25 Stats Make You Think Twice About Your Funeral Home Marketing

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Your website is one of the most important assets to your funeral home marketing. We’ve been saying it for years ﹘ if your families cannot find your website and services online, the chances of them seeking out your funeral home are slim.

And while your funeral home may have an online presence, there is still a lot more to a successful online marketing plan than simply having a website and throwing a few pictures on it. Your website needs to be engineered to meet the needs of today’s families.

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It All Begins With Your Website

If you’re already thinking of skipping over a website, stop right there. 56% of consumers reported that they would not trust a business that didn’t have a website. So a funeral home website is a must.

Once you have created a website for your business, make sure it contains basic information that will lead families to your funeral home, such as your contact information and address. While this may seem obvious, in a survey of 3.9 million small business websites, nearly 50% did not provide a contact number on their homepage. How can you expect to win a family’s business if they can’t find a way to contact you?

Unfortunately, 49% of websites fail to comply with basic usability principles and 50% of all online sales are lost simply because visitors cannot find the content they are looking for. For funeral homes, this means families are looking for the value you can provide during their time of need and what sets you apart from the competition. But it’s important that this information in showcased right on your homepage ﹘ not hidden away on an unseen tab ﹘ because 55% of visitors will spend less than 15 seconds on your website, unless they land on a page that offers them clear value.

Your website is one of the best (and most powerful) content marketing tools to give your families information they need to select your funeral home. Content marketing efforts (such as updated website content and blogging) generate 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing (trade shows, tv commercials, magazine ads, etc.), but cost 62% less. Why is web content so powerful? Because it is actually providing your families with the valuable content that they are seeking, which pulls them into your website like a magnet, rather than interrupting them with unwanted marketing messages they didn’t ask for, like traditional marketing does.

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It’s also important to remember that your website content is essentially meaningless if it is not easy to find. After all, 76% of consumers say that the most important element of a website is that it makes it easy for them to find what they need.

The Power Of Search

Another big component of a great funeral home website is making sure that it is optimized for search engines. In just one month, Americans conducted a staggering 20.3 billion searches, with Google being responsible for 13.4 billion searches alone. With this many searches happening, you want to make sure that your website is one of the first options that comes up when they search for local funeral homes online.

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Just how powerful are search engines for funeral home websites? 88% of consumers who search for a local business on a mobile device ultimately call or visit that business within 24 hours. In fact, 70% of searches on a mobile device are followed up with an action in one hour.

It’s also helpful to make sure that you’re optimizing your website for local search specifically. Why? 61% of searchers consider local results to be more relevant than standard search results and 73% of all online activity is related to local content.

The Importance Of Social Media

Even having an informative, easy to use, SEO-friendly website isn’t enough to overhaul your online marketing efforts. It’s also very beneficial to work in social media, as well. In fact, 85% of customers expect businesses to be active in social media. 59% of social media users also think that companies who are active on social media seem to be more approachable. To top it all off, seven out of ten consumers said they are more likely to use a local business if they have information available on a social media site.

But if you’re thinking the people that use social media sites are out of your target audience’s age demographic, think again. Almost 80% of Baby Boomers are online and spend nearly 26-40 hours browsing the web every month. In fact, they are the fastest growing demographic on Facebook.

So what exactly are these baby boomers and other social media users looking for from a business’s social media page? Globally, 46% of consumers with a digital device use social media to help make purchasing decisions, primarily because of the honest user-reviews that are posted on these types of sites.

68% of consumers go to social networking sites in order to read product reviews and 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from real people.

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But social media isn’t just a powerful tool for your families to read about your business. It’s also a great source for bringing new people to your website. A new report released this month unveiled that social media is now the #1 driver of all website referral traffic, with 31.24% of all referral traffic coming from social sites. (Compare this to 22.71% from the same period in the last year.)

So if your funeral home doesn’t integrate with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, you’re missing out on a huge amount of social media referral traffic. Luckily, there are some helpful social tools out there (like our f1Connect platform) that help connect the funeral profession to their social media profiles. This is a win-win for funeral homes AND their families because it gives families a powerful sharing tool that helps them connect with their loved one, while also giving funeral homes a huge amount of social media referral traffic back to their website.

Just take our client Bradford O’Keefe Funeral Homes, who had one of their website obituaries go viral due to the lighthearted, humorous nature of the obit. This led to over 16,000 Facebook users alone recommending the obituary page that was hosted on the funeral home’s website. That’s a lot of website traffic!

What do you think about these online marketing statistics? Did any of them surprise you, or did you predict that online marketing would have such a strong influence over your families? Let us know in the comments below!

Too busy to rehaul your funeral home’s online marketing?

Our stunning f1Connect website platform will deliver all of the essential online marketing strategies to help you attract more families and we’ve already done all of the hard work for you! Check out funeralOne’s all-in-one website platform, f1Connect, by clicking here or calling us at (800) 798-2575 ext. 5!

Joe Joachim

funeralOne

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