5 Powerful Advantages of Google Reviews

Any funeral director will agree healthy families never want to think about death…. they just want to live their lives. However on the flip-side of that, it’s not uncommon for a family member to pass suddenly at home. It happens all the time and if a family is not referred they are usually woefully unprepared what to do next. So in their deep grief and confusion, they reach into their pocket for their cell phone and type in the most commonly search keyword phrase in the funeral home industry, “funeral homes.”

Funeral Marketing Services _ Top Keywords

Google will pick up the IP address of the person doing the search and provide them with relevant funeral homes in the area. At that point it becomes a level playing field because families don’t know one funeral home from the other, so they rely heavily on the reviews from past families before them. This short video shows just how impactful and important outstanding 5 star reviews are.

Personalization of YOU: The Funeral Director

Funeral Directors can now create tremendous authority in the demographic they serve.
Personalization of a funeral director or death care professional is priceless. We believe it’s part of a blueprint for developing a secure multi-million-dollar funeral home business. Finding at-need families in your demographic and having them call you over your competition takes a very specialized skill.

Here’s the problem; Most families think that if they approach a funeral director, something “bad” is going to happen. People are full of superstitions. We want to correct that by making you as a funeral director more approachable to the families you serve. How do we accomplish this? We need to personalize you and make you approachable to the many families that have end of life questions but are afraid or don’t know how to start a conversation with you. Believe it or not, personalization is the simple part. We developed a short video describing why personalization of you, the funeral director is invaluable;

Here’s what’s needed.

You talk to grieving families often. Sometimes there are challenges you need to solve for these families above and beyond making funeral arrangements because you want to help them as best you can during a very difficult time. Think about it, how many times have you gone the extra mile to help a family?

This is what you need to do; Take your phone and video yourself explaining a situation you experienced and how you went about helping or solving it for a family. It could be a short video, a minute to a minute and a half long. What you are looking to create through a video selfie is the compassion you showed during a difficult time for that family. When a family is EFFECTIVELY meeting a funeral director through a “Compassionate story” shared on video, it gives the funeral director the opportunity to stand out like a shining star in their demographic, making him or her approachable and personable. Here are two video that drives this point home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoCrQIHksdQ – 2:40 long

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD5GLModcPE&t=15s – 7:48 long

Upon watching the videos above, you can see how two funeral directors did this for themselves and how we edited the video to complete it. Hopefully this will provide ideas and inspiration to do this for your funeral home. We envision doing a series of these videos for each one of our clients. Then we drive these videos high in the local search results in your area. The results will make you the “go to” funeral home in your demographic because families don’t do business with a building, they do business with the people that run it!

Once we get your video online for people to find it, we want to “surround” your targeted market with an amazing and “tasteful” tri-fold direct mail piece. The direct mail piece ties in effectively with the personalized video. The targeted family actually gets an introduction to the funeral director through an easy to use QR code linking directly to the video. Watch the short mail piece presentation here:

At http://www.funeralmarketingservices.com allow us to show you how well we market our funeral home clients to help them generate more quality services each month.

Funeral Home Marketing Strategies That work

I read an article written in Funeral Business Advisor by Danielle Burmeister, a daughter of two funeral professionals. https://funeralbusinessadvisor.com/what-growing-up-in-a-funeral-home-taught-me-about-marketing/funeral-business-advisor She grew up in an apartment above her parents funeral home and in this article, she makes a few valid points. Here are two of them along with my thoughts as well;

1. Your personal brand matters;

Families don’t do business with a funeral home. They did business with a funeral director. When families need to talk about end-of-life care, they want to talk with someone they know – they don’t necessarily want to cold call a funeral home. Because funeral service is relational, not transactional, this is likely true in the communities you serve as well. Often, a family feels more connected to the funeral home staff than they do to the funeral home business. That’s where personal branding comes into play.

The link between you and your business brand can be a very good thing – think of it in terms of exponential growth. When you have the ability to educate your community, the positive perception of your business brand increases at the same rate as your personal brand.

