I’m going to name them right at the beginning of this article. If you use Yellow Pages, television or radio commercials, direct mail, billboards, or telemarketing to promote your funeral business you should dump them right along with your flip phone. I realize this may hurt your tender feelings or step on your toes, but sometimes it’s necessary to straight up tell the truth even if it makes you angry.
Lead generation lacking for your funeral home? Ramp up your efforts this year simply through running a few Facebook contests. Increase engagement on your Facebook page and recognize deserving individuals in your local communities all while capturing email and phone numbers that you can add to your CRM.
It’s 2017. Are you still marketing your funeral business like it’s 1979 (I know most of you are)? Are you spending the bulk of your advertising dollars on old school methods that are expensive and ineffective? There is a major problem in this profession where funeral directors think they can be guarded from change - like you're untouchable from what the market (consumer) demands or wants. Regardless of what you do or how you market, you think families you have served in the past are always going to come back to you, this is just not true. Yet, we (the profession) continue to do things the same way we always have. The market doesn't owe you anything. Every family is fair game and the funeral home that gets their attention is the funeral home that will win.
I talk with numerous funeral directors every week. When we discuss how they are currently marketing their business, they list the usual methods: radio, newspaper, television, Yellow Pages, direct mail, and…word of mouth (WOM). Almost always they will comment that word of mouth marketing is, by far, the most effective.
Let’s assume your Facebook business page has 324 fans (people who have Liked you page). You make a post on your page, so you assume that all 324 fans will see your post. You are wrong. Less than 6% of your current fans will have the content you post actually show up in their Facebook profile news feed. Does this shock you?
Most funeral home Facebook users who maintain a business page understand the importance of increasing their fan base so their content has a better chance of being seen by more people. But we’ve made it clear in a previous article that the average Facebook user will NEVER see all the content posted by his or her friends and by the businesses s/he follows. There is simply too much, so Facebook utilizes algorithms to filter users’ news feeds and prioritize the content that rises to the top (if Facebook didn’t filter the news feed users could see up to 15,000 pieces of content each day). The end result of this filtering is that, on average, only 6% of the content posted by a business is ever seen by the fans of their page.
I talk to a lot of funeral directors about social media, Facebook in particular. There is simply no better way to represent your funeral business than on Facebook. Facebook is HUGE, and it’s growing by the minute. It has a lot of moving parts. This can tend to generate some confusion for those who do not spend a lot of time engaging online.
Facebook is a busy place! This is both a blessing and a curse for funeral homes who are working to get noticed online. It’s great that so many potential customers frequent Facebook these days (about as often as they use the restroom!), but with so much traffic and competition in the Newsfeed it can be difficult for a funeral home to get noticed. We’ve compiled below some quick tips as to how you can increase the odds of being seen when people use the restroom, er…when they browse their Facebook Newsfeed:
This week on Disrupt U!: Stop being romantic about traditional media and 'old' advertising habits! Being romantic about what use to work and not giving attention to what 'works now' and where the consumer is playing, is hurting thousands of funeral homes. Social media is not an option for funeral companies in 2016, it's what's required to be relevant.
Article by: Ryan Thogmartin, CEO of DISRUPT Media