Three Tips for Funeral Home Social Media Marketing

More than half of people who use social media sometimes research products and services via those channels, and more than 70 percent of marketers believe social media is an effective method for engaging target audiences.

But surely that’s true of industries such as fashion or food and not deathcare? You might think someone logging into Facebook or Instagram wouldn’t care to see advertisements or statuses from funeral homes, but you would be wrong.

Sure, no one wants depressing or worrisome brand messaging. Most people have enough of that type of thing in their feed because their friends won’t stop sharing the news cycles. But that doesn’t mean you can’t connect with potential clientele via social; it just means you must be purposeful and strategic in doing so.

Check out these three tips for funeral home social media marketing to start making organic, meaningful connections that can drive conversions and revenues for your deathcare business.

1. Provide educational content.
Social media is a great place to market preneed services and products by educating people about them. Deathcare can be mysterious and frightening to people who aren’t professionals, and people may see preplanning as a macabre step to take. Demystifying these products with compassionate, matter-of-fact, and helpful content on your social channels might increase the likelihood people consider them.

2. Don’t make it all about you.
But don’t make your posts all about you—there’s a reason they call it social media. Share posts from others, hype local events, and open the door for user-generated content by asking questions, holding contests, and encouraging people to share pictures or stories. When you’re engaging with others on social media, they’re more likely to engage with you.

3. Use inviting language to call people to action.
In multi-user communities such as forums and social media platforms, it’s typical to see a 90-9-1 rule of participation—also called participation inequality. It works like this:

• Around 1 percent of the community are heavy contributors, regularly commenting, liking, and sharing.
• Around 9 percent are intermittent contributors, contributing here and there but with obvious other priorities on their time.
• Close to 90 percent are lurkers, which means they might observe the posts and comments, but they never participate.

Help persuade lurkers to take action, even if it’s not in the public space, by using inviting language and giving specific actions for CTAs. Let them know where they can call, whom they can speak to, or what links to click and what to do when they get there, for example.

Social media is great. But if you’re not issuing the invitation and people aren’t following through on the CTA, you’re wasting some of your marketing effort and time cultivating a group of followers that could be meaningless to your bottom line.