349 - Breaking Down Barriers: How Social Media Ads Make Church Invites Personal with ChurchCandy Marketing's Brady Sticker

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Brady Sticker, welcome to Listening with Leaders. When your name came across my desk, I got so intrigued because you're the CEO of a company called Church Candy. And not only are you a pastor, but you provide social media, digital, or I should say digital media services to churches to help them grow. And you do it not because you wanna make a ton of money, but because you wanna serve these people. I just think that's awesome. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, man, Doug, hey, thank you so much for having me.

Absolutely. So why don't you give us a little bit about your backstory? I know we talked just for a second before, and I know reading on your website, started when you were in school.

Yeah. So to get through Bible college, whenever I was going to seminary to be a pastor, I was working with my dad's company to just help pay the bills. And they had a company that helped chiropractors with social media marketing. And my dad like used to work in the chiropractic industry, so that's like how he was just in that world. And so I always thought I would go into what what you would call bi-vocational ministry where like I would have a day job that paid the bills, but then serve in like a local church as a youth pastor or something to, as like my main like focus. And just whenever I was in school, I realized, man, I think a local church needs what I've been doing for these chiropractors. And graduated seminary and ended up starting working with a church in the Houston area in their student ministry. And At the same time, we started inviting people to church through social media ads, which is a little like interesting. Like you would never think of a church like buying ads on Instagram and Facebook. But it worked great for us to just let people in our city know about us. And we started getting a ton of new faces. And then the lead pastor of our church told some of his friends about what we were doing. So they hired me. To help them do it as well. And now we've worked today with over 1,000 churches helping them do this. And it's so cool just to see like the impact that we're making. It's just really cool, Doug.

That just makes my heart glow to think about it. What a— this is an era where church congregations have been shrinking and not growing. And that you're able to help these churches attract new congregants. Is really amazing to me. So tell me a little bit about the process of how you go about structuring a campaign for a church.

Yeah, so the way it works is I will ask their pastor to record a video just on their phone, basically inviting people to church, and they'll use the words, I know it might be intimidating visiting a church where you don't know anyone, so that's why if you click below and plan a visit, We'll connect before Sunday. That way you and the whole family feels welcomed when you guys come and visit. And that phrasing is so important because what they're doing is they're entering the conversation people are already having in their head, right? Because people are, it is intimidating going to a new church. You don't know anyone.

You're walking into a community that you're walking into a community blind and you're really not even being invited into the community. You're just walking in cold.

Doug, the other day I was looking for a new gym, wanted to get in shape. And my sister, she goes on and on about CrossFit. You've heard of CrossFit, right?

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Dude, people say they're crazy. I don't know. My sister's really into it, but she lives not near me, so I couldn't just go with her. She's like, you should go check, find a CrossFit gym near you. So Doug, I'm going, I'm looking online at these different CrossFit gyms in my neighborhood. And I was like, man, I'm a little outta shape. Like, I don't know anyone at this gym. What if they judge me? And I think to myself, I was like, man, I wish I could talk to a trainer that worked there beforehand. Like, wonder if they have a phone number I can call or if like I fill out a form and talk to someone or like, I wonder if I know anyone like in my neighborhood that goes to this gym. And then I realize this is what people feel like before they go and visit a church too. They're like, what if I'm not as spiritual as everyone else? Or it's like, I'm ashamed of my past. Like, I'm not like holier than on the same level as these other people that go to church. I don't know anyone there. So that is what we're trying to do with churches is just invite people to church and get churches connected to people. So like we say that we're on a mission to connect a million people to a local church and we track that every single week. Like last week we connected right around 3,500 people to churches all across the country, just like in one week. So total it's 315,000 people that we've connected to a local church. We're trying to get that to a million. And man, it's just so cool. That's what we're, that's what we've done to help these churches. And it's taught me a lot about, yes, that side of things, but just like in our own business, because we have, we, we had to build a business to be able to do this, to hire staff. And we've scaled it to now working with hundreds and hundreds of churches. And we have a team of 40.

