Find out in this blog how you can significantly improve your funeral home marketing.
Do you doubt your funeral home is reaching its full audience potential in your community, and you don’t know why? That can be the case… Running a funeral home can be incredibly complex and often hard, and marketing sometimes gets pushed to the side, because clients, families, and the tough situation they are in come first!
No one likes to think about death, so how to advertise a business in which death is the main component, and is that even possible? Of course, it is!
In this blog, you will find some really useful pieces of advice, a list of proven funeral home marketing strategies, tips, and techniques to try to implement in your marketing for funeral home strategy. The strategies we are going to present to you have proven successful, and by implementing them, you can attract new clients, build stronger brand awareness and community connections, and increase your revenue.
Funeral homes are the cornerstone of communities, offering necessary services and support in the hardest times for all the people, and this blog will help you serve more families and expand your business. Marketing for funeral home techniques we have identified range from branding, to presentation, to specific advertising platforms, to community interaction. Implementing just a couple of these techniques that fit with your community can help you increase revenue, generate more positive reviews online, and get that phone ringing!
So, let’s be clear at the start – marketing for funeral homes is challenging and probably more sensitive than in other industries, but that is a reason more to dedicate all available resources to it! We’ll help you to do that in the right way!
Table of Contents
1. Blogging, blogging, and more blogging
The internet has fundamentally changed marketing practices and there is a radical new philosophy gaining popularity:
You are not a funeral home. You are a company that sells funeral services.
This may seem exaggerated at first, but it’s intended to emphasize the concept that people online are turned off by advertisements and on by useful and helpful content. If you can provide useful tools, answers, information, and resources for people, then you gain their trust and loyalty. In an industry built on trust, it’s beyond words how this strategy can be insanely valuable for funeral homes.
Blogg is your number 1 tool to gain all adventages we mentioned above. Use it! Publish informative and engaging content, and do you on the regular basis, at least two times a week.
On your blog, you can educate your customers on the importance of pre-planning, services, insurance, estate planning, wills, and more. You can also deliver the content on Facebook and Instagram (organic or paid) and via email. Blog is an ideal “weapon” for community engagement, gaining trust and loyalty, but also a powerful promotion tool.
Remember, people are into honesty, transparency, and “clean” and comprehensive content that will help them to find what they looking for, so don’t complicate it – make it simple and trustworthy.
2. Rank better online with SEO
It’s hard to imagine ranking anyplace good on Google without weel designed and implemented SEO (Search engine optimization). And without Google, it’s hard to imagine any business growth in a digital age.
An important part of establishing an online presence is making sure people can find you. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an easy way for funeral homes to get their services in front of families in need. For most funeral homes that are located outside of densely populated urban areas ranking high on Google is easier than for those in big cities and densely populated places.
SEO can help there by emphasizing your business specifics and what distinguish you from the competition and using that to rank you organically higher on search engine. SEO uses unique designed keywords and implements them, all that in order to build your business visibility online. If you decide to rank higher on Google or other search platforms, consider hiring an SEO expert, as we in Monument SEO & Design have.
3. Testimonials
Testimonials are a very powerful form of advertising because they come directly from the clients and they are not reducted in any way. So, people trust them and that’s a huge thing.
In the digital age, all marketers know that testimonials are an essential component of selling. The reason? Social proof. The second best thing to a direct friend referral is 5 or 10 strangers talking about what a great experience they had with your company. You can add testemonials section to your website and immediately begin to increase call volume.
4. Website
30 years ago, your family’s first impression was your actual funeral home facility – today that is your website. That is your business mirror and you should put maximum effort to look your best in it. Having a well-designed website with a quality user experience is the physical-world equivalent of wearing your best suit and presenting to a family in an arrangement room that makes them feel comforted and confident. There are hundreds of thousands of Google searches for funeral homes in the U.S. each month which means customers are checking for the most trusted-feeling website in each community before they make a decision.
5. Organic and Paid Social Media
Social media channels have become an inseparable part of successful marketing strategies, which include marketing for funeral home strategies as well.
At the essence of every good digital marketing, practice lies organic social media. The benefits of regular organic social media are huge and include: forming relationships with clients, growing your market share, becoming a visible brand for people in your community, forming a fellowship with your audience, and educating families on the value of services before they walk into your facility. In organic social media efforts also lays the groundwork for successful paid ad campaigns.
At the core of Facebook and Instagram advertising (the two most popular social platforms) is their incredibly sophisticated demographic targeting tools. Let us give you an example. We are assuming that your primary pre-need clients are college-educated married women between the ages of 40-60 within a 30-mile radius of your business.
Facebook and Instagram Ads allow you to put your brand and call-to-action in front of 90% of those people in our community in 1 week’s time for far less money than you spend on an entire year of newspaper ads that never got close to that kind of reach. Additionally, Facebook ads offer one-click actions making collecting new customer leads simple.
In summary, social media platforms are indisposable and powerful tools for implementing successful marketing for funeral home strategy.
6. On-Site Live Chat
An analysis of more than 2,200 American companies found those who attempted to reach leads within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to have meaningful conversations with decision makers than those who waited even sixty minutes. The internet has provided an incredibly useful for you to reach leads fast – on-site chat boxes!
These brilliant tools work by displaying a little box on every page of your website saying “Have a question? Chat with us!.” When a potential customer sends a message on your site it pops up instantly on your smartphone allowing you to answer leads instantly. This will increase conversions and increase revenue fast. The top tools for chats (ranging in price and features) are Tidio, ZenDesk Chat, Podium, and Kayako.
If you really understood the significance of marketing for funeral home strategies for your business development, you should consider hiring an experienced marketing team that specializes in digital marketing for funeral homes, as this will provide you the fastest possible results, and releive you of any headaches and marketing learning curves.
