Heritage Coach Dealer Blog USA

Facebook recently announced that they have over 500 million users; easily making it the largest social network on the planet. Some Innovators in the Funeral Industry are already leveraging Facebook for business, like ConnectingDirectors.com; the first online funeral publication and networking site. Funeral home owners can use online tools like Facebook to reach customers & prospects and educate them on their services. Facebook is also a great tool for driving traffic to your funeral home website. In this post, like other recent articles on Funeral Homes using social media, we will dive into why Facebook makes sense as a marketing channel for funeral home owners and funeral directors, as well as, how you can leverage Facebook for your funeral home.

Facebook provides business owners with a platform for reaching people, engaging them in discussions around products & services, and turning them into customers. It’s a great platform for speading your online content. Do you blog about your funeral home, create Flickr Slide Shows for your customers, or shoot YouTube videos about your Funeral Services? If so, Facebook is a great platform for promoting that online content to your connections.

Here are a few ways that Funeral Home owners can leverage a business page on Facebook:

• The first steps are to fill out relevant information about your company, add links to the Website section within Facebook to help drive traffic to your online real estate, and add branding elements to your Facebook business page.
• Promote funerals under Facebook Events — I know we have to tread lightly here because of the sensitive nature of a funeral. If it’s positioned as a way to help your customers easily provide funeral information to friends & family, then it becomes a useful tool for funeral home owners.
• Create a FBML page for your Facebook business page – FBML pages allow you to create custom Facebook pages. You can put any relevant information about your business on these pages. You can also create more than one. Custom Facebook pages change the Facebook experience for your connections — in a positive way.
• Engage your Facebook Connections — If you produce online content, say through a blog or videos, you can post links to those articles/videos on your Facebook Wall and then write a sentence or two describing the article/video. Be sure to elicit feedback from your Facebook connections. When someone leaves a comment, be sure to respond, and even ask yet another question — keeping the conversation going. The goal is to engage as many of your connections as possible. Engagement helps build relationships.

As you can see from reading the information above, Facebook offers funeral home owners a platform for connecting with their target audience. Not only is it the largest social network out there, but it’s absolutely free. All that it takes is a time investment. If you’re looking for ways to promote your funeral home and communicate with customers and prospects, then consider creating a Facebook business page for your funeral home today.

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Are you looking for ways to drive new sales for your funeral home? If so, our Monthly Blog Series is worth checking out. Each month we write an article about how funeral home owners and funeral directors can use new technologies, mainly online tools, to market their business and drive new revenue sources. Last month we discussed how Funeral Home Owners and Funeral Directors can create blog obituaries in order to create a revenue source for Funeral Home Owners. In this month’s article, we are going to take Blog Obituaries to the next level, and throw out the idea of creating Memorial Websites as a new service for funeral homes.

Everyday people who have passed are remembered. They are remembered in the thoughts of their friends & family. They are also remembered through actions like leaving flowers at their grave site, or just the simple act of stopping by their grave site to say hello. While people are alive, they want to feel like they will be remembered when their time on this earth is up. Even though it’s not yet possible for technology to allow us to live forever, technology has made it possible to be memorialized forever. The Internet makes this possible. To us, the combination of people wanting to be remembered and the technology allowing us to do so, provides a great opportunity for innovative funeral home owners.

Funeral home owners can use tools like Ning or even WordPress to create a Memorial Website for the deceased. Customers can pay funeral home owners to develop, design, host, and maintain their memorial website. This can create upfront income for funeral home owners, as well as, residual income through hosting and maintenance fees.

Let’s use Ning as our tool of choice for creating the Memorial Websites. You can create a ning for your funeral home. Those customers who purchase the service will become a member of your Ning in the name of the deceased. A ning page can be created on behalf of the deceased. Friends & family can sign-up to add to the Ning and interact with one another on behalf of their lost loved one. The Ning can contain a blog, so that people can post their memories of the deceased, write about causes that are going on in the name of the deceased, etc. Images can be shared. Videos can be uploaded. Comments and interaction can take place, all through their very own Memorial Ning Website. The memory of their loved one will live on online.

Funeral home owners can make this a reality for their customers. It may be possible to charge anywhere from $500 – $1500 for the development of the site, and then you can charge a small monthly hosting/maintenance fee – only a few dollars, as this will add up the more of these that you develop. The actual maintenance needed will be minimal. Funeral Directors can even outsource the entire service to an online marketing agency if they wanted. Then you can simply take some profit off the top for selling the service, but you don’t have to worry about executing on something that isn’t in your core skill set.

Offering to create Memorial Websites as a service at your funeral home could be a great way to drive new revenue for your business. We think that people would be interested in having them created on behalf of their loved-ones, and the most likely place to go when someone passes away is to a funeral home. If you can offer this innovative solution, customers won’t look elsewhere.

