I don’t know about you, but when I go, I want people to celebrate my life instead of mourning my death. More and more people would rather not see their family members grieving at their funeral. So with the trend fully in place, why not take advantage of it by offering a new service at your funeral home? Instead of the traditional viewing and funeral, customers should be able to enlist your services to host a ‘Celebrate Life’ party for their deceased loved one.

If you do this for your funeral home you have to get creative and go big. I’m talking food, drinks, custom themes, full planning help, etc. Parties can be hosted in the parking lot or even inside the funeral parlor if it’s not too depressing. If not, you can also contract with local businesses in the area to host ‘Celebrate Life’ parties at their location. A service like this might bring in thousands of dollars per event. Not only will you be making money, but you’ll be creating a unique experience that will be remembered forever by your customers, as well as, talked about with their friends/family.

Example ‘Celebrate Life’ Parties that You Can Host at Your Funeral Home

• Celebrate Life Bar-B-Q
• Celebrate Life Sports Outing
• Celebrate Life Costume Party
• Celebrate Life Concert
• Celebrate Life Volunteer Outing

When coming up with your ‘Celebrate Life’ service, it’s important that you provide example party ideas, but with that said, you should also explain that ALL ‘Celebrate Life’ parties can be customized to meet the families interests. Families will want to have a party that symbolizes their loved ones’ interests. If he/she was a HUGE sports fan, maybe the family wants to get everyone together at a sports bar to watch his/her favorite team play. If he/she loved to grill, a BBQ would be really fun. The important part is that you’re providing grieving families with a reason to celebrate and be happy instead of mourning their lost loved one in a traditional fashion.

If you set this new service up properly I can see you generating thousands of dollars in new revenue for your funeral home. What ‘Celebrate Life’ party ideas can you come up with? Leave your comments below.

Promote Local Content

There are probably hundreds of websites out there who focus on promoting either news or events (or both) in your local area. Why not take advantage of that great local content by promoting it through your Facebook & Twitter accounts. Start connecting with the best local news & events sites out there, follow them & engage with them. Share that content with your online community. You can then engage local community members (your prospects) in online conversations around the local content that you’re promoting. Over time this tactic will allow you to build many relationships with your target audience that you otherwise would not have been able to do through traditional marketing tactics.

Create Local Content

If you have time and you have the tools (a blog, e-newsletter, online radio show, YouTube video series, etc) you can create you own local content. It’s always more valuable to create your own content than to promote others’ content, as when you’re promoting your content you’re driving traffic back to YOUR websites. If you have a blog for your funeral home you can start drafting localized content. Pick up on local news stories and put your own spin on it. Help promote a great local cause or event. There are countless local content topics that funeral home owners can discuss. Once you create the content you can promote it through Facebook and Twitter, as discussed above. Creating your own content will simply allow you to generate even more awareness and build more relationships than simply promoting others’ content.

Whether you decide to create your own content or promote the content from local sources, the main thing is to engage your local community around that content. Use your social media channels to start building relationships with your target audience. Use your local community as your conversation starter. You’ll be happy with the results if you put some serious time into this.

Use paper.li for your funeral home

What is paper.li?

According to their website, “Paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format.” Paper.li allows users to create their own newspaper through tweets or Facebook links. You can choose from a number of content collection options within the paper.li system. Depending which option you choose, paper.li looks for tweets/Facebook posts with links attached, and then organizes the content into a newspaper format automatically. Using paper.li provides funeral home owners and funeral directors with a tool to spread relevant content from other funeral industry experts to your customers and prospects in a way that’s very elegant and consistent.

How do I setup a paper.li newspaper for my funeral home?

Paper.li allows you to sign-in with your Facebook OR Twitter account. Once signed in you can create up to 10 unique online newspapers for free. Once you’ve signed-in you can click the ‘create a newspaper’ link in the top right corner of paper.li. You will then be presented with 5 options for creating your paper.li online daily newspaper. The options are very intuitive and the system will walk you through everything.

Benefits of creating an online newspaper for your funeral home

By taking time to follow the right people on Twitter you can create a highly relevant daily online newspaper that you can use to educate and provide value to your followers. Now you can still use content marketing techniques without having to take the time to create your own original content. Even better, you can still create content, but not as frequently, yet still provide valuable content from yourself and from others in the funeral industry to your customers and prospects on a daily basis. Another nice feature is that you can promote your online daily newspaper automatically on Twitter simply by selecting that setting. You can also promote your paper.li funeral newspaper manually on your other social media sites.

By getting great content in front of your target audience on a regular basis you’re going to position your funeral home and yourself as a leader in the local funeral industry. When people need funeral services they are going to think about you right away. By taking a little time to learn how to use paper.li, then setting up your online daily newspaper, and actively promoting it, you will “turn strangers into friends, and friends into customers.” – Seth Godin

What are you waiting for? Get started creating your online daily newspaper for your funeral home right now. Let us know how it goes.

