Digital Marketing for Funeral Directors: Creating a Thoughtful and Impactful Online Presence
If you’re a funeral director, picture this:
- Your website drives hundreds of monthly local visitors.
- You regularly convert leads from your website.
- You consistently gain new clients.
- You have 100% clarity on your digital marketing strategy and performance.
Seems simple enough, right? When you work with the right digital marketing agency, this is easy enough. Discover how The Houston Marketing Agency creates effective digital marketing campaigns for funeral directors to help them achieve their goals.
We’re a Marketing Agency Specializing in Helping Funeral Directors
Of course, we know digital marketing — but even better, we specialize in what works and what doesn’t work for your industry. Contact us to schedule a no-strings-attached free consultation to learn how we can assist you.
The Holistic Playbook for a High-Performing Funeral Directors’ Digital Marketing Campaign
As a top-performing Houston marketing agency, our clear-cut processes and strategies have consistently helped many clients achieve their goals.
When you work with us, your funeral director marketing journey will focus on three important components:
- Setting up data analytics to track performance.
- Driving inbound traffic to your website.
- Converting that traffic into customers.
Seems fairly straightforward, right?
It can be, but your results have to be trackable.
Think about your digital marketing campaign by considering these questions:
- What is your website’s conversion rate?
- How many organic visitors did you get from Google last month?
- What is your cost per qualified lead from Google Ads?
Do you feel like this guy? Keep reading. We’ll walk you through our process so you can understand how we work. The Houston Marketing Agency is more than a digital marketing agency; we’re also a “data agency.” We’ll use what works to create a personalized, high-performing marketing campaign.
Phase 1: Build Robust Data Analytics
Trackable KPIs
Without tracking reliable data, you’re shooting into the dark every time you make a decision.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important data pieces that can be analyzed for digital marketing.
As a funeral director, you might be tracking important KPIs like:
- Response time to inquiries
- Number of services conducted per month
- Average revenue per service
- Merchandise sales per service
- Customer acquisition cost
- And more
These KPIs are specific to your industry, so additionally, you might focus on tracking:
- Leads generated per channel
- Cost per channel:
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- Cost per website visitor
- Cost per lead
- Cost per qualified lead
- Cost per conversion
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Data Fidelity
Many other data agencies aren’t as meticulous as we are when it comes to data fidelity. For our digital marketing campaigns, we:
- Count every conversion
- Track all relevant conversions
- Track every step of the funnel to understand drop-off and conversion rates
At The Houston Marketing Agency, we strive for perfect data tracking relevant to your business’s marketing campaign so we can best move forward to achieve results.
Phase 2: Maximize Affordable Inbound Traffic
When considering a digital marketing campaign for funeral directors, you first have to consider why people are searching for you. Assumedly, most customers need a funeral director when there’s a death in their family, but other sensitive and specific reasons may apply, too:
- Hospice or hospital staff have advised the family to begin making arrangements.
- A family is unsure what to do following a death.
- They are comparing prices, reviews, and services of multiple funeral homes.
- They need to transport a deceased body.
Knowing which of these apply to your funeral director business can help you focus on your digital marketing campaign and dial in on specific strategies to help you generate the most traffic at the lowest rate.
When most people think of conducting an online search, they head to Google.
Over 3,000 people per month search for “funeral directors near me” or a similar variation of that keyword. Sometimes, people search using a specific location or city name.
Why is knowing this important?
If your funeral director campaign isn’t performing well in both organic and paid traffic, you’ll miss out on potential customers.
Organic
To rank organically for keywords like “funeral directors” on Google means you either fall in the Google Local Pack or as a paid sponsor.
Here is an example of ranking in the Google Local Pack:
How do you rank here? Local SEO can be difficult to understand, but it boils down to having an optimized, highly reviewed Google Business Profile and having an abundance of localized content on your website.
Below the Google Local Pack is where you’ll find the organic results. They look like this:
How do you rank here? Start with creating a comprehensive and content-rich website, and optimize your on-page SEO (title tags, meta descriptions, headers, etc.)
Paid
How paid channels perform depends on factors like your location, your specific funeral home, prospective customers, and more. When creating your digital marketing campaign budget, consider spending it in places that typically see the best performance:
Google Ads
Everything we’ve discussed about Google also pertains to Google Ads — a paid option that helps you rank at the top of the results. When done right, prospective customers will see your sponsored links first, click them, and land on your website.
