The Domani Blog

Is Your Funeral Home Ready For 2021?

caden@thedomanigroup.com (Caden Rhoton) — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 20:41:13 GMT

Now is the time to think about next year.

If there's one thing we've learned in 2020, it's that it's difficult to predict the future, and there will all be surprises that lie ahead. Businesses and individuals need to stay agile and adaptable to be ready for whatever life throws at them.

2020 has been a challenging year for the funeral profession and others as well. Still, we've seen that those funeral homes and funeral professionals who have focused on making their consumer experience as comforting and easy as possible are those that are winning.

At Domani, we exist to help funeral homes help their families have a better experience. Through the power of text messaging, we follow up with families and give them the support and resources they need following a loss. That great experience then leads to a positive online review and helps others looking for a positive experience to find that funeral home. It's a virtuous cycle that helps grow a funeral home's at-need business.

When it comes to preneed, the same principle holds. If funeral homes can provide the experience a family is looking for, that will be the funeral home that wins. During 2020, our preneed appointment setting team has found great success in scheduling remote appointments. Funeral homes that have been willing to adapt and find new ways to do business have grown even during difficult circumstances.

We firmly believe that technology will help us as a funeral profession provide those better experiences for families, but simply using technology for technology's sake is not the answer. We need to leverage technology to help provide personal, engaging experiences with families. We shouldn't use technology as a crutch or an excuse. It's another way to help the ones we serve and provide them the support they need during a difficult time.

As we approach the end of the year and look forward to 2020, take some time to think about how your funeral home is providing meaningful experiences for families and how/what you can do to improve that in the coming year. If you're interested in learning more about Domanicare or Domani Appoinment Setting, please schedule a demo by clicking the link below.

3 Ways For Funeral Homes To Get Returning Customers

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 21:47:47 GMT

The funeral profession is a rare case in that we don’t hope for returning customers. However, when a death does occur within a family, more than once, we want them to trust us enough to handle their arrangements once again.

By far the most effective way to create a sense of loyalty to your funeral home is to perform an exceptional service for that family. However, there’s more that you can be doing to establish credibility with families. Here’s three easy steps on how to develop loyalty to your company and ensure your customers come back for your services when a loved one passes.

Remember Anniversaries/Birthdays

The deceased’s birthday, the anniversary of their passing, and holidays are sensitive times for a family. Be sure to check up on family members as they may be feeling more lonely or depressed during these times. They’ll appreciate the thought and feel your care for them.

Checking in from time to time creates a trust between you and the individual or family, and you’ll be fresh on their mind when they need your services again. .

Personal Aftercare

Aftercare is crucial to the success of your funeral home. Just because you performed a memorable service doesn’t mean your responsibilities are done. The family is still in the process of healing and it will take time. Following up with great aftercare will solidify your relationship with families.

Customers will choose a company and pay more for their services if they have a personal relationship and great customer service. However, one in three customers will stop using that company after a single bad experience, such as not following up. Growing the relationship with the family will ensure they choose you again and don’t go with one of your competitors.

Educate Families

Most people don’t understand the value of preplanning, and as a funeral director it is your responsibility to educate them. Your customers will appreciate your help and preplanning is a sure way to gain returning customers.

We understand how time consuming prospecting can be. Funeral homes will often outsource appointment setting as well to get a leg up on the competition.

5 Reasons to Text Your Aftercare Families

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 16:42:06 GMT

Texting is the most efficient way to communicate in the modern world, and it’s the most effective and personal way to contact families during their hard time.

The vast majority of people in the US and Canada use smartphones.

Almost everyone has a smartphone nowadays. Remember when the first “smartphone” came out in 1992 and cell phones like the BlackBerry and iPhone were considered luxuries when they were first created? Now it’s a common sight to see an iPhone. Most funeral homes and cemeteries haven’t even scratched the surface of text-based aftercare, but with 80% of the U.S. population owning a smartphone, and that number expected to rapidly grow.

