the point
of not thinking we're a cult anymore, and that is a significant success,
right? Yes, it is, especially down South, where health is often not taken
as seriously.
Now that they know about who we are, it seems like we have won
some confidence. Now we can go towards direct-response advertising,
so let’s break that down. Direct-response advertising is what it sounds
like. You are getting people to take action directly from that piece of
advertisement. You have probably seen a lot of infomercials in your
lifetime. You have received flyers, magazines, and whatnot in your mail.
Those are good examples. Any ad that says, “Hey, click here to buy
this,” is usually attached to some type of incentive or discount promo-
tion, such as “buy two, get one free.” Direct-response advertising is an
art, and we are going to give you all the tools in this course to teach you
how to write your own direct-response ads. We will even put together
some direct-response ads that we've been testing in the field and have
been working on, and you guys will have direct access to that. You can
download or copy and paste them and start your campaigns immedi-
ately with those ads.

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 D irect R esponse A ds

Direct-response advertising is also a science. That has been fasci-

nating to us. It is not just a matter of thinking, “Now that you know
who I am, buy my stuff ” or “Now that you know who we are, come to
our events.” There is a way to get into it, which we will discuss shortly.
Right now, we are actually going to share transcriptions of two sample
direct-response video ads: one we made and one that prompted one of
our partners to spend $2,000:
Are you feeling tired? exhausted? stressed out? I'm not. Maybe
you should consider working less and trying Sabbathrest.
Studies have shown that Sabbathrest can reconnect you with re-
ality.
Sabbathrest can remind you that life is more than answering ev-
ery ping or ding
From the people that brought you breakfast cereal comes cre-
ation-strength Sabbathrest.
Are you tired of the rat race or frustrated at the lack of likes on
your selfies ‘cause your daughter won't smile?
If you're angry, depressed, or wondering if your boss is Satan,
try Sabbathrest today. Side effects may include peace of mind,
losing your job, or, in some rare cases, persecution.
Ask your pastor if Sabbathrest and creation Sabbath are right
for you.
And cut.
Look, this is great and all, but most people watching this have
already heard of the Sabbath and creation. How we tell other
people about this is what gets me excited.
Hi, I'm Jared. Though I look like a hungry Chuck Norris, I pas-
tor an Adventist church, and Sabbath is the best day of my week.
But sadly, many people don't believe in this weekly holiday or
creation. Many believe we came from [monkeys]. Every day, we
see the destructive results of indifference toward the very cre-
ation that was entrusted to us. But if the world had a weekly
holiday to celebrate and remember that we were created for a
purpose, what would be the result?

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

This coming October 24, I'm inviting you to join me and mil-
lions of other Sabbath celebrators as we seek to share about
creation Sabbath, not just with ourselves, but with our neighbors.
To pick up a creation-strength prescription of Sabbathrest for
you and your community, click below to register your church and
get access to awesome resources to make your creation Sabbath
fun, easy, and restful.
Or here is The Purple Mattress:
What's a super easy way to tell that your bed is awful? The raw
egg test. Let me prove it.
When it comes to mattresses, you used to only have three choic-
es: Looking for some shoulder pain? Try a hard mattress. It may
feel like a rock and put pressure on your hips, but it's the perfect
way to tell your partner, “Hey baby! Wants some arthritis?” It
just fails the raw egg test. Then there's the soft mattress. It starts
out okay, but collapses over time, like some cheap sneakers or
Anakin Skywalker. And since it comes without back support, you
get to try cool new hobbies, like chronic pain. But it also fails the
raw egg test.
Now let me explain the eggs. The raw egg test states that the
perfect bed will let you put weight on raw eggs without breaking
them ‘cause if a bed can cradle raw eggs while supporting all
that weight, it'll also cradle your pressure points while supporting
your body for maximum comfort. Well, if the hard bed's bad at
cradling and the soft bed's bad at supporting, at least the medium
bed is just… terrible! It's not firm enough for back support or
soft enough for your pressure points, so in the end, it's just a sad
middle ground, like limbo or a whoosy centaur.
It's average. No one wants average. Now, to get around that,
some beds come with $5,000 remotes so you can choose be-
tween hard-bed problems or soft-bed problems. They're so high
tech, they fail the raw egg test twice.
I don't need a bed that's hard, soft, or average. I need the best
of firm and soft without the drawbacks. Introducing Purple, the

20
 D irect R esponse A ds

only mattress that cradles your pressure points like a soft bed
while supporting everywhere else like a firm one.
Need proof ? Let's check… double check… triple check… all the
checks. I'm really heavy for a little girl from a fairytale.
Yes, these eggs are raw, and no, we didn't fake it. How lame
would that be? You're lame for thinking that. How can a bed be
this comfortable? Maybe because it has 15 patents, was created
by an actual rocket scientist, and uses a comfort-grid system to
distribute weight across any body type, giving you the best sleep
you've ever had, guaranteed. Thanks, science.
Now, there's a catch. Most high-end mattresses cost $5,000, but
ours is only $1,000. We're sorry about that. We're the best.…
And while you're saving money, you'll save time, too, because
we're shipping Purple right to your door for free.…
We're so convinced you'll love Purple, if it doesn't change your
life in the first 100 nights, we'll take it back for a complete refund.
That's the Purple no-pressure guarantee. So if you or someone
you love sleeps, click here to buy your purple at onpurple.com
and say goodbye to the rock-hard prison bed, the saggy swamp
bed, the average bed, and the expensive remote. Get yourself
into a Purple.… Click now to start your 100-night trial of noc-
turnal bliss.
No pressure. It's Purple.
Chris spent $2,000 in response to the latter ad and loves his mattress.
That is probably a big part of it. People have to feel like after they have
responded to your direct response, they have received value. That's
where even some testing and experimentation can come in, for you
have to make sure what you're saying is credible and delivers on the
intent. In the grand scheme of things, you want to make sure you're
building trust all along the way so that when you go for the bigger asks
in the future, they are more receptive to those things.
For example, if we sold a smaller, lower-ticket item—let's say it costs
five dollars—we want them to buy that five-dollar product and think,
“Man, this is worth $50!” Then, we're going to hit them with a product
that actually does cost $50, and they're going to buy it and have the

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same experience. Then, we're going to upsell them to something that

costs $500, then eventually $5,000.
To explain this further, there is this idea Ellen White presented:
when we teach people about health, this is an entering wedge. She
stated that once people realize how much we know about health, they
will conclude we know about other things, too. It's about delivering on
that promise.
We call that upselling. Direct-response advertising, being persuasive,
and going for the close is something we, as Adventists, spend a lot of
time doing with our marketing, yet we're not really good at it. We don't
do branding at all. Therefore, you combine the two and get amazing
results. That is exactly what we're seeing with our church and many of
our other clients.

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 T he A dventist B rand

The Adventist
Brand
L et's talk about the Adventist brand. There are many things we
could say about this, but it has been all the more real to us recent-
ly when we've been doing online advertising, working with our local
church, and finding that the brand is what people say about us. If we're
not saying enough about ourselves, it's what other people think. With
us, we have found that our brand has become “Aren't all those people
vegetarians?” “Those people worship Ellen White,” “Those people are
working their way to heaven,” and other crazy stuff.
We wish they were saying, “Aren't they the longest-living Ameri-
cans?” “Don't they have the largest Protestant healthcare network in
the world?” “They have the largest Protestant health education system
in the world.” “They are the most diverse U.S. denomination.” These
things are what constitute a great brand for us.
However, people do not know these things. Why not? They don't
know these things because we're not branding. We're not telling our
story. Therefore, we're not in control of our story. We're just allowing
people's imaginations to run wild. They're telling themselves whatever
they want to conclude about us, filtering through Google search, their
skeptical friends, a really upset grandpa, or whomever it is. They're
letting that dictate what they believe about Adventists.
Therefore, branding, or in our case, rebranding Adventism, is some-
thing that is going to take a long time. What we're going to actually
suggest in this course is that you use your church's Facebook page,

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rather than set up your sub-page. We will say, “This is Hope in Proph-
ecy,” “Unlocking Revelation,” or something like that. We are guilty of
setting up of these sub-brands, and it does not do anything for us. It's
like putting a bandage over a bullet wound—it’s a short-term fix.
Sure, if you start saying, “Hey, we are an Adventist organization and
want you to come to our evangelistic series,” you are probably not
going to get a ton of people. That is exactly why we're using these sub-
brands. If you do this long enough and actually start building up what
we call “brand equity,” then people will start attending these events
over time.
Let’s touch on a particular point really quickly because we think it's
really important: We're spending all this money, building these sub-
brands, and every year, we reinvent a new one (new domains, new
logos, etc.). We're building this brand equity behind each of these little
sub-brands, but that equity has never transferred over. Imagine what
would happen if we put all that behind a brand that's going to stay
consistent. The only thing that's really going to stay consistent is the
Seventh-day Adventist Church.
We can give you an obnoxious example. One of our partners and his
wife were on their anniversary. While they were walking the streets of
some Caribbean Island, a gentleman walked up to them and said, “Hey,
would you like some ganja [marijuana]?”
“Okay,” our partner replied. “You know, I'm going to let you down
here. I'm going to be a bore. But I'm from these people called the Sev-
enth-day Adventists, and we're just not into those things.”
This guy in long dreads looks at him and says, “You people are pro-
tected. You have a nice day.”
That local guy’s idea of the Seventh-day Adventist brand was only
what our partner told him. He didn't know him from Adam, but he
knew something “interesting” with these people and God is with them.
If it had been an event where it wasn't branded with the Seventh-day
Adventist brand, he likely would have said, “Oh yeah, you're with the
whole prophecy countdown.”
When we do something good, people are oftentimes not knowing
who we are because we're branding using sub-brands. And when peo-

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 T he A dventist B rand

ple start thinking bad things, they associate that with the Seventh-day
Adventist Church because we're not really in control of that story. We
need to take initiative. This is something that will take a long time, but
if we did it collectively, it can change a lot.
We are not going to change our story overnight. We will not immedi-
ately convince people that we're not a cult or something of that nature.
We just need to take control of our own story and start changing the
minds of our audience. We're going to show you exactly how to do
that.

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

The Great
Controversy in
Advertising
W e told you one of our partners is a new Adventist, and growing
up, he experienced a lot of adversity at home. When he came
into the church, the understanding of the war going on between good
and evil and why God allows suffering to happen really affected him
and changed his life. What we have all started to realize is the great
controversy is weaving through everything, even advertising.
This realization opened up our whole worldview. You start to look
at commercials very differently. We earlier touched on this idea of per-
suasion versus manipulation. Sex sells, but you're hijacking the body's
systems, so it's this idea of the great controversy in advertising. The
devil can get us to do stuff, buy stuff, and go places, but he's just hi-
jacking the system. However, God's method is entirely different.
Let’s discuss a contrast. Basically, in the human mind, we don't have
to get into everything like that, but within your mind, there are two
main motivators: a desire for gain and a fear of loss. Many times, what
we see in the church and our advertising speaks more to the fear of
loss. To explain this really important point, we have these big beasts,
burning buildings, and declarations that the world is coming to an end.
We are trying to scare people to get their attention. It may not be inten-
tional, but it scares people. This gets you the quicker, more immediate
results.

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 T he G reat C ontroversy in A dvertising

However, we believe this is Satan's form of advertising. He uses a

more fear-based approach and things that get you to make an imme-
diate decision, but what you'll notice is that the fear-based approach
is not very “sticky,” meaning that sure, you can get someone to do
something, but you won't get that person to stay. We spend a whole lot
of money getting people into the church, but many of them leave very
soon after they come in. Our partner came into the church three-and-
a-half years ago and knows a few people who have entered and already
left the church within that span, and that's very sad. Therefore, what
we want to do is start using Jesus's form of advertising, which taps into
people's desire for gain—something more in the long term.
Let’s break this down: based on the great-controversy theme, we can
see God had a decision to make when the war in heaven broke out.
He could have destroyed Lucifer and the other rebelling angels, but
He chose not to do so. Right. Why did He make that choice? Because
if He had destroyed the rebels, then the other angels would have just
followed Him out of fear. God knew that His beings following Him
out of fear wouldn't last. Another war would have probably broken
out. He knew He needed to let this whole thing play out to get the best
results—beings worshipping Him out of love.
In examining our church, we are not going after long-term results.
Many times, we're focusing on the immediate quick fix, putting a ban-
dage over bullet wounds. If we want to see real results with our ad-
vertising, especially since we spend a lot of money on advertising, we
need to start using God's approach, tapping into those desires for gain
and using branding and strong, direct-response principles to get peo-
ple to stay.
This is interesting because the temptation is to just get it done. If
we were in heaven, Jesus, let's just get this in Satan. Let's get on with
life. The temptation with ads is, “Can we just tell them to come to our
event because this is good for them and they need to be there rather
than…?” We need to build our reputation and rapport with the public.
Often, we get these calls from pastors, and they'll say, “We're having
an evangelistic series next month. We want you to start running some
ads for us.” All the while, we're thinking, “If you're having an evange-
listic series next month, you have no relationship with those people.

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

How are we going to get them to attend your event? Are we going
to scare them into it?” Right. It is our only fallback plan because we
don't think about marketing for your church from a long-term point
of view. It is just a quick fix to get people to your events and get your
numbers up, but it's really just wasting your money. You might as well
light it on fire.
The best approach is to give the people something better.