I saw the picture. That's a big organization.

It's, it's wild. It is gone crazy. Way bigger. Doug, I'm 27 years old. Ever heard of imposter syndrome? That's me every day. Sometimes I feel like, why am I doing this? I was a youth pastor just a few, and I'm still like involved in church and stuff, but now like I do this full time. It, it has been a crazy ride the past few years.

So what is it? You're 27, you're pretty young, but obviously successful. An organization with 40 employees and you scaled up to where you're working with thousands of churches. What is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you really excited to go to work, man?

The other day I had a pastor text me and he told me about this guy. His, his guy's name is David, and David used to be a drug addict and an alcoholic and didn't have a job, wasn't allowed in his kids' lives at all. Just think of just like rock bottom. And one day David sees an ad, or actually no, one day David gets a text from a pastor and he's, what is this? What's going on? Like, how does this pastor have my phone number? Apparently the night before when he was strung out high on drugs and drunk on alcohol, he saw an ad on social media from a church and he filled out the form. He doesn't even remember it.

Wow.

Because the next morning he's just waking up getting a text from a pastor. He ends up connecting with them. They go to coffee and they get connected. 6 months later from that conversation, now he's given his life to the Lord. He's 6 months sober. He's got a great job in a management position at a construction company. He's in his kids' lives again. And all of that happened because he just got connected with a local pastor from an Instagram ad that we had set up for this church. And the, this pastor's telling me about it. And that's the kind of stuff that just gets me excited, man.

Wow. Yeah, I get it. I worked for 10 years in prisons from 2010 to the pandemic training lifers how to stop prison violence.

Wow.

And I saw a lot of amazing transformations and that's the kind of work that gets you excited and gets you up in the morning. Absolutely.

Yeah, man. Absolutely. Yeah. It, and I think that's just, the Bible talks about how there's power by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. So the blood of the Lamb is Jesus, there's power Jesus has power and then our stories have power. And like, I've taken that like mindset and I think that's one of the ways we've grown the business is I, we're good at a lot of things. I think the two things we're best at is number one, getting results for our clients. And then number two, we're really good at documenting those results. Like you asked me before we pressed record, is, do you have any competitors or are there other people in this world like doing this too? And there are some. But we're really good and any business can do this. It's like when you get a new client or get a new customer, give them the best experience possible. You want to knock it out of the world with delivering, right?

Data-driven.

Once you do that and you get the result, document that. Document that in a case study. I'll sit down with clients or have our team sit down with clients like this over Zoom and we'll do interviews on their experience. What kind of growth have they seen? So we'll document like a testimonial or case study. I started doing podcasts where we interview our clients for them to tell their stories and we'll chop it up for social media. But what that does is that's additional social proof that is now fueled the growth to go get the next client.

That's right.

And then when we get the next client, you know what we do? So we deliver them great results.

It's just rinse and repeat.

And then we document it and then it just repeats. It's a cycle. That's what we've done to really scale the business.

Is your business coming— has it started out, of course, word of mouth, but where do you think your new clients are coming from now?

A lot of word of mouth, but what we'll do is we'll run ads on Instagram and Facebook targeting pastors, literally just saying, hey, we're helping churches use Facebook and Instagram ads to invite their city to church. Here's the results they're seeing. And then we just play a bunch of testimonial videos. So it's not me talking. They don't wanna hear me.

Of course.

They wanna see the fruit. They wanna see the testimony.

Just like I shared, they're listening to their peers talk about how Brady and his team just kicked ass.

Yeah. And so we'll just show those videos and like, I've found, I, like, I'll try to record ads for myself. Oh, we'll do this for your church and we'll do this. And there's these systems and things that we can do on the backend. No one cares about that. That when I run those split tests, if like a testimonial ad of a pastor saying, man, this just worked really good for our church. We get a ton of new families. Like people's lives are being changed.

It's awesome.