What do you think about the idea of creating memorial websites? Has anyone offered a service like this in the past? We’d love to hear from you.

Last month we discussed how Funeral Home Owners and Funeral Directors can add a funeral home to Google Places in order to build awareness of their services and drive more traffic to their website, blog, and other online assets. For this post, we are going to discuss a new revenue source for Funeral Home Owners.

Obituaries printed in the local newspaper allow readers to know if anyone they knew has died. Obituaries usually describe the individual who died, provide funeral arrangements, and state the surviving family members. Obituaries have been around for a long time, but they haven’t really evolved much. This provides an opportunity for creative Funeral Home Owners. Funeral Home Owners can create a service whereby they produce Blog Obituaries for their customers.

The benefits to family members in having a Blog Obituary versus a standard newspaper obituary are:

• Much more information about the person’s life can be included, as space is not an issue
• Images can be inserted
• The Blog Obituary can technically be online FOREVER — Keeping the memory of their loved-one alive
• A Blog Obituary can link out to other sites that are relevant to the deceased, such as a charity or even a Flickr Slide Show about their life.

A blog obituary would probably take 2-3 hours to create, and funeral home owners can probably charge anywhere from $250 – $300 for each blog obituary. If you get really creative with your pricing, being that blog articles can be hosted forever, you can price the obituaries two separate ways. The first price would be to create the blog obituary and host it on your blog for 1 month, which would be in that $250 – $300 range. The second price would include the same as the first price, except that you’ll host it as long as the blog is live (theoretically, forever), which you can charge say $400 for. For an extra $100, the family can keep their loved-ones’ memory alive forever.

To create a Blog Obituary Service, you must first start a blog. WordPress offers a great free platform, as well as, a paid service. You should blog about more than just obituaries, as blog articles are a great way to drive traffic to your website. The Obituaries Section can be one section of your blog, just like it is in a newspaper. For those customers who purchase this service, simply schedule some time to learn about the life of the deceased, collect images, and find out how the family wants the person portrayed. Then write the article and send out your invoice. Blog Obituaries are a great way for Funeral Home Owners to add new revenue sources for their business.

As many of you know, we have created a new Blog Series focused on helping funeral home owners, and funeral directors, drive more revenue for their funeral home. So far we discussed two ways that funeral home owners and directors can add new revenue sources, one by adding video services for funeral homes, and the second by adding Flickr Slide Show services. In this month’s installment of our new Blog Series, we are going to talk about the benefits of adding your funeral home to Google Places.

Google Places, which used to be Google Local, is a free Google Tool used by business owners to list their business online. Adding your funeral home to Google Places will allow your listing to come up in search results being performed for your local area. Local Search is really beginning to build momentum. Next time you use Google, add a location to your search term, such as “funeral homes philadelphia pa” and notice the listings that come up next to the Google Map. These are Google Places listings. If your funeral home is not listed on Google Places, you will not come up in those results.

By adding your funeral home to Google Places, you have an opportunity to drive traffic to your Google Places listing, and then to your blog and/or website. The ultimate goal being to drive these web viewers to take action, such as email you for pricing, or giving you a call to answer questions. In order to drive this action, you must first get the eyeballs to your site. Google Places can help capture interested prospects, and then direct them to your other (more robust) online properties.

Setting up a Google Places listing is actually pretty easy. The only pre-requisite is that you have a Google account. If you don’t already have one, simply create one and then get started on your Google Places Listing – it’s FREE. Here are a few steps to help you out:

1. Navigate to the Google Places Business Center and click “Add New Business”
2. Fill out your profile as completely as possible, the more details, the better
3. Add your business listing
4. Add your business information – TIP: Add a few custom fields and insert relevant search terms for your small business. This will help you rank for those search terms
5. Last, but not least, claim your new Google Places Business Listing – You can claim your listing by phone, text message, or postcard

Not only will having a Google Places Business Listing help increase traffic to your funeral home website or blog, but there are also a number of other benefits. Here are just a few:

• You can add coupons for your Google Places Listing
• The Google Places Business Center allows you to track stats for your funeral home listing
• You can provide your business contact information on your listing
• Customer Reviews can be added to your listing to help build credibility for your small business

If you don’t already have your funeral home listed on Google Places, we hope that this post helps shed some light on why it’s important to have one, what the benefits of a Google Places Listing are, and how to create a listing for your funeral home. If you have any questions about creating a Google Places Listing for your funeral home, leave a comment below and we’ll get back with you.

The Internet has created countless opportunities for new businesses, as well as, helped existing businesses create new revenue streams. As I’m sure many of you know, the funeral industry has taken a hit over the past few years, and without innovation, it’s looking like sales will continue to decline. This is where Heritage Coach comes in.

