Key Takeaways:
- Victory Family Church’s Encounter Conference equips students and their youth leaders and encourages them to make a real impact in their community.
- While they knew the conference would be valuable to many, the team needed a communications strategy to help them reach more students and leaders in their region.
A church with a heart for discipleship and encouragement
Victory Family Church in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, is passionate about seeing people of all ages make a real difference in the world. They want to equip each person with encouragement, wisdom, and practical tools to create positive change.
One way Victory Family pursues its goal to equip and encourage the next generation is through its annual Encounter Conference—a three-day conference strategically designed to invest in students and their leaders. Attendees partake in exciting group activities, interactive breakout sessions, and inspiring main sessions featuring renowned speakers like John Bevere, Bubba Massey, and Brandon Cormier.
But Victory Family Church didn’t want to just reach the students and leaders in their own community. They wanted to reach beyond their congregation, engage students and leaders across the region, and create an engaging invitation to three days of connection, worship, and fun. With a goal to maximize the conference’s impact, they called ArtSpeak.
Getting the word out about the Encounter Conference
In 2023, Encounter Conference had 300 students in attendance. But when Victory Family Church’s leaders began imagining 2024, they had a big goal: to see 1,700 students attend.
The team decided to offer attendees lower registration costs as an incentive. But they also needed to reach people who had never heard of the conference before.
With an already engaged social media following and deep connections with other churches throughout the Northeast region, they partnered with ArtSpeak to tactically leverage these strengths as part of a detailed campaign strategy.
A brand refresh and campaign strategy for an engaging website
Victory Family Church already had a microsite created for Encounter Conference that housed a landing page and several additional pages featuring content, but the site needed to engage its audience and drive results. That’s where a brand refresh and web content strategy came in.
Since the team at Victory Family had established a presence on social media and ordered print items, ArtSpeak worked to build upon the existing brand rather than opt for drastic changes. The brand refresh included choosing and implementing some complementary fonts and additional colors to further enhance the fun, retro aesthetic of the existing brand.
In order to maximize the web page’s effectiveness, ArtSpeak worked to write updated copy for the pages and optimize the content on the site. This brought clarity for the site navigation and created a user journey from landing on the homepage to registering for the conference.
A new, engaging Encounter Conference landing page showcased the brand and made the value for the audience front and center: “Where believers encounter God and transform our region for the Kingdom!”
Strategic secondary pages highlighted the heart of the conference, the featured speakers and lodging accommodations, and daily schedules, so every attendee knew the value of their time over the 3-day conference.
A social media and email strategy to maximize engagement
To further increase online engagement, ArtSpeak developed a strategy for social media content for Victory Family Church that would lead more students and leaders to the Encounter Conference.
This included creating both paid ads and organic posts across the church’s social media platforms to highlight the conference and encourage registration. The team refreshed dynamic creative ads tailored to each audience monthly leading up to the conference, and implemented a 12-week promotional organic content strategy.
Together with Victory Family, ArtSpeak outlined an email marketing plan to build awareness, establish connections, and encourage its congregation to invite others to the Encounter Conference. This included email sequences for Victory Family Church pastors and leaders to send to their personal connections at other churches, letting them know how they could register their groups for the conference and about a price discount for early registration.
After the conference, a post-event email sequence went out to all attendees with an invitation to get notified for next year’s conference and download a copy of Victory Family’s student summer curriculum to continue engaging with the content from Encounter Conference.