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 T he 4 S tages of A wareness

The 4 Stages of
Awareness
W e want to talk to you about the four stages of awareness. This
is pretty exciting because this is more on the seeker's journey.
How do you take people from where they are to where you want them
to be? This is often called a “sales funnel.”
Before we use actual funnels for demonstration, we will share a tes-
timony with you. We have seen a lot of growth and engagement with
our online content at our church, and one of the reasons why is we
figured out where people are in their journey in the funnel. Even as we
prepare sermons or you prepare for messaging people—whether it's
online or from the pulpit—it really helps.
If you know specifically the people to whom you are talking are at
the bottom of the funnel, you hear statements like, “We're all Adven-
tists here right now. Turn with me to {Christ’s Object Lessons?} page 36.
We're going to look at what Ellen White says about SDAs.” Then you
think, “Oh, that is bottom-of-the-funnel, insider-information stuff.”
However, if you're reaching somebody who's not somewhere in
there—well, in general—there are these different tiers within the fun-
nel. And in some cases, people are not even in the funnel. We call this
“no food.” What this means is they don't know they even have a prob-
lem you can solve.
Let’s first start by defining your market as people who have a prob-
lem you can solve. These people were not in the funnel. They don't
even know they have a problem you can solve, nor do they know you

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

have a solution. Then you have the top of the funnel. These people
know they have a problem, but they're not aware of any solution. It is
a little bit easier to communicate with them because they're aware of
the problem they have.
Then you have the middle of the funnel. These people are aware of
the problem. They're also aware of solutions, but they're not aware of
you and what you offer as the best solution to their problem. Then
you have the bottom of the funnel. These people are the easiest ones
to sell or persuade because they now think of you as the solution to
their problem.
In marketing, advertising, and evangelism, our whole goal is to find
where people are in the funnel—top, middle, wherever—and move
them through to the bottom of the funnel. You do that very strategi-
cally to get people to make those certain types of decisions. And again,
this is just a reiteration of Christ’s method of evangelism. Jesus is the
Master Advertiser. He was able to take people where they were in the
funnel and move them through so that they were able to make that
decision.
This is pretty fascinating. If you look at it in our context, people in
the funnel don't really think they have a problem; therefore, they don't
need a solution to an imaginary problem. We would call these people
“atheists.” Then, you go to the next level. This would be other faiths or
at least spiritual-mindedness. People of this persuasion recognize there
is a problem but are not really sure of the solution. They are exploring
if there is a solution, but they at least know they have a problem.
Then, you drop down the funnel to Christians. “Well, I have a prob-
lem. I want to be saved. And I think I found a solution, but not what
Seventh-day Adventists have found.” You get down to the bottom,
and it's this beautiful sweet spot.
We determined that we can reach people at these various stages, all
at the same time, so we've created ads. You're going to get to use them.
We've been using them with our local church, targeting atheists, Chris-
tians, people who are spiritual—and talking to them all differently. You
don't have to run these all through your public page. You're running
these ads so that the atheist who is seeing an ad is different from what

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 T he 4 S tages of A wareness

the Christian person sees. You're going to reach those people very dif-
ferently with totally different references. That is what gets us excited
about this idea of the sales funnel and building on the complementary
idea of the secret journey.
We are going to show you exactly how to create the ads. All these
actions are really important because you need to know to whom you're
writing. It's very, very critical. If you don't know to whom you're writ-
ing and how aware they are of their problem and the solution you can
provide for them, you're never going to reach them. You're just guess-
ing and assuming.

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

Knowing your
Community
I f you want to have success with your evangelistic marketing efforts,
you need to know your community. It is absolutely critical. This is
really important for us. At the local church, they started to use some of
the census data, which is reasonably attainable. There are other areas
about which we will tell you.
In the meantime, the church started to see they had a reading-level
issue in the area. Many people did not have a high reading level, so that
led them to say, “Hey, the ministry needed here is tutoring and story-
time so that kids are reading at the optimal level.” Another, perhaps
more extreme, example of this would be to offer cooking classes in
Tokyo because nobody is cooking and everybody is eating out. You
really need to know your community if you want to have success in
marketing.
In running this marketing company, we have a lot of people who are
always coming to us, asking us different things and whether or not we
can help them grow their business and solve different problems. There
are many cases where people fall in love with their own ideas, create
a business, yet nobody wants to buy what they have. They fail and go
out of business.
Many times, in churches, we do the same thing. We create all these
different events and actions to try to reach our community, which cost
a lot of money and take a lot of time, but nobody comes, and we don't
find success.

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 K nowing your C ommunity

The main frustration is it seems like we are limited in determining

our success. It is predicated on someone else deciding to give us atten-
tion and investment. Additionally, we probably run into those in our
ranks who say, “This worked for me. It worked for my grandfather.
This is the way we should always do it.” They tend to be out of touch,
which is a major hindrance. You have to know your community.
We touched on census data earlier. That is a wonderful way to tap
into knowing your community based on basic demographics and other
information. What you want to do is ask your community what they
need. Walk around your community, mingle with people, meet them,
call Town Hall and different officials in your city, and figure out what's
happening—what types of needs you can fulfill with your church's
evangelistic efforts, what types of events you can have, and more.
It makes all the more difference because that research you're doing
“in the flesh”—in real life—will affect your digital marketing. It will
affect the efficiency and resonance of your ads, which means your ad
dollars are going further. These platforms reward you for having con-
tent that's more relevant to the audience that you're actually trying to
target. To reiterate, you need to know your community.

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

The Seeker Profile

L et's talk about our favorite part of this whole journey: the people
with whom we are talking. This is an actual example. We started
to talk through something and wanted to work through it with you
because you must know those with whom you are talking.
You have been able to go out into your community. You have maybe
walked around, spent some time getting to know people, called Town
Hall, or looked online, finding some census data and gathering all these
different numbers. How can you make those numbers useful? We will
be going through this exercise where we're creating a customer avatar.
This is something we're creating based on all of those numbers.
It is more of a person to whom we're writing our ads that we are
targeting because when you're trying to speak to all those different
numbers you've been collecting, it's very challenging because of vary-
ing demographics. Is the person 18-to-35 years old? You want to make
sure you are always talking to a person at the end of the day with the
ads that you're creating.
This is also applicable to something like writing sermons. You write
it to a person or persons—first to Cornelius, then to Susan, etc.—and
they come from different areas. This approach really helps you write
copy and properly incorporate the images you're using. It is pretty im-
portant.
Additionally, you have this worksheet you can print and fill out your-
self; it is also a downloadable PDF you can just fill out as well. Let's
walk through it. We did this here in this Georgia community and came
up with some different results. Here is Cornelius. He is a male from
Atlanta, age 35.

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 T he S eeker P rofile

As we were going through this, we started to think about friends

and loved ones we would love to reach with this amazing message.
Anyway, continuing with Cornelius, he’s married. He is hard to reach,
but we believe he's going to be an amazing Seventh-day Adventist one
day. He has a busy life as a production manager (Atlanta is known as
the “Hollywood of the South”). He's making $600,000 a year and has
a bachelor's degree. This tells you some of the demographics of Cor-
nelius, and there are these other categories.
Next, we are going to look at some of his goals and values. This
is fun to do because you discover real information about the people
in your community. For example, 73% of the people in this zip code
we're trying to reach are married. They all have a home. Therefore,
homeownership and financial issues may be something to address.
This is where you start to think, “You know what? Maybe some finan-
cial health and peace seminars might be good.”
You start to know the demographics. What are the people in IRA
making? If we charge $100 for a cooking class, are people going to
come? If we don't charge at all, are people going to value it? You start
to really think through some of these things like goals and values. We
thought Cornelius is in shape; he's a great dad; he's looking for finan-
cial freedom; he probably has some stress in his life; he wants a happy
marriage. This is where you start to say, “You know what? Maybe a
marriage seminar would reach him.”
We are going to start to find some ways in which to reach Cornelius.
This starts to give you a picture of who he is, but then you have to
figure out how to get into this guy's life. You start to paint in all these
blank spaces: he probably lives in the suburbs; he's probably driving to
work in Atlanta traffic. That's probably a 70-minute commute. Then
we start to say, “Okay, he has 70 minutes on the way to work. Maybe he
could listen to something. He really wants a happy marriage; he wants
financial freedom; maybe he has kids, so we need to offer Christian
children’s programming.
These information sources are based on where Cornelius is spend-
ing his time. As you can see, he's spending his time on Facebook. He
gets a lot of information from Forbes, so he’s interested in business
and entrepreneurship. He also looks up Fox, Instagram, and YouTube.

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

These are some places where we can start to understand a person’s

likes, dislikes, etc.
We like to look at other ads that people are using in a given informa-
tion source. With something like Forbes or Fox, it mirrors the person-
ality they're pursuing. There are many times they spent a lot of money
doing market research, thus taking the challenge or learning curve out
of it for you.
Another thing here is if you really get into this, and you're thinking,
“What or who are the influencers in this guy's life?” We now live in
an age where you can contact influencers and say, “This guy is in love
with this one financial guru who teaches all this stuff. He buys all these
courses. Maybe we have that guru do a seminar on finances.”
Knowing who has a rapport with him so you can leverage it to build
your own immediate rapport is pivotal. Here are some really good in-
sights here, similar to what we discussed earlier regarding goals and
values. You want to figure out what this person wants because people
do things for self-interested reasons. They do something because they
value it or are striving for a goal they want to fulfill. Therefore, you
want to make sure you can speak to their goals and values and help
them overcome their struggles and challenges.
This is not an assumption. This replicates what it’s like to actually
be buddies with Cornelius. Imagine if he said, “I struggled with lust.
What do I do about that?”; “I'm always tired”; “I'm a workaholic”;
“I'm trying to get financial freedom.” This starts to give you some
ideas of things he recognizes are problems. He is subtly starting to
look for solutions here, so that's something to consider as we come up
with ways to serve.
These are struggles. These are things to which we can definitely
speak. Then, an objection that he would have for us if we tried to in-
vite him to church is that he is an agnostic. There are probably some
more issues here, and we can expand upon that. Maybe he just doesn't
like Christians. He was brought up in a Christian home but has this
negative concept of what a Christian is, so it makes it even harder to
reach him.

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 T he S eeker P rofile

We are definitely dealing with someone who is not in the funnel as

we talked about earlier, where he is not even aware that he has a prob-
lem we can solve. Therefore, you are not going to come out and say,
“Oh, you want to overcome loss, chronic fatigue, or being a workahol-
ic, come do some Bible studies or attend our evangelistic series.” He is
not even going to care.
As you're thinking about how to reach people like Cornelius, it's not
through a lead-generation, automated Bible study or inviting him to
an evangelistic seminar, right? At least not from the get-go. It might
be a branding ad about health, especially pertaining to something like
chronic fatigue, and you're literally in his world now. “Yeah, I am al-
ways feeling tired. What do I do?” And Seventh Avenue Church has
so much to share about health and can teach him something valuable.
Then he starts to say, “Wow, this is pretty good. I need some more
sleep and maybe some work-life balance. Now, we can start to enrich
his life, especially using the right hand of the gospel.
You want to make sure you're going through this exercise. We are
going to keep reiterating this point because if you don't do this, you're
going to start writing ads and that are not going to be effective. You
want to write an ad that is actually going to resonate with a person. You
need to know who they are, based on the data you're gathering out in
the field, and this is the best way to do it.
Imagine sitting across from someone and having a conversation with
that person. What objections will he or she give you regarding why he
or she is not going to come to your event or do the thing you want
that person to do? Thank about some of these types of struggles and
challenges someone may have so that when you go to write an ad, you
can speak directly to that person.
We have tested this a few times and thought specifically about doing
something young moms and their kids would love. Additionally, we
find that 35-year-old men are engaging with a particular ad. You are
going to test this out and start to figure out the reason why you want
resonance so much is because if you spend a dollar to go reach one
hundred Corneliuses, you'd love to have ten or twenty of them share
it organically with their audiences, and it will repeat, and hopefully, go
viral.

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

What happens here is Facebook will reward you if your content is

relevant to the audience you're targeting, so you want to make sure
it's pertinent and not a waste of money. Go through this exercise,
download the worksheet, and have fun with it. Spend some time going
through this on your own; then go through it with your church board,
as well.

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 W here is Y our C ommunity ?

Where is Your
Community?
A very important part of knowing your community is knowing
where they are and how you can reach them. This has been ex-
tremely informative. We will give the best example. We had a church
strategy session (AKA a business meeting) a few weeks ago with a lot
of ages represented. There were some thoughts we had on ways we
have been reaching people—some ideas we have been talking about
how we could reach new, different demographics.
We went around and asked people, “Hey, if someone was to get into
your life to share a message with you that they have not been able to
share before, how would they do it? Before we begin, let’s start with
the youngest person in the room.” Someone who was around 14 said,
“Instagram;” a couple others, 18 and 19, also said, “Instagram.” Then,
someone a little older, 21, said, “Facebook and Instagram.” Another
younger person preferred TikTok.
The fact that all these youth chose these different platforms was
interesting. However, you start to ask people who are a little north
of 50, and they say, “I might listen online,” or “I might engage with
Facebook.” Someone else said, “I would look in the newspaper.” It's
interesting how you can find different groups of people. Pretty much
everybody's on Facebook, but then you start to get more nuanced as
you get into the social platforms.
This is very important because there are different demographics you
want to reach through your church. If you are having VBS, you are

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

going to reach young parents and their kids. However, you can't really
market to nine-year-old kids very easily on social media, but you can
market to 34-year-old moms, right?
Well, where are the 34-year-old moms, and how are you going to
reach them? What matters to them? This idea of where your commu-
nity lies is really important as you're creating a strategy for who you
want to reach and how you reach them, which we’re going to discuss.
In this course, we are going to talk about how to reach your community
through paid advertising, specifically on Facebook and Instagram, be-
cause those two platforms encompass pretty much every demographic
and will give you the best bang for your buck, as far as advertising
dollars are concerned.

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 P lanning Y our C ampaign

Planning Your
Campaign
T his is one of the most important steps in the whole course: Plan-
ning your campaign. This is really where you want to start. Re-
member the words of Scripture, write the vision, and make it plain.
You may want to consider the evangelistic calendar. What are we going
to do at our church in the next year? Are we going to have a Christmas
program? Easter program? Evangelistic series? Health program?
That was the first thing we tried to do at the local church. We got
everyone together and said, “How do we feel called to reach this com-
munity? In what ways?” If you start to list all those out, try and include
as much as you can with as much budget as you have. You start to lay
all those out and say, “Okay, if we want to do all these different live
events, how are we going to get people to attend them?”
For example, if we want to do Bible studies, how are we going to get
people to those Bible studies? Again, you start to lay those out through
the year and then build upon them through direct-response ads. That is
a very straightforward way to get someone to attend that event. How-
ever, if you had a health program at or near your church, why would
someone come to it? A random person won't think you're an expert in
health. This is why the branding campaigns are so important.
We put these on the calendar with the mindset of following Christ's
method. Remember this rule: We can't tell people to come to an event
if they don't know who we are. Therefore, we are going to plan ahead
of time, yet scale back, executing little by little at a time, saying, “All

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 THE VIRAL GOSPEL

right, as we start the next few months, we want to just let the commu-
nity know we're Adventists.”
We are passionate about health, and this is why. This is some of the
research we have. Then they start to say, “Wow, I didn't know. These
people actually know what they're talking about and are getting the
results.” Then, when those ads start to show up for a given event, our
quality health will give us credibility, and people will more likely come
to our event. That is a very crude example. The ads you're going to get
are much better, and they will absolutely feel like we know about the
people in your community.
They do have credibility, and that's what it's all about. It's about po-
sitioning yourself in a way that you can now influence your audience
because they think you have something valuable to offer them, which
we do. And the thing to note here is those events you're planning and
the campaigns you're planning around those events are all dat- driven,
or they should be, because that reflects you have actually gone into
your community and asked them what they need.

