For funeral professionals, there is never enough time in the day to complete every task that needs to be done. Even the best-laid plans are often interrupted. You spend as much time as you can helping families say goodbye to their loved ones, but still also need to find time for administrative work to maintain the building and keep the business running. Marketing is an essential piece of that puzzle as well. These high-impact marketing ideas will help you work smarter, not harder, to ensure your community's families understand all you have to offer.
Know Your Audience
Getting started in the right way means having all of the information you need at your fingertips. We have more data available than ever before, allowing us to truly understand the specific needs of the families you serve. A thorough market and needs analysis allows you to take a look at your community, your business and the trends that could affect both into the future. This may seem like a daunting task, but your Homesteaders account executive can work with you to not only complete the analysis, but then put that information to use for you.
Engage Your Community
One of the most effective ways to help people in your community understand the value of funeral service is to educate them. Group presentations are a great opportunity to help those in your community learn about the components of a meaningful service and how to make a plan. Now, more than ever, it is important to find new ways to engage people and deliver this message. Many of the same best practices apply whether you’re sharing information in person at a dine-and-learn event or presenting remotely when we can’t meet in person.
Care for Your Families
While it may be a no-brainer to care for the families you serve, having a strong aftercare program that will build your business takes commitment. It can be challenging to provide meaningful ongoing support to families in the weeks and months following their loss while balancing your growing at-need caseload. What if there was a way for you to offer personalized support to every family without requiring additional time from you and your staff?
Domanicare’s industry-leading text-based aftercare program extends meaningful service and support to every family. Coupled with real-time compassionate support behind every text, Domanicare offers thoughtful family follow up and an increase in customer satisfaction through free, online grief support.
Improve Your Online Reviews
Consumers increasingly look to the internet first when researching purchase decisions, and that includes funeral planning. Your online presence matters—both the things you control (like your website and social media pages) and the things you don’t, like online reviews. Not sure you agree? Consider the following statistics from Forbes magazine:
- Online reviews impact nearly 70% of all purchasing decisions.
- Nine out of 10 consumers will read an online review before they ever step foot inside your business.
- Eighty-four percent place as much trust in online reviews as in recommendations from friends and family members.
If you’re not sure if your funeral home even has online reviews, google it. You may be surprised at what you find. And if you’re not already encouraging satisfied families to leave reviews on Google, Yelp and Facebook, you need to start.
Asking for reviews and referrals can be initially uncomfortable for funeral professionals—especially if you’re not used to it—but remember that it’s a perfectly reasonable request. Consider the following tactics:
- Focus on how they can help other families: “Losing a loved one is difficult for every family – especially those who have never experienced loss before. You can help other families by sharing your experience with them.”
- Ask for testimonials: “We’ve found that hearing from other families we’ve served helps others who experience a loss understand what they can expect when they use our funeral home. Would you be comfortable providing a testimonial about your experience?”
- Let them know how they can provide feedback: “We are honored you chose our firm to care for your loved one. Our service standard is to provide exceptional service to each and every family. If you feel we went above and beyond in our service to you, please share that on our funeral home’s Facebook page.”
Funeral professionals do this successfully in a number of ways. Some build this into their one or two-week aftercare home visits. Others talk about it when a family comes in to pick up death certificates. Some even provide every family with their cell phone number and text them after the service to check-in. Once they have a conversation started, they send them a direct link to their funeral home's Facebook page to make it as easy as possible for the family to submit a review. Whichever way you ask, it’s important that you focus on online reviews.
YOUR FUNERAL HOME WEBSITE
Your website is likely one of the most-viewed components in your funeral home marketing strategy, but many funeral businesses don’t leverage that digital landscape as well as they could. This year, take a hard, critical look at your site:
- Is it showcasing the very best your funeral home has to offer?
- Does it truly reflect the quality of service and support you offer when families visit your business in person?
- Are there ways you can tweak the layout and navigation to share your story with every website visitor?
If you’re not sure, then it’s probably a good idea to put your funeral home website on your list of marketing projects for this year. There are a few good places to start:
Reevaluate Your Content
Think about what most consumers don’t know about funeral planning and try to anticipate the questions they will have when they visit your site, such as:
- Are you setting clear expectations for what they can expect when they work with your staff?
- How transparent are you about your service options and prices?
- Are you giving visitors something to do before leaving your site—a way to request additional information, an option to set an appointment, an interactive planning tool, etc.?
If not, consider revamping some of your website content to more effectively educate and engage site visitors.
Reevaluate Your Layout
Most visitors to your website are looking for a deceased loved one’s service information. Funeral homes accommodate this by placing the obituary link in the most prominent location on their homepage. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—in fact, it is often the result of your customer-centric focus on anticipating families’ needs and providing exceptional service.
However, when you place your obituary link in the most visible location on your homepage, you miss opportunities to educate visitors on the value of what you do and what makes you stand out from competitors. When designing your site navigation, ensure that the journey to your obituary page passes through important information about your firm, the services you offer and what makes your business unique.
Reevaluate Your Accessibility
For years, digital marketers have affirmed the importance of having a mobile-friendly website. That is truer today than ever before. If your website doesn’t already offer a mobile-friendly experience, that should be your top priority this year. But you should also consider other accessibility features—like offering text alternatives for hearing or seeing-impaired visitors, providing options to navigate the site on a keyboard or ensuring the font size is readable. It’s likely that some of your website traffic comes from people of varying abilities. Accommodating them in your digital space helps set the tone for the ways you will address their needs when they visit your funeral home in person.
Remember that, for many client families, your website is their first impression of your funeral business. It’s worth spending a little extra time this year to ensure it’s truly a reflection of the best you and your staff have to offer.
Enhance YOUR FUNERAL HOME FACEBOOK PAGE
We all know that social media is a key part of funeral home marketing, but with so many options for platforms and strategies, it can be a challenge to know where to put your time and energy. Try focusing on two key areas to improve the customer experience on your Facebook business page, if you haven't already:
Customize Your Messenger
When page visitors have questions about your funeral home, they’re likely to send you a private message. Since funeral service is unpredictable, there’s no guarantee you’ll be at your funeral home—let alone a computer—when a message comes in, so set up messenger on your Facebook business page to send an automatic reply when new messages arrive.
Something simple can do the trick—just be sure to set expectations for your follow-up: “Thank you for your message. Our staff is happy to assist you and will respond within 24 hours. If this is an emergency, please call our funeral home directly at…”
You can also set up an automatic greeting through Facebook that will appear when a visitor opens up the messenger window on your page before they even send their message.
Take Advantage of Facebook Blueprint
Did you know that Facebook offers a robust catalog of courses designed to teach businesses how to get the most out of the platform? Any user can visit Facebook Blueprint to access 75+ free online courses on everything from building brand awareness and placing Facebook ads to increasing sales and generating leads. The courses are short, too, so you can complete most of them in 15 minutes or less.
Just a few small changes like these could make a big impact on the effectiveness of your social media presence.
Like yours, our goal at every touchpoint is to provide exceptional service that turns satisfied customers into loyal brand advocates. Homesteaders works around the clock with best-in-class service providers to connect you with more families, offering the support you and your staff need to provide exceptional experiences and serve more families. Contact your account executive to learn more about any of these high-impact marketing ideas to help you do more, better.
* Forbes Magazine, April 2018