Texting is the most popular way to reach smartphone owners.

Using a smartphone has become second nature, especially in the younger generations. Smartphone owners use their device for everything from online shopping to looking up directions. However, a majority of owners say their top use on their phone is texting. In fact, worldwide, people send and receive an average of 53 text messages a day. So then why do only 39% of marketers use texting?

Y our company gains an advantage over your competitors.

I’m sure you’ve received a message from a business at least one point in time, no matter the format or reason. However, not as many businesses as you’d think are taking advantage of this. Using text messages to reach your families gives you an advantage over your competitors.

Texting is more personal, which is the most important part of aftercare.

A lot is expected from a funeral director, and we know how much you have on your plate. Using an aftercare texting service decreases your time spent on aftercare, and it’s not only more efficient, but also more personal. According to aftercare experts at Domani, a text-based aftercare service , “Sending a personalized text message is a non-intrusive way to check in on the family and show your emotional support for the family that recently suffered a loss.” Be there for your families the best way you can be, without losing focus on the families you’re serving now.

The number of businesses using texting is growing.

Soon texting will be the status quo of aftercare. In other industries, there’s been an increase in the use of text marketing and 84% of businesses plan to use texting in the future. The switch to text-based aftercare now will put you ahead of the curve and help you gain a competitive advantage.

Top 6 Funeral Innovations to Consider in 2020

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 20:32:26 GMT

The year 2020 has ushered in a new era of change. Masks are required, handshakes are discouraged, and hugs are forbidden. The funeral industry has long been thought of as “unchanging”, but this is far from true.

Trends rise and fall, what was traditional then may not be traditional now. So let’s take a look at the top 6 funeral innovations for funeral homes and cemeteries to consider in 2020.

6. Creative/Interactive Headstones

A headstone can be more than just a name carved into granite. Using a smartphone, family members and friends can visit a grave and scan a QR code on the headstone; this will unlock pictures and memories of their loved one.

The QR code can be applied to any headstone and, when scanned, will take you to a memorial page. The family can update the page as often as they’d like and upload everything from pictures to audio clips.

5 . Live Streaming Services

In 2020, travel restrictions and social distancing make attending a funeral very difficult for many people. Depending on the local restrictions, you may not be able to attend at all.

Live streaming a funeral service provides those who can’t be there in person a way to heal, while staying healthy and safe. The most popular platform to live stream a service on is Youtube Live. You simply need an account and some form of camera (smartphone, webcam, DSLR camera, etc.) to livestream the service. Friends and family can easily view the content.

4 . Text Messaging-Based Aftercare

In a time when memorials and services are limited and the world is functioning online, texting is the best way to reach your aftercare families. Not only is it more efficient, but also more personal.

The unique thing about services like Domanicare is that a human, not a computer, is responding to your families text messages. These live responders are also able to request online reviews and tie up any loose ends after the service by promptly forwarding any urgent requests to the funeral home staff.

3 . Green Burials

The phrase “Leave it better than you found it,” isn’t always easy to follow when it comes to burials. As our society works to establish sustainable lifestyles, more and more people are turning toward green burials. Green burials have little to no environmental impact and can actually restore natural resources and habitats.

Their sustainability comes from the use of nontoxic and biodegradable materials. The effort of caring for the dead in an environmental-friendly way is both natural and rewarding.

2 . Funeral Home Apps

By now you’ve realized how important it is to have an active website for your business. However, you can go a step further. Creating an app to pair with your already great website can help you gain a larger market share. Not only does an app make your business look professional, but it also helps your families. The families who you serve can use the app to view obituaries, refer others for pre-planning, and access condensed info from your website.

An app can also increase your ranking on search engines and give your brand increased exposure. Considering that four out of five funeral shoppers choose the first funeral home they find in their online search, this is a huge advantage over your competitors.

1 . Flameless Cremation

Another sustainable way to care for the dead is alkaline hydrolysis, or flameless cremation. Our bodies are already 65% water, so this method is a cleaner way to cremate. Families receive and keep the remains the same as a conventional cremation with fire, but the process is different.

