Spring Cleaning: Refresh Your Funeral Homes Social Media Presence
Your funeral home may be active on one or more social networking sites. But the question is, is your funeral home actually taking advantage of the benefits the proper use of social media offers? Most of the time the answer is no. Used properly, social media firstly allows your funeral home to build relationships with the community. It acts to promote your funeral home and keeps your brand top of mind. It gives you a way to immediately respond to customer questions and allows you to be where the people are. With over a billion active members using just Facebook alone, there is no better place to reach people. This spring it is essential to focus on improving your funeral homes social media presence.
Social media is one of the most powerful marketing channels. One that every growth-focused funeral home should leverage. The most successful funeral homes know how important social media is to their success. They allocate the proper time, money and resources to engage with their families online through social media networks. As social media is here to stay, the question now becomes how do funeral homes become relevant in their social media presence?
Whether your funeral home is just getting started with social media or if your just not sure why it isn’t working, we’ve got your back. When used properly, a strong funeral home social media presence will help improve your brand and attract new customers. To help you achieve this, here are four pieces of advice on how to improve your funeral homes social media presence:
1. Master Your Funeral Homes Social Media Strategy
Not having a strategy behind your funeral homes social media is equivalent to building a house without a blueprint. If you are not sure of what you want to achieve with your funeral homes social media, it will be hard to figure out if you are achieving it. This is where social media strategy comes in in full force.
First, you will need to define goals for your funeral homes social media strategy. Does your funeral home want to promote content? Increase brand awareness? What does your funeral home want to be known for? What do you want people to say about your business? Once you’ve defined your funeral homes social media goals, you need to find someone to manage your social media pages, properly manage it. Next, your funeral home will need to decide what types of content you want to post. A funeral home social media plan or schedule will also need to be put in place to help you stay on track. Ensure that the posts you make are consistent and differentiated. You want your followers to see different content that is valuable to them and keeps them in the know.
Do all these things and you are well on the way to having a successful social media marketing campaign!
2. Embrace Multiple Platforms – Facebook and Beyond
Take time to explore and research all of the social media platforms available to your funeral home. Do you know without a doubt that your target demographic uses only one social media network? Probably not. Therefore, you can’t depend on reaching your entire audience by just being on one social media platform. Using different platforms will allow your funeral home to reach communities on the medium they prefer. However, instead of signing up for every social media account possible, think about what sites your target audience will use the most. It is most effective to only be on the social networks your audience is.
Get Started Off On The Right Foot
Facebook has an abundance of options for any type of organization. Therefore, it is a great starting point to grow your funeral homes social media presence. With over 2 billion active users, Facebook presents a great opportunity to connect with people in the community and establish h trusting relationships. Your funeral home can use Facebook to share photos, videos, and interesting company updates. Facebook will also keep your funeral home top of mind if families should ever need your services. With affordable advertising, brand development, and networking opportunities- Facebook should be at the top of the list during any discussion regarding funeral home social media strategy.
Is your funeral home already comfortable and active on Facebook? Instagram and LinkedIn are great next steps to broadening your social media presence.
Take Your Funeral Home One Step Further
Instagram is a great way to market your funeral home and respond to customer service requests. If your funeral home has interesting content, Instagram is a great tool for quickly spreading this information with images and videos. In addition, you can manage Instagram and Facebook from one ads manager account. This will ensure that your content and messaging is consistent across these channels. Instagram is also a great place to show the potential families that you care about what is going on in the community.
LinkedIn is also a powerful tool for funeral homes looking to make new connections, generate leads, and build their brand. How important is it for your funeral home to have a page on LinkedIn? Very. Creating your own LinkedIn funeral home page gives more exposure and visibility to your business, products, or services. Company pages also have recommendations and followers which increases the credibility of your business.
There is no better time than now to put your funeral home out there and join these social media networks. When on these platforms, your funeral home must remember that some messages may work best when customized to fit a certain social media platform. However, you should strive to create a social media presence that is integrated and complementary across all mediums. This will ensure that your brand and mission statement don’t become diluted or confused.
