Marketing plans for funeral homes (therefore generating funeral home leads) are more effective when the following is done: promoting external communication, creating a brand image, and outperforming the competition. Since this is a sensitive niche to work in, you want to approach your prospects carefully, and in many cases, it is a great idea to employ a sales team to generate funeral home leads for your business.
However, keep in mind that hiring a team isn’t necessary; it can just be useful in cases where strategies continue to fail for you. What do you do when you haven’t even started or are barely trying now? You go over what you can do yourself.
Here, our plan is to show you the easiest and most effective lead generation strategies for funeral homes. We will also share some free resources to help you create your lead generation campaign.
Marketing for funeral homes shares many similarities with other industries. However, it also has its own unique characteristics. The Art of War is a key factor in any marketing plan you create for this business, and we strongly believe you will find this easier the more you keep working around your goals.
In order to attract funeral home customers, it is a good idea to gather all information about your business and competitors.
You should also worry about your marketing and prospects in a local aspect. What does this mean? You just need to target prospects who are in your area.
Do you worry that your funeral home is not reaching its full potential in your local community? A thing or two could be going wrong, or you could simply be utilizing the wrong strategies.
We have identified a variety of lead generation strategies for funeral homes, including branding, design, specific advertising platforms, and community events.
You can increase your revenue, get more positive reviews online and get the phone ringing by using just a few of these methods that are compatible with your community.
Just make sure to stick with us and work around your strategy.
Marketing Through Aftercare
It is easy to put together a cost-effective lead generation strategy for your funeral home in aftercare. These families have already been served, so there is no need to invest in new leads or increase brand awareness.
Examine your existing aftercare programs. What are your options for reaching these families in times of crisis? You can create community among your clients by thinking of ways to do this.
You could host a weekly social club, a monthly grief support program, or even an annual funeral service.
You will be able to connect with other families who are experiencing grief and create a network of brand advocates by introducing them to each other. As their relationships improve, so will the value, they place upon your services.
Sponsorship Marketing Works
You are probably familiar with basic sponsorship opportunities as a funeral professional.
Your logo is displayed on jerseys, game-day programs, or banner sponsorship. Although this type of marketing for funeral homes is beneficial to your community, it may not be the best way to spend your money, as some people can find it a bit too much based on the niche.
But when you give it a thought—or two—you should be able to find an option that opens your audience and doesn’t make them feel down. Instead, they end up considering your services based on how necessary they are at some point.
Our best advice for this is to be there when they don’t feel overwhelmed, and when you are there, try to keep the logos, phone numbers, and more low in terms of how often you add them during your sponsor deal.
Marketing Via Fundraising
Families are increasingly turning to funeral homes for end-of-life services. Traditionally, these services were held at local churches.
Customized celebrations of life are becoming more popular, which is good news for your business. This transforms traditional funeral luncheons to elaborate receptions.
Families want to feel at ease in your facility and confident in your ability to assist them. How can you foster this comfort better than by offering your funeral home at local events?
Host fundraising events at your funeral home will help you to highlight your firm’s charitable aims and showcase your expertise. It is an easy, inexpensive way to show your ability and willingness to be of use and valuable besides trying to make money as many people see you.
Educating Is Always Valuable
As part of their life cycle unit, seventh-graders from many hometowns visit a local funeral home.
The funeral director leads students through the office, selection room, conference area, and chapel. They share stories about creative memorial services and explain the importance of celebrating a life well-lived.
After lunch, the staff will give them homework. Think about how you can be part of this process and if you can educate them to the point of generating leads based on their parents and what you get.
As funeral professionals, you have a responsibility to inform your community about the importance of funeral services, and this doesn’t involve children only.
Reach out to your local school board and ask if you can help their students or attend general events where you can be a speaker. You can create talking points for parents to use when speaking to children about death and to die or for people who are starting to worry about it due to their age.
Encourage teachers to ask students to write about their grief experiences when you are working with schools. You can invite students to visit your class after the tour to receive feedback and answer questions.
You are uniquely qualified to show your community the value of your funeral service.