We have been developing a series of one on one video’s for our clients. https://funeralmarketingservices.com/video-interview-with-funeral-directors/ Let your community get to know you through a series of one on one videos designed to personalize you and the valuable services you provide.

2. Your reputation matters;

funeral home marketing

The shortest distance between two people is not a straight line. It’s a compelling story. I think this is especially true when it comes to brand advocates (testimonials) – those consumers who have compelling stories to share about their experience with your funeral home. By far, word of mouth referrals are best, but an “at need” who isn’t referred will lean heavily on the reviews and opinions posted online. Reviews can and will have a huge impact on the number of services you do over the next 12 months and beyond. We encourage our client base to build fresh, positive reviews from the families they serve through our review dashboard. The method in which we help funeral directors acquire reviews from the families they serve is unmatched in our industry. Set up a free demo with us. We will show you how to stand out above your competition in the demographic you serve.

Adding Amazing Content to your Funeral Home Website

Here are some of the major high authority sites that will recognize your business from the results of our creative writing services about your funeral home. 

Press release logos

By getting our articles about your funeral home onto these high authority news sites that Google trusts and more importantly, your families know and trust, we’ll be getting serious rankings and great visibility in all the communities and towns your funeral home wants to do business in.

You’ll achieve page 1 rankings, a flood of targeted traffic and over 200 high quality backlinks from high traffic, high authority websites. Best of all Google loves our highly respected method of conducting business.

Here is how it works:
 
Included in our articles are hyperlinks of your domain name, that when clicked upon, take the reader back to your website.  So when a website like NBC news publishes our articles about your funeral home on their web pages, there is a hyperlink that takes the user back to your website. That’s called a backlink. Backlinks are a major metric for the ranking of a webpage. A page with a lot of backlinks tend to rank higher on all major search engines, including Google. It makes sense too. If you have a good number of quality backlinks from all different sources pointing back to your website, that is considered a sign of authority.
 
The more quality backlinks you have, or in other words, the more businesses that recognize you, the more authority your website has and the higher it will appear in the search results. The awesome thing about this is that your funeral home is a local business looking for high visibility in a determined demographic. We are not running a national campaign. We are not worried about ranking in all 50 states. We are only worried about ranking in your state and only in a specific area of your state.

Your competition doesn’t stand a chance.

Casting a Wider Net for Your Funeral Home

GoalFuneral homes don’t only do business with the residents in the immediate area surrounding their funeral home, they also offer their funeral services in nearby towns and communities.

In most search directories, including Google, you are indexed by the address of your physical location. For example, type the keyword phrase, Funeral homes + (your city) you will probably see your listing on page 1 and hopefully on top of the page. However, it’s not guaranteed that will happen as you search for your funeral home in areas outside your main town.

Although you do business with residents in nearby towns and communities you are probably not a top choice or a choice at all in the search results in the nearby locations you also service. Most funeral homes “narrow cast” and this limits their reach and the number of immediate need death calls they receive. You’ve got to “cast a wider net” into all the surrounding towns and communities you serve. This short video explains the concept perfectly.

 

It’s not up for debate anymore that no one uses the yellow pages to find or search for a funeral home. Everyone goes onto Google to find and search for products and services and here is a major fact to prove this:

Google keywords 2017

This illustration is taken directly from Google and not counting any other traffic source, major search engine or review site. What makes these staggering numbers even more appealing is another fact to consider; Funeral Home related keywords are not a “leisure search,” they are a serious search. It’s not like I’m surfing the web wanting to learn how to swing my 9 iron properly or looking up the latest holiday recipe. It’s a serious search, something serious has happened and with this kind of search volume, you want your funeral home to be set up properly on the web fielding that initial call!