YouTube Ads
YouTube Ads are an easy and affordable way to provide highly targeted visual ads. Clients who are ready to invest in a funeral director are looking for one that:
- Is empathetic
- Provides empathy and compassion
- Has high client satisfaction
- And more
A high-quality video showing clients who have been happy with their outcomes during such a difficult time can go a long way.
Social Media Ads
Taking to social media for advertising has become more commonplace for funeral directors to connect with the community, share information, and offer support to grieving families.
Different demographics utilize various social media platforms — mainly Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. While there’s likely to be crossover between the platforms, in general:
- Facebook & Instagram While most popular with Boomer and Millennials, don’t think of these as just reaching boomer or gen x audiences.
Facebook & Instagram perform well for creative products and services, traditional products and services. One key tip is video is expensive.
So if you only have a limited budget, or what you are promoting can be represented as in a static image, motion graphic type videos, or technical/traditional presentations, then Facebook & Instagram often give the best return on investment.
- TikTok is popular with Millennials and Gen Z. TikTok is popular, but are you promoting yourself in the users expectations products that are largely experiential, extremely visual, and somewhat humorous?
The biggest challenge and limitation with TikTok is the heavy investment in video production.
Often meaning someone is always filming, or hiring influencers to film very creative videos, with very flexible brand standards. But in the unique User Generated Content style that works best on TikTok.
All of these generations are part of your target audience as a funeral director, so spreading your budget among these platforms can help increase your performance.
Phase 3: Increase Conversion Rates
You’ve attracted potential clients to your website — that’s step one — but the work doesn’t end there. Now you have to bring customers in, see them through until the end, and ensure they’re satisfied.
How do you make this happen?
Use CRO Best Practices
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) can include many practices, such as:
- Adding testimonials to your website
- Using imagery and video content that is unique and high-quality
- Having a mobile-friendly website that’s easy to navigate
- And more
There are many strategies you might use — here are a few we recommend:
Split Test Landing Pages
Running split landing page tests is a quick and effective way to learn what works and what doesn’t regarding website copy, design, and other on-page elements.
For example:
- Landing Page A is your control page.
- Landing Page B is your test page. Take Landing Page A and change one element or component (i.e., the call-to-action).
You can compare the performance of your control page to your test page to learn which components draw more users to help increase conversions.
Clear CTAs
A clear Call to Action (CTA) might be one of the most obvious components of your website — it should appear on the page multiple times.
Whatever action you’d like potential customers to take to convert should be simple and clear:
- Schedule a consultation
- Contact us
- And more
Optimizing the Funnel
These are the steps users must take to go from an interested searcher to a paying customer. You’ll typically receive a lot of drop-offs during this process, so we take advantage of these trends to:
- Determine where drop-offs are happening
- Optimize the drop-off points through data-driven tests
- Monitor performance
- Continue running tests and making changes
Increase LTV on Autopilot
Your interested user has become a customer, but there’s still more work to do — now you have to keep them by increasing their lifetime value (LTV).
For funeral directors, this could be tricky — most clients usually only need a funeral director a minimal number of times in their lives. However, you can still maximize the value of each client through referrals, cross-selling, and brand loyalty.
Maximize Client Acquisitions
Become the local funeral director everyone wants to work with. How do you do this? By:
- Creating an empathetic and thoughtful experience
- Becoming visible in your community
- Building long-term relationships
- Targeting pre-need arrangements
Make Referrals a Necessity
Your customer may not need you again, but they likely know someone who will. Make them want to refer your services to others when you:
- Create an experience with fast communication, compassion, and care.
- Send a personalized sympathy card following the service.
- Follow up on the family with emails, newsletters, etc.
- Offer aftercare with grief resources, memorial anniversary cards, memorial keepsakes, and more.
- Build strong referral partnerships with:
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- Hospices
- Hospitals
- Nursing homes
- Religious leaders
- Grief counselors
- Support groups
- Elder law attorneys
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Digital Marketing for Funeral Directors Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
At The Houston Marketing Agency, we want to help funeral directors reach their goals through a customized digital marketing campaign. Our team will help you increase inbound traffic and conversions using strategies specific to funeral directors and the industry.
We are so confident in our work that we offer a 100% money-back guarantee if we don’t improve your performance within three months.
Contact us today to get started.