That dramatically outperforms a video where I'm like, oh, we do these advanced targeting things and we write these custom scripts for you. And they're like, I don't care about that. It's the whole homage of you don't wanna sell, you don't wanna sell a drill, you wanna sell the hole.

Right? Yeah. Good for you. So what do you think it is about you? You're obviously really excited. You're very charismatic. What is it about you personally that you think you bring to the table that makes you so successful at this?

This? Man, I think it's just being excited about the goal and having a mission. Like for us, it's that mission to connect a million people to a local church. As we were scaling our company, I don't know if you've read the book Traction by Gino Wickman. It's just like a framework for structuring your organization. They have an operating system called EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, but it's basically getting your core values, getting a solid like org chart, how you should have things structured. But throughout that process, it was to, you needed to come up with a goal, like what's one goal that the company can strive for? And when we first had like our meeting with our team trying to figure out what that goal was, we left with it saying, oh, we want to have 1,000 clients. We want to work with 1,000 churches. And that's cool. That's great to say that we work with 1,000 churches. But that goal's about us, right? I just struggled. I remember laying down one night just thinking, man, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that goal. And so we went back to the next meeting and I was like, okay, no, instead of the goal being about us and like, let's get us 1,000 clients, right? 1,000 churches that we work with, let's make it about the results we're getting for the clients. And so now we have that goal of we want to get A million people connected to a local church. So having what's a goal that you're striving for, and that makes it really easy too for team buy-in, right? People always talk about how, man, like my team, they just not, they don't take ownership. They're not bought in. They're just clocking in and clocking out. How can you create a mission and set that vision as a leader to make the whole organization as a whole? Go towards a goal that's bigger than yourself, because you do that and it's really easy to get team buy-in.

Yeah, it sounds to me like this is a mantra that I've been talking about for year— decades— service to others. So how do you, how do you set up your vision or your goal, your company goal, to serve others? And if you can do that, then I think you're right, there's a different kind of energy people are looking at every time people come to work. They are getting excited about the fact that they're serving others, and that gives them meaning. And once they have meaning, they feel content and satisfied.

100%, man. And we see that in our company. It helps. I hire a lot of church people that either used to work on staff at a church, or they're just at least believers themselves. And because of that, they buy into that vision of serving others and They, they love our clients. And so it's made it really easy to get team buy-in too.

So you've got 300,000, you've connected over 300,000 people with local churches. So you're about a third of the way there. What happens when you reach a million? Then what?

Man, we're gonna make the next goal 5 million or 10 million. We'll probably have to, I don't know, man. I haven't thought about what we do when we get there. My team said we're, we have to throw a big party, have a conference, invite all our clients to, I'm based in Houston, so maybe we do something here. I don't know. Haven't gotten that far, but it'll probably be here within the next couple years.

Wow. And your churches are all over the, all over North America?

Yeah, we've got churches mainly in the States. We've got a handful in Canada. We've looked at expanding. You get into different issues where different, like different countries have different laws for like marketing and advertising. And some of them will even discriminate against religion.

Wow.

So like we can't even run YouTube ads because it's against YouTube, which is weird cuz we can do Google ads but not YouTube ads.

Right.

Because YouTube has. It's part of their terms of service is you can't, nothing, no religious-based ads for whatever reason.

Wow. Interesting. Huh? Interesting.

Yeah.

So this show's called Listening with Leaders. I don't know if you know anything about me. I'm a lawyer turned peacemaker, and I help people stop fights and arguments in their lives forever by ignoring their words and listen and listening to emotions rather than to words. I'm curious. About how you learned how to listen. Yeah.

One of the things for me is whenever I was first getting started in all this, and I would be on a Zoom call similar to this with a pastor, and he's interested in our programs. Oh yeah, tell me more about it. And what I would do is I would sit and list all the features and all the things we do and all. And I would just talk and talk. And I was having a hard time converting them into new clients and customers that ended up hiring us. And it wasn't until I switched, instead of just talking about what we do, what I would do is I would ask questions and then listen. So I would ask questions like, what made you want to schedule this call today? Why do you want to reach more people? Why are you passionate about wanting to grow your church? So I'd ask questions about kind of their goals and where are the pain points they're having. Listen to that and then use the things that they tell me and explain how our agency, how our company can help them reach those goals. And so that was a big shift I had to make to where it's like, I needed to talk less because you see me on this call today, like I can talk, like I'm great at that.