On a pay per click campaign (which by the way we re very good at) you don’t focus your funeral services in the immediate area of your funeral home. You “cast a wider net” into outside communities, cities and towns within your funeral homes service area. Casting a wider net by ranking organically is by far more cost effective then PPC (Pay Per Click) as organic results are 8.5x more likely to be clicked on than paid search results! To prove that point, ask yourself when you do a search, do you click on the paid ads or the organic search results? Most people click on the organic results first and that includes the families you serve!

To cast a wider net for your funeral home, come talk with us. There is never a cost to fact find and share ideas and strategies specific to your funeral home and location.

How to Get Your Funeral Home on Page One of Google in All the Cities You Want to Do Business In

We have been writing Press Releases with great success, and I am proud to say that these Press Releases have been shared by television stations as well as by major publications around the country.

This terrific exposure results in amazing, high-quality backlinks from quality websites with high authority.

Allow us to help your Funeral Home gain more visibility on the Internet. Immediate need families finding you on the web in all the cities you want to do business in will result in more sales and revenue for your Funeral Home.

Here is a list of publications that have posted our Press Releases for our Funeral Home clients:

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How Funeral Directors Can Develop Relationships with the Living

How to build relationships with families BEFORE a family has an immediate need for funeral home services. Nobody thinks of a funeral home unless there is an urgent need. Here’s a way to build relationships with the living prior to the need for your services.

Ask yourself this question; In your funeral home business, what percentage of your clients do you meet for the first time upon the death of a loved one? Even when a family is referred to you, generally you are meeting new families at the time of someone’s passing. Yes, there are families that may have used your services more than once, but the truth is the percentage of families you meet for the first time is very high. This pretty much is how it’s been for centuries and it makes sense in our business, as our business is an urgent need business, nobody thinks about a funeral home until the time of urgent need.
The public perception of a funeral home and funeral home services is that they assist in burying the dead. That is true, but you deal, collaborate, bond and do business with the living.

In step by step format, here is how to develop relationships with the living so that the chances increase dramatically that you are the funeral home of choice in their time of need.

We do facebook advertising here at Funeral Marketing Services. In fact, we are experts in targeting funeral directors and sharing ideas that benefit them financially. You can do a similar campaign for your targeted market, offering your funeral services to the residents in all the towns and communities you want to do business in.

Why facebook? Because if facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd largest country on the planet. As of last count, Facebook has 1.3 billion users & 75% of facebook users log on daily. That’s quite a lot of people,Taking a much closer look at FB; we found FB can be very valuable and powerful because you get more targeting options than any other type of advertising available today.

No other type of advertising platform or marketing channel allows you to drill down and target the exact type of people that have the means and motivation to purchase from you. FB has a network of data partners that allow facebook to really monitor user behavior and profile FB users. And while it does seem a little big brother to us as FB users, this couldn’t be more advantageous to funeral homes. It means we have access to data that allows us to get our message in front of our ideal audience. It means we can laser target our clients and get the most out of every dime we are spending. Our best opportunity for generating new customers and produce more services per month is when our targeting is specific and dialed in.

So why not target families in your demographic or zip code that are facing an end of life situation?

Yes! We can be very specific and dialed in to make sure we are getting the most for every dime we are spending. We can target seniors over a certain age. (great for pre-planning) How about families that have someone in hospice care or hold power of attorney? How about targeting families caring for someone with a terminal illness or in Palliative Care? Once we know our exact target, it’s time to develop an eye catching, attention getting ad for our targeted audience. Here are a few examples;

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Now here is the cool part. The ad is placed on our targeted families facebook feed page. This is the page they check each and every day, sometimes multiple times a day and spend hours interacting with videos, comments and friends. Since we are only targeting families facing an end of life situation or retiring “baby boomers,” we can expect interested families clicking through on the ad. Once the ad is clicked, they are taken to a special landing page that is completely relevant to your advertisement. For example, take the last ad above, Meaningful Memorialization

Here’s the headline above the ad;

