Instagram as a Funeral Home Marketing Platform: What You Need to Know About New Updates

It’s not currently official, but Instagram seems to be dipping its toes into local business profiles. And that means it’s time for death care companies to dive into the funeral home marketing opportunities on the social platform.

Here’s what you need to know about the unofficial update and how you can prepare to leverage potential marketing benefits:

Local Business Profiles Spotted on Instagram 

If you can’t see these profiles from your personal Instagram account, don’t feel left out. The local business profiles seem to be in beta mode, which means they’re popping up for random users and companies. But they do exist — people are sharing online screenshots to prove it — so the potential benefits for local funeral home marketing are coming.

In their current version, the profiles include information such as company name, Instagram profile link, street address, hours of operation, business category, phone number, and website URL. The profiles also appear to display the last three images posted by the business on Instagram.

A full rollout of these profiles will provide another place where users can discover your business. And with almost 30 percent of adults in the United States on Instagram, more exposure on the platform could drive impressive results.

Three Tips for Preparing for Your Own Profile Listing

As a funeral home or other death care company, you might be wary of incorporating Instagram marketing. That’s understandable. But while you certainly need to draw some hard lines in the sand about the type of pictures you share from your business, Instagram is an ideal platform for engaging with people of all ages in a very authentic manner.

Here are three things you can do today to position your company to benefit from an eventual rollout of Instagram’s local business profiles:

1. Create an Instagram account and start posting. You can share images of products — such as urns — your staff, and even a beautiful sunset or rainbow outside of your building. Make sure to write engaging captions, which can include comments on local events, information about preplanning, or questions for your followers.
2. Update Facebook business data. Ensure your business profile on Facebook is updated with correct information. Since Facebook owns Instagram, the company could leverage existing data to build out future profiles on both platforms.
3. Post to Instagram Stories. Instagram Stories include temporary content outside of your profile page; these posts only last up to 24 hours, so you can test the performance of different types of content here. You might also post a series of images to tell a story or show your staff participating in local events.

Any work you put into your Instagram account won’t be wasted regardless of what happens with local business profiles. By offering potential clientele a peek into your business, you create engagement and help drive awareness of your products and services.