You're good at it, right?

I'm excited about what we do, so it's easier for me to ramble about it, but sometimes it's better for me just to shut up, listen to what they have to say, listen to the pains that they have, and then reference the pains that they have and say, hey, you said X, Y, and Z. Here's how what we do can help you X, Y, and Z. And that's worked really well for us. Just listening to the pain points that our customers have.

Yeah.

And use that almost in the sales process.

I teach sales and amongst other things, and the number one rule is when you're talking, you're not selling. It's all about listening. And there's no such thing as a sales conversation. It's called a buyer's conversation. And you gotta listen to your buyer to make it.

Yeah.

And it sounds like you've discovered that. So how, you've got a team of 40 people. How, what kind of values do you have around listening to each other and respect and that sort of thing? How people treat each other within the company?

Yeah, man, that's a great question. So we've got a handful of core values. I actually got 'em written right here. I've got this cool, got a phone stand, phone can sit on it, but it's got all our core values. Building the kingdom, own it, pursue excellence. Keep it positive and mission over methods. A couple of those core values touch on listening and like the respect level between team members. One of them, keeping it positive. Another one, pursuing excellence. I think if we're— keep it positive, we always want to look at the bright side. We always want to, if a team member does make a mistake or drop the ball, it's like, hey, you got to own it. Another one of our core values, but It's not the end of the world. Things happen. Now, if that continues and it's a habit and they don't learn from it, then it's one of those things like, hey, maybe you're not the right fit for this role.

Exactly.

Or that's one of those things to where we've really had to learn just having sympathy for other people, putting them, putting yourselves in their shoes. And then even as a CEO, I, my wife will tell me like, you are way too generous and way too, like I show too much grace to some of our employees. And I heard actually Dave Ramsey, the financial guy, talk, talk about this once when he was talking about leading his teams and his employees. And he says that I take the idea of treat people the way you want to be treated. I take that very literal in the sense of if I was in their role, if I was in their shoes, how would I want to be treated in this situation? And so because of that, I try to make it a really fun place to work. I try to, be really generous with our team. And it comes down to that principle of just, if I was in their shoes, how would I want to be treated?

You and your wife work together in this business, right?

Kind of. She did for a while.

Oh, okay.

And we, then we started having kids and it was too stressful for her cuz she was like in our finance department and we're doing good. It's fine. But she's, ah, just looking at the numbers stress me out. I'm just gonna be a stay-at-home mom. Let you worry about the business. And so now, so that works. Yeah. And she, like, she's in another room. I don't want her to hear me say this. She works way harder than I do and does way more than I, like, keeping up with our family and the house and stuff. I just hang out all day, talk to pastors, and I feel like I don't do much work.

Wow. That's cool. Your work is your life.

It's the—

So are you guys remote or hybrid or in person? How's your business?

Yeah, so we're like 90% remote. Once a quarter, my leadership team will get together and then twice a year, our US-based team will get together. We'll do a staff retreat in the summer and then a Christmas party in December.

And are people spread out all over the place or are they mostly in Texas?

Just all of our staff is in Texas. It makes it easier on us for like HR and payroll compliance, right?

One state law you have to comply with.

Yeah. So I don't have to worry about, okay, because for example, like I have a friend who owns a business and he had one employee move to Oregon, and Oregon has some of the most strict HR and compliance and payroll laws. And so because of that, he had to switch some of their things to match Oregon's compliance things, but he had to do that for all of his employees, not just that one person that lived in Oregon. So now I'm like, I'm just going to keep it easy. Just keep everyone in Texas. You could argue that it caps our talent pool, but there's millions of people that live here in Texas, so we can find good talent here. And then we have some contractors overseas just for like behind the scenes stuff, but for the most part, like all of our teams here in Texas.