The benefits of Pre-Planning – One of life’s most difficult decisions need not be made at a time of deep grief and confusion.”
To drive home my point, in this country, at any given time, there are thousands of families facing an end of life situation. If your targeting is right, what family in your demographic won’t click through on this ad? Once they click through, they will be directed to a special landing page like this;

Click here for actual page – Funeral Marketing Landing Page

preplanning6

Be sensitive to the fact that most people are not IMPULSE BUYERS. That’s why so many campaigns fail. Advertisers expect people to take action immediately. Even when people want a product or more information, they generally don’t act impulsively. You need to give them good choices.
In this campaign, we provide a number for families to call a funeral director immediately for information, but we know most people won’t do that. Here’s the secret. Give something away for free in exchange for the families email address. But give something away that is of value. In this case we are providing the family a FREE downloadable guide to planning a meaningful memorial for themselves or for a loved one. They can also call the funeral home directly, but they don’t have too. They have a choice.

By providing their email address we can now begin develop a database of living families we can market to and educate on the Amazing Benefits of Funeral Pre- Planning, or any funeral home topic for that matter.

We are in a position to build relationships with the living! How many funeral homes do you know that do something like this? Probably not many and certainly not in your demographic.

No family wants to think about death especially arranging their own funeral. It’s not something people will naturally think about and never had we the platform in which to bring the topic up in such a favorable way.

When you have an interested family engaged, you can educate that family while you have their attention. Responsible people facing an end of life situation will get it and appreciate the information no one else is providing.

Passing is a guaranteed event. You can’t avoid it. You can’t predict it. Death is a fact of life that’s going to happen to everyone. Pre-Planning is responsible and takes so much pressure off the people you care deeply about and who you love most. (I don’t have to sell you, but you’ll now have the ability to sell them without worry of competition!) You will want to personalize your message while making it educational….. and finally we have the platform to do it right.

Get in touch with us…. We will provide you with the right message or run your campaign for you.

Right now, we are seeing the birth of social media in the funeral industry. Having a plan to capitalize on this platform will help develop deeper relationships with a whole generation of people that have been brought up on Facebook. By getting involved with this platform, you are effectively building a relationship with an active generation of people that will become familiar with you and your business and naturally and in most cases, use your services at their time of need.

I can bet a high percentage of families in your demographic and in all the nearby towns, communities and cities you want to do business in have and uses facebook. This is another opportunity in a series of “how to” videos and quality content to lay down the foundation for a multi-million dollar funeral home business.

Funeral Marketing 2016

My name is Alan Hillsberg, Owner of Funeral Marketing Services. Our group exclusively works with funeral homes helping them build the foundation for a secure multi-million dollar funeral home business for years to come.

This article and video will show you an example how we do that.

For many funeral homes, their marketing plan centers around neighborhood walk-ins and referrals. Funeral Homes have relied on neighborhood walk-ins and referrals for decades and while there is nothing wrong with this type of business and this business will always be welcome, at best, neighborhood walk-ins and referrals are unreliable and unpredictable from month to month. Isn’t that true? You can’t base sales projections on something that is unpredictable and unreliable.

Here is where I want to shift your thinking;

Take a look at these numbers from Google over the last 30 days;

funeral home marketing
funeral marketing

For the two keyword phrases shown, cremation and funeral homes, (of course there are obviously more keywords than these two for the funeral home business) these keywords total 110,000 searches from Google alone in the last 30 days. I’m not talking about Bing, Yahoo or any other directory. This is coming from Google alone! These 110,000 searches were not neighborhood walk-ins or referrals. These are families that weren’t referred or chose not to walk in to a funeral home.

The huge volume of 110,000 searches tell us this; For every referral you get, there are tens of dozens in your demographic that are not referred, and for every neighborhood walk-in you get, there are 10s of dozens of families in your demographic that don’t want to walk into a funeral home. It’s easier and more convenient for a family to do a local search for a funeral home over the Internet and the proof and verification of this fact is in the sheer number of searches taken directly from Google analytics last month.

