A lot of funeral homes already know that they need to be on Facebook, but simply having a Facebook Page is just the start.

There are a lot of simple ways funeral home owners can use Facebook to better market their funeral home and nurture relationships with families in their community. Here are a few tools worth checking out.

Facebook Pixel

The people over at Facebook already know the potential that social media has in helping grow a small business, and every day they are making it easier and easier for small business owners to reach their target audiences. That’s why they launched a new version of Facebook pixel — a Facebook business tool that allows your funeral home to track and optimize your marketing.

The tool lets you track who visits your Facebook Page, then lets you put them in specific audience lists. From there, you can target your Facebook marketing specifically by those different lists. It also lets you know how well your ads are performing.

For example, a funeral home could consider breaking their marketing lists up by different generations. That way a funeral home can market one set of ads and posts to only Millennials, and another set to just Baby Boomers.

Lookalike Audience

After using pixel to create lists of your different audiences, Facebook also allows you to create Lookalike Audiences. This is a really cool feature for funeral homes that are looking to market to new client families in their area.

The Lookalike Audience tool takes the people you have in your current audience lists and cross-references their profile information with every user on Facebook. It will then give you a list of all those people that are most like your current audience and will let you market to them.

Let’s say you wanted to create a new list of people who most likely match your current target audience of people aged 45 and older and are in the same town as your current followers. The Lookalike Audience tool will help you discover a whole new set of relevant people to market your Facebook Page to.

Boosting a Post

Facebook also allows your funeral home to boost a post. By boosting a post you can guarantee your post will be seen by your followers and their social networks. A boosted post will reach a wider audience and help your funeral home grow your number of followers.

Let’s say your funeral home recently implemented the Tribute Pay Crowdfunding feature. You can write a post or link to a blog article about it and then boost it. Once you boost it, it will appear in all your followers’ News Feeds, and even the News Feeds of their friends who aren’t following your funeral home on Facebook.

Boosting is simple, too. On your funeral home’s Facebook Page, simply write your status update and click on the “Boost” button in the lower right-hand corner.

From there, Facebook gives you the option to preview your boosted post, target it to a specific audience (including where they live, their age, and other demographics), and plan the duration of the boosted ad. Facebook also allows your funeral home to promote your very own Facebook Page. Read our step-by-step Page promotion guide here.

Using More Video

Maybe it’s a sign of our short attention spans in the modern world, but people are more likely to watch a video than they will read an article or ad. And Facebook users love video. According to HubSpot, 90% of users said that video is helpful toward their decision process and choosing a business. They also found that 92% of consumers will share a video they like with others.

Simply put, it’s a great tool to connect, educate, and grow your client families — all at a low cost (a study by Moz found that just $1 a day on promoting a video has the potential to reach about 4,000 people).

Facebook offers several ways to leverage video with your audiences:

• For starters, you can use Facebook Live. It’s an easy and quick way to connect with your followers via a live broadcast. Besides a little planning ahead of time, Facebook Live will cost your funeral home nothing. And it will give you a platform to directly connect with families.
• Facebook also lets you create video ads or posts and then promote them to your followers and their friends. What’s even more valuable is that Facebook has also introduced a video metrics tool that allows your funeral home to “see information like video views, unique video views, the average duration of the video view and audience retention.” The metrics also allow your funeral home to view audience insights, so you can see the breakdown of video views by your audience location, age, and gender. All of this will help you more effectively create and promote your videos on Facebook.

To learn more about Facebook and your funeral home, download our free Facebook eBook!