Facebook offers your funeral home great perks.

For starters, it’s a simple way to engage with local families, build brand loyalty, and increase the overall visibility of your funeral home. But that’s just surface-level stuff — if you dig a litter deeper, you’ll find Facebook has even more great tools to help your funeral home succeed.

There’s the event planning feature, a simple tool that allows you to easily organize and invite families to your local events. There’s a poll tool as well, which is another nice feature that’s helpful for getting feedback and ideas from families.

But one of Facebook’s greatest tools for small business is its promotion feature. It’s a simple method to get your website, Facebook Page, or Facebook posts onto your families’ News Feeds.

Why Facebook?

Let’s get this out of the way first. Why Facebook?

Because it’s where your families are spending their time. Facebook has become ubiquitous, and it’s the number one platform used by Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. According to the Washington Post, Facebook is so popular among older adults that teens don’t consider the social networking site “cool.”

Besides being a great place to conveniently target client families, Facebook can assist in:

• The process of finding new client families.
• Humanizing your funeral home and telling your story.
• Helping you learn more specifics about your target audience to better tailor services for them.

Sold? Then let’s dive in on how to promote your Facebook Page. The whole process can be broken down into three easy steps.

Step 1.

Head to your funeral home’s Facebook Page. In the left-hand column, you’ll see the promote button. (You also can manage promotions from your Page’s Insights tab).

Once you click the promote button, you’ll have a few options on how to continue. You can promote your Facebook Page, a Facebook post, or even your funeral home website (the good news is all options have a similar method).

Step 2.

After picking one of the options, a new window will appear:

The promoted ad will automatically use the images and info provided on your funeral home’s Facebook Page, but it’s also all customizable. You can change the text to whatever you’d like, use different images, create slideshows, or even upload a video.

On the right-hand side of the window, you’ll be able to preview how your ad will appear on a family’s desktop computer, their mobile phone, and even in the right-hand column of a Facebook News Feed.

Facebook also gives you the power to target who will see your promoted post. That means you can narrow the audience of your promoted page or website by location, age, gender, and interests. (Facebook also has tools for advanced targeting and ad creation in their ad manager, but we’ll cover that in another blog post later).

Step 3.

After choosing the options to target client families in your area, the next step is to plan the budget and duration of the promoted post. You have a lot of options — you can set the daily budget (it’s a $1 minimum — to learn more about the daily budget, click here), which gives you an estimation on how many people will like and visit your page. (Facebook notes that your daily budget is used only when your ad is displayed on Facebook, meaning your entire budget may not always be spent).

You also can set how long you want the promotion to run. You can promote for just a day or have it go on for months — it’s all up to you.

To track your promotion’s results, you can click back to the “Insights” tab on your funeral home’s Facebook Page. From the Insight section, you’ll be able to edit the promotion, stop or pause it, and you’ll also be able to look at the number of new likes and number of people you’ve reached with your promotion.

Beyond promoting a page or website, Facebook also allows your funeral home to promote pictures, posts, events, and other announcements, meaning you can easily share your message with your targeted client families.