Funerals are relatively routine.
How you connect with clients shouldn’t be.
You show up at the funeral home. You greet the family. You wait in a line. You stand in front of a casket or urn and say your final goodbyes. You view the pictures around the room and sign the guest book. You follow the procession to the gravesite if there is going to be a burial. You stay until the end of the message. You head to lunch. For more than 50 years, this has been the way. The script hasn’t varied much.
Except for the occasional beachfront ceremony or the occasional themed funeral service, there aren’t many variants in the way that our society says goodbye to loved ones. But, that familiarity can breed complacency. Just because the events themselves remain the same doesn’t mean that your marketing plan and customer experience should too. If you get caught up in the routine and the mundanity, you can easily miss out on opportunities to expand your business and customer base.
Marketing a funeral home was routine for a long time as well. In many small towns, there were only a few options anyways, and family loyalties usually dictated where services would be held. But, the people responsible for arranging services are getting younger and, thanks to technology, they are savvier. They see what other places are offering grieving families, and they want a more holistic experience with their death industry provider. They aren’t afraid to move against traditional loyalty and ties to provide an alternative. For the first time in decades, the competition is heating up. Here are some things you can do to offer more for your clients:
- Offer better grieving strategy opportunities for your families.
Gone are the days when the funeral director lowered the casket and waited until the next death to re-connect with the family. On-going grief counseling is now a standard part of the funeral service process. Homes are doing everything from partnering with counseling centers and therapists to offering yoga classes for grieving families. The process is just starting after the services are over.
- Use social media to allow families to get to know you.
Showing your home as a warm, inviting place goes a long way towards helping families feel comfortable in choosing you. If you can use social media to showcase your employees, such as showing them performing the day-to-day business tasks of running a funeral home, it shows your funeral home as a place of life, not death. That can go a long way towards building a relationship with a family.
- Offer resources through your website.
At this point, if you don’t have a website for your funeral home, you should immediately close this article and call a web designer because every second you spend with no site is costing you money. If you already have one, it’s a great place to write informative blogs and post videos to help guide people through the death industry. Help them understand the process. Give away your knowledge, knowing that the more you present yourself as an expert, the more families are going to trust you as their funeral home of choice.
- Get outside the box.
We talked about grieving programs with therapists, but top funeral homes are stepping it up beyond that. It’s not uncommon to hear of funeral homes organizing bus trips for grieving widows and widowers who want to escape their homes for a getaway with other people that know what they are going through. What about taking kids who lost parents to a basketball game or an amusement park? Not only are they going to remember that day as a positive, but the family will remember how you went the extra mile to help them heal, and they’ll want to feel that way again when tragedy strikes in the future.
- Network with other homes.
You never know when you’ll need some help. The death industry is big enough for everyone to make things work for their business without worrying about the next person putting them out of business. Times have changed and homes can no longer put up barriers. Host a meet and greet with area industry experts. Hold a seminar once a month on trends in the industry. Become the industry leader and soon you will see that others are relying on you to be the torchbearer. It can only help when it comes time to handle overbooking or crisis situations. You want to be prepared for every scenario, and, sometimes, that means having help.
The death industry battle is no longer won by running an ad in a church bulletin and opening your doors. It’s time to go that extra step to make your presence felt and offer unique services that help you stand out. National Mortuary Shipping and Cremation can help. If you need to be your area’s resource for body shipping and non-traditional funeral logistics, we can help. Contact us today to see how we can help you connect better with clients as well as the community you serve.
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