As you may have read, last month we wrote about Funeral Directors using video as a new revenue source by allowing out-of-town family and friends to attend the viewing remotely. With ideas like this, and the one we want to talk about today, we are hoping to use this blog as a vehicle for promoting innovation in the Funeral Industry. For this post, we want to talk about how Funeral Home Owners and Funeral Directors can use Flickr, a photo-sharing social tool, as a platform for creating a new revenue stream for your business.

Flickr is a Photo-Sharing social platform that allows users to upload photos, comment on those photos, tag them for easier search, and share them with the world. Best of all, Flickr is free. By getting creative, Funeral Home Owners can use Flickr to create a brand new service offering to sell to customers. Funeral Directors can collect digital photos of the lost loved-one and setup a Flickr Slide Show full of photos of the lost loved-one. You may be saying, well, I’m sure customers don’t want to share their photos with the world. That’s OK. Flickr has privacy settings that can be leveraged.

For privacy, create a new Flickr group for each customer and then invite family and friends to join your Flickr group. This way all photos and discussions will be private to group members only. Creating groups is easy and free. Within a group, people can upload photos and videos, as well as, use the discussion board to communicate with one another. For Funeral Directors, they can have a process whereby the collect photos, create a Flickr group, share photos within the Flickr group, and send out invites to all family and friends to join the Flickr group and participate in photo-sharing and discussions around their lost loved-one.

Here’s how Funeral Home Owners can execute on this new Flickr Photo-Sharing service offering:

• Set guidelines on what customers will get and for what price – It’s recommended that there is some sort of limit on the number of photos that you will upload into the Slide Show
• Create a process for explaining the service to potential customers
• Setup a way to collect digital photos from customers’ friends and family
• Create a Flickr account and learn the tool – Determine how exactly you’ll setup your groups and inform friends & family
• Promote the heck out of your new service – Use it as an add-on service

I think Funeral Home Owners can charge somewhere around $200 – $300 for this service, but ultimately, the market will decide. The most important thing is to get started. Figure out your plan for how you’ll offer this service out to customers, what you will charge for it, and how you will execute on it when the first set of customers order the service. Over time, Funeral Home Owners will learn what a fair price is (based on what their market is willing to pay). Either way, setting up a Flickr Slide Show for customers is a valuable service, yet one that has high margins for Funeral Home Owners. Another option is to buy a scanner and let customers know that if they don’t have digital photos, you can scan their hard-copy photos (for an additional fee of course). I hope that many of you will consider adding Flickr Slide Shows as a service for your customers.

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If you like what you read here in this post, and want more information like this, along with great saving opportunities on new and used limousine and hearses, please consider signing up for our free Heritage Coach Insider Program. Each month we will send you 1-2 emails. We will not share your information with outside parties. As part of each email, we will inform you on the latest Heritage Happenings, as well as, provide you with savings coupons. We hope you considering signing up to be Heritage Coach Insider today.

The funeral industry has been struggling for some time now. There are a number of different reasons for this. One of the main reasons is the increase in cremations. Whatever the reason, many funeral directors are left wondering how they can drive new sales for their funeral homes. The answer might be found in using new technologies.

The advancement of the Internet has led to the creation of thousands of new tools that small businesses can leverage. The best part for funeral directors is that along with the increase in new tools, costs for using those tools have been decreasing at a similar rate. By leveraging certain technologies and getting creative, funeral directors can find ways to drive new revenue streams for their funeral homes, while their competitors are left trying to do the same old thing.

Video Services could be a huge growth opportunity for funeral directors. Funeral directors can create a new service whereby families pay to have live video feeds coming from their viewing. This allows friends and family who live out of town to participate in the funeral. Webcams can be setup throughout the funeral home, along with computer monitors. This will allows friends and family to log on from the comfort of their own homes, watch the viewing, and even video chat with other friends and family who are attending the viewing. Technologies like Oovoo and Skype can be leveraged for this new video service. Guess what? Both of these video chat software tools are absolutely free.

There are even new Startups being born around video services for funeral homes. Online-Funeral is one of those Startups. For a service fee, you can outsource this new service to Online-Funerals and they will take care of everything for you. With that said, it may be that many funeral directors will want to set this up themselves as it’s really not too complicated. If anything, you can bring in a technology/video expert to help install your webcams and computer monitors with either Skype or Oovoo. Either way, by leveraging technology and thinking creatively about your funeral home business, funeral directors can create new revenue streams. For those funeral directors who maintain the status quo, the numbers do not look to be in your favor. Take advantage of the tools that are out there and you’ll be very happy with the results.