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 B randed P osts

Branded Posts
W e've been building on a lot of principles, and these are ex-
tremely important because what we really had a passion for
with this course was to teach these principles so that if the social media
platform changes, the principles stay the same. There was Myspace.
Now, there's Facebook. And TikTok is on the rise. We want to under-
stand the principles.
What we are going to do now is get into writing branded posts. We
have talked about the idea of the first step in Christ’s method—min-
gling with people, introducing yourselves, and all parties getting to
know each other. We are going to examine what that looks like as you
build up to direct response.
When you start thinking about branded posts, remember it is about
getting people to think what you want them to think about you so that
when you invite them to your events, they're more willing to come.
You can see here that we have this graphic image we've created, which
says, “Do this before it’s too late.” By the way, enrolling in this course
means you actually get all these images. We have a bunch of them for
you guys with all this copy that's written for you.
Let me add one more thing: It is nice that these are designed with
the Adventist identity. The General Conference actually has an identity
guide they have put out with the exact color scheme, logo, fonts, and
more. These images you're seeing here actually follow suit with the
very one put out by the General Conference. There was this tension in
determining how to build a consistent brand so we can take ownership
of who we say we are.

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Let’s get back to this tagline, “Do this before it's too late.” The kids
grew up so fast, and the sad reality is that as they get older, they won't
want to spend as much time with you anymore. You can see here, with
the text that's overlaid on the image in the first few sentences, we're
kind of provoking curiosity and speaking to their self-interests. This
has to do with spending time with family. It is primarily speaking to
parents here.
You want to speak to things that are relevant in your community.
That is why knowing your community is so important, so when you're
creating these, they are relevant and speaking to problems they may be
experiencing. Continuing with this example, the best way to maintain a
strong connection with your children is to spend meaningful time with
them. Therefore, we put together seven of our favorite family-time
ideas, and you can see a few of those that we have listed here.
Basically, after people have interacted with this post and others like
it, they're going to start thinking about what we want them to think
about us. This specific post is framing us as an organization that's ei-
ther family-oriented or family-focused. We want people to think posi-
tively about us.
These people are not lazy. They like to get outside. Clearly, these are
many outside ideas. They love family. I think as they start to hear things
like, “Hey, these are the longest living people. They're all about health.
What are some of the ways they get healthy?” And now we're sharing
those ways with them.
You can also see here the way we write these taglines; we are speak-
ing to self-interest and curiosity, making the sentences pretty punchy,
short, and clear. Additionally, we actually space out the lines and sen-
tences here to them easier to see and skim. Imagine if we had all of
this in one paragraph: People would see this in their newsfeeds while
scrolling on Facebook and think, “This is just a lot of work to try to
read this thing. I don't have time for that. Let me keep on scrolling.”
There is literally a formula and science to writing this copy in a brand-
ed post—even to the usage of emojis—and the emotions it evokes as
one read makes the person feel more of a connection. Again, this is
the purpose of something like, “Hello. My name is Seventh Avenue

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Church of X.” This is what we're about, and what ends up happen-
ing is, as you're using this style of writing, even adding an emoji to
your brand, your church actually starts taking on a personality of being
warm, friendly, and kind. Again, that is how we want to be seen in the
community, rather than as a rigid cult that just wants to invoke fear in
people and get them to come and join our church.
That's an example here, and we are going to show you a couple of
the posts we put together for you. You can see we have different ones,
and the text overlay here has to do with invoking curiosity. There is a
science to that, which we are going to talk about further.
We will go through a few of these. You can see a lot of them have
to do with health, sleep, family, marriage, dating and relationships, and
things in the news for which people are searching—whatever is rele-
vant to the community. We've got all these for you, and you can take
advantage of them; then you can also go out and create your own, and
we're going to show you how to do that very soon, as well.

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Direct
Response Ads
B est-case scenario, we have been doing branding ads for a few
months. People are starting to get to know us online—they know
about our church—but the next step is writing direct-response ads.
You want someone to engage directly. You are making an “ask.”
This “ask” can come in many different shapes and sizes. One way
it could look, for example, is specifically for an evangelistic series or
health program. Maybe it's getting people to sign up for Bible studies.
We will show you two other examples. In this first one, we are not re-
ally having them sign up for a specific event per se but more or less a
resource we can provide them so we can follow up with them.
In this case, we call this a “lead magnet.” We are giving them some-
thing in exchange for their information: name, email, phone number—
or they can interact with us on Facebook Messenger so that we can
follow up with them later. For this first one, you can see it says, “Two
habits that will reignite your faith.”
Here is another example: “Is Jesus still your best friend?” Then up
here, you'll see the copy says, “Remember how you felt when you first
discovered God's love for you. Time has passed since then. It even
feels like a distant memory. You try to be a good Christian, but you're
not as close to Christ. After analyzing millions of Christians’ journeys,
we found that most fulfilled Christians have two daily habits. Are you
ready to reignite your faith? We put together a step-by-step guide you

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can use right away. When you tap “Get message,” you'll instantly re-
ceive this free guide via Messenger.”
It wasn't just this one, but others we have written, created the copy
for the graphics, and actually tested. You are going to get access to
some of these things that have already been tested.
Basically, just to break this down, we understand that we want to
speak to different people where they are, and obviously, we are speak-
ing to a Christian audience here, right? And that's more like the middle
of the funnel, so to speak. They are not Adventists. We are speaking
to this audience; we're speaking directly to self-interest here. You can
see they are interested in reigniting their faith, and we are going to tap
into that interest and curiosity with copywriting, a term not everybody
understands, but we’ll clarify.
Regarding copywriting, what is the text you want to use to engage
with people? One’s mindset may be, “Let me just put together some-
thing short, simple, sweet, and get the graphic to get their attention.”
We would walk that person through how the graphic gets people's
attention so that they will go to the copy to really see if this is worthy
of their time.
We are going to talk about the psychology of Facebook ads here in
an upcoming segment, but just so you can understand this again, we
tried to double space every sentence. It makes it easier to see, skim,
or read. It's not all clumped together in one big paragraph, which is a
lot harder to read. We also try to insert emojis using short and snappy
sentences to make it fun and playful. We want people to relate to this,
so we are actually speaking directly to their experience.
“Remember how you felt when you first discovered God's love for
you?” We're putting them into a time where they have experienced
some type of excitement and then reminding them of that experience.
And we're also sympathizing and then going into a solution. In sum-
mary, we are highlighting a problem, creating a solution, and then giv-
ing them some type of incentive to connect with us here. Basically, if
you connect with us, we are going to give you this guide that can help
you reignite your faith.

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We have another example over here, which we will go to right now.

This one is interesting because we did some AB testing and found
this was the one that resonated more with people and solicited more
engagement with a very similar ad. This one is tried and true, as well.
You can see our goal is to get these people to sign up for automated
Bible studies. We are also going to be teaching you guys how they cre-
ate those as well, but basically, here in the headline or text overlay that's
on the graphic, you can see we're speaking to their curiosity. They will
read, “Your pastor's worst nightmare,” and think “What would that
be? Oh, that's, that's interesting.” And we knew we were playing with
a little controversy here, but it has received some pretty good engage-
ment, and we're not even just talking about these numbers you see
below—the amount of people who have actually clicked this button to
receive Bible studies has been significant. You can see you’re speaking
to their curiosity, building on that curiosity, and then getting right into
the meat of it.
“Hey, Pastor John, I have a question. Why does God allow so much
suffering? Can we really trust the Bible? Why would God burn people
in hell forever? Is God punishing me for my past sins? Did God create
the devil?” Seekers have tons of questions, right? If you've been bold
enough to ask your pastor these questions, you either never received a
reasonable answer, or you're no longer a Christian. Therefore, we are
now making a claim—basically emphasizing a problem for them. We
say, “We know you have questions. Then we get in here and portray a
statistic like, “Eighty percent of Christians don't study their Bible. And
yes, this likely includes your pastor.”
We knew we were poking at a little bit of a nest there, but we want
to challenge people. We want to bring to the surface a problem for
them so that there's a reason for a solution. If there's no problem, then
there's no need for a solution, right? We are challenging them with the
notion that their pastors don't necessarily know what they're talking
about, and neither does direct audience.
They may think, “How dare you?” And I knew I was not only po-
tentially stirring up some emotion but also their curiosity. Now they’re
thinking, “I've got to check this thing out now because I want to make
sure my pastor and I are on the right track.” We are kind of putting a

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little bit of salt on the wound, so to speak. Again, remember this isn't
some initial ad branding. People know a little bit about the church:
“They have some stuff about health and all these things. What are they
saying about my pastor, their pastor, etc.?”
This is a direct-response ad. If you follow the strategy we have been
laying out, you are running a branding campaign 24/7. We are going to
show you, technologically speaking, why that's a really good idea. You
can actually go in, create these different audiences in the backend of
Facebook, where it's breaking down all the people who have actually
been engaging with you—all those branding posts—and you're now
targeting those people who've been engaging with the branding posts
with a direct-response ad, now trying to get them to have Bible studies,
come to your events, or download certain resources and guides.
This is pretty much it—leading them to a solution. “If you're ready
to get your questions answered and want to turn your confusion into
clarity and excitement, it's time for you to sign up for our free lesson
guides. When you tap ‘Learn more,’ you'll instantly receive the first
lesson in your inbox.” Again, this is kind of the automated Bible study
approach. We're going to show you how to set that up in a little bit,
just so you guys can get a feel for how these ads look and how you
should be creating them. Many people are very confused about direct
response versus branding and what those types of ads look like, so
here are a few principles, and we are going to jump into some more.

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Compliance
S ome people think, “They're listening to us. There is a conspiracy,”
and formulate many reasons to think of this conspiracy when it
comes to Facebook. What's so funny about this is when we started
meeting, we discussed putting something out there that they didn't ap-
prove. We had this ad with all this imagery and all these texts but can't
put texts all over your image.
When we started to walk through it, it made some sense and took the
conspiracy notions away. There is a lot here, and we are not going to
go through everything in this session, but it's super important that you
take the time to go through all of Facebook’s policies before you start
advertising, because if you get enough violations, they will terminate
your account and eliminate your advertising accessibility, and you're
done. It's really hard to start getting your account up and running after
they've done that. And we know people who've had it happen to them,
and it's absolutely true.
For instance, there was a policy enacted early last year. We helped
the local church, especially working on some evidence review projects,
and started to have ads repeatedly denied. We were a little perplexed
but then realized some of these compliance issues of national interest
can be pretty broad. And we were talking about a lot of things that are
political in the landscape and extremely important.
Basically, what you are going to want to do is go to www.facebook.
com/policies for slash ads. You are going to see all their stuff here.
Again, we are not going to go through everything, but we'll just look
at one as an example. They are going to tell you the examples where
it's okay to use personal attributes and where it's not. For a bird’s-eye

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 C ompliance

view, there is an ability on Facebook to target different people doing

different things. We want to target people who love NASCAR, but we
can't say, “Hey NASCAR fans;” or, “Hey Christians.” These are some
nuances of the policies.
There are some little loopholes, ones we even use sometimes when
we’re targeting Adventists. We'll say, “Hey, SDA is right,” because
Facebook has not caught on to that one yet. You just have to be a little
bit clever yet work within their parameters.
You can also use the example of religious or philosophical beliefs.
You can look for Christians, Buddhists, etc. near you. There are a
bunch of examples here and a lot that goes into this, so just make sure
you're caught up to speed on all these policies so that you don't get
your ad shut down and start believing some weird conspiracy theories
about them.

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Writing to Different
Audiences
W e have been covering different things so far regarding ads, and
we want to start talking about how to write different ads for
different audiences based on where people are. We're going to look at
a few examples here. The first example we have pulled up is for a lead
magnet, which we talked about in the last session.
Now, before we move forward, when we say people from different
places, what do we mean by that? Different locations or different plac-
es in the funnel?
We mean different places in the funnel. You have “not in the funnel,”
then “in the top of the funnel,” “middle of the funnel,” and “bottom
of the funnel.” We talked about that earlier, especially how you have
to speak the language of those people. If you say, “Hey, Jesus can save
you,” to people not in the funnel, they’ll reply, “What do I need to be
saved from? I have no problem.”
You want to speak to the problem or solution of which they're aware.
Here's an example of something you can use for people who are not
in the funnel or the top of the funnel as a branding lead magnet, just
to get them interested. You start nurturing them and building relation-
ships with them. They hear about America's longest-living people and
wonder who those people are. What we're going to want to do is shoot
over here to the copy regarding health.
Let's assume an atheist is reading this a copy. One could be at mul-
tiple places in the top of the funnel or not in it at all. Who are these

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long-living people, and what are their secrets? They live seven-to-ten
years longer and healthier than everyone else does. Who are the Ad-
ventists? We are walking through this bulleted sequence that people are
reading, and then it gets into the copy. We're answering questions they
may not even be asking yet, like this one we talked about earlier: “They
even have the second largest health network in the entire world. Wow!
Who are these people?”
Continue reading. You want to build rapport with people. Recently,
researchers have validated Adventist lifestyle habits and made them
available to the public. This builds curiosity. We are leading the reader
along, and you want to create this experience in your copy, where your
only goal is to get someone to read the first sentence. And if that sen-
tence accomplishes its job, it'll get them to read the second sentence,
and so on.
They will read the whole ad and cooperate with it. You want them to
do so because you've created an experience for them. It's almost like
reading a good book here. They're two chapters deep and don't even
remember flipping the pages. It's just so clear in their minds. You want
to be able to do that through writing. Getting back to the example,
offer the readers instant access to the “holy grail” of longevity. Make
it sound very interesting. You could just say, “Get instant access to our
e-book,” but that sounds really boring, right? “Holy grail of longevity”
sounds really interesting, fun, and exciting.
Again, this is not just theory; we have written this material, tested it,
and found ways in which you learn these things.
When we were working on this copy, we discussed getting to the
close—"Who are the longest living people? Click here to find out.” We
then shifted to the idea of bringing them along so that they feel like
they have invested all this time, read all these lines, and need to click.
You want to build curiosity; you want to give some type of reasoning
and support for their curiosity or the claim you're making; and you
want to exacerbate the problem. Then, give them a solution that is
really easy for them to access.
This has helped us when we write to different audiences, putting
ourselves into their shoes, thinking about how this would sound to

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us. We love Jesus’ golden rule. As you write the copy, think through
that experience, and it will influence the very words you are using and
directly affect the ad’s engagement.
We are going to touch on some more things in our next chapter.

