However, the recent pandemic has many of us contemplating our mortality more than ever, opening the door for funeral directors to have more planning and end-of-life conversations. Do you have everything you need to reach families in need looking for a funeral home? If not, we can help.
Where do you have these conversations when people are too afraid to leave their home, and when assisted living facilities and other senior care centers are on lock-down? The answer is online.
At Incite Creative, we serve as an extension of your staff, helping your funeral home be more proactive about your marketing efforts by taking that burden off of you. For over 20 years, we have been building small business brands nationwide and specialize in marketing for funeral homes. We’ll keep your attention to tradition and quality in mind while introducing you to strategies and tactics that work in today’s digital world. Together, we can help you:
The business of deathcare is a $20 billion industry. And like all businesses, funeral homes need to differentiate, evolve, and stay relevant, particularly in this new normal.
Relying on faith-based referrals and traditional marketing will no longer sustain the average funeral home. By improving your marketing strategies and adopting digital marketing, independent funeral homes can be found on local searches and weather the storm.
One might assume that a pandemic would be good for the funeral business, given the worldwide climbing death toll. But in March 2020, “social-distancing” became a household phrase. Suddenly when families and friends needed each other most — to comfort and console each other in the wake of a loss — they couldn’t. Most funeral homes were limited to a maximum of 10 participants when pre-COVID, many funeral services had hundreds of attendees.
These restrictions impacted how families were able to grieve and heal from their loss. The mandates also affected funeral homes bottom line because families didn’t feel like they needed to invest as much money into a memorial service for so few attendees. No casket, no service or a smaller service, no flowers, and no repast or catered event adds up to less revenue for the funeral home. This compounded an already-growing trend toward cremation over traditional burial.
However, the funeral homes that had a digital marketing strategy already in place fare better than those without a plan.
More and more, consumers rely on the Internet as a leading resource for information.
To enhance a funeral home’s service to families, directors need a website that includes obituary information, contact information, and a unique story about the funeral home and its founders. That’s a good start, but it’s not enough.
Funeral homes that have embraced live streaming, Facebook Live webcasts, and recording services, stand out and above their neighborhood competitors. Technological advances such as online tributes, tribute pay, virtual selections, online planning, reputation management, and grief counseling have become critical to success. Funeral homes with such resources now can capture market share from traditional providers that are slower to evolve. Couple these with online marketing services that are done consistently well, and you are in a position to grow your funeral home business.
Communicating how a funeral home meets and exceeds consumer expectations is essential to a funeral home’s long-term success.
Marketing these differentiators in the right way, to the right audiences, at the right time, and via the right medium, requires a dedicated team. Often, this team is outside the funeral home’s internal personnel, given the ever-changing tools and skills needed to market a firm consistently and effectively.
At Incite Creative, we have worked with nine funeral homes across four different states. During that time, we learned the industry’s nuances, built relationships with industry product and service providers, and we know how to grow a funeral brand. We applied our decades of marketing expertise to help our funeral home clients build upon their initial successes. Together with our marketing efforts, our clients pivoted to overcome the obstacles COVID-19 created and evolved to meet consumer demands.
By adopting technology, our clients have become far more efficient and successful. With our marketing consultation and leadership, they have increased their brand awareness, expanded into new markets, and remained independent and vital to their communities and the families they serve.
We are honored to partner with our funeral home clients, recognizing their essential role in the mental health and healing of many. We welcome the opportunity to share our knowledge and capabilities with you so that your funeral home can enjoy similar successes and build upon your legacy and ministry of care.
