Two Good Agencies.
Different in the Right Ways.
Creative Church Marketing is a Greenville, SC-based agency dedicated exclusively to church marketing. They've worked with 300+ churches across the country, pitching themselves as an "extended staff" model with quantified monthly deliverables — sermon clips, graphics, reels, and Plan Your Visit ad campaigns.
This comparison exists to help you decide. We'll tell you what they do well, where we differ, and which option is likely the better fit for your situation. We'd rather you make the right choice — even if that's not us.
What They Offer
Church-only focus
Creative Church Marketing serves churches exclusively. Every page on their site, every case study, and every piece of educational content is written for a senior pastor. That single-vertical focus is genuinely useful — they speak the language fluently and have refined a playbook that produces consistent results for the churches they fit.
Volume of church relationships
They've worked with over 300 churches, which gives them a lot of pattern recognition for what works in church social media, what visitor ad campaigns convert at, and what a church can reasonably expect from a managed monthly engagement.
Productized monthly output
CCM publishes specific monthly deliverable counts — 12 sermon clips, 30-45 graphics, 3-5 reels, plus website management and Plan Your Visit campaigns. That clarity makes it easy for a church to know exactly what they're getting and budget accordingly.
Cost calculator and transparent pricing tiers
They publish a homepage cost calculator and tiered pricing based on church size, which removes some of the friction of getting a quote. For pastors who want to know the budget conversation before booking a call, that's helpful.
Where Sidestreet Is Different
Broadcast production heritage applied to church work
Sidestreet's production team comes from broadcast — NBC News, ESPN, NBCUniversal, LTN Global Communications, and regional television. We bring that level of craft to church work because we believe ministry deserves it. Most church-focused marketing agencies are built on the social-ad and content-production playbook; we're built on broadcast. That difference shows up in sermon clip quality, ministry film production, live-stream engineering, and capital campaign video work in ways a church considering both options will see immediately.
Full-service beyond marketing and content
Creative Church Marketing is focused on the marketing and content layer — social, ads, graphics, web management, visitor campaigns. Sidestreet covers that scope and also handles live streaming infrastructure (Resi, LiveU, AWS-based encoding), worship technology consulting (Planning Center, ProPresenter, AV system design), PR and crisis communications, and pastoral transition support. For churches that want one senior team across the whole picture rather than a marketing-only agency, the scope is the practical difference.
Senior-led engagements with no junior handoff
When you hire Sidestreet, the senior people you talk to in the sales conversation are the people building your campaigns and producing your content. We don't have an account-manager-to-junior-producer handoff structure. CCM's 300+ church scale necessarily involves a team structure with account management layers. For churches that prefer direct senior involvement on the work, Sidestreet operates differently by design.
Sermonix for church planters and small-staff churches
Sidestreet built Sermonix — eight Slack-native AI tools for sermon prep, sermon-to-social, weekly newsletter, guest follow-up, devotionals, small group guides, image generation, and open-ended questions. Tuned to your church via a one-time profile. $49/seat/month, first 3 months free during beta. It's a tool no other church marketing agency offers because no other church marketing agency built one.
AI-powered workflow across the engagement
Sidestreet runs AI through every part of the workflow — Claude, in-house models, and Sermonix where it fits. The marketing layer (Plan Your Visit funnels, Google Ad Grant management, social content) all moves faster because of it. For a church evaluating partners, the question isn't which agency uses AI; it's which one has been investing in AI as a core competency for years.
How to Decide
Creative Church Marketing is probably the right choice if: you're looking for a church-exclusive agency with a clear, productized monthly content output (clips/graphics/reels), Plan Your Visit campaign management, and a published pricing tier system. Creative Church Marketing has built a clean, repeatable model and works well for churches who want a known-quantity content engine.
Sidestreet is probably the right choice if: you want broadcast-grade production quality alongside the marketing work, a senior-led engagement without account-manager handoffs, full-service scope that includes live streaming engineering and worship technology alongside marketing, PR and crisis communications coverage when you need it, and access to Sermonix for the AI tools your team actually uses in the week.
If you're genuinely unsure, talk to both of us before committing. Any agency worth working with will give you a straight answer about whether they're the right fit — and so will we.