Having an effective marketing strategy is crucial for small businesses like funeral homes.

However, with both offline and online marketing methods, it’s hard to know what to do. But through a little trial and error, you can determine the right mixture of offline and online funeral home marketing.

Remember, what works for one business may not work for the next. You should focus on your funeral home’s brand and target audience to determine what works best for you.

Let’s discuss the differences between offline and online funeral home marketing and the benefits of both.

Offline vs. Online Marketing

Offline and online marketing mean pretty much what they sound like. Online marketing includes internet-related marketing efforts while offline marketing uses non-internet-related marketing efforts. Although in some cases, the main goal of offline marketing may be to get consumers online such as going to your funeral home’s website.

More specifically, some examples of online marketing are social media posts, blog posts, online ads, and email campaigns. While some examples of offline marketing are print ads and articles, direct mail, phone calls, and TV or radio ads.

The main difference between these two is that online marketing is 24/7. Potential client families are constantly online and have access to the internet at whatever time of the day they wish. While with offline marketing, many methods are limited to the standard business hours. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t benefits to both methods.

Benefits of Online Funeral Home Marketing

Like we mentioned above, your potential client families are online. In fact, 77% of Americans go online on a daily basis, per Pew Research Center. For many, the internet is their preferred way to search for and interact with businesses. So if your funeral home isn’t taking advantage of online marketing, you may be missing out on potential client families.

With online marketing, it’s easy to create content and analyze the results. There are many tools out there that can track the effectiveness of your marketing, whether it’s a social media post, an online ad, or an email.

For example, if you create a Facebook post about preplanning, you can boost the post to promote it. Then, you can check the results to see how people engaged with the post, whether it’s through reactions, comments, or clicks on your call-to-action — the action you want the user to complete, such as clicking “Learn More” to go to your funeral home’s website.

Or let’s say you send out an email newsletter with some links to your funeral home’s latest blog posts. Through an email marketing automation platform such as Marketo or HubSpot, you can track  how many people opened the email and what content they clicked on.

Benefits of Offline Funeral Home Marketing

Offline marketing isn’t as simple to track. Unlike opening an email or clicking an ad, it’s hard to know if someone opens a piece of print mail. But there are still ways to track it. If you have a call-to-action on your print marketing piece, then it makes it easier to track the effectiveness.

For example, you can send out direct mail about an upcoming remembrance event and ask people to call to RSVP. You can use a tracking service to have a unique phone number for the marketing campaign. Or when you receive a phone call about it, you can simply ask the caller where they heard about the event.

Or if you want people to respond online, you can create a unique PURL — personalized URL. Then you know that everyone who RSVPed at that link received your mailer and followed the call-to-action.

Why Your Funeral Home Needs Both

An effective marketing strategy has both online and offline marketing campaigns. You’re missing out on potential client families if you just do one or the other. Even though people are online, they still appreciate personalized direct mail and act on it. About 66% of people bought something because of direct mail, per the Direct Mail Association.

We understand it’s hard to juggle running and marketing your funeral home along with taking care of your families. That’s why it may be a good idea to enlist the help of a marketing specialist or marketing intern. They can test out different methods to see what works and help develop an effective marketing strategy for your funeral home.

Also, don’t feel like you have to try everything all at once. Choose a few things to focus on, such as boosting Facebook posts and sending direct mailers. Then create a marketing schedule for sending things out to help you stay organized and keep track of your campaigns.

Download our free marketing eBook to learn more about how to effectively market your funeral home!