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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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.
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.
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.
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. 
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.
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
If you have attended several