Flameless cremation benefits both the family and the earth. This method doesn’t have the same issue of carbon discoloration as cremation with fire, and most importantly, it’s a green option for those who choose cremation.

Google Search: "funeral home near me"

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:20:48 GMT

I fire up my computer, open up Google, and search the term “funeral home near me”. Which funeral home in my area shows up first? Which funeral home has the highest star rating? How many reviews does this funeral home have?

These are all questions that myself and most all people will ask themselves as they search for a reputable funeral home in their area to do business with. In the digital age we live in, online reputation and search engine optimization will determine a significant portion of your at-need volume.

Getting online reviews in the funeral industry is a careful process. Families are grieving. Requesting a review must be done at the appropriate time, and in a respectful manner. When done correctly, families are more than happy to leave a 5-star review for a positive experience they had with your funeral home and the funeral director who assisted in their service.

However, 5-star reviews are not enough. Reviews must be recent and frequent. Aftercare services like Domanicare utilize text communication to effectively gather positive 5-star reviews on a consistent basis, helping you to become the most trusted funeral home in the market.

Texting is a less invasive way to solicit reviews, boasting a 98% read rate and 45% response rate. Those numbers seem outrageous? Put it to the test! Pull out your phone, and check to see how many unread texts you have. For most of us, it will almost always be ZERO. After all, when was the last time you received a text message, and didn't read it?

You offer a fantastic service, make sure your online profile represents that!

As you gain a higher number of 5-star reviews, and those reviews come in regularly, you will quickly rise up through the Google results and be the first funeral home people see when searching the phrase “funeral home near me”.

How Healthy Is Your Aftercare Program? Take the Quiz

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 22:55:04 GMT

How high is your aftercare program on the priority list? For many of us, preneed and at-need services push aftercare lower than we'd have liked...

Blockbuster, Netflix, and the Funeral Industry

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 18:29:20 GMT

What happened to Blockbuster? What did Netflix do right? And how can we learn from this in the funeral industry?

Blockbuster

If you were alive in the 1980s, then you remember the beginnings of Blockbuster video. Blockbuster was born at a time when movie rental services were less than ten years old. Absurdly high prices for video purchases had created high demand for lower-cost video rentals. As a result, video rental stores spread like wildfire across the United States. Blockbuster didn’t just grow, it flourished. Within eight years, they had grown their store footprint to 3,600 locations across the US. The brand had become a household name and was embedding itself in the culture of everyday Americans.

Unfortunately, during this time of prosperity, Blockbuster became out of touch with changing consumer preferences. Consumers hated late fees, wanted a bigger selection, and didn’t want to drive to and from the store. Blockbuster ignored these signs and instead trusted in their business model which had already been proven successful. This became an invitation for competitors to enter the market, like a small startup called Netflix.

Netflix

Netflix embraced the DVD revolution by implementing a mail-based subscription service. While Blockbuster watched this small company slowly gain market share with DVD mailings, Netflix was also developing an online streaming service that would eventually fully integrate technology into their company model. Soon after turning into a multi-million dollar company, Netflix executives offered to allow Blockbuster to purchase the company. Blockbuster declined the offer, later referring to Netflix as a “very small niche business”.

By the time Blockbuster realized that consumers preferred online streaming, it was too late. Netflix had already created a completely personalized and convenient process for streaming movies. Their platform allowed for new movies to be suggested to each user based on their interests, late fees were nonexistent, monthly payments were automatic and cheap, and families could browse options from the comfort of their own home.

Funeral Industry

Now how exactly does this relate to us in our funeral homes and cemeteries? The funeral industry as a whole has been slower to fully embrace the tech boom. The personal level at which we do business has often seemed at odds with technology. Our customers aren’t just customers, they’re families going through a very difficult time. Where does technology fit into our service? And what happens if we are too late in adopting it?