So you got 40 employees now. What do you see? How do you see yourself scaling up to a million people connected with local churches?

Yeah, hopefully I want to scale without hiring as much. AI has been great at helping our team be more efficient. I told my team when we were really diving into AI, I don't want AI to take your job. I want AI to make you extremely efficient at your job. To where basically instead of used to, you could only manage 30 church accounts, but now with AI you can manage 60. And so just make them more efficient and be able to handle more in their day-to-day roles.

How do you end up— so you're doing a lot of social media advertising. How do you train people to do that kind of work? It's a, that's a complex business. Yeah.

That's why for us it's great because we have like a playbook. We have a playbook that we run for churches.

And that's the thing, like if—

yeah, if you're a plumber and you call us, it's like, hey, love you, love what you do. We're not a good fit. Let me refer you to my friend who has a company that does something similar, but for plumbers, because we don't have to learn. Like if I signed up a plumber and gave it to my team, we would have to learn how to get plumbers new clients or new customers. Like we, we don't know. And some of the like practical things is when we sign a new client, We built a custom GPT that basically like this AI bot that will take our framework for ads and the way we write all of our ads, but it'll read their website. Ah, so it'll rewrite all of our ads in our frameworks that we know works really well, but it'll rewrite it in their voice so that it's custom to them. And so what used to take my team like half a day to take the templates and rewrite it custom for a client. Now it takes maybe 10 to 15 minutes. Wow.

To get the basic ad going. Wow.

Yeah. And there's things like that. And then like with the video ads and this is a practical marketing tip for anyone out there that something we do for churches and ourselves is when we get a new client, we'll have a client, we'll have them record a video inviting people to church that we'll use as an ad. But one of the things we do is we have them record 3 different hooks. So 3 different intros to the video, and then we'll edit it together to make it look as one. But that way we can split test the 3 different intros to see which one works better. So we'll tell our clients the 3 Fs: faith, family, and fellowship. Record an intro to a video that's centered around families, an intro to a video that's centered around faith, and an intro to the video that's centered around fellowship. So the family one would be for our clients, it's, hey, culture's crazy right now. Do you want to raise your kids with biblical values? But I feel like culture's working against you. Hey, my name's Brady. I'd love to invite you to our church. Right? So that would be one intro for family. The faith would be like, hey, are you looking to grow your relationship with God? You're looking for a church in the Houston area. That's the faith one. And then fellowship is just like community. I'd say doing life alone is no fun. That's why at our church, we're all about doing life together. Hi, my name's Brady. I would love to invite you to our church. And right, so we would split test those 3 ads where the main video is the same on the back end. It's just different intros. And then depending on which one performs the best, now we can go back to the client and say, okay, hey, the family-based video is working best. Let's record 3 more like that. Let's record 3 more family intro videos and we'll now we'll double down on that. And so that's just one of the things that we found works really well for our clients that I feel like you can go and deploy. 'Cause now when we run ads for ourselves, I'll do the same thing. I'll record a video inviting people to schedule a call to learn more and I'll record multiple intros to the video, but the bulk of the content's the same and most of the content is It's testimonials, like I said earlier, but well, I'll just re-record different intros.

Cool. All right. This has really been interesting. I knew it would be. You're a pretty interesting guy. One more question. I'll let you go, Brady. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

One thing that you would never know about me is that while this is my main— I would say that Church Candy is my side hustle. My main job is being a fantasy football manager, and I take my fantasy football very seriously. And this is just my side hustle. But my main thing is fantasy football. Yeah, I'm a huge Houston Texans fan. And they, over the past— recently they've been doing okay, but over the past 10 years, not as much. I've been putting a lot of my focus into my pretend football league.

There you go. Thank you so much for joining me today, Brady. It's been great talking to you.

Awesome, Doug. Thank you so much for having me. Hope I was able to give some value to the audience today.

No doubt. Thank you so much. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/listeningwithleaders. Podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.