This month we are going to focus on helping funeral home owners and funeral directors learn how to optimize their website to include links to their Social Media sites. By adding Social Media links to your funeral home website you can turn website traffic into new online community members. Over time you can then convert those new community members into new customers. It’s an easy update to your website, but the results can be HUGE for your funeral home.

Add Social Media Links to Your Funeral Home Website

Many social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have made it extremely easy to link from your website to your social media profiles. You can even find image icons to add to your website and link to your social media sites. It is highly recommended that you add your Social Media icons/links near the header of your website so that everyone who lands on your website sees them. Some companies only add their social media icons/links to the footer of their website, but if people do not scroll down the site, they never see the icons. The biggest thing is to get your social media icons on your funeral home website. Where you put them is secondary, though we think it makes a big impact when you have them in a place that is highly visible to everyone who lands on your website.

Benefits of Having Social Media Links on Your Funeral Home Website

There are numerous benefits to having your social media icons/links posted on your funeral home website. Here are a few of the biggest benefits to having your social media icons/links on your website:

• Converts web traffic into new online community members
• Helps with SEO when folks search for “XYZ Funeral home on Twitter”
• Separates you from your competitors who may not have added social media icons/links to their website
• Allows prospects to connect with your past customers to ask questions
• Provides you with a direct line of communication to new prospects

If you’re using Social Media to connect with customers and prospects, build relationships, and ultimately drives sales then you’re much further along then many funeral homes. Now, with a few creative ideas, like adding your social media icons/links to your funeral home website, you can drive even more people to your social media sites. Over time, with the right social media strategy, you will convert your online networks into customers. You’ve already done the hard work, which is buying into social media, setting up profiles, and continually updating your sites. Now you just need to start driving more traffic to those social media sites. Adding social media icons/links to your funeral home website is a great way to do just that!

Google gives Funeral Home Owners and Funeral Directors the ability to create your own custom Google Places Coupon. If you’re looking to offer a discount on your Funeral Services or offer a free product or service with the purchase of other producs or services, you can do so with your Google Places Coupon. Follow the steps below to create your own Google Places Coupon (before moving forward be sure that you’ve already created your Google Places page for your Funeral Home).

Develop a Coupon Offer

Probably the biggest key to building a successful Google Places Coupon is coming up with a highly actionable offer. When coming up with your offer be sure to think about what your target audience would find valuable.

Design a Google Places Coupon

Once you come up with your highly actionable offer it’s time to go into your Google Places account and begin designing your Google Places Coupon. Simply log into your Google Places account and you’ll see two tabs. The first is entitled, “Dashboard” and the second is a tab entitled, “Coupons”. Click the “Coupons” tab to begin designing your Google Places Coupon.

The main inputs for your Google Places Coupon are: | Headline | Sub-Heading | Details | Image | Good Until Date |. When designing your coupon be sure to use your keywords throughout the copy. Your Headline should use keywords and be appealing to the customer-type you are trying to attract. Add actionable details to your coupon to explain as much as possible about the offer. Be sure to include your call-to-action at the end of the Details section. The last thing that you want to remember is to include an image. We used our avatar, but you can use your full company logo, an image relevant to your offer or to your audience. However you approach it the important thing is that you use an image on your Google Places Coupon.

You can watch your Google Places Coupon build on the right side of the page as you add inputs to your coupon. On top of this being free, Google makes it super easy for you to create a Google Places Coupon. Once you have all of your inputs locked in it’s time to finalize & promote your coupon.

Promote a Google Places Coupon

Once your Google Places Coupon is finalized it will start showing up on your Google Places Page. When people search terms relevant to your funeral home and add a location to their search (ie. Funeral Home Philadelphia PA) then your Listing will appear. When your Google Places Listing is clicked on users will be taken to your Google Places Page, which is where they will see your Google Places Coupon. Those who are interested in your offer will print out your coupon and bring it with them to your store the next time they are in need of your products or services.

You can also take an active approach and promote your Google Places Coupon on your website, blog, and social media. Google provides you with a URL to add to your web properties. Through this URL, you can now drive your customers and prospects to your Google Places Coupon, which is a great way to positively impact coupon redemption.

Google Places Coupons for Funeral Homes

As you can see from the information above, creating your own Google Places Coupon for your Funeral Home is extremely easy, as well as, cost effective. You want to ensure that your Google Places Page is optimized for your keywords so that you can drive quality traffic to your Google Places page. Also, be sure to use the other online tools that you’re using to market your Funeral Home (like Facebook & Twitter) to drive traffic to your Google Places Coupon. By optimizing your Google Places page for Search and by promoting your Google Places Coupon on Facebook & Twitter, you will drive quality traffic to your Google Places page and coupon. The more quality traffic you have hitting your Google Places page, the more likely you are to convert that traffic into new customers through the use of your Google Places Coupon.

Is anyone currently using a Google Places Coupon to promote your Funeral Home? How is it working for you? We’d love to hear your stories via the comments section below.