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Market Saturation
W e want to talk about market saturation. It seems like overseas,
in a place like India, for example, when you don't have many
resources or a big, expensive facility, after your three-week event, 100
people are still baptized. However, here in the United States, it feels
like we would have to have a 30-year event to baptize 100 people. Why
go overseas, then? Why do online evangelism versus going overseas? It
doesn't seem to compare.
When you start thinking about advertising to different markets that
have different levels of saturation, you have to understand how many
times a claim has been made to that particular segment of the mar-
ket. The more saturated, the less believable. In our case, many times,
that overseas audience has never really heard the claim that Jesus loves
them, can save them, give them healing, and change their lives. It's very
believable, right? We would actually call that a “blue ocean.”
On the contrary, when you're making a claim here in the United
States—we have been blessed with the ability to proselytize and share
our faith, either door-to-door or with our family, friends, coworkers,
neighbors, strangers, and more. Everybody and their brother have
heard of Christianity and Jesus, and the claim that's associated with
Christianity is almost no longer believable. We would refer to that as a
“red ocean.”
You have the unsaturated market; you have the super-saturated mar-
ket. Then you have markets that are somewhat in between, and these
people are not necessarily super-saturated yet, but there is still some
competition—some noise where they have heard the claims before.
That is what we would call a “green ocean.”

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With this, when you're writing your advertisements, you want to un-
derstand the segment in which your audience falls and how saturated
it is. How many times have they heard this claim before? And it can
be with almost anything. A lot of times, we're doing advertising for
health, and, just in general, this is a highly saturated market. There are
so many health solutions out there—the latest and greatest diets or
trends—so people are being bombarded with these messages all the
time and starting not to believe it anymore.
We had a friend from Sweden recently say, “Let me tell you what
would not work in Sweden. What would not work in Sweden is if a
church offered a vegetarian cooking class. No one is converting from
eating meat to being a vegetarian in Sweden right now. You're either
eating animal products, or you’re not. Nobody's stopping halfway.”
That’s really where you have to understand your market and know if
it’s saturated. They may all be super healthy. You're not going to tell
them the benefits of eating plants. It is really about being in tune with
the audience and what they already know, as wells as how saturated the
market is.
Sometimes, you just have to take the claim. You always start with
identifying what problem your audience has, as well as what solution
you have to offer that will fulfill that need. Then, you have to think
about the claim that's associated with it and how many times that claim
has been repeated to the audience.
Sometimes, you just have to reinvent the claim a little bit—add a new,
exciting mechanism to it—so it's fresh and more believable. You can
do this in many different ways. We are really into the advertisers from
the Madison Avenue days back in the 1950s—the toothpaste market
started becoming more and more saturated because people were start-
ing to actually use it.
All these advertisers are trying to find unique angles. What they
would do was find different ingredients that were already in tooth-
paste. Nobody else was talking about them, so they made up a random,
exciting word for this or that ingredient that all the others had. They
would just use it as their unique angle, selling proposition, and a differ-
entiator between them and all the other products out there.

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They basically created a green ocean out of a red ocean. They found
a new market in that existing market. And you can do this over and
over again. You just have to understand those claims that are associat-
ed with it. What are the solutions you have to offer or the interesting
and exciting mechanisms you can add to your claim to get someone to
believe it?
It makes you realize more readily the difficulty of targeting people in
the United States, for example.
“Hey, be a Christian.”
“Oh no, I've heard of Christians. I already know what you guys are
all about.”
We see this a lot on social media. We call them “haters.”
“I know all about you people; all you people believe God burns peo-
ple in Hell. He hates us!”
We want to share with skeptics like this that that is not the case. How
do we create these different-colored oceans? Market saturation.

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The Psychology of
Facebook Ads
I t is pretty exciting that we got to benefit from all these classes and
courses over the last few years. Now you get to benefit from all this
stuff we implemented at the local church—the money we've spent and
the way we've been testing things. There is a real psychology to how
you influence people and, specifically, how Facebook ads work.
We are here, just waiting for you. We're inside your mind right now.
We know what you're reading and thinking. Is this not the most amaz-
ing thing you've ever seen?
This is basically an example of what goes on in the mind when
someone is experiencing a Facebook ad and talking about how quickly
that's happening. It's just within a few seconds. And what you're go-
ing to see here is the section that says “Text Overlay.” That is where
it says you will read this first. That is the actual text that's overlaid on
the graphic. When you're scrolling through your newsfeed, mostly on a
mobile device, you are doing it really, really fast. Therefore, that image
or video with the copy or text that's overlaid there is going to capture
your attention first.
Is it better to have a little text on an image, rather than just a bare
image? You want to have a little bit of text—something that speaks to
curiosity or self-interest that grabs the attention. We call this a “stop-
per.” You want to stop them in their tracks. As they are scrolling from
there, you are going to lead them into the headline area, and the head-
line needs to reinforce the idea that was presented in the text overlay.

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 T he P sychology of F acebook A ds

Earlier, we showed you a few examples regarding leading with curi-

osity, one of them being “Your pastor's worst nightmare: is it because
he doesn't know?” You want to build on that curiosity and put some
salt on the wound. It sounds painful, but they will want to find out
about what you're discussing.
We also talked about hooking their attention. You have to do so in
those couple of seconds. Then they're going to read the ad, and if
you keep them there, they're going to ask, “What is this? Who's be-
hind this?” Then they will go back to the primary text. It's like the old
cartoons: one little cracker or bread crumb on the ground at a time,
leading somebody along the journey.
The primary text is the text above the post or ad. Usually, you're go-
ing to see a lot more short-form or long-form copy placed there. Most
people think, “Oh, everybody reads that first,” but it is actually the last
thing the person will see. Therefore, if you don't captivate them with
the text, overlay, headline, and optional link description, which just acts
as a sub-headline, then you've lost them.
This all happens so fast, and what you're doing here is creating dif-
ferent paths for different personalities. Consider a person who is really
go, go, go, and likes to make decisions very quickly: that person is go-
ing to read the text overlay and headline and make a decision right then
and there, either for or against what you're doing.
Regarding the action button, if they're interested, they won't even
read the primary text most of the time. The primary text now breaks
down everything and speaks to the analytical minds here. You are kind
of weaving two different paths and speaking to two different person-
alities with those paths you're laying out in your ad. This works very,
very well. We hope it worked for you as we put you through that little
bit of a test. If you want to create really killer ads that grab attention,
keep attention, and get people to do what you want them to do, follow
this format.

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Branded Social
Graphics
R ight now, we are going to show you an amazing free tool. Every-
body likes free, right? We like free. You can use it to create graph-
ics for your social media posts, ads, events, posters, flyers, and all kinds
of different things. We are going to walk through how to use this tool
in a really practical way.
We have used this at the church for so many things in the last year.
We love it. For years, we thought about how they could make Pho-
toshop for people who don't understand Photoshop. Well, they have
made it, and it's called Canva. You can have a free account or a paid
account. We recommend paying the $12/month to get the expanded
features.
We are already logged into Canva. It pulls up a dashboard of every-
thing that is sized correctly. We are going to choose an Instagram post,
which is basically a square post. Here, we're doing something brand-
ing-wise. We want to show you how easy this is. We go in and can pick
all these different graphics. You can mix it up, but you want to brand it
with your branding. In this case, we're going to try this. You can go up
here and pick from a whole bunch of photos, or go to a site we love to
use: unsplash.com, which provides royalty-free images.
We are going to give you a little document with all these different
links in it, so you don't have to remember them all right now, but we
just want to show you how easy this is. Here, you're going through and
can see different graphics. If you don't see something you like, you can

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search up here. You hold it, drag it over, and it fills in the “Double-click
the image” portion of the screen.
We are going to implement tutoring and storytime, which, as we
said, is something we do at our local church after we found out the
community need—and this is the branding. We just want to let people
know, “Hey, this is what we do. This is what we're about.” You can
do something like that. For demonstration, we will put “Free Every
Wednesday” so you can see how easy that is. You can adjust something
like this, as well as shrink it or change the colors.
From here, we go down to our uploads. This shows you everything
you've been uploading. We have a good logo here that we can shrink
down, put it down here, then shrink it down a little more. We literally
had no idea about design until we started to use Canva. Then we got
the hang of it. Here’s another quick thing you can do: if you really want
to change the exact color here, you can download a Chrome extension.
It's called “Color Picker Eyedropper.” You click on it, then from there,
you can go to this screen, and it will actually pull in the exact hex code
for you. In this case, we’ll pick the blue of the logo, then copy it, then
click on this element over here.
There are many cool things you can do with Canva. As we said, it
makes Photoshop pretty much obsolete. Continuing, you have the ex-
act color here. You can come in and upload your own images into this.
You can also select different elements and change the text and font.
Now we want to test it, right? There is a way to test this, and by doing
so—we talked earlier about compliance. You want to make sure you
can do something with this so you can download it. You can adjust the
size. We are going to download it now. Then we're going to go over
here and actually test to see if this passes Facebook's optimal imaging
tests.
Facebook has a rule where you can't have more than 20% of the
graphic space covered in the text. And they have this text overlay tool
where you can actually upload your image, and it gives an immediate
score—basically pass/fail. This will help you know whether or not you
can run this out as an ad on Facebook. This is pivotal because of the
money you’re behind it. If it passes the test, it is more optimally used.
They will promote it more. When you have too much text, they throttle

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the amount of reach you will have with it. Bottom line, you're paying
way more than you should.
We will give you the link to this tool in that download as well. That's
pretty much it. You can go back and make as many graphics as you
want. You can make all the necessary adjustments. It's super easy.
Goodbye, Adobe.

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 D irect R esponse S ocial G raphics

Direct Response
Social Graphics
N ow we are going to jump in and start learning how to start us-
ing Canva to create some direct-response ads. Facebook ads are
shaped a little differently than Instagram ads are. They are essentially
16x9. The reason why we use the size we do is because you can put a
lot more text on the graphic on Facebook. They really run you through
the wringer. We know our last image passed the test, but here we want
to try and get a little more real estate because this is really important
to stop people in their tracks to get their attention and a call to action.
We are going to make something for a cooking class. We want to
say, “Sign up today.” What is the main thing they can get out of this?
They're going to learn how to cook. They're going to be the most
famous person in their respective houses because they can now make
delicious meals. How do we make that a little bit more concise? “Learn
and to make your family say, ‘What? Huh? Mmm!’”
Another option could be “Learn to cook, learn to impress!” And
with Canva, you can ungroup some things and make it your own. We
hope to capture their attention. Then they are going to read the copy,
find out about this cooking class, and hopefully, come to it and learn
how we put the “luck” in “potluck.” Sometimes, you need more luck
than you do at other times.
Then, all you do is click “Download,” and you are uploaded into the
Facebook tool and good to go.

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Branded Video Ads

Y ou probably think you need a lot of money to create nice videos
that are actually going to appeal to your event, but you can cre-
ate it for nothing—even just your smartphone. We are going to show
you exactly how you can use nothing but your smartphone and some
simple technical details to create videos that are going to get people to
come to your events. This is a way to build rapport, attract interest, and
influence your local community, especially for the kingdom of God.
You don't need a big, fancy camera to do a lot of videos that do re-
ally well online. We know someone who makes videos for a living, and
he knows and sees what works many times: it's the stuff you do with
your phone that gets a lot of engagement and interaction. We have a
sample script that we can shoot with our phone. This is rebranding our
branding. We are going to talk through the process. The most import-
ant thing about making videos is understanding you can shoot a lot of
great video content with very inexpensive equipment.
It helps to have an iPhone or Android that has a good camera. You
can do a Google search and find the best phones with a quality camera.
Even if yours is so-so, that's fine. The real key is good lighting, espe-
cially on people’s faces.
If your camera can shoot 4K, that is ideal because more pixels means
more resolution, which means higher quality and production value.
However, if you can't shoot 4K, don't worry about it. We shoot on an
iPhone in 4K at 24 frames/second, which is helpful, and setting it up
is simple: you just tap the corner, and it changes it to whatever frame
rate you want to use.

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 B randed V ideo A ds

We are going to get a little technical here. Some people decide to

shoot at higher frame rates, like 30 or 60 frames/second. That's if you
want to slow things down a bit. Twenty-four frames/second is the av-
erage rate you want to shoot when it to people talking.
We mentioned lighting is important. If you can shoot something
near a window, it will be much more flattering. You don't necessarily
need those shop lights or big production lights from a place like Home
Depot. Those are meant for seeing, not so much for viewing yourself.
You want to have a light that is diffused. You want sunlight from
outside coming through a window. Alternatively, if you want to get a
ring light from Amazon, those can run between $20 and $100, possibly
more. With that said, get near a window.
We are going to create something we want to put on social media
to let people know who we are and what we're about. There are dif-
ferent apps you can use. The native iPhone app generally does a great
job. You can tweak different operations, like playing with the aperture,
which fluctuates focus and how much light is let into the lens. You can
do many different things like that, but for our purposes, we’ll keep it
simple.
For this demonstration, we will express appreciation to all those who
have engaged with some of our posts and highlight how we get a lot
of questions from the community on what Adventists believe and our
passion for reframing what God is like. The way we will do that is by
answering the one question that's maybe asked more than is any other:
Why does God allow suffering?
Well, we actually don't think that's the full picture of God, and as
you jump into Scripture, you start to learn there as a war taking place.
The book of Job has some insight on this, as do Ezekiel and Isaiah. We
really want to share with people, “Hey, God is at war with an enemy.
He is out to save and rescue you. The Bible is full of these lessons that
can encourage us, and we just want to encourage you if you're expe-
riencing a trial or struggling in life. Don't give up! God is going to see
you through this because He loves and cares for you. He will defeat the
enemy at the end of the day.”

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When it comes to branded posts, it is crucial to keep it short, suc-

cinct, and to the point. We think people are going to like this. That's
one example. In our next video, we are going to talk about direct re-
sponse.

