The funeral profession is a competitive business. You’re constantly competing with other local funeral homes for your families’ business, you’re competing with the market to bring your families value in an affordable way, and you’re competing with the ever-changing wants and needs of today’s families, which can can ultimately decide the future of the funeral services you provide.

But in this ultra competitive profession, there are still a few funeral homes that manage to come out on top and just kill it at their jobs year after year (excuse the pun). And, not surprising to us, the majority of the most successful funeral homes got to where they are because of a successful online presence. Why does that make a difference, you may ask? Because the online world is where their families are.

According to Google, 90% of all media interactions today are screen based. Meaning, your families are moving between multiple devices ﹘ smartphones, computers or tablets ﹘ to accomplish their goals. In fact, 56% of today’s consumers say they don’t trust a business without a website.

A few big players in the funeral profession have taken this statistic to heart, by ensuring their website and online presence reflects their passion and commitment to helping families. And it’s paid off for them! Here are a few ways that the most successful funeral pros in the business have become great.

They Follow Obituary Best Practices

Every funeral home does obituaries. But very few take advantage of their full power… like building engagement, bringing traffic to your website, and even helping people support the immediate family. (Bet you didn’t know an obituary could do all that, did you?) If you follow the right steps, your obituaries can do all that and more. Here’s how the best in the business do obituaries:

1. They upload obituaries right away

The second that family and friends begin to hear about their loved one’s passing, they are going to begin scouring the internet, looking for service information and how they can help the family. If the obituary is not on your website, they are simply going to click-off and find the information they are looking for someplace else. Not only do you lose out on traffic the longer you wait to upload obits, but you also lose out on the engagement that you would have received by allowing family and friends to share their memories and condolences.

Gray Funeral Home is one example of a successful funeral home who makes the obituary a priority during the arrangement process with families. By personalizing the memorial page with the loved one’s photo and obituary right away, they are ensuring that friends and families looking for service information online will find what they need, and they’ll be able to build emotional connections with their loved one’s story through the photos and memories shared there.

2. They offer people clear, easy ways to support the family

If you are simply copying and pasting the obituary the family posted in the newspapers to your website and leaving it at that, you are doing a disservice to people who are looking for ways to help. Why? Because they now have to scan a big wall of text when looking for service information, any requests made by the family, or any other important information that will help them lend support. Instead, you should break out important information so it’s easy to find, such as what time the service will be starting, or when and where they can send flowers.

E.J. Fielding’s Funeral Home does a great job of showcasing their service information, maps to their location, and even the cemetery details right on a loved one’s memorial page. This way, friends and families do not have to go searching for information about their loved one’s service.

3. They share their obituaries on social media

52% of brands say that social media is the top driver for relationship building and brand engagement. That is why sharing your funeral home’s obituaries on Facebook or Twitter is such a vital step in the obituary posting process. When your families see their loved one’s service information online, they can help spread the world about the service by sharing it with their network. This viral spread of information will also bring more traffic to your website, and more exposure of your funeral home to outside friends and family who may not know about you.

Langeland Family Funeral Homes takes advantage of f1Connect’s new Social Share function, which automatically posts the obituaries on their website to their Facebook page. This helps to bring more visibility and reach to each obituary you are posting, and brings more awareness for the funeral service you are holding.

They Help Encourage Emotional Connections

From the very second a family walks through your door, your focus should be on building an emotional connection with them and kick-starting the healing process. The best funeral professionals in the business do this by introducing social memorial websites right in the arrangement process, so that building emotional connections becomes the first and strongest element of the funeral service, from beginning to end. Memorial websites are also a great resource for gathering photos and memories from everyone who was touched by the loved one, giving the immediate family the chance to hear new memories that they may have not even known about before.

4. They seed loved ones’ memorial pages with content

Through all aspects of a funeral service, people want to feel an emotional connection to the loved one they are celebrating. And this begins at the obituary page. If you upload a memorial page without personal photos and videos of the loved one ﹘ or worse yet, no photo at all ﹘ you are losing your engagement with the people who are coming to your website. They do not feel that emotional connection, so they are less likely to support the family by uploading a photo of their own, sharing a beautiful memory or sending flowers. However, when you trigger that emotional connection with beautiful photos of the loved one, other friends and family are more likely to share their support and will want to take part, as well.
 

By uploading personalized photos and videos to their memorial pages, Wilkerson Funeral Home offers families a chance to share their own memories and stories about their loved ones. In this example, a nephew was able to reminisce about an emotional memory of his uncle that was triggered by a photo.

5. They help families build new connections and memories of their loved ones

A beautiful service should leave family and friends with a deeper understanding of their loved one. A funeral service done right should encourage people to share stories, remember moments and events, and should feel that emotional connection they are craving. One of the most effective ways many successful funeral homes have achieved this is through tribute videos. Not only do these videos help tell the story of a beautiful life lived and bring a personalized touch to visitations and services, but it’s also a very healing experience for the immediate family who is gathering photos to honor their loved one.

But the healing power of tribute videos doesn’t have to stop there… they can also be uploaded to a loved one’s memorial page after the service. As an added bonus, when you are putting together a tribute video for your family, all of the photos included in the video are automatically scanned into a beautiful photo album on the loved one’s memorial page, furthering the personalized memorial experience you are creating for your families.

Shackelford Funeral Directors uploads the Life Tributes videos that they create for their families on the loved one’s social memorial page on their website. This helps ensure that friends and family from out of town feel emotionally connected to their loved one, even if they didn’t attend the funeral service.

If you would like to learn more about how you too can create beautiful obituaries and social memorial pages that help your families create emotional connections with their loved ones, check out our f1Connect Website Platform today.

For more great insight into what the most successful funeral homes in our profession are doing to stay relevant and valuable to their families, stay tuned for PART TWO of this blog… coming soon!

Rochelle Rietow

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