Social Media Still Works for Your Business
Organic social media is the foundation of any digital marketing strategy today, and it works for your niche as well.
Regular organic social media is a great way to build relationships with clients, grow your market share, improve lead quality, become a visible brand in your local community, form camaraderie, and educate families about the benefits of your services before they even walk in the doors.
This also helps to prepare for successful paid lead generation campaigns.
An organic lead generation strategy can be difficult because it requires time. Funeral directors rarely have the time to devote to this extra task. However, it might be worth delegating this responsibility to your sales team.
This can be stressful if they have never managed a business page and have had to deal with negative reviews, public criticisms, or how to grow an audience.
Luckily, many funeral home marketing sales teams have a track record of increasing call volumes, revenue, high-quality leads and growing your market share via social media such as Facebook and Instagram.
Funeral professionals often rely on auto-published funeral obituaries as a way to drive their social media content and do online lead generation. It is an important piece of information that you should include on your pages. However, it is only one aspect of the digital conversation.
When getting into this, think about how you can use your marketing to create social media content. Next, make a commitment to post regularly and engage your followers. Is there a weekly group you are hosting?
Invite your Facebook friends to share, donate, or be a support.
Regularly posting and sharing information about outreach activities can help highlight your involvement and foster a strong sense of community among your followers.
Social media is a great way to show off your staff and make your funeral home more personal. You can make a post with their photo and a fun fact. This will allow the target audience to get acquainted with you.
Review Marketing Can Help You Manage Your Reputation
Online reviews are becoming more popular than ever, so it is vital for funeral homes to keep up with their review strategies and plan a marketing option for this alone. Your business can be saved or destroyed by reviews.
While word-of-mouth and community talk can be a powerful way to spread awareness about your funeral home, it is still important that you monitor, respond and generate reviews.
Remember that your funeral home is not only for the local community. It is also open to people from all over the country.
If a loved one dies but they are not in the same place, they will search for funeral homes in that city. They cannot rely on word-of-mouth but instead will rely on your digital presence and online reviews.
When someone is in mourning, they want the process of finding a funeral home to be simple. Your business will not get any reviews if they do not trust you. Review marketing not only helps funeral homes but also benefits your future customers.
Make a Website
Many platforms allow you to build your website and have it hosted on their servers for free, so stop avoiding this task when it is so crucial for your digital presence.
You should consider purchasing your own domain name right away when you start your business. This will make your funeral home look more professional and more profitable. It will cost around $20 per year.
Now, when it comes to building your site, you should include content that anticipates future customers’ needs. These include:
- Presentation. A brief description of your funeral home is a good idea. This will be your first impression to future clients, so make sure it is concise and appealing. This is the time to highlight the strengths that you have discovered in the “know yourself” phase.
- Image gallery. Include photos of the facilities. These images will be your showcase, so they should be high-quality and nice. A professional photographer is better if a camera is not for you. Their services are affordable and well worth the effort.
- Prices and services: Transparency and clarity are the keys to this section. It is not fun to read too much or feel cheated by the exclusion of taxes. Add a form to allow families to request a quote ahead of time. Customers can also contact you via a chat room which gives them instant feedback.
- Location: Include the address, phone number, opening hours, and any other information that will be useful to your clients. This could include the metro, bus line or even details about your car park. You can add an indicative map to Google Maps, which is a great tool for marketing funeral homes and other businesses in any industry.
You Need to Show on Google Maps
Your funeral home must have a Google Maps listing with contact information, opening hours, and directions. This will attract more customers and help you get sales qualified leads.
First, register your business with Google.
Create a Google My Business account. It is easy and completely free. Fill in your business name, address, and location—all the basic yet crucial info.
Do not forget to include your website. Google will then ask you to confirm that you are the owner or operator of the funeral home. It is better to choose the SMS or call option.
You can allow users to leave comments about their visit to your funeral home and even rate it on an arbitrary scale from one to five. These messages can be a great reference for customers who are still undecided.
Positive reviews are a great thing for generating leads. You should also be grateful and apologize for any negative comments. You will show that you care about customers and are willing to work harder.