While the funeral industry is by no means a tech-heavy industry yet, it is heading in that direction. We’ve all seen the booths of tech companies at NFDA and ICCFA that look a little out of place among the traditional services we’ve seen for decades. As consumer preferences change with innovative technology moving forward, companies can either adapt themselves, or watch their competitors adapt and capture the market share.

Blockbuster wasn’t taken down by Netflix. Blockbuster was taken down by their own failure to respond to the changing preferences of the consumer.

What are the current preferences of families in the funeral industry? Here are a few I believe are trending:

Communication through text message
Online pre-planning
Online purchases
Video content
Online reviews
Transparent pricing
Social media

Would you add or remove any from this list? Where is your funeral home or cemetery at in adapting to these preferences?

The secret sauce we look for in the funeral industry is this: implementing technology into our funeral homes and cemeteries that create more personal experience, trust, and simplicity for the families we serve. By selecting innovative services that use this key ingredient, you can ride the wave of innovation and simultaneously create a deeper personal connection with your families.

3 Signs Your Funeral Home Needs Appointment Setting

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 20:15:59 GMT

Funeral homes across the country are turning to appointment setting services to complement and boost their preneed efforts.
Here are three signs that appointment setting would be perfect for your funeral home:

How much time does your preneed counselor spend making calls to set appointments? Often it is somewhere between 60-75% of their time. But where is their time best spent? Meeting with families. This is why funeral homes across the country are turning to appointment setting services to complement and boost their preneed efforts.

Here are three signs that appointment setting would be perfect for your funeral home:

1. Your preneed counselors calendars are frequently empty

Many funeral home employees only work on preneed efforts part-time while they attend to other at-need services in the funeral home. Other more pressing at-need services often push back preneed on the list of priorities. The result is an empty calendar, with appointments scattered here and there.

An appointment setting service like Domani allows for calendars to be filled with a steady stream of appointments as dedicated planners make numerous calls and texts to families from multiple lead sources.

2. Calendars are full, but counselors spend the majority of their time setting appointments instead of meeting with families

What if your calendar is already full of quality appointments? This likely means your counselors are spending a fair amount of time working to schedule those appointments. Unfortunately, this means less time spent meeting with families.

Appointment setting services allow preneed counselors to prioritize their time and sell more preneed by meeting with more families.

3. You have a stash of untouched leads, or have only had time for one or two attempts at contact

More leads are only helpful if somebody is consistently following up on each of those leads. Domani Planners use a state-of-the-art CRM system to keep track of leads and nurture each family into a quality appointment. Leads often need consistent communication over a period of months before an appointment is scheduled. An appointment setting service ensures that leads are never wasted.

5 Ways to Increase Market Share in the Digital Age

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 16:56:25 GMT

Are your digital efforts optimized for maintaining and growing market share in the age of technology? What about your competitor's?

Whether you want to grow your funeral home market share or simply maintain your current share, adapting to the consumer is essential. In this digital age, people are increasingly turning to websites, cell phones, and social media. Naturally, this is where funeral homes have turned as well.

In order to gain or maintain market share, a variety of techniques should be used at levels and combinations best suited for your particular market. Consider the following:

1. Aftercare service

How much of your current business comes from aftercare? Increasing the satisfaction of families will inevitably lead to a higher number of referrals. An effective aftercare program builds relationships with families after the service and spirals into more 5-star online reviews, more preneed leads, and more referrals.

Learn more about the text-message based aftercare , Domanicare, to understand how aftercare has changed in the digital age.

2. Google Reviews

The power of online reviews is no secret. Online review generation in the funeral industry is a different process from other industries because of the sensitive nature of our business. Check out review generation services to find out how to boost your online reviews through personalized text-messages to your families. Let’s look at some numbers:

93 percent of consumers say online reviews have an impact on their purchase decision.
68 percent of consumers are willing to pay up to 15% more for the same service if assured they’ll have a better experience
97 percent of consumers that read online reviews trust them as much as recommendations from friends and family

Google Review generation is a vital part of growing your business. Frequent reviews should be a goal for your funeral home to maintain a good online reputation and capture calls that could otherwise be lost to competitors.