Think about it; How are people that don’t know you going to find your business? Outside of neighborhood walk-ins and referrals, the Internet is where your next funeral service is coming from, and if used properly, it’s an absolute goldmine!

So how can we drive more of this immediate need traffic to your funeral home? Let me show you EXACTLY how we do this by sharing ONE strategy with you.
I have a client who has a funeral home in Hewlett NY. It’s a town here on Long Island, and here’s the key; His funeral home not only does business with the residents of Hewlett NY, but just like your funeral home, he also does business with the residents in nearby towns and sub cities surrounding his funeral home.

Look at this map – The red icon represents his funeral home in Hewlett NY and the green icons represent the surrounding communities he wants to do business in. This map shows 15 cities within a 6 mile radius of Hewlett NY.

Funeral Marketing
Funeral Home in Hewlett NY

In most cases, Google will rank you high in the search results in the city in which your funeral home is located. If my client types in Funeral Homes, Hewlett NY, he will probably show on top of the search results. However that is not true in the surrounding areas in which he also does business. When we started with him he was not listed on Google in any of the 15 cities listed here.

As I just stated, the center of each of these 15 cities are within 6 miles of Hewlett NY. Imagine an urgent need family typing in Funeral Homes, Woodmere, or Funeral Homes East Rockaway or Funeral Homes Lynbrook and his funeral home shows on top of the search results for each of these 15 cities? By exposing his funeral home services to more cities, we are exposing his funeral services to 1000s of additional families in the demographic he serves. Instead of narrow casting, we are suddenly casting a wider net.

This is exactly what we do for our clients, and I’m going to show you how you can do this for your funeral home FOR FREE.

I wrote a book called The Ultimate Internet Marketing Guide for Funeral Homes which provides a step by step tutorial on how you can cast a wider net for your funeral home.

Since we exclusively work with funeral homes, we put into play just the right strategies to generate a consistent flow of new traditional burials and cremation services per month for our clients.

So download our free guide…. Here is what you’ll learn;

1. How to get your funeral home on top of google for all the high traffic keywords urgent need families use to find your business – FOR FREE!

2. How to get your Google listing to STAND OUT so your funeral home gets that immediate need phone call over your competition. – Again FOR FREE!

3. How to Rank your high traffic keywords on top of all the cities you want to do business in! For Free.

4. How to use the power of Social Media to build relationships with the living so that in their time of need, you are the funeral home that gets their urgent need call, and their business.

5. How to set up an intelligent Marketing Plan for 2016 to maximize the number of Services you do this year. All FOR FREE!

In addition to the free guide, if you have any questions implementing any of these ideas in your business, or want more examples on how to generate more services per month that’s SPECIFIC to your funeral home and location, let’s set up a one on one strategy session, again at absolutely no charge.
It doesn’t matter where your funeral home is located, in a rural community or in the middle of a large city, we have custom strategies to create huge opportunities, build a secure financial foundation, and generate more business for your funeral home now and in the future.

Funeral Marketing Services
Alan Hillsberg can be reached at 516-263-2565
http://www.funeralmarketingservices.com

Funeral Home Marketing

As professional marketers in the funeral home industry, we have learned to put into practice a few coordinated concepts that have proven to generate new business for our clients. For those of you looking to build a secure, multi-million dollar funeral home business, I am going to lay out a blueprint.

To be successful in marketing your funeral services, you’ve got to adapt a number of the right marketing strategies all working together to make your business strong and help you grow dramatically. Not all marketing concepts or ideas are right for the funeral home business. In addition, not all marketing companies offer the right strategies for the funeral home business. A company that also does SEO for a bakery or a clothing boutique or a hair dresser is not going to know what the best strategies to use for your business. It’s not a one size fits all approach and it’s not going to work because they don’t specialize in you and your funeral home business. Choosing the wrong strategies or wrong company to do it for you can be expensive with little results.