Heritage Coach Insider Program

For those of you who would like to receive special saving opportunities on new and used limousine and hearses, as well as, service coupons, please consider signing up for our free Heritage Coach Insider Program. Each month we will send you 1-2 emails. We will not share your information with outside parties. As part of each email, we will inform you on the latest Heritage Happenings, as well as, link you to our social media sites and provide you with savings coupons. We hope you considering signing up to be Heritage Coach Insider today.

Recently, an autistic boy in Sydney, N.S. died in a snowstorm after following his dog Chance into the woods. Search teams weren’t able to find him until it was too late, but Chance stayed faithfully by the boy’s side, trying to keep him warm in a futile fight against a snowstorm and the hypothermia that eventually set in.

At the funeral procession, among the hearses and funeral cars that traveled to the memorial, there was one whose passenger had four legs, a tail, and mournful eyes that seemed entirely in keeping with the tone of the day. Dogs have been known to lie on their master’s graves and return time and again to keep them company – but how many have actually attended the procession?

It’s a touching thought that when a community gathers together in mourning for a little boy who could not even cry out for help due to his autism, an allowance could be made for the pet who was so faithful to his master, and who tried to save him. Many funeral homes might not have allowed Chance to ride in the hearse, but they recognized that he had an important role in this little boy’s life and deserved to be a part of the memorial too.

Anyone who has ever driven funeral cars or hearses has surely had rules and regulations to follow about what is and is not acceptable within the bounds of the car. Some of those rules are simply practical, such as not eating food in the car because it might leave crumbs. Others might be more for the sake of the solemnity of the car’s task, such as not honking the horn because such a loud noise might feel disrespectful to the mourners.

Though I haven’t personally asked all the funeral car drivers out there, I’m sure many of them have rules about pets in their vehicles. I’m equally sure that almost all of them would say that they would make an exception for a situation such as this one, and a dog such as Chance. Particularly when your industry is a realm all about compassion and respect, it seems almost essential that sometimes funeral cars must give way to human emotions.

So here’s a question from us at Heritage Coach for all of you out there: when is it appropriate to make exceptions to rules regarding hearses and funeral cars out of consideration for the family and for the deceased? What circumstances would you make an exception for? And when would you say that funeral cars deserve respect too, and that certain rules need to be obeyed to make sure they stay that way?

We’d love to hear your stories about any times when funeral cars have made exceptions or chosen not to.

Funeral homes across the country are adding video equipment to their facilities in an effort to give family members overseas a chance to say goodbye. One funeral home owner in the Twin Tiers region – Brad Perkins – is joining the trend.

Perkins, owner of the Dryden area Perkins Funeral Home, recently invested in some state-of-the-art video equipment to allow family members overseas to view the funeral of a loved one. During the holiday season, Perkins is offering this service for free for military families. Perkins is the son of a WWII soldier so he knows the comfort of instant communication during the most tragic events in a family’s life. That’s not something he had growing up because communication with soldiers overseas took so long.

“To realize that those messages took 10 days to two months to arrive, now we can do something that’s virtually live, that’s right away. We can record a message today, and it can be seen 40 seconds later in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he explained.

Is your funeral home equipped with video equipment to serve those family members who cannot make it to the funeral services? If not, you may be missing out!

Mock funerals tend to be the way to get attention and make your cause known these days. The students at UNC-Asheville recognize this and used a mock funeral to bring awareness to the cancelled EARN scholarship for students at the school.

The Students for a Democratic Society held the demonstration earlier this month as part of a “national day of action for education rights” that was initiated by the Network to Fight for Economic Justice, a new group on campus. During the demonstration, pallbearers carried fake caskets to the “quad” while making stops along the way. At the end of the journey, there was a tombstone which remained there for the rest of the week to commemorate the end of the EARN scholarship’s availability for UNCA students because it was “struck down by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.”

More than 10,000 students in the state received the EARN scholarship to attend college. It was designed to help lower-income students and families afford the high cost of going to school. However, the scholarship was cut at the state level because of budget shortfalls, which the Students for a Democratic Society do not agree with because many of the top administrators are still bringing in more than $100,000 per year.

If you have attended several military funerals in recent months, you may have noticed a couple of them playing “Taps” over a tape recorder. That just does not have the same effect as hearing it live, but a shortage of bugle players have made the taped version a necessity for families who want to hear it at the ceremony.

In Long Island, New York, Louis DiLeo is the only bugle player available in the southern region of NY’s Military Forces Honor Guard to play the touching notes at services for fallen military personnel. Due to the shortage, he is keeping quite busy traveling to various funerals in the area to give families their desire to hear “Taps” played live on a bugle. According to DiLeo, he started doing this more than three years ago and he has not missed a day during that time.

Are you a bugler who is able to travel around your area and provide this last tribute to fallen soldiers? If so, please contact your local VFW office or military reserve to let them know. It’s a great way to spend your time while lightening the load for the few buglers who are left.