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Direct Response
Video Ads
T his time, we are going to talk about direct-response ads. They are
very similar to what we discussed in the last session. You want to
make sure there are a few key elements that you're not forgetting in
this. For example, you want to have a call to action—a direct response.
If you remember from our other sessions, it’s about leading people to
make a certain decision to do something. You want to make sure they
are doing something.
As a pastor or spiritual leader, you can probably come up with some-
thing on the spot that gives a positive brand. Nevertheless, with a di-
rect-response ad, you might want to write a script. You want to think,
“Okay, what are we trying to do here?” Remember, a direct-response
ad is executed after some time of getting to know the audience already.
They have probably met you already, so ideally, you would probably
say something like, “Hey, I'm Pastor so-and-so. I’m from this area,”
or, “You probably saw me on these commercials.” Therefore, regard-
ing your direct-response ad, you already laid the groundwork in the
beginning, so you remind them of that groundwork and then begin to
share with them the opportunity you're presenting to them, with a call
to action.
There is one important thing we need to take note of: When you're
doing a direct-response ad, you want to give the people an incentive.
You also want to make sure that you're leveraging the branding or rap-
port you built with your audience as much as possible. We know many
of you are doing mailers. You are sending out postcards and things like

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that during your evangelistic series. Thus, in the direct-response ad,

you're going to want to hold that up in front of the camera. Now they
see that and think, “Oh, this is Pastor so-and-so, whom I know, like,
trust, and respect. He's inviting me to this event.” When they get that
mailer in their mailbox, they're going to see it as a personal invitation
rather than a piece of paper that they're going to throw in the trash.
Here is a sample canvass: “Hello, Anytown USA. This is Pastor so-
and-so, and it's great to see you and talk with you. I really appreciate
all your comments and encouraging words on our posts in the last
few months. We have something really exciting plan, but I only have
20 spots, so you'll want to listen up to what I have to share. You're
going to be getting a mailer, just like this one, in your mailbox. This
is from us. We want to show you some of the secrets regarding why
Seventh-day Adventists live longer than everyone else in the United
States does—seven-to-ten years longer. And these are not just drudg-
ing, painful years, but healthy, happy years, sometimes up to 100 or
more. We are going to show you what we’re doing.
“What are these secrets? When you get this flyer, there's going to be
a special number to call or a website to visit. And like I said, the first 20
spots are all we can facilitate because we want to show you, on an in-
dividual level, how you can learn these things. Here's the inside secret:
We don't know how to make hundreds of meals; we know just a few
that are really good, and then we repeat them.
“One of those meals is going to be haystacks. You're going to hear a
lot about that one. That's kind of the hodgepodge of all hodgepodges.
You'll know why our potlucks are so lucky that we hope you're going
to be there, so look for this. It's coming in your mailbox this next week.
It's from us. Sign up, and I'll see you there.”
Notice how the pastor in this sample mentioned the mailer multiple
times. He also reminded the folks, at the very beginning, who he was
and how they know him—by referring to the comments. You must be
doing these things to stir the minds and memories of the people you're
reaching.

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Facebook Pages
and Groups
O ne of the biggest values that Facebook is offering right now is
Groups. Inside of a group, you will notice the organic reach of
your content reaches a lot more people. You can set a variety of pa-
rameters whereby people can join or apply to join your private group.
You can make groups public as well.
Facebook Pages, on the other hand, is your public-facing page to
interact with your audience. Anyone can see what you post on these
pages, and also, anyone can comment.
As you set up your Facebook Page, you will be asked to select the
area of emphasis that most closely reflects what you do. This is im-
portant as you prepare to grow and be found.
It’s important as you set up a group or page that you create a nice
header image, a simple avatar photo, and, if possible, a @username
that matches your organization’s name.
You also have the opportunity to add various users and give them
varying levels of admin access.
The key to making your group or page successful is by engaging
with anyone and everyone that visits your page and interacts with your
brand.

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Scheduling Posts
N ow we are going to teach you how to save a ton of time. You're
busy; you have a schedule; maybe you’re a pastor, church mem-
ber, etc. You're busy—like we all are—and the last thing you want to
be doing is constantly getting on social media and coming up with the
latest and greatest posts and whatnot. That's why 1) we are going to
give you a massive batch of ready-made social media posts that you
can just queue up and schedule into your Facebook page so that you
can publish them, and 2) once you start building out your own using
Canva—like we saw earlier—you can then just follow this step to start
scheduling them natively in Facebook.
There are other tools and software like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout
Social that you can use to do this. Omni-channel allows you to cross-
post, using software. We are going to show you how to use it natively
within Facebook right now. What you're going to do is go to your
Facebook page, click on this button that says “More,” then click on
the one that says “Publishing Tools.” We're going to let this load for a
second, and now, we're going to click “Create.”
Over here, we are just going to switch this screen to the copy we have
already written for your social media posts. The first one says “Study-
ing the Bible 101,” and here's the copy that goes along with it. We are
just going to take this, copy it, and then go back over to Facebook and
paste it in there. We will scroll through and make sure we don't have
any weird typos. Then we'll go into the Google Drive folder we have
shared with you. We're going to search for, “Studying the Bible 101,”
download it, then go back over to Facebook and upload it into here.

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If you have not done so already, we recommend installing this

Chrome extension called Grammarly. If you're bad at spelling—like
we can be—you're going to want to use that.
Now we're going to click down on the “Share” button, then “Sched-
ule,” “Custom Date,” “Calendar,” “Time”—this depends on what
time zone you're in, but a lot of people interact with social media in the
mornings when they first wake up and before they go to work. They're
even sitting on the commode, catching up with their day, seeing what's
going on later. Then you have times when they're at work or on lunch
break; they're checking their social media. After work, they're checking
social media again.
You want to be scheduling these posts about every three days. There's
a balance. If you do it too much, Facebook will actually “blacklist”
you, so to speak. It's not that harsh, but they will throttle your reach
because—to use an example, let's say you're putting out ten posts, and
your engagement rate average across those ten is lower than if you just
published three. More is not always better. You have to find your own
sweet spot. That is why we recommend everything you're doing, like
putting a little bit of money behind the post to increase your engage-
ment rates.
In an upcoming session, we plan to talk about why organic reach can
be so terrible. We were looking at some of our stats that we haven't
been boosting, and it's wild. That is going to be an important session.
Continuing our demonstration, we will click “Schedule,” then
“Schedule Post,” and it is published here. You saw how quick that was.
We rambled on for a few minutes there, but it was super quick.
We have already given you a ton of these different social media posts:
health ones, Bible ones, etc. You can just go through and have content
for the next six months to a year already queued up, without having to
go in and do all that stuff in Canva, a demonstration we gave previous-
ly as a bonus. If you want to fast-track your success, just do everything
we've already done. We put all the hard work in for you, and we're also
giving you the skill set on top of it so you can go in and expand upon
them. Get busy scheduling your posts right now. Don't wait.

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Organic – Boosting
– or Ads?
T his session may be the most shocking one you hear in this course.
Here's why: Do you ever post something on social media and
think, “This is going to get a lot of likes. People are gonna love this,”
yet it falls flat? Or maybe you post something with low expectations,
and it gets a lot of likes. You have no idea what's going on.
Then there's another phenomenon: Somebody you know asks you,
“Hey, did you see that post I put on there?”
You reply, “No, what do you mean?” There is this thought that when
we put stuff on social media, everyone sees it.
In this session, we are going to talk about organic versus boosting
versus ads. During our strategy meeting at church, we discussed how
to reach people for Christ, as well as how the church members wanted
to go about it. We found that the reach an organic post has on Face-
book is, on average, under five percent. What that means is if 100 peo-
ple follow your church's Facebook page, Facebook is going to show
your post to approximately five of them.
Just because someone subscribes to your channel, that does not nec-
essarily mean anything. We are entering this era of “pay-to-play.” If
you want to use these platforms to reach an audience, build rapport,
and get people to come to your events and be receptive, you have to
pay. Facebook is a business. It is not just a free service from which to
consume cat videos and weird things like that. We have to give Face-
book their cut. It’s kind of like the mafia.

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Next, we will talk about the differences between these three ads: or-
ganic, boosting, and ads. All three of them are different. We just down-
played organic, so we don't recommend it at all. Don't ask us about it
because we don't believe in it, even though we all are guilty of doing
it—scheduling all these posts and not putting money behind them.
With our church, if we had been boosting our posts, our engagement
goes up significantly. Sometimes, we need to recognize our failures—
briefly. Let's move on.
Facebook has a feature where you can pay them to start getting your
ad in front of more people. That is what's referred to as “boosting.”
It's easy to find; it's a little button. They have a product that anybody
can use and requires no technical skill. You publish something, there's
a blue button, you click it, Facebook charges you money, and it's in
front of people.
It works better than organic does, but not as well as ads do. What
are they doing? They're basically saying, “Hey, we're going to try and
show this to more people. Thanks for giving us your money, and we'll
expose it.” There are some parameters you can select, like different
demographics and interests. However, they are very surface-level com-
pared to what you can do on the back end, which all has to do with the
Facebook ads manager.
We will do an in-depth tutorial on that here in a little bit. We are
building out specific campaigns. If you look at our illustration, you will
see organic is like a dead flower, boosting is like a healthy, alive flower,
and ads are like a tree that just got fed fertilizer. And we use the good,
old Ellen white method to get that bad boy growing and setting some
deep roots. Right? You want to use ads because they allow you to do
a lot more stuff compared to boosting, and organic is just a waste of
your time. We wasted a lot of time, but that means you won't need to
waste any.
Without further ado, let's start to learn. How do you get into the ad
world?

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Introduction to
Facebook Ads
Part 1
T his is the moment for which you have all been waiting. Right now,
we are going to introduce you to the powerful tool of Facebook
ads and quickly show you how to set it up. You are going to start
by going to business.facebook.com/create. When you get there, your
screen is going to look just like this. You're going to click on that big,
bright, blue button in the upper-right-hand corner that says, “Create
Account.”
From there, you're going to fill out all these fields with your church’s
information. We want to warn you that if you have already done this
multiple times before, there is a limit to how many accounts you can
have, so if it locks you out or says you have reached the limit, call a
friend phone or someone else in your church and have that person do
it, and you'll be totally fine.
You'll fill this out, then click the “Next” button. There is going to be
another screen on which you fill out your address, phone number, etc.
Click “Submit,” and you'll now have an account. We are going to show
you how to do the rest of this stuff in the next session.

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Facebook Ads
Part 2
L et's create your business manager. We are going to help you set it
up. Your screen may or may not look like this one. Facebook is
currently going through an update, so they have two different versions
of the business manager account. You're either going to see, in the
upper-left-hand corner, three dashes or lines—that's where the menu
is—or one that looks just like this: it has nine dots right across from
the Facebook logo, kind of towards the upper-left side of the screen.
Right. We are going to start by going to “Business Settings.”
From “Business Settings,” we're going to scroll down to “Accounts”
and click on “Add Accounts.” Then we're going to click that blue but-
ton, “Add,” and scroll down all the way to “Create New Ad Account.”
Then we're going to name it. You could call it your church’s ad ac-
count. We recommend putting it in terms of the actual times in the
year when you will schedule your campaigns because it will need to
have this as a reference. Select the right time zone, currency, and your
business, then click “Create.”
You need to let it load. You're going to see where it says, “People.”
Click on yourself and then click on “Manage Ad Account” at the bot-
tom. You do not have to click all this stuff. It will automatically select
them. From here, click “Sign” and then close. Then you'll go down to
the left-hand side of the screen, scroll down to where it says, “Payment
Methods,” and click “Add Payment Method.”

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You will fill this out with your church’s credit card information. Face-
book isn't going to charge you anything for this account; it's com-
pletely free, but you need to have a payment method to run ads. They
charge you based on the budget. You have set the threshold for your-
self. Sometimes it's the threshold. When you're a newer person with
them, it’s ten dollars. Once you hit ten dollars, they'll charge you. If
you've had an ad account with them for quite a while, you get a larger
threshold, so you don't have to have so many transactions all the time;
it really depends. For instance, with our church, we set it at $75. There-
fore, for every $75, they send you an email indicating you have spent
$75 and reporting how you spend it, then it resets it. Through this, you
stay in the loop.
Once you fill this out, you're going to see a section at the bottom
here. Once you're done, then it will tell you to select a primary payment
method, or you can click on those nine dots. Here is an alternative way
to do it regarding those nine dots. You're going to scroll down—yours
may not have this because you don't have a payment method yet, but
you will actually have a section here. Once you've added in a payment
method, refresh your screen and click the menu bar, as we did. Those
nine dots are the three dashes. If you have the old business manager
account, you're going to see this in billing settings. Then you click that,
and you'll be able to make the card you just put into business manager
your primary card for your ad account. That is really important be-
cause if you don't do that, you will not be able to run out.
Now you're set up. You have an ad account and payment method. In
the next session, we will go a little more into it.

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Facebook Ads
Part 3
W e are going to show you how to add people and your page
into your business manager account and connect it with your
ad account so that everything is in sync. Click those nine dots in the
upper-left-hand corner. You have the old business manager. It's the
three dashes. You're going to look for the section that says, “Business
Settings” right under “Brand Safety” up at the top. You'll go to where
it says “Accounts Pages” and click “Add.” You'll scroll down afterward
and—if you already have your page set up, you can just add it in like
this. If you do not have administrative access to the page, you can
request it.
That is going to limit you in a lot of ways. We don't recommend that
method because they are going to need the ID and all that stuff. We
recommend just adding the page if you have it; if not, create a new
page. You already have a page for this. We will use Love and War as an
example. It popped up, as you can see. All you had to do is search for
it, and it popped up. Now you can click “Add Page.”
We had to set up this page prior to having administrative rights, but
now it's done. You can click “Close,” then, all the way in the upper-left-
hand corner, “People.” After that, click “Add.” Let's now add some-
one. For demonstration, let's add John. Okay, we'll send John an email
[request?]. After sorting that out and sending John an email, you click
“Admin Access” if you want him to have it—no restrictions. That
makes things go smoother. We do this for a lot of people. For you, we
recommend thinking about those with whom you want to collaborate:

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is it your board members, other members in your church, or those who

are part of your ministry? Whomever it is, you will want to add them
in here so you can all collaborate on this.
Click “Next.” Then, in this case, we are going to click on “Love and
War,” next to “Pages,” scroll down, give them admin access like we did
on the right-hand side. Then add accounts to the left, under “Pages.”
Click “Select the Ad Account.” Now it's all good. Click “Invite” and
voila! It's all good to go.
That's about it. We are going to give you a little bit of a tour in the
next session, showing you how to start building out some audiences
and getting your campaign set up. See you there.