The goal is not about getting a great ranking on Google, that’s only part of a strategy. The goal is to get your phone to ring placing you or your team in a position to convert those calls into clients and that comes from putting together the right funeral marketing strategies and executing them well. The goal should be generating more quality services per month.

So Instead of adapting one or two strategies that you think might work and hoping those strategies will generate some revenue, we have incorporated a specific multi step funeral marketing strategy all working at the same time that will result in more calls and more sales by getting your internet marketing right.

Our presentation to you is designed to provide a clear, concise plan to build a secure, multi-million dollar funeral home business by taking the right strategy and approach towards Funeral Home SEO and Marketing.

The Powerful Benefits of Facebook Marketing for Funeral Homes

Facebook represents a huge potential market for your social media efforts and can be a huge revenue generator as well if used correctly in our industry. There are over 1.39 billion monthly active Facebook users which is a 13 percent increase year over year. What this means for you: In case you had any lingering doubts, statistically, Facebook is too big to ignore.

Ask yourself this question; what percentage of your clients do you meet for the first time upon the death of a loved one? You haven’t built a relationship with these people; they have first come to know you at the time of someone’s passing. The percentage of customers you meet for the first time is high, if not all. This pretty much is how it’s been for centuries and it makes sense in our business, as our business is an urgent need business. Nobody thinks about us until the time of urgent need.

The public perception of a funeral home and funeral home services is that they assist in burying the dead. That is true, but you deal, collaborate, bond and do business with the living.

Facebook provides a huge opportunity to reach out to your community, new families, as well as past clients. It provides the opportunity we have never had before, to build relationships with the living.
Check out these Facebook fan numbers! These are people actually opted in and are following these businesses!

Moloney Funeral Homes – over 1500 followers

Branch Funeral Homes – over 300 followers

Raynor & D’Andrea – over 500 followers

Why would anyone want to follow a funeral home?

There are great reasons which I’ll get to in a second. Many funeral homes use Facebook to post obituaries and hourly services of current funerals. While there is nothing wrong with that; I propose using face book a different way, by using engaging posts that appeal to the living and that people will want to share with others, creating a larger fan base or audience for you.

facebook humor

These posts are not roll “on the floor” hysterical, but they are engaging! This type of light humor will bring a smile to your customers face and get shared. What you are doing is keeping your audience interested and focused for the main reason behind this article, to educate.

You want to mix funny and engaging with educational posts. Now that you have a growing captive live audience, you want to guide and educate them on topics like Pre-Planning. Never before have Funeral Homes had the right platform to speak and educate people about the benefits of Pre-Planning.

For example, look how huge the Life Insurance Industry is! A life Insurance policy is as widely owned as owning a car. People own Life Insurance because of the financial security it provides for the family they leave behind.

I sincerely believe Pre-planning a funeral would be as popular as owning a Life Insurance policy if we had the proper platform to present the benefits of this topic. Nobody wants to think about death especially arranging their own funeral. It’s not something people will naturally think about and never had we the platform in which to bring the topic up in a favorable way.

Facebook provides that platform by mixing light humor with educational.

Pose a statement like this to any responsible adult that has the best interest of their family in mind.

“The benefits of Pre-Planning- One of life’s most difficult decisions need not be made at a time of deep grief and confusion.”

When you have someone engaged through Facebook, and you educate that person while you have their attention, you can bet there will be many Sunday morning conversations between Husband and Wife about the benefits of Pre-planning. Responsible people will get it.

Passing is a guaranteed event. You can’t avoid it. You can’t predict it. Death is a fact of life that’s going to happen to everyone. Pre-Planning is responsible and takes so much pressure off the people you care deeply about and who you love most. So we want to mix funny and engaging with educational and finally we have the platform to do it right.

Right now, we are seeing the birth of social media in the funeral industry. Having a plan to capitalize on this platform will help develop deeper relationships with a whole generation of people that have been brought up on Facebook. By getting involved with this platform, you are effectively building a relationship with an active generation of people that will become familiar with you and your business and naturally and in most cases, use your services at their time of need.