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4 Types of Funeral Home Marketing, With Pros and Cons

The past few weeks, we’ve talked a lot about building community with and around your marketing as a way to better engage your target audience and create more conversions. This is a type of relational marketing, but it isn’t the only type of marketing to choose from.

Check out these four marketing types:

1. Relational Marketing

This type of marketing focuses on building relationships with your audience and clientele. If you’ve built a relationship, the hope is that the family or person chooses you when there’s an at-need situation or they’re ready to begin preplanning.

Pros: Relational marketing is positive in nature and can be quite effective. It’s also an ideal marketing type for many funeral homes because deathcare is, at its core, a relational business.

Cons: Building community and relationships takes time, effort, and commitment. It also means drilling down to what your target audience really needs and wants and potentially leaving out people who aren’t in that audience.

2. Scarcity Marketing

Scarcity marketing involves playing on fears, worries, or facts about the limited availability of products or services. It prompts people to make a decision out of fear they’ll miss out. One example would be marketing burial plots with language that implies space is limited and prices may only go up over time.

Pros: Scarcity marketing is effective because it plays on emotions like fear. Emotions definitely drive conversions. It might also be an obvious choice if you’re the only funeral home in the area.

Cons: You have to walk a fine line, or you could alienate your audience.

3. Cause Marketing

Cause marketing aligns your brand or message with a cause people can get behind. If you provide green burial services, for example, you might engage in environmental cause marketing.

Pros: Cause marketing attaches your message to things people are already passionate about, making it easier to drive interest and conversions.

Cons: It only works when you’re sincere, and there can be a temptation to jump on a bandwagon just because it’s trending. Only engage in cause marketing that truly matches your existing mission and values.

4. Stealth Marketing

This type of marketing occurs when people don’t realize they’re being marketed to. Some community-based marketing may fall into this category—your business might sponsor or participate in an event primarily because you care about the community. But getting your name out there is still marketing.

Pros: Stealth marketing helps you build connections with people when they’re not guarded against advertising strategies.

Cons: It’s hard to manage this in any long-term way, and since transparency is so important, most funeral homes wouldn’t want to.

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