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Creating Audiences
W e are now going to talk about Facebook audiences. We will
show you how to set up your audiences at the backend of
Facebook so that when you're building out your campaigns, you al-
ready have your audiences prepared for you to just plug-and-play into
your campaigns and target.
When we first discussed this, we remember identifying the lameness
of organic posting and the limitations of boosting. When we started
to unpack the capacity to create custom audiences, we applied this
to particular scenarios. If you had a stop-smoking seminar in your
community, you could send out invitations to 5,000 people in the area,
hoping they'll come, or you can go find people on Facebook in your
community that either fit demographics or already like stop-smoking
accounts, brands, etc. We are literally targeting people we already think
are open to stopping smoking. It is amazing what you can do with
audiences.
What you're going to do is go to the nine dots in the upper-left-hand
corner, scroll down to “Audiences,” and you're going to see there are
a few different options. Do you see how it says “Custom Audience?”
We can break that down in more in detail, but generally, a custom au-
dience is an audience you're creating from some type of data source:
people who have followed your page, engaged with you on Facebook,
your posts, website, etc. You can upload your email list into Facebook,
which will then hash them out and match them with user IDs in their
accounts. You can target them specifically there.
You can get highly complex. One of the things we like is you can tar-
get people to whom you want to advertise—those who have engaged

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with your posts in the last 30 days, 90 days, year, whatever. Here is
where the strategy that we've been laying out with Christ's method of
advertising or evangelism in an online context comes into play. We've
been saying you need to be putting out this content and running your
branding campaign 365 days a year. These are social media posts and
videos about health, family, Bible verses, spiritual nuggets, and things
like that. It is about positioning yourself as an influencer in your lo-
cal community. Then you're going to enter into it using this method.
You're going to create an audience of all those people who have been
interacting with those videos and social media posts over that set peri-
od; then, you will target them with a specific ad that is going to invite
them to some type of event.
Look at it like this: You walk into a big, crowded room over through-
out the last year, and at each of the different occasions, someone's
shaking your hand (speaking English, of course), saying, “Hey, really
glad you're here. Here's a free drink. Here's a sandwich. Here's a bal-
loon.” All these different interactions would make a person feel really
good. There’s a lot of bonding. Now, all those people who have liked,
commented, and spent time viewing your video for a certain amount
of time—maybe they didn't like someone’s comment—we're going
back to all these people and saying, “Hey, remember interacting with
us earlier in the year? We want to invite you to something because
we're using this in our church. It's absolutely awesome!”
You are building a relationship with them over and over again, and
you're able to do it strategically here because the different things they
are doing on Facebook indicate they're a warm market—they are high-
er or lower in the funnel, for instance—there are all these different
indicators about them that tell us where they're at, and this can better
help us craft our campaigns so we can reach them.
We can even get really specific. We can get to the point where we
scope everybody who has interacted with us in the last year, but only
want to target people under 40 because we think they have kids and
we're going to invite them. Maybe we're going to market our new kin-
dergarten to them—or our church’s children’s program—whatever it
may be. It's pretty cool how you can get it down to, for a more partic-

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ular example, only women from ages 30 to 40 in the past year. We're
targeting moms. It's pretty impressive.
There are so many different things. Here, you will see there are these
three different options. You have your custom audiences, so we can
click on that quickly. Here are a few of the different options. We will
have an upcoming webinar about how to be able to create audiences
based on people who are visiting your website. Basically, you're install-
ing a piece of code there that matches people with their Facebook ID
that they're given. We are now able to target them on Facebook. Your
customer list is your email list. You can upload that here; it'll hash it out
and match them. You can target them here.
Something we discussed is that the more data you have on your email
list, the healthier the list is. Typically, a list of 500 plus 500 is still really
small. You can get away with it when you start targeting really small
audiences, but it costs you a lot of money. That is because Facebook
advertising is not calculated off of here. Give me a dollar, and I'll send
this ad out to 100 people, right? It's very dynamic and based on of
supply and demand.
Basically, what will happen is you'll put out an ad, and Facebook is
determining how many people are logging, during the given time you
are running the campaign among the audience you're trying to target,
as well as how many other people are also trying to target that same
audience. Facebook is determining how much your campaign is worth
because it is a bidding strategy.
There are other manuals and automatic bidding strategies you can
use, but in a nutshell, it's a matter of supply and demand: how many
people you are trying to target and how many other people are trying
to target the same people. When you shrink your audience down to a
smaller number, you are decreasing the odds of winning a bid because
there are more competition and fewer eyeballs.
There are all these different things you can do here, like targeting
people based on video views, Instagram profile visits, interactions with
your Facebook events, etc. We won't talk about these too much right
now, but in an upcoming session, we will. Regarding this Facebook
page, people are talking or engaging with our lookalike audience. These

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are our audiences based on a data source that have been provided here
in your custom audiences.
For example, you have a cooking class, and let's say 1,000 people
showed up to this class or all your cooking classes over the past year.
You get all their names, emails, and maybe phone numbers and their
addresses. That is a very healthy list. You import those into Facebook
as a custom audience and think, ‘Hey, you know what? Those are the
people who came to our cooking class. Now we want to go find peo-
ple who are like these people; they look alike.’ That is what you can do
here. It's a great feature.
They look at all the data points from those people on that original
data source, hash them out, find all the similarities, and create a looka-
like based on those similarities. They are using machine learning—arti-
ficial intelligence—to sift through that data and build something effec-
tive. This would be considered a cold audience. That data source you're
normally referencing is a warm audience, but because it's a lookalike,
it's a cold audience. However, as a cold audience, this performs very
well. Normally, warm audiences are your best-performing audiences
because you have rapport, so you want to be doing this.
Finally, we come to your saved audience. In many cases, these are
more of your general cold audiences based on interest categories and
things like that. It may be how you start your branding. We have tried
this in our area. To everybody within our 20-mile radius, we want to
start to show them who the Seventh Avenue Seventh-day Adventists
are.
As we wrap up here, you can combine your custom audience; layer
that with an interest-based audience here, and then even further lay-
er that by narrowing or excluding. However, you do not want to get
very narrow in your targeting in the beginning. You want to set up
basic parameters, probably not even targeting any specific group like
Christians, atheists, or anything like that. You just want to target your
location with a radius you feel like people are willing to drive.
The reason why is because Facebook is using machine learning and
artificial intelligence, so when you're setting up a wider parameter,
you're allowing it to collect a lot of data in self-optimization over time.

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It's no secret Facebook likes money, right? Facebook wants to keep

their money, so they need to keep you, the user, on their platform to
keep their money. Basically, in most cases, they are not going to show
an ad to someone who is not in the market for what you're offering,
and they are able to delineate that with artificial intelligence. Don't get
too caught up in layering and targeting these small audiences because
what's going to happen is you're going to waste your money.
An example is when we started advertising, we focused on young
moms. They want their boys and girls to be tutored in our community
and have storytime. Maybe they don't have time to read to them. Well,
if you limit that to a certain age group, you skip out on—by the way,
did you know their grandmothers want these kids to have this? And
they are more likely to bring their kids to these tutoring and daycare
sites. That is why you put 18–65+, an extra-wide age range, and per-
haps include gender. Don't focus much on this.
You can split tasks. We will talk a little bit about split-testing here in
a moment. Then you also want to narrow this down to your location.
In our case, we are going with Adairsville, Georgia, and as you can see,
you can select the radius around that. If you look up in the right, it will
affect the population you are reaching—the larger the radius, the more
people you are reaching.
This is all super important for you to get effective results within
Facebook advertising—understanding your audience, not going too
narrow with parameters, and just trying a few different things, in the
beginning, to see what sticks. That is going to involve the split test. We
will talk about that more soon.
Review this session again and again because it is critical. Most peo-
ple try Facebook advertising and don't know what they're doing. They
get too tightly focused on their audience and waste a ton of money
because the software is not working in their favor. They are restricting
it and not allowing it to collect data for them. To reiterate, this is very
important.

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Campaign
Structure
N ow you know how to create your different audiences. What we're
going to talk about now is structuring your campaign. This is in-
credibly critical because campaign structure plays a lot into the way the
algorithm is set up and the machine learning functions. We will touch
on that as we walk through, but first, we will go over to that section
that says, “Ads Manager,” then click here. Feel free to go through this
demonstration at your own pace.
Pay attention to these three folders pertaining to campaigns, ad sets,
and ads. Think about your campaign like a house and your ad sets like
different rooms in that house. Your ads are like different pieces of
furniture in those different rooms. You have one house with multiple
rooms and multiple pieces of furniture.
Similarly, here's the church, the different ministries in the church,
and the different things within those ministries. For instance, health
ministry has cooking classes and health seminars, right? That’s the lay-
er pattern. We are going to walk through and show you what those
different things are.
With campaigns, we will start by clicking this green “Create” button.
We are going to walk through as if we're building a campaign so that
you have a general overview of what's happening with the first layer.
What you’re choosing for your campaign is basically the objective—
what you're ultimately trying to accomplish. This is the most basic
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the outcome of your campaign. For example, you may want to choose
one that says “traffic” to get people to your website to watch a video
or just click on a link that takes them somewhere.
You can even optimize beyond that. Say you want people to not only
click on this link but also let the page load. There are different metrics
or key performance indicators you can pursue and optimize. Traffic is
just an example of one of the different objectives you can accomplish
when we talk about Christ’s method. When we talk about mingling,
this is brand awareness, which helps you reach a larger amount of peo-
ple. Additionally, just so you guys know, you can click on that little “I,”
and it gives you pertinent information.
Brand awareness and reach are very similar. They are about reaching
people and raising awareness for a lower amount of money, but there
are many hidden things here. For example, consider video views. If
you have a video in your selection of brand awareness or reach an
objective, instead of video views, you're probably going to pay more
money than if you were just to click the video views campaign. This
is because you're telling Facebook, “I want people to watch this video.
That's the whole goal of this campaign. All the other things in this
campaign—the audiences and ads they need to accomplish this one
thing—go to get video views. Facebook is monitoring you. It knows
exactly how many videos you watch each week. What you want to do
is understand that Facebook knows how many videos you're watching,
how long those videos are, and how much time you're spending watch-
ing those videos.
If you, as an advertiser, choose video views as the objective for your
campaign, they are going to find more people within the other param-
eters that you set up who are more likely to watch a video. They also
know if you're someone who clicks on links, goes to websites, and
lands on them long enough to let the page load. They also know if
you're someone, for example, with the conversions campaign; you can
select different things. For example, add to cart or initiate checkout.
They know if you're someone who clicks on an ad, goes to a website,
then adds to the cart, initiates checkout, or makes a purchasing deci-
sion. There is a lot of stuff here that is strategically feeding that data
into the algorithm to make it smarter, especially with conversion cam-

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paigns. We are not going to get into some of these other things until
a later session.
For you as a church, while you want to be focusing on your cam-
paign objectives, whenever you're doing videos in the beginning, if
those videos are to simply build your brand awareness and reach a lot
of people in your community, you're going to want to be using video
views objective. If you're focusing on something we're going to talk
about later, which is our automated Bible study sequence, you're going
to want to choose this messenger objective. This is going to allow you
to have a button people click, which then starts a messaging conver-
sation with them using a third-party program that delivers them Bible
studies automatically. We have set that up for you and will talk about
that soon in one of our next session.
You will want to use brand awareness or reach for your posts that
you're scheduling on your Facebook page as you try to reach as many
people as possible. We recommend that all your direct-response ads
you are using to get people to attend an event be a video because you
have that power. Like we showed you earlier, you hold up that flyer or
mailer and build instant rapport and familiarity with them through it.
They are going to get it in their mailbox and be more receptive to it.
Thus, you will have a higher response. We can talk a lot about these.
Again, you can go through here and see what they're all about on
your own. We have already set up our ad account, so we're just go-
ing to click “Continue.” You can see here it selects the ad set level.
Again, they are like the different rooms within your house. You can
see they are broken down into these different categories: audiences,
placements, budget, and schedule. Right now, it's saying “Message des-
tination” because we selected that as our campaign objective.
The campaign objective is what we want the overall campaign to do
right now. Regarding audience, this is who we want to target. This is
more tailored to your specific audience primarily, but there are other
things in here that are really important as well, which you can choose
depending on your campaign, objective, etc. for which to optimize spe-
cifically. You can run traffic to a website, app, Messenger, WhatsApp,
and other different things.

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Again, you don't need to do this stuff right now. We are not going to
recommend you create a traffic campaign or send a website or traffic
to it in the context of church marketing because we have other things
like a lead-generation objective, which looks like an ad. They click on
a form in Facebook. You do not have to create a landing page. We will
just send them to a website. The form is in Facebook; it's filled out
with their information. They can put in more information, click “Sub-
mit,” and it just gets sent right over to you.
This is pretty slick, isn’t it? You don't need to have your website
or landing page to generate leads anymore. It is the same thing with
Messenger; we're doing something very similar with that process. In
this case, you are focusing on those different campaign objectives, and
then you have your audiences that you have already built based on our
previous instructions. You want to go through your cold and warm
audiences.
At every stage, make sure you're naming your campaign. For exam-
ple, at the campaign level down here, once you select your objective,
you can name it; then, once you're down at the ad set level, you can
name that. It is really important that you name it because later on after
you're running your campaign, you're going to be looking at all the
results. Let's say you're doing campaigns. When you have hundreds
and hundreds of different campaigns, ad sets, and ads, it gets quite
confusing if you don't tag them correctly.
Additionally, you want to know which ones optimized—which ones
worked—which ones performed well— because we want to take all
the bad ones and cut them off, as well as scale around the ones that
performed well, add in more similar things that can help them perform
better, or create new ones that could potentially perform well. That is
it in a nutshell. You can come down here, add in those different audi-
ences you've already created, and then select different things based on
your specific audience.
Even though we might have put in an audience, we can tweak it. For
example, you can see how it says “Create New Audience,” “Add Your
Custom Audience,” and “Use a Saved Audience.” All of your saved
audience would be filled out. We are using a lot of this stuff, but in the
“Audiences” tab, if you click on this, it will pull in here. We have not set

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it up for this account because it's a fresh account that we're not using
right now. However, if we would have, it would have pulled in just like
that. Or you click here, and all your custom and lookalike audiences
will pull in. That is why we recommend building out all your audiences
before you get into setting up your campaign.
If you need to build an audience on the fly, you can do that here. You
can also save it as you go, label it, and {manipulate?} placement. There
are different places, and we recommend using the default settings for
this one because again, Facebook is very smart. They know where the
users in your audience are and thus will show a relevant ad to that
person where they are. There are many different places on Facebook
in which your ad can show up. You can edit them very specifically, but
again, though, you might like the ad inventory, the number of available
positions within a news feed, Instagram story, Facebook Messenger, or
the Marketplace could be very limited.
If you just limit it to that one position in the inventory, the inventory
itself could be limited, which means the supply is limited, which means
the cost is going to be higher. Therefore, we leave it on the default
settings because Facebook will pretty much chase those people around
wherever they're at and make the ad {shop?} wherever they are. This
is where we can choose if we only want to show it on Instagram, for
example, we could select that Instagram newsfeed.
You can do all that stuff, but again, we recommend you leave it on
the default settings so you can optimize them based on the different
delivery. This is based on which campaign objective you have chosen.
You can also set start and end dates here, as well as all these different
things that pertain more to your budget.
One last thing we want to address, as it relates to budget, is you'll
notice, up at the campaign level, where you have this option to turn
on campaign budget optimization, which means that all the ad sets
within this campaign and all the ads within those ad sets are now being
optimized for the best performance of a daily budget. Conversely, you
can choose lifetime, but still the best performance based on budget.
For example, instead of setting a budget for every single ad set, let's say
you had one campaign, and you want to generate leads, aiming for five