3. 4 Reasons Why We Invest In Social Media & You Should Too
What is the value that social media brings your funeral home? And more importantly, what are the benefits of investing in your funeral homes social media?
Reason One: Sky Rocket Your Sales
Being successfully active on social media will help you increase the amount of traffic and attention your funeral home website receives. In turn this plays an essential role in your funeral homes ability to generate leads. Which brings us to the first reason you need to invest in your funeral homes social media presence: it will increase your sales.
Reason Two: Build Brand Power
Social media is a great way of keeping your brand in the mind of customers. Social media as an SEO ranking signal is becoming increasingly important. Being talked about and well liked on social media platforms is a signal that your funeral home has content worth sharing and is popular. This alerts Google to regard your website as being more authoritative, which will help your website rank better in organic SEO.
Reason Three: Gain Credibility
A funeral home that boasts a great deal of online followers can appear to be more legitimate in the eyes of prospective clients. It is therefore understandable why your funeral home should invest a great deal into increasing its social media numbers.
Reason Four: Zone In On Your Target
Although you can hope that every one of your funeral homes posts will generate engagement, in most cases you will need to pay to get the right people to see it. The good thing about social media advertising is that you can target your ideal audience to ensure that they view your posts. Some of the ways you can filter your audience is by age, gender, location, or occupation. Various social media platforms offer this feature, however, Facebook is the number one social media platform to advertise on.
Establishing a strong presence on social media platforms does involve a significant investment. However, the benefits severely outweigh the costs. Ensure your funeral home takes the time to allocate an adequate amount of time, money, and resources towards creating a successful social media presence. Remember: due diligence is needed before any real investment is made. Prior to running a Facebook or Twitter campaign, ensure your funeral home has a strong understanding of what you want to gain from it.
4. Interact with Your Community and Create Mind Blowing Social Media Content!
In order for your funeral home to create an effective social media presence you need to understand who your audience is. This means taking the time to understand your audience. You need to look at what kind of content engages them and what does not interest them. By establishing this you can tailor your content to be relevant and useful for them. People want to see content that is entertaining, informing, or providing some sort of value to them. It is not enough to simply post content about your services and the great things your funeral home is doing.
One Rule To Live By
Try to follow the 4-1 rule. For every 4 pieces of content you post, 1 promotional post is allowed. Incorporating this type of strategy for your social media posts will allow your funeral home to be established as a resource people turn to for guidance.
Maintaining Engagement Is Not Mission Impossible
Once you begin posting content that attracts your audience, it is important that you continue to engage with them. You can do this by answering some of the questions they have, posting frequently, and liking their comments. Make sure that the content you are sharing also allows you to differentiate yourself from your competition. Think about questions such as, what makes your funeral home unique?
With your funeral homes social media, the key is continued interaction with your community. This interaction will become visible to others, who will then become interested in interacting with your content as well. Your funeral homes main goal should be to become a part of the community. Do this while also establishing relationships with current and potential clients through the use of social media.
Get Cracking, Improve Your Funeral Homes Social Media Presence Today!
These four quick tips have gotten you thinking about your funeral homes social media presence, but being a successful member of the social media game involves long-term plans and expert knowledge. Is there no one in house that can dedicate their time and energy to do this? No one who has the skill to do it right? Look no further, FrontRunner Social is here to help you with all of your social media needs! Our social media marketing team would love to show you the many ways we can keep your funeral home front and center in the online world. Social Media has become the new way people connect with each other and brands, and is an opportunity your funeral home can no longer ignore.
Make an investment in your funeral homes social media presence, and let the FrontRunner Social team take care of your social media marketing from beginning to end or guide you a long the way!
Alicia is a student intern with FrontRunner Professional. She assists the entire marketing team and aids in the development of marketing related projects. Alicia is working towards her commerce degree and certificate in law and social impact from Queen’s University. She is enthusiastic about everything marketing. Her creative mind-set works to provide FrontRunner Professional with refreshing ideas and innovative solutions to everyday marketing tasks.