Halloween is such a fun time of year. Everyone gets to dress up and either go to parties or go trick-or-treating. Another BIG activity during the month of October is attending haunted houses and riding haunted hayrides. Farms and local area businesses drive a lot of revenue by hosting these events. Funeral Homes should get into the game. What’s scarier than going to a real funeral home haunted house? Many people believe funeral homes are truly haunted, so people would line up to walk through the Haunted Funeral Home on the Hill.

Turn Your Funeral Home into a Haunted House

Turning your funeral home into a haunted house takes planning. It might make sense to hire someone who specializes in setting up haunted houses. You can do it yourself, it will just take a little more time. You want to be sure that you can run the haunted funeral home without disrupting your core business. You want to be sure that you make it very fun and scary all at the same time. Public safety should be a big concern and you may want to look into temporary insurance for the event. These are all things that need to happen, but all things that when planned for, can be very easy to execute.

The 3 most critical things that you want to remember are:

• Be sure that during the events there are no dead bodies at your funeral home. Family members of the deceased may find it unappealing and patrons may be a little freaked out by it.
• Only run the haunted funeral home for 1-2 weeks. You don’t want to take away from your main business, but if everything is scheduled properly and planned for, you can make a very generous profit in 1-2 weeks without disrupting your core business.
• Communicate clearly to the community that you’re turning your funeral home into a haunted house. Promote it properly. Ensure the families of your customers and the local community know that there will be no dead bodies inside the funeral home during the event, when your haunted funeral home will be home, the costs, etc.
• Price it right. Find out what other area haunted houses and hayrides are going for and either price it either a little more or less than those. Determine the value that your haunted funeral home is bringing compared to your competitors and then price it accordingly. You should consider giving away a lot of free passes as a promotion, as you know that nobody will come to a haunted funeral home along. This could be a great way to get groups to come to your haunted funeral home instead of your competitors’. If I have a free pass to your haunted funeral home then I’m trying to convince my friends to go there instead of the one down the street.

Promote Your Haunted Funeral Home

You can promote your haunted funeral home within your community through creative partnerships with other local businesses. You can use social media to promote your haunted funeral home. Flickr could be a great tool for you to use as you can post pictures of your haunted funeral home and scared patrons. You can also write blog articles or send out an ad in your e-Newsletter. Traditional advertising tactics might also be a good route to go if you can keep your costs down. Fliers and signs around town are a good way to go about it. You can run print ads or radio spots on local media outlets. The opportunities for promotion are pretty much endless. Our advice is to get creative, use free online tools if you can, and save yourself a lot of money when it comes to promotion. BUT also be sure to do enough promotion to get people to come!

Community Involvement is key for Funeral Homes

As we mentioned in an earlier post here on the Heritage Coach Blog, your local community is your customer base. A great marketing strategy would be to get involved in your local community by attending events and also hosting your own events. Turning your funeral home into a haunted house would be a great community event that you can do to promote your funeral home services. Turning your funeral home into a haunted house will generate a lot of awareness for your business throughout the community and it will also make you a few extra bucks. In this economy it’s important to always generate new revenue streams. Turning your funeral home into a haunted house is a great way to do that!

In our current economy it’s going to become more and more critical that everyone focuses on supporting their local community. Funeral Home Owners should get deeply involved in leading this support. As a funeral home owner you are limited in how you approach the public with your marketing message because of the nature of your business. People don’t want to see funeral ads. With that said, this shouldn’t stop you from finding creative ways to build relationships with local community members; who are ultimately your prospects. A great way to build relationships with local prospects is by participating in community events.

There are two main ways that you can get in front of the local community through community involvement. The first is to host your own events within the community. The second is to partner or join with existing community organizations and help with their community events and programs. As a business owner who’s probably fairly busy, the latter may be your best bet. You can join the chamber of commerce if you’re not already a member. You can scope out local meetup groups and get involved with their local programs. You can also use LinkedIn Groups to find community groups in your area. Once you get involved with some great community groups in your area you can then start participating in their local events. While doing so you will begin to meet new people, explain what you do for a living, and begin building your relationships.

By spending time suporting your local community you will begin to create a bond with other community members. When those folks have to face the difficult situation of making arrangements for a deceased loved one, you’re going to be the first person to pop into their head. Over the years you will create some truly remarkable friendships with other local residents. As you know better than anyone, people like working with friends during tough times. The funeral planning process is very difficult, but they’ll know that you will be there to support them. This is why they are going to choose your products & services over other local funeral homes.

It may not be a flashy way to market your business, but it is the right way. Marketing is all about relationship building. You do that through engagement around like-minded topics. By getting involved in your local community you will begin to meet others who are interested in supporting your community as well. Those folks will drive your sales in the years ahead.

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.

Heritage Coach Email Insider Program

Are you finding the information above valuable? If so, we encourage you to join our FREE Insider Program. The Heritage Coach Insider Program is free to sign-up. Each month we send our Insiders all of the latest Heritage Coach information, along with special savings opportunities on new and used limos & hearses, as well as, vehicle service. We hope that you’ll take advantage of this opportunity by becoming a Heritage Coach Insider today.

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.

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.