Funeral Home Marketing – Online vs Offline
Only six percent of companies believe their online and offline marketing efforts are working together according to a study by Smart Insights. That creates a huge opportunity to set your funeral home apart from the other ninety-four percent of businesses that don’t have an integrated marketing strategy.
It’s 2019, and by now you’ve likely heard countless times how important digital marketing is. In fact, eighty-eight percent of consumers say use the internet to research a product they’re considering buying. Another sixty-four percent have also reported that a video they watched on Facebook influenced a purchase.
With numbers like that, you might as well put all of your resources into online marketing, right? Wrong.
Consider your website and your Facebook page. They’re two different channels but you use them together in tandem to communicate with families. The same can be done by integrating your funeral home’s online and offline marketing strategies.
Funeral Home Marketing – Online vs Offline
We’ve published several blog posts on both offline (commonly referred to as traditional marketing) and online marketing. Below is a link to some helpful blogs posts covering each type:
Funeral Home Advertising in 2019
Print Advertising For Funeral Homes
6 Easy Ways To Promote Your Funeral Home Event Online
Why Your Funeral Home Needs A Public Relations Strategy
8 Tips To Improve Funeral Home SEO In 2019
Offline Marketing For Funeral Homes
Offline marketing is any form of marketing that is published and released without the internet. Offline marketing can take place in many forms including direct mail, television, radio, print, and more.
Online Marketing For Funeral Homes
Online marketing or digital marketing as its often referred to is any form of marketing that uses the internet to share a message. Online marketing is accomplished through email, web content, social media, search engines, and other forms to generate leads.
Connecting Your Online and Offline Marketing Efforts
One of the main reasons to focus on both digital and traditional marketing is that it helps you cast a wider net. Not everyone is going to see your posts of Facebook and others will miss your ads in the newspaper. But, when you make sure you’re broadcasting a consistent message across different channels, you’re covering all the bases and ensuring you reach your entire audience (wherever they prefer to be reached).
Branding and Messaging
It’s important to make sure that your branding and messaging are consistent across all of your marketing materials. The colors, font, and messaging used in your emails should be similar to what is printed on a flyer. It can take up to seven touch points before a consumer is ready to make a purchase. Some of these may come from online and some from offline. The best way to build a memorable brand is by staying consistent with your messaging and slogans. By making sure your branding and messaging are aligned, you can continue to influence your prospects no matter where they see your marketing efforts.
If you plan to use a hashtag for an event, make sure to include it on offline materials. Even though the family might be reading a church bulletin, including the hashtag gives them something to search for if they wish to look for your event online.
Provide Links To Your Website
Your website is a hub of information about your business. Nowadays, most families are going to conduct some research online, so make it easy for them to find you. Including a link to your website on business cards, emails, Facebook ads, and any other marketing materials will ensure whoever sees the material has somewhere to go afterward if they want more information.
Build Landing Pages For Campaigns
Including a link to your website gives people a place to visit, but it makes it hard to track if your offline ads are working. If you’re planning a certain promotion or campaign, consider building a landing page with a specific URL. With the Pulse Websystem, it’s easy to create a new landing page for your funeral home website in minutes.
If you want to see how effective an offline ad is, include the URL to the landing page on it. Just make sure that you don’t promote the page online as this will skew your reporting numbers. If you’re not concerned with this kind of data, push your online ads to the landing page as well. Consider it an extension of your website and the page you want people to visit along their buyer’s journey.
Keywords
Keywords are important in both online and offline marketing. Not only are they used by search engines to locate websites, people will also use them too. An easy way to align your online and offline marketing is through consistent keywords. If someone sees your billboard or newspaper ad promoting an event or something like “affordable cremation services” they might use that term when searching online. Make it easier for them to find you with paid search engine ads targeting
Again, this is just an easy way to make sure your message is consistent across every channel you’re using to reach people in your community.
Lets Talk About Your Funeral Home Marketing Strategy
Looking to get more out of your funeral home marketing and advertising? We’d love to work with you and help you reach your goals. As the strategic arm behind more than 150 social media and search engine strategies for our clients, we understand how to build connections with families and create quality leads for your firm.
Contact us today to learn more about our marketing services and how we can help set you up for success.
If you’re looking for more marketing tips, make sure to subscribe to our monthly newsletter, The Pulse. Each month we send out an email filled with helpful articles, tips, and free downloadable resources to help guide your funeral home marketing.
Tommy holds a Communications degree from Laurentian University and an Integrated Marketing Communications Graduate Certificate from St. Lawrence College. He is a Content Marketing Specialist at FrontRunner and focuses on producing engaging content that funeral homes can use to connect with families. In addition, Tommy crafts SEO content for clients and specializes in helping the general public connect with the death care industry as a whole.