When marketing your funeral home’s services, you need to know your audience. While funeral planners need to make the same decisions, they make them differently depending on certain factors, like their generation.
The generation someone grew up in influences their decision-making process. From what they expect when navigating your website to deciding whether to purchase your services, each generation is different. They grew up experiencing different things, and therefore, have different expectations when working with a business, like your funeral home.
So, what should your funeral home know about the different generations and how should you market to them? Let’s break it down below.
Know Your Current Audience: Baby Boomers
Let’s start with your current target audience: Baby Boomers. As you know, Boomers are big on personalized funeral experiences. They want their loved ones’ funerals to reflect the life being honored. Whether it’s the funeral theme, funeral reception food, or the obituary, they want it to be unique. So, it’s important that your funeral home can help turn their funeral desires into reality.
Know the Younger Generations
Don’t ignore the younger generations, because soon they’ll be your target audience. Their expectations when working with a business are different than Boomers, so let’s break them down below:
Generation X
Gen X is often known as the forgotten generation among the other generations. But it’s important not to forget about Gen X, which falls between Baby Boomers and Millennials. They’re the children of Boomers, so as Boomers age, Gen X may be looking to funeral plan for them and preplan for themselves.
Gen X is the first generation to really embrace the internet. They’ve also embraced newer technology trends like smartphones and social media. So, they expect your funeral home to have an easy-to-use website and a social media presence. Many of them also have children, so price matters to them when making major purchases, like a funeral.
Millennials
Millennials also want personalized funeral experiences, but with more technology incorporated into it. They care about the funeral experience and expect to find the information they need about your funeral home online. So, it’s important to have information about your products and services on your website.
They’re also interested in alternative burial options, like cremation and green burial options. With more alternative burial options on the rise, like human composting, who knows what burial options will be the most popular when this generation has aged.
Millennials and Generation Z: Not the Same
Gen Z is not the same as Millennials, despite what a lot of people may think. Millennials grew up with dial-up internet, while Gen Z was born into a world of technology with smartphones and tablets. They’ve never known anything else. If you think the other generations are big on technology, Gen Z is ready to set the bar ever higher.
While both generations use social media, they’re more active on different platforms. Millennials prefer platforms like Facebook and Twitter, while Gen Z is on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. Although, Millennials and Gen Z both like video content, but in different forms.
Per HubSpot, Millennials have a 12-second attention span, while Gen Z’s attention span is only 8 seconds. When viewing video content, Millennials like longer, detailed videos or podcasts, while Gen Z likes shorter, straightforward content. So when creating marketing content for these younger generations, keep in mind who you are targeting and don’t lump them together.
Of course, many Gen Z members aren’t old enough yet to work with businesses like your funeral home. However, some of them are young adults, and as they age, their opinions are going to matter even more.
How does your funeral home market to the different generations? Share your advice in the comments.
Last updated: 9/21/2021
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