Therapy Dogs as Part of Your Business
Funeral homes are increasingly considering training therapy dogs to be part of their staff. They can help grieving families by providing a comforting service, and if you add this to your strong points during your marketing strategies, you will get more people coming.
Therapy dogs have been shown to calm nerves during times of stress and trauma. They are also able to be covered in the national and local news for their help during times of mourning.
Let us be clear: a therapy dog is not for funeral home marketing. They are meant to assist grieving families. Word-of-mouth marketing is an additional benefit that comes from having them, as people will talk about how they are included in helping families.
Consider this an addition to your company with more than one benefit.
Contests Don’t Really Sound Bad
Social media marketing for funeral homes presents a problem. How can you reach people who are not interested in death?
Promoting local causes is a great way to connect with your community and get your brand noticed in the community. This goes without having to mention your services or advertise. Your goal is to keep your brand top of mind in times of crisis.
The Facebook contest is a very successful strategy that we have used with funeral home businesses before, so we know first-hand it works.
It is simple: find a cause or a hero in your area and give something to them. You could give away tickets to sporting events, artwork by local artists, Easter baskets, or gift certificates to local restaurants.
Now, not everything needs to be a gift out of nowhere. Make sure you build contests around it, and you will get the best results.
Get Redesign + Booze
The funeral industry landscape is constantly changing due to factors such as e-commerce and foreign imports. This means that the traditional funeral home brand is also changing. With each success, the industry fills a small portion of the gap in its profits.
The industry is trying new ways to generate income. You have found a new revenue stream by redesigning your funeral home experience to be more event-like. You can even sell alcohol. Customers who would normally spend thousands elsewhere are kept in-house by this new model.
The word-of-mouth marketing potential of transforming your space to reflect modern memorialization trends is immense. Everyone will tell their neighbors about the wonderful experience they had at your funeral house, and keep in mind this will ONLY work when you are a funeral home based on celebrating and not only mourning as many people prefer today.
Thus, evaluate whether this is a good option for yourself.
We recommend that you apply for a liquor license as soon as possible to get the necessary permits. They can be difficult to obtain and can take many years if you decide to go for this.
Find Your “Wow!”
How does your company stand out from its competitors? Find out what makes your company different from others and make that a selling point for your target market.
Learn about your competition, which could include other funeral homes, crematory services, or online casket websites.
Researching your competitors is a good idea. You can find out what their marketing strategies are and what yours are. Just don’t be too obvious when doing so.
Develop Strong Relationships
Investing in communities and the people within them is the best way to carry out lead capture. Get to know your local community and other businesses. Offer assistance and partnership to help organize events.
Establish deeper relationships with loved ones and keep in touch through things like inviting them to the funeral home’s relevant events that don’t need to be about sad aspects.
If you are given a chance to educate others about funeral services, you can be an expert in your field.
Marketing your funeral home can seem daunting, but if done right, it can be a benefit to both the company and the families that are being served. Your business will be unique and stand out from the rest.
Your Newsletter Can Be Creative
It is time to start a newsletter if you do not have one. Mailchimp is a simple and free platform that allows you to connect with your clients.
What do you write in your newsletter? This is a great place for storytellers. You can tell the story of your funeral home or how you became a death care professional. Or how an inspiring service you held.
Remember to invite others to share their stories at the end of your newsletter. This creates a personal connection that is sure to be remembered when they think about funeral services.
Traditional Marketing Isn’t Dead
Place ads in yellow page directories to promote your business since, despite what many believe, traditional options aren’t dead for businesses like yours.
People who are looking for funeral homes use these directories to search for services, especially if they are not tech-savvy or consider that going the old fashion way will be better.
Advertise in newspapers to inform people about your pre-planning services. This is especially important for older adults who read the newspaper more than online news or platforms.
To encourage your market to contact you for a consultation, create a direct mail letter about your pre-planning services.
The letter should be compelling. For example, you could tell the story of a client who used your pre-planning services in order to get access to a special service or to ensure their families weren’t going to have any issues.
Explain how the service helped your client’s family to cope better, knowing that they were honoring their relative’s wishes.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Funeral Home Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Funeral Home Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Funeral Home Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.