Does your funeral home want to create an online and offline marketing plan but don’t know where to start? No need to worry, we’re sharing some of our best marketing tips for funeral homes, as well as some resources.

From researching your target audience to generating leads and creating marketing campaigns, let’s go over some marketing tips!

Marketing Research

When doing marketing research, there are two main types: secondary and primary. Despite having secondary in the name, it’s done first. It involves researching already published data to determine your current client families’ demographics. Some places to find this information are reputable online sources, your local library, and college campuses.

Once you’re done with secondary research, it’s time to conduct primary research, such as through surveys and interviews. Surveys are best for quantitative data on your whole community, while interviews are best for qualitative data on a smaller sample of your community.

Now that you have all this valuable data, you can create buyer personas! These are semi-fictional representations of your funeral home’s ideal customers. Besides your demographics, you also may want to consider your customers’ technology and internet usage.

Ready to start your own marketing research? Download our free eBook!

Lead Generation

There are many lead generation tactics, but these are three impactful methods: having a blog, social media, and a modern website. Your funeral home can have a blog on your website and include calls-to-action (CTAs) in your posts. These CTAs can include a form, lead the reader to a landing page, or another action you want them to complete, such as calling your funeral home.

Social media is great for engaging with current client families and finding new ones. You can share your blog posts on your funeral home’s social media pages. Additionally, some other post ideas are sharing your obituaries, creating educational videos, and talking about relevant topics like burial versus cremation. Don’t forget to boost your posts to reach a larger audience.

Having a responsive funeral home website and following other search engine optimization (SEO) best practices helps you generate more leads. Some small, yet significant ways to improve your SEO besides having a responsive design are including keywords in your content and fixing broken links. While more in-depth SEO strategies can be accomplished with our SEO packages.

Want to learn more lead generation techniques? Download our free eBook!

Emailing Marketing

Three major types of emails you can send are a newsletter, one-off emails, and autoresponder emails. An email newsletter is a great way to establish yourself as the go-to funeral resource in your community. You can include educational content like your blog posts, grief tips, and other resources. You also should include some imagery to make it more visually appealing.

One-off emails, also known as email blasts, are single emails you sent out to an email list. This could be for a contest, new product or service promotion, or an upcoming event. When writing the content, keep the main reason for the email in mind. Include the most important information, like the date, time, and location if it’s for an event.

Autoresponders automatically send out when someone completes a certain action, like filling out a preplanning form. For this, your email can thank them for preplanning with your funeral home, suggest some helpful resources, and let them know a staff member will reach out to them shortly. These are a great tool because you only have to write the email copy once. However, you should update it at least once a year.

Interested in learning more email marketing tips? Download our free eBook!

Direct Mail Marketing

Direct mail marketing is not dead. In fact, it can be even more effective than online marketing. When building a mailing list for a direct mail marketing campaign, you can use an in-house mailing list or a third-party mailing list.

For the content, keep the message and text simple. However, you should personalize it to your funeral home where you can while still being tasteful. The mailer type also may impact your design and content amount. Some design types you may choose are a postcard, brochure, or standard letter.

With direct mail, you want some sort of unique CTA. Depending on the mailer’s objective, this could be to call a personalized phone number or go to a unique URL. This way, you can easily track the success of the campaign.

Want to start your own direct mail marketing campaign? Download our free eBook!