How Do I Market My Funeral Business?
With more than 2.4 million funerals held annually, estimates value the funeral industry in America at over $20 billion, shared among about 19,000 funeral homes. Considering the fact that the US is fast becoming an ageing society, the industry has the potential to continue growing. However, any funeral home that will benefit from this has to invest in marketing. We have studied the strategies applied by funeral homes in Mooreland, IN.
With this, we can come up with the best approach to doing marketing for a funeral business.
Two Major Avenues for Marketing a Funeral Business
There are two major marketing sources for your funeral business, namely Online and Offline.
We will take a look at both approaches in detail.
Online Marketing
There are several benefits of prioritizing online marketing. For one, you have far greater reach if you market online. In essence, the pool of clients that you get online is practically endless.
Furthermore, you get an engaged audience. People spend most of their times online these days, and as such, when they encounter your service, they are likely to get interested. In fact, in several cases, the clients will be the one to seek you out. In addition, advertising online can either be entirely free or extremely cheap.
However, the world “online” is wide, and involves different avenues. Let’s examine the various online marketing strategies.
Social Media Marketing
Americans spend an average of 3 hours per day across various social media platforms. When you consider the fact that 80% of US residents use these social networks, you will agree that this is a goldmine.
There are various ways to advertise on social media:
Organic Marketing: This involves opening a business social media profile, building a following and marketing your services to your followers. This is completely free. However, it is very limited as your reach is largely tied to the number of followers.
Paid Advertising: This involves paying the social network such as Facebook or Twitter to show your services or page to as many people as possible. To succeed at this, you need to target the right audience in the ad settings.
You can reach several people with this, but the social network charges you for impressions, clicks and conversion.
Search Advertising: Everyone uses search engines, and digital marketing experts argue that it’s the best form of online marketing since the chances of conversion are often higher.
People who type certain keywords related to your business into the search engine are most likely seeking a product or service. As such, when they come across your business, they are likely to reach out or make a purchase.
This is not always the case with social media which mostly involves people “stumbling on” your service without having prior intention to make a purchase.
However, just as with social media, there are two main ways to do search advertising:
Organic Marketing: This entails building up your business website with proper search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to ensure that it ranks for certain keywords. Such keywords should typically relate to the funeral industry and can also target certain locations. For instance, “funeral homes Mooreland, IN.”
However, this is limited as you have to compete with several other businesses that are optimizing for the same keywords.
Paid Advertising: To improve your chances of ranking, you can pay the search engine (Google or Bing) to rank your website for the selected keywords.
Display Advertising
Just as you have advertising banners in city centers, they are also online. Here, graphics displaying your business or service are placed in websites across the internet.
You can do this either organically or via an ad service such as AdMob.
Other online marketing types include influencer marketing, blogging, posting testimonials and reviews.
Offline Marketing
This is no longer as popular as it used to be. Nonetheless, it can still play a role. Ideas for offline marketing include:
- Placement in newspapers and magazines
- Banner ads, especially near hospitals
- Shared printed materials such as flyers.
Conclusion
As the funeral industry expands, so also is the competition. To distinguish your business, there is the need to invest in marketing. Based on the strategies applied by funeral homes in Mooreland, IN your marketing should involve a mix of offline and online advertising. We have covered specific approaches to both in this piece.
