During this first week of Advent, most of us wonder how best to promote our upcoming Christmas services. Social media promotions in the form of Facebook ads are a cost-effective way to get the word out about church events. However, creating an effective ad typically takes more than just filling out a few fields in the ad builder, and clicking publish.  
 
All advertisements, in print or digital formats, include an implicit or explicit call to action. When you create an ad, you encourage the person viewing your ad to do something, such as donate money to your church or participate in an event. Facebook ads include a call to action button that routes the user to a specific location that you choose. If you are seeking a donation, and your church has signed up for Facebook's charitable giving tools, the user will be routed directly to the donation page interface on Facebook once they click or tap the Donate Now button. When running a standard ad to promote an upcoming worship service or event on Facebook, most churches simply link the call to action button to their churches' homepage, which is not always ideal.  
 
Best practice calls for creating and linking your call to action button on Facebook to a landing page on your website. A landing page is a webpage that offers visitors information specific to your event. For example, let's suppose you create an ad to promote your church's upcoming Christmas Eve service. Your landing page provides additional information about the event. It does not try to convey that your church just celebrated its 200th anniversary, serves the homeless and disenfranchised in your area, and hosts a monthly community dinner. While these are important in the life of your community, they do not add specific information about your Christmas Eve service.

Not only might social media ads direct users to your event-specific landing page, but so might organic search results, email campaigns, and your own homepage. 
 
Because social media ad respondents -- and others -- tend to skim quickly for the information they seek, landing pages should be simple, clean, use real and relatable pictures, and repeat key information. Landing pages will feature some sort of "call to action" of their own in order to help the visitor take the next step. Ultimately, that call to action should be designed to begin or strengthen the relationship between the church and the respondent by directing them to a place that will collect their contact information, or perhaps invite them to join a newsletter list, In addition, that landing page might include a "Plan Your Visit" button which links to a page that let's first-timers know what to expect when visiting the church. A good example of that type of page is at:https://westfielducc.org/faq/.

Here's a sample landing page that provides information for an upcoming Christmas eve service: http://www.somersvilleucc.org/christmas.