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different audiences. You want to test it out, so you have five different
ad sets, then you go in here and have five different ads.
You are going to have five ads and five different ad sets in one cam-
paign. Each ad set would, typically, if you didn't choose campaign bud-
get optimization, get its own budget, which means Facebook is going
to spend your money. You give it five dollars a day at the ad-set level.
Even if it's a bad-performing ad set compared to some of the others,
it's going to spend it no matter what.
Therefore, you choose campaign budget optimization. You're telling
Facebook to, based on the performance here, only give your money to
the ad sets that perform the best, which is good. There are some other
situations we can talk about it in the future, like why this may not be
good when you're doing stuff at scale, but for now, we would recom-
mend that if you're building campaigns with more than one ad set, just
flip this on, and it does a pretty good job.
To finish this demonstration, we will go down to the ad level and
click “Next,” then agree to the terms and continue. At this point, we
will click on the identity. If you have an Instagram page, you will have
to click on this and add it in. If not, don’t worry about it, but we
do recommend you get one because Facebook owns Instagram. That
means when you're doing a Facebook ad, it will also show up on Insta-
gram, as long as that placement is selected in the ad set level.
You can now, at this point, add in the different media. It might come
in preselected with an image, so just click this “X” and then add media.
Additionally, you can upload your video or image here. Once it's up-
loaded, you can edit it. You can add a thumbnail and captions. We rec-
ommend adding captions using rev.com. They will give you captions
for about a dollar a minute.
They say 95% of videos on Facebook are viewed with no sound
on. People are often in a public place— bathroom, school, grocery
store—and scrolling, so they're not listening to the sound in the video.
Therefore, you want to make sure that you have those captions, and
rev.com can provide those for you.
When it comes to video length, we typically recommend under two
minutes because with the placement of Facebook and Instagram’s

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newsfeeds, which are the most popular placements, they have the most
inventory available because that is where most people are spending
their time. Those need to be under two minutes for that placement to
accept it. On Facebook only, it can be over two minutes, but if you're
doing Instagram, it has to be two minutes.
We were talking about the psychology of Facebook ads that headline
the link description. You want to go through here, and it's going to
preview it all on the right side. The cool thing is we have already gone
through and pretty much done this part for you. We've already built the
ads, so you just have to copy and paste. And there's a lot more to come.
This stuff is not so simple that you can just master it in one sit-
ting. It's a year later, and we're still figuring things out, especially the
software updates. Therefore, make sure you are hopping on our live
webinars so you can learn all the latest and greatest steps on this stuff.
Review this session multiple times and meditate on it. We know it is
difficult to find the time to review and redo it, but it can make a world
of difference because it's complex. We are definitely in the weeds here,
but we're going to get through them.
To finally wrap up this demonstration, click “Confirm.” Then it will
go into a review process: Facebook is going to review it and make sure
you're following their advertising policies. You don't have too much
text in your image or video, nor are you promoting anything crazy.
Just know that this is so worth it. You master this because this is the
future. Then you have control over it. If not, you don't have to wait for
another company to come in and start advertising for you. You have
the control to do it.
Now you want to get people to your church. Run a campaign to es-
tablish 50 Bible studies in 48 hours. You have the control to turn it on
or off. Take the time to learn this knowledge; become a student; don't
just review these sessions, but use your free time to just poke around
and get familiar with the software; try new things. You are going to
learn by doing in this case.

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Messenger Bots
W e are going to do something very exciting. This is a way where
we have been able to develop a system for generating leads in
Bible studies and interests and start building this one-on-one relation-
ship with the members of our community. What you're going to do is
start by going to manychat.com. Once you go there, you're going to
come in here, and it's going to give you an option to connect and create
an account. And if you're an administrator of the Facebook page with
which you want to start using this tool, you will now have the option to
connect that Facebook page with your ManyChat account.
ManyChat is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This
is a tool to help you stay in contact with people and build a relation-
ship with them. Here, you can see they have a way for you to keep in
contact with people via Facebook Messenger, text, email, etc. A lot of
you are probably familiar with platforms like MailChimp, ActiveCam-
paign, Campaign Monitor, or others like them. Imagine a MailChimp
for Facebook Messenger; that's pretty much what we're dealing with
here. This has all that functionality built into it, and there are so many
cool tools you can use. We could spend hours and hours going through
this, so let’s jump in.
We tested this out last week with some new ads we wrote. Just in the
past week, about 100 people engaged with {our ads?}, which is pretty
amazing. Anyway, this is easy to use. It's a simple software, and you're
able to set up automation. The best part about this course is you don't
have to know how to do all this. We have set up all the “bots,” if you
will. Let's give a preview of what this looks like.

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There are all these different things with this interface. Just poke
around and get familiar. You're going to feel quite confused and over-
whelmed and have no idea what's going on, but just get familiar with
some of the buttons and modes. In our webinars, we will keep diving
deeper, and you will keep learning. It is like repeat and enlarge, that
biblical principle especially prominent in the book of Daniel. Keep
learning, keep diving in, and it will start to come together.
We will go over to a growth tool that we have already put together
here. We showed you a sample ad earlier that talks about your pastor's
worst nightmare. People are seeing that ad show up in their newsfeed,
clicking on it, and getting drawn into a Bible study. We will preview it
now and show you what that looks like.
We have to sign in first. Alright, so now you can see, once we clicked
on a preview, we got a message from the church, which says, “Are you
ready to study the Bible? Click ‘Yes’ to get instant access.” Therefore,
we click this “Yes” button, and then it continues, “Have you ever won-
dered why God allows suffering? In this first lesson, we will discover
an in-depth answer to this question.”
This is a PDF file; click on it to view your study, and feel free to
download and print it if you would like. And you can see the studies
we put together for you. Again, we have the ads for you too, as well as
these built-out flows. You can download these flows and upload them
into your account; they are pretty much done for you.
We will give you some instructions in some later sessions on how to
get things set up and running. We wrote this series in a very different
way, starting with kind of a chronological timeline—From where did
evil come? Why did God allow this? And where did the war break out?
Then we transition people through earth’s history. You will get this
seven-part series, and we are seeing great traction with it so far, which
is pretty exciting.
It is an amazing tool because—getting back into ManyChat, you can
go in and see tags of people who have started different sections of
the studies. You can do a lot of these amazing things. You can send
broadcasts to all of your subscribers at one time. There is just a bunch
of stuff here, so we're going to keep diving into it, but again, it's just an

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overview of this tool. We just wanted to show you that quick example
of how we're using it at the local church here and how you can use it,
as well.

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Automated Bible
Studies
W e know one of the biggest interests for a pastor, church mem-
ber, or anybody who is involved in evangelism is getting Bible
studies. We do so many different things to get Bible studies, right?
We go door to door, send out mailers, have events, try many different
things, and spend lots of time and money to do it. This is something
that's been near and dear to our hearts.
When we came into the church, we fell in love with the message
we have as Adventists and wanted to share it with as many people
as possible. We spent time doing canvassing door to door, conduct-
ing surveys, and all these different methods, yet we wanted to find a
scalable approach, so we started combining our talents in evangelism
and online advertising and figuring out different systems to automate
this because we find ourselves wasting a lot of time with people who
weren't very interested.
Investing a lot of time in these conventional methods and seeing lim-
ited results was kind of tough, so what we have done is taken the pre-
viously discussed ManyChat and created some sequences and different
tools you can download and plug into your computers and accounts.
You have it already done for you. We spent a lot of time developing
this, and you can see this made it so easy for our church because we
don't have to know all the complicated things that people are learning
in this course. You can just plug these in, and we will show you how
easy this is, but the bottom line is it was awesome to be able to tell our
church we only spent $75 and 48 hours.

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The more striking statistic is the 30-to-40 people who have opted to
take Bible studies. Church members' jaws dropped, and they asked us
what we were doing and how they could get involved, financially and
otherwise. We will walk through the process.
You have this document, and you're going to see this growth tool.
This section is the tool that is going to now be plugged into the ad it-
self and used to generate the Bible studies in ManyChat. We are going
to get into that and show you how to set up the campaigns for this in
a later session, but for right now, we will show you how it works. Go
ahead and click on that first link, the growth tool. This is going to take
you inside your own ManyChat account. You can see how it says “Save
to ManyChat” in the bottom-right-hand corner. It is already done for
you. This is the sequence. You can edit this if you like, but it’s ready to
go, so there's no need.
Some tags indicate the person has done this study or reached some
milestone, which triggers the next event. All that is done for you. You
then save this to your ManyChat account and go view the flow.
Now, we will show you a little demo of how this works. Let's click
“Preview” in the upper-right-hand corner. Yup. Open the messenger.
We started showing you this the last time, but just so you get an idea,
it gives you the sequence flow, as you can see. Now click “Yes,” and it
gives them the study. The cool thing is after you click this, you get to
the first lesson—"Have you ever wondered why God allows suffer-
ing”—and it walks you through an in-depth answer.
We were just talking about this. It gives them a PDF download that
they can start studying. And the cool thing is—let's go back to the
Google doc we had for this. Now let's click on that first one: “Sab-
bath.” We are going to go through all these and save them to our
ManyChat account. In here, we go over to the sequences under “Auto-
mation,” then click here, and see that we already have some that we've
been running. Your count is going to look a little bit different from this
one. We are going to click this “New Sequence” button and then type
in, as an example, “automated studies.”
We are going to type in another example because we already have
one that is live in the account. We don't want to get it confused. We

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will click “Create” and create one. Right here, it says, “Create New,”
“Apply,” or “Select Existing.” We'll click “Select Existing.” From the
ones we just downloaded, we have different options to select.
Your account is not going to look like this because you don't have
anything in it yet, but once you go through the process with a Google
Drive, like we just did, you're going to have all of these downloaded in
there. You will click on all of these, click “Save,” then simply come into
ManyChat in the sequences. For example, let's click this one. The Bible
students will go through them as we have them set up, like the Sabbath
one first, then State of the Dead, Signs of the Times, Daniel 2, What
Must I Do to be Saved—a sequence like that. You'll see it outlined
perfectly over here in the document.
You want to go through here, download all those to make them avail-
able here in sequences, and then click “One Day” and save them. We
set it up for one day, then did a test with two days because we wanted
people to have the chance to be able to have the time to digest these
studies, not just blaze through them and send them as fast as they're
done. It's a built-in sequence in delayed sync.
Now we can go to this one. We're just going to keep adding these in
because we have already had these in your case. Again, you'll be able
to add them all from the Google doc, and there will be a sequence like
this. Add those all in and just keep clicking “Select Existing” at the
next one, the next one—repeat that process. And make sure it says
“one day.”
Something you will want to do to get someone to opt into this one
is by going back over to “growth tools” and make sure the growth tool
you have just received from us is downloaded into your account. Go
up to your new growth tool, then click “Facebook ads,” proceed with
the growth tool, and click “Edit.”
In here, this is where you will be able to—it probably feels a little
complicated, but if you go through it slowly and pause when neces-
sary, you’ll get the hang of it. Anyway, this is where you will be able
to replace it with the growth tool that we just shared with you, which
again is the one over here that you just downloaded into your account.

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It's going to be set up perfectly, just how we need it to be. Click “Next”
and then “Edit.”
In here, we can click on this and see there's a bunch of different
things we can do to edit it. However, we do not need to edit it, so that’s
the end of this session.

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Interest Follow Up
T he reason this whole course exists is to get people to study the
Bible, know Jesus, and eventually find a way to meet Seventh-day
Adventist Christians face to face. Let’s jump ahead in your journey to
where we are in our journey by applying all these things we have taught
and you have learned in this course, which led people to say, “Alright,
I've taken Bible studies. I want to know more.” It became such an issue
for us that we had to, within a short amount of time, hire a full-time
Bible worker. We needed help. We discussed the amount of money our
church was spending and how the ads were going. We tested several
ads, and these ads were more effective than were others that had been
run.
We realized we needed someone to devote about 25 hours per week
to conduct Bible studies. Otherwise, we had a problem on our hands.
We started praying and looking, and we found someone to follow up
on these qualified leads. Now she is engaging with people who are
asking questions online, and they're in the sequence.
You set up all these things, and it can be a little complicated, but
they're in the sequence. And it's awesome when they get to that sev-
enth study and say, “I want to talk to somebody. I want to know more
about baptism.” This is what it's all about. We are thankful for all these
different tools that are now becoming a real blessing. It is a joy to tell
the laypeople at the local church, “Hey, this is happening.” They don't
realize the amount of work we are going to put into setting this up, but
it will pay off.
One of the things that would be helpful to the people who are tak-
ing this course is knowing we have received many responses. As time

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allowed, we even replied to some of these people. We can highlight

some of those responses and our approach to replying. Last week,
we were targeting someone not in the funnel with a branding ad, and
she engaged with us and said, “Hey, I just want you to know, I did not
believe in God, but I'm open.” We thought, ‘Wow, that makes it all
worth it.’
Another guy, through the course of conversation and exchanging
questions, indicated he was Jewish. We had a great dialogue, and it was
great to tell him we keep the Sabbath and adhere to the old-school
dietary laws. Instantly, we had this kinship. You start to build connec-
tions, and who knows where those will lead?
You want to be genuine. You want to think about this from the sense
of making new friends. One of the things we recommend is friend-re-
questing some of these people on your personal Facebook page. Take
the conversation there instead of leaving it all within ManyChat or
your church's Facebook Messenger. Connecting with them on your
personal Facebook page can enhance the relationship. Eventually, you
can get them to jump on a phone call or video chat because they're go-
ing to be more willing to do that than meet in person at first. You want
to build that relationship over the phone, then eventually jump on a
video call, and then, eventually, meet them in person in a public place.
Follow these methods, and you're going to get a lot of really awe-
some results. It is so rewarding to be able to say—well, a lot of the
technical stuff we're talking about can sometimes be challenging and
have you feel bogged down or overwhelmed, but when you're able to
start reaching people and interacting with them at scale, God lights a
fire in your heart and your church, and it is so real.
Sometimes, we get discouraged and think, “Man, there are not a lot
of people out there who care about these things or are open. What is
going on with the world?” It is not like that at all. The problem is the
harvest is plentiful, but we are not readily where the people are. We
have to put a little bit of work into it and be like Jesus. We have to
be there, building relationships with people and making friends with
them.

