We all know how impactful online marketing can be for your funeral home. We’ve heard it time and time again ﹘ a good social media plan or an awesome website can help you attract more families than ever before. And it’s no exaggeration! While most families used to look to their local Yellow Pages or newspaper to find a funeral home, 97% are now turning online to find reputable local businesses.

These facts (and other eye-popping statistics that will make you want to re-haul your funeral marketing) make it more obvious than ever that you should be shouting about your funeral home from the rooftops… or, at the very least, your website, your blog and your social media pages. However, many funeral professionals still struggle with where to begin when it comes to online marketing. And understandably so!

Getting Started With Marketing

Whether you are a small three-person funeral home or a much larger business, getting started with funeral home marketing remains equally tough. Sure, you may have a good grasp of who you are and where you would like your funeral home to go in the future. However, when it comes time to spread that message to your families, it’s never quite as easy as it seems.

For example, how do you pull families in through engaging marketing without bombarding them and pushing them away? How do you differentiate your business without focusing too much on yourself and not enough on your families?

The key is to identify what you want to share about your funeral home and what you hope to achieve with your marketing efforts before you get started. This starts with asking yourself the right questions and mapping out a clear goal.

Identify Your 5 W’s

Many businesses make the same mistakes when it comes to marketing their funeral home; they don’t showcase how they can help families or what really sets them apart. This makes it harder for their families to connect with them and think of them when it comes time to make purchasing decisions.

To avoid doing this in your funeral home’s marketing initiatives, be sure to clearly define your 5 W’s and use them to guide your marketing strategy:

1. Who are you? How would you explain yourself as a business? What are your values?

2. What is your purpose? What do you want to contribute to the world? What do you hope to do for your families? What is the motivating factor behind your profession and your business?

3. When are you needed most? What causes families to come to you? When can you be useful to families? When do you make the most difference?

4. Where do you see yourself in the future? What is your ultimate goal at your funeral home? What is your most perfect vision of success?

5. Why should families choose you? What sets you apart from the competition? What do your families think after they have worked with you?

Define Your Strategic Vision

Now that you have successfully identified the 5 W’s of your funeral home, it’s time to dive deeper into your purpose that you defined in step two (above) and turn it into an actionable vision plan that will make your vision a reality. After all, “vision without action is a daydream… action without vision is a nightmare.”

Your vision should be a clear picture of where you ultimately want your funeral home to lead you. It is a combination of your long-term aspirations and what motivates and inspires you to do what you do; it’s that perfect picture of success. Here are some prompts that will help get you started:

1. Why do you get up and go to work everyday?

2. What keeps everyone at your funeral home loyal and motivated?

3. What are your long-term aspirations?

4. At what point do you consider your funeral home successful?

Now take the answers that you came up with above, and combine them into one simple, yet inspiring vision statement. To give you an example, here are some vision statements created by popular companies:

Twitter: To be the pulse of the planet.

Disney: To be one of the world’s leading producers and providers of entertainment and information.

Amazon: To be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.

Define Your Goal

Lastly, it’s time to create an ideal goal that will come from your marketing efforts. This can be thought of in a number of different ways, from a quantitative goal (how many families you hope to serve each month), to a disruptive goal (revolutionizing how your town thinks of funerals). There is no goal that is too big or too imaginative, but your team should believe that it can be achieved.

Some common themes that may help you identify your goal include:

1. Domination – Become the #1 funeral home in your community.

2. Reach – Help over X hundred families per year.

3. Role Model – Become the Willy Wonka of Funeral Homes.

4. Disruption – Change the way your families think about funeral service.

6. Family Experience – Give X families a magical, memorable funeral experience.

7. Revenue – Become a million dollar business.

Marketing To Your Families

Once you have spent the proper time identifying who you are as a business and what your vision is for the future you can take the next step in kickstarting your marketing ﹘ understanding your families.

We’ve written many times about how the families of today are vastly different from the ones that you are used to serving in the past. Therefore, it is worth the time to do your research and really get to know them before you begin your funeral home marketing. These articles will help get you started:

• One Simple Trick To Truly Understand Your Families
• What Do 76% of Families Want From Your Funeral Home Website?
• 7 Tools To Help You Better Understand Your Families

Jumpstart Your Online Marketing

Another great and effective way to kickstart your online marketing efforts is to start right at the core ﹘ your funeral home’s website. After all, 1/3 of all United States consumers spend over three hours online each day, and over 88% of internet users browse or research the products they buy online. Therefore, if you want these users to choose you funeral home for their end of life services, you better put your information where they are going to see it… a.k.a. right on your website.

To speed up this process and ensure that you are truly delivering the most useful and informative website possible for your families, you should consider finding a reputable company that knows the funeral profession inside and out.

Want to break through the clutter to reach more families? Be sure to check out f1Connect – the funeral profession’s only website platform engineered to attract educate today’s families and successfully market your funeral home online. Click here or call 1 (800) 798-2575 extension 5.

Rilee Chastain

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