Homesteaders Blog

Low-Cost Ways to Help Families Personalize Funeral Services

Funerals continue to change as consumers are getting more creative in how they honor loved ones. When you personalize a service, it helps families find comfort in happy memories of their loved one’s unique characteristics and stories. Those special touches will help you earn your clients’ satisfaction, referrals and positive reviews. People who attend the services will also take note of the extra care you took to make the experience meaningful.

Steps for Branding, or Rebranding, Your Funeral Home

What do client families do when a death occurs and they don’t have a go-to funeral provider picked out? They Google it.

Tips for Hiring Preneed Professionals

Hiring new employees can be both exciting and daunting. In addition to your day-to-day tasks and taking care of the families you serve, you must find time to advertise for the position, screen résumés and conduct interviews; not to mention the additional pressure to make sure you find a candidate who will fit your company culture.

How to Turn Funeral Home Employees into Leaders

“No one is stepping up and showing any leadership. I still have to do most of it myself.” As John* inched closer to his retirement date, he had hoped that his children (who are funeral professionals) would start taking on more responsibility to help families, work with vendors and volunteer for countless other tasks. But when you talked to John’s children, they would frequently complain that their father would not allow them to take on these new responsibilities.

Then John contracted COVID-19, forcing him to miss work for three weeks. In hindsight, he wishes he had let his children take on more responsibilities earlier. Instead, he had less than a day to prepare them to run the business without him and found out the hard way that they were not ready to take over day-to-day operations.

Using Data to Connect with and Retain Funeral Home Client Families

What are your preneed goals for 2022? For many funeral homes, goal setting includes defining a target for the amount of preneed and at-need business your firm will generate. The most successful firms maintain a preneed to at-need ratio 60/40, which may seem like a stretch goal. Fortunately, you can turn to easily accessible data to help you find and retain your client families.

3 Steps to Align Your Funeral Home Marketing Strategy to Your Customer Journey

In the first and second posts of this three-part series, we discussed what a funeral home marketing plan is and why it’s necessary and how to lock down market share in your community using a market analysis. The final post in this series will cover high-level considerations and marketing tactics you should account for when aligning your firm’s marketing strategy to your customer journey. Specifically, we will explore each stage of the marketing funnel and help you consider how to use appropriate digital and physical marketing tactics and messaging at each phase to move consumers through the funnel.

Tips for Expanding Your Reach with Facebook

Do you own or operate the funeral home of choice in your community? The funeral home that’s served the longest, does the most calls and, because of its impeccable reputation, enjoys powerful word-of-mouth advertising? If the answer is yes, and if you and those that came before you have done everything right, how many years did it take to become the funeral home of choice? Fifty years? One hundred years? Some funeral home of choice clients began as early as the mid-1800s.

The Funeral Home Marketing Plan Series

Do you have a steady stream of preneed and at-need clients, or do you find that your marketing campaigns fall short of generating enough qualified leads to support your business goals? Having a comprehensive marketing plan in place can help you target the right consumers in your community with the right messaging at the right time. This complete series will walk you through the fundamentals of creating a funeral home marketing plan that works and aid you with resources to help you build or refine your funeral home’s marketing plan.

Key Funeral Home Business Growth Opportunities for 2022

The start of a new year is often a time of renewed energy and focus as business leaders reflect on the previous year and pursue even greater success in the year to come. For funeral service leaders, this means even more opportunities to act on the lessons learned about client families’ preferences as the coronavirus pandemic continues to change how consumers interact with service providers.

What A Funeral Home Marketing Plan Is and Why It’s Necessary

Developing a comprehensive funeral home marketing plan begins with understanding the people in your community, which, in the marketing world, means conducting a market analysis. Without getting a deep sense of who these people are, you risk throwing your marketing dollars in the metaphorical fire.