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The 21st Century

Evangelistic Series
Y ou guys are used to running different kinds of evangelistic series,
getting people to come to a live, in-person event where they sit
back in a chair or pew and listen to a sermon or presentation for an
hour or so. You're going through all these slides and doing all these
things. Getting people to come to these types of events is getting more
and more challenging here, especially in America. We are competing
with so many other things for a person's mind and attention. One of
the things you can do to get more peoples’ attention and get them to
experience what you want them to experience from an evangelistic
series is to record a shorter, simpler version, without any audience in
front of you, and run it live on Facebook.
They may be five-to-ten-minute variations of what you would nor-
mally preach in a live evangelistic series. Just record those, run them on
Facebook with a little bit of money behind them, and target all your
warm and cold audiences. Now, you're getting people to watch that
content without actually having to leave the comfort of their homes.
In marketing, we call this “friction:” Everything you have in between
your customer and the end experience, where they can get your prod-
uct.
We want you to think about a company called Amazon. They have
been the master at reducing friction in terms of what they're offering.
For someone who lives in a wintry environment to go buy a brand-new
pair of shoes in the winter, that person needs to go out, get in the car,
start it up, warm it up, and drive through the snow—all this friction,

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just to get a new pair of shoes. Don’t forget being at the store, shop-
ping around, talking to an annoying sales agent, and standing in line.
Consumers don't like friction. The more friction there is in the pro-
cess, the lower the conversion rate. Then amazon.com comes along.
One can be sitting wherever, click a button, and boom! The product is
shipped to the house in two days. All the fiction is gone. With that said,
how do we take a product like a church, which we have been somewhat
selling for a long time through evangelistic series, and now package it
in a way where we have totally eliminated the friction? We can create
videos, put them out on Facebook, and put some money behind them.
And now there's no friction. They can attend our evangelistic series
online.
We will give you a couple of examples of what we're going to try at
our local church this year. We are going to record one series to which
you are going to get access. It is simply a pastor talking through some
of our biblical doctrines. Use it however you want, but it's going to be
more traditional. Here are all the different teachings that are unique to
the Seventh-day Adventist Church. We typically call them fundamental
beliefs. Considering we have 28 of them, we could stretch them among
separate nights or pack them into a weekend. Think of these as short-
er, three-to-five-minute videos where you can capture the experience
of having lunch with a friend who asks, “Hey, tell me about my friend
who died. What's going on?” or, “Hey, I'm trying to understand, does
God really burn people in hell?”
This is your short little pitch on what the Bible says about that in
a very concise way. That is a new way of doing an evangelistic series.
When people engage with it, then we can retarget them to say, “Hey,
come to our live event.” That's one idea. Another idea we're trying will
turn evangelism on its head. We are doing a ten-part narrative series,
telling the story of good and evil from start to finish. That's our Love
and War series.
Therefore, test the waters. You have the ability on here to see if
people engage with this. If it gets a great response, do it live. This is
an amazing opportunity. Like we said, test things because you can take
ideas, put them out there in the marketplace, and get real feedback.
Before you start planning all these different events for your church

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and deciding what you're going to do this month or that month, again,
you don't get to decide; it's the end consumers who decide. They are
going to tell you what they want and need. And if you listen to them,
you're going to win many souls and get people to come to your differ-
ent events.

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The Power of a
Podcast
N ow, we are going to talk about podcasting. One of the things
with which we have been impressed is our little church’s ability to
produce so much content that gets a lot of views every single week. It’s
doing great. We will walk through how to set up a high-impact podcast
with which to reach our communities.
We did not have a lot of technical skill in trying to figure out what
we needed to do this, but we knew we love podcasting. Some of the
data on podcasting skews toward younger demographics. People can
be multitasking—listening to podcasts at work or while they drive to
work—and that's okay. With a highly consumable form of content like
a video, you need to be sitting there watching it. You have to give it
your time and attention. However, with podcasts, you could be doing
the dishes, walking the dog, exercising, etc.
The size of the file doesn't matter, and that's pretty awesome. Many
demographics listen to podcasts. “Podcasting” is another term for au-
dio transmission, like old-school radio, and that's now on the Internet
and on demand. We thought we would tell everyone what we're doing,
how we're doing it, and walk through it so you get a better idea of how
you could do this.
When we started about a year, we did not have any podcasting. We
had listened to a few podcasts like TED Radio Hour and others and
thought they were pretty good, then asked, “How do we do this?”
Here is what you want to do: You're thinking about the brand of your

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church. What do you want people to hear and feel as they engage with
videos, audio, branding posts, etc.?
We started to think about that and realized, “You know what?
We're in the South. We just want people to feel a down-home, south-
ern-cooking vibe. We have a great potluck at our church all the time.”
We want to walk you through how we do it. We take the audio—it's a
couple-hundred-dollar ability to plug one of the XLR cables from your
sermon into a little audio device—and record that. It doesn't have to
be the most amazing, but you take that into an audio program. For
instance, GarageBand comes free on all Mac computers. If you go up
to the next level, Adobe Audition, you want to create a template—you
want to find a cheap mic on Amazon ($20–$50) and plug it into your
computer. They can make USB mics go into your closet.
You are going to record your intro and outro. Your intro should be
something very personable. At our church, it is simply, “Hey, thanks
for listening this week. If you're ever in the area, please stop in and say
‘Hi’”—something like that. It is a quick intro. We introduce who we
are: “This is our church podcast, and we hope you enjoy.” We add a
little jingle of music that's probably 10–15 seconds and dive right in.
We edit the sermon, and it fades right in.
Toward the end of the sermon, there is an outro—a little fade to
music as we close with prayer—then, “Hey, thanks for listening. If you
wouldn't mind, please share this with your friends, like our Facebook
page, and let us know what kind of topics you would like to hear.” It
has been so fulfilling for us to receive letters and emails from different
people. We see anywhere from 700–800 podcast downloads per week,
and recently, it was 1,200. It is a consistent range that continues to
grow.
What is amazing is only half are local. Therefore, this is how a small,
rural church, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, can have a nation-
al reach and larger impact.
We are going to show you how, once you edit the sermon file, some
people just grab it and go through the process. For a podcast, it's about
the set-up and getting people into it, and it's an outro that will make it
feel better. You go to Google, and the software we use is called Simple-

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cast. We love it. It is really simple. You would click {specify}, and once
you record the sermon and take the title—we usually go over to Canva
and make a graphic; we usually grab our graphics from Unsplash. We
will bring it into a template; we have an existing template, which is very
simple.
Here is a white box. This violates some of the rules we have recently
discussed regarding what is most effective with Facebook ads. You do
not want to think, “What are we doing? Why are we doing it?” You
can see on a few of these, we put text and are trying to find a way to
do that more. Another thing you will see here is the different images.
Every week we started this, and now that we have helped others get
into it, the best practice is to use the same image. Find yourself an
image, whether it's you as a pastor or spiritual leader. the church, or
whatever it may be. Whoever is doing the podcast, put that person’s
image up and make it nice. Apply the branding and keep it consistent.
Make sure you are trying to follow some of the rules of Facebook
with your podcast because you want to ultimately put your podcast on
there. That will be the end of our workflow in a minute, and we will
guide you through it.
In the meantime, you get your graphic, which, if it's consistent, you
don't even have to go to that step. Simplecast already stores it for you.
You go in here with your audio file, click “Add New Episode,” and add
your title here. We did one recently, entitled “Coby and Talking to the
Dead,” to which many people seem to respond. We write a summary
here. This sermon is about the book of Acts. You should copy and
save it because you are going to use the same copy when you go to
Facebook.
Then you come down here and search for keywords, which is a pret-
ty awesome feature. Whatever your sermon is about, put as many key-
words as you can in there. “Death,” “hell,” “talking to the dead,” “spir-
itualism,” “paranormal,” and “supernatural” are all terms that may deal
with this sermon. We always put the words “Christian,” “Adventists,”
“Sabbath,” “mark of the beast,” and whatever else may be a buzzword.
If somebody is searching in iTunes or Spotify specifically, I want that
person to somehow find this sermon and have it pop up. We have had

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numerous testimonies of people saying, “I found this sermon. I don't

really know how I was looking for this topic.” That's pretty awesome!
Here, you can choose the file, but if you don't, it falls back to the
main podcast artwork. That's what you want to do to keep it simple.
Then you add your audio file here. You can drag it in to upload it, and
it automatically pushes it out to iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and
all these other places on this site after the publisher has posted it.
We can show you how to do this. You can come here, grab the em-
bed code, and put it on your website. It's pretty simple. There is a free
version, and they offer plans for $12, $24, or $36 per month, depend-
ing on the amount of consumption. It will give you a lot of data.
Where are people listening? iTunes? Spotify? Other? How much are
they listening? You will start to find out how people are consuming
podcasts and can optimize it accordingly. Once you do all these steps,
posted it to your website and on the platforms, it usually takes about
two hours to populate. What we do is take all those links and keep
them consistent. When we go to Facebook or Instagram, we usually
close those at the same time.
Right before you do the boosting—“Hey everyone, here's this week's
message on this topic”—that is where you paste in what the sermon
is about. Then you put the links to watch this on. We also do videos.
You watch it on YouTube, yet the audio is great because it's a lot more
cost-effective to produce. Just follow through with these steps, and
you're going to see unbelievable responses and results. We are pretty
stoked that we found this and extremely blessed to use this software,
and we know you will be, too.

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Dealing with
Negative Comments
O ne of the most challenging parts of when you're putting your
stuff out there to let the world determine whether or not it's a
good idea is that they hate you, especially when you have a negative
brand with that audience already, and you're going to get a lot of weird
comments and messages among all the good ones. The wheat and
tares are real. Last night, we were filming, and someone wrote in, as a
recommendation on our church page, “Y'all are full up this message
you preach big!” We were taken aback. Haters are going to hate. Yes,
it's very true.
We want to give you guys some principles and solid advice for deal-
ing with this. First, you pretty much want to block the person, or at
least hide it. The reason why is because we have to realize we are not
going to change people's minds in just one conversation, yet we can
love and pray for them. It's a process to get them from complete hater
to devoted Seventh-day Adventist Christian. It is not going to happen
in one conversation. Let’s not waste our time arguing with people on
Facebook or being keyboard warriors. It is not a good look for us.
Rightness is not righteousness. Just plant the seeds and let people en-
gage with you. Some people may get under your skin and try to em-
barrass your church.
It may be that some of those people are the best ones with whom
to converse. There was someone with whom we recently engaged who
claimed Jesus is a false god and things like that. We reached out and
asked him to tell us some of his experience. Well, with time, he re-

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vealed he is Jewish and has these feelings and whatnot, and now we're
bantering back and forth. Doing so on a public thread is a detriment.
You either delete, block, or hide those comments because you don't
want people you are trying to reach to start reading through there and
conclude Adventists are out to lunch or crazy. This is one of the big
issues with the importance of rebuilding.
The equity of the Adventist brand is the search engine. If you Goo-
gle right now, people come to your series. We have heard this from
people we know. They put all this money into a series. People are com-
ing, then they go to Google and come across all these hater sites. It
helps their experience because the vast majority of that stuff is fake,
and the other stuff can be explained.
Thus, roughly 60% of people who Google “Adventists” or “Sev-
enth-day Adventism” after they have had an encounter with us will
never come to an event again, which is bad. We know there are or-
ganizations out there that are putting a lot of time and effort behind
changing things in the search engine for our brand, which is amazing,
but we need to change the image of our brand at the local-church level
as well.
It is not fruitful to argue that we're right, but if a person leaves a
hateful comment, eliminate it or block the person. We have eliminated
comments before, come back, and seen the person repost it, plus a
whole new book worth. You just ban those people.
What you want to do is make sure you have a conversation with
the people who are writing good things, genuine questions. Respond
to them, engage with them, and create conversation and community.
However, if someone asks you a genuine question and you have po-
tential suspicion that it might go south, go one round with that person.
That means go one response. If it turns into a debate or argument,
stop yourself and exercise self-control.
You need to know the devil is going to try to suck you in and waste
your time dealing with someone whom he has deceived. It is just not
going to work. This is an art. This is a science. This is a discipline. You
will figure it out as you go.

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Live Event
Experiences
W e spent a lot of time talking about how to attract people us-
ing online methods, invite them to attend different events, and
things like that. However, when they attend your events, what should
happen? What should you do? How can you create an amazing ex-
perience for them so that they keep coming back to your events and
ultimately make eternal decisions? Being able to tap into a pastor's per-
spective (remember, pastors deal with this a lot), we are going to share
a lot of insight into this.
You can pour your heart and soul, as well as a lot of money and re-
sources, into the idea of rebranding and getting people to know who
you are and what you're about, but if somebody comes in and a church
member crosses paths and says, “Who are you?” or something like that
in a rude manner, or worse, ignores that person, it can kill everything.
One might ignore a person under the assumption that he or she is
probably a church member who has been here a thousand times. This
is extremely important, even to the point where before you start every-
thing, put your calendar out, guide your church through a dry run of
visitors coming to talk with us, meet with us, and be with us.
We suggest it starts in the parking lot. If a visitor drives up in your
parking lot and does not know where to park, it sure would be great
if somebody had shown him or her where to park. Then it contin-
ues outside your front doors. The best experiences in this world have
someone opening your door for you. Big, fancy hotels and restaurants

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open the doors for guests. This stuff seems so simple, but you need
to explain this to your church members because sometimes, they just
don't understand.
We do not want to assume. If we're assuming, we're risking a lot—
spending all this money and time to get people to come to these events.
Do not assume your church members automatically have a handle on
things because they likely don't. Therefore, you need to do a dry run
and guide people through the process.
When guests walk up to the front doors of your church, you need to
have some people who are trained at opening a door, reaching out their
hands, welcoming them, expressing gladness that they're here. They
need to show them around, give them a program, help them register,
walk them to the restrooms, gather any kids for their program, and the
list goes on.
This is the most important thing. Besides a live event, this applies
to the church. If people show up at your church, which is a weekly
evangelistic series, make sure they feel welcome, and the members are
kind. There is an expression: kindness is king, candor is queen, and
experience is everything. The theology we preach or all the right meth-
ods and practices we put into it don’t matter if the people don't come
and say, “Man, these people are amazing,” on our church page. We dis-
cussed how every brand evokes emotion, and when visitors are around
us Seventh-day Adventists, we want that emotion to be positive.
People are kind, loving, interesting, different, and curious, so it draws
them on this journey. Do not underestimate this. We wouldn't even
spend a dollar on anything you've heard in this course without think-
ing, “Alright, God is going to bless this. We're going to get people to
engage with us in person—in real life. What are we going to do when
they're around us?” We would even suggest going so far as to bring in
some “secret shoppers”—call some friends or others whom nobody
at your church knows and say, “Hey, I want you to come over and tell
me what we do well and what we don't do well;” then graciously share
that with your church.

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Conclusion
We want to thank you so much for taking the time to engage with
this course. Our prayer is that God does more than you can ask or
think as you use these newfound tools in your community.
We look forward to hearing from you if you have any ideas or ques-
tions or want to share some of your success stories.
-Chris and Jared
hello@advertiselikejesus.com
www.advertiselikejesus.com

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