3. Search Engine Optimization

What keywords do families in your market need to search in Google to find your funeral home? Are you on the first page of results? Are you at the top? Search Engine Optimization helps people searching for funeral services to be directed to your funeral home specifically. Increase your exposure by ... writing articles on your blog page, checking your copy for relevant content on each page, adding meta descriptions, and optimizing your image sizes.

4. Website Layout

What is the most visited page on your website? For most funeral homes, it is probably the obituary page. How easy is it for someone to navigate to other parts of your website from the obituary page? Most people won’t spend long looking for the information they want before giving up and exiting your site. Important information such as “Contact Us”, “Directions”, “Locations”, “Pricing”, etc. should be easily found.

5. Social media

Facebook is quickly becoming one of the biggest advertising channels in the world. With the ability to target your key demographic and track results of every campaign, Facebook is a sure way to reach those you’d like to serve. Companies in the funeral industry like Disrupt Media specialize in helping funeral homes capitalize on their social media advertising and lead generation.

Preneed Appointment Setting During COVID-19

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 17:54:23 GMT

We are living in an unprecedented time. During this COVID-19 pandemic, the most important thing and number one priority should be the health and safety of your funeral home staff and the families you serve.

During this time of social distancing and self-quarantine, your preneed efforts may have slowed down. Understandably, families may be less willing to meet with someone face-to-face or come into the funeral home to prearrange during this time.

While social distancing does present some operational challenges, it doesn't mean that families aren't willing to discuss their final wishes and prearrange their funeral. It just means that as a funeral home, you need to get more creative with how to meet the needs of the families in your community.

In addition to helping families get their final wishes in writing, another reason to keep your preneed efforts going during this pandemic is to continue to provide income opportunities for your family service counselors.

At Domani, we pride ourselves in helping funeral homes grow their preneed programs by providing appointment setting assistance for family service counselors. Our team of highly trained planners follows up with your families on behalf of your funeral home to schedule appointments with families to prearrange.

We have found that families are more willing than ever to discuss their funeral plans as our planning center has set nearly 30% more appointments in the last month than average.

Our team of highly trained planners take pride in the work they do and share the value of funeral service. With Domani Appointment Setting, your preneed counselors can spend their time doing what they do best, prearranging families!

In closing, we'd like to highlight one of our newest appointment setting clients, Service Group of Oklahoma. They started with Domani Appointment Setting in mid-March, during the COVID-19 pandemic. John Davenport shares some of his experience so far,

"Domani Appointment Setting has been fabulous for us at Service Group of Oklahoma. We started in the middle of March 2020, yes, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we have had tremendous success with over 56 appointments set and over $60,000 in closed business as a direct result from Domani."

"I was initially concerned about someone calling from out of town, but this has been no issue whatsoever because they use a local number and relate to our families very well. The follow-up calls have been great and allowed for any adjustments or tweaks. I highly recommend Domani and utilizing this service. For the value they bring, you will see a return."

A Letter from the CEO

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 19:41:50 GMT

Our CEO, Jon Lefrandt, on COVID-19 and Domani’s response and plan moving forward:

What we're seeing right now with COVID-19 is nothing short of unprecedented. With so much uncertainty and volatility, it can be easy to worry and lose sight of what’s most important: serving families experiencing a loss with respect and professionalism.

We at Domani are committed now more than ever to supporting our funeral home partners as they help families in their communities navigate the loss of a loved one amid the current uncertainty.

We have structured our business to be agile and adaptable to meet the needs of our funeral home clients.

Families need outreach now more than ever, and because of the web-based technology that powers Domani, we are continuing aftercare communication with families while our staff works from home.

The same is true for Domani Preneed Appointment Setting. We chose the best-in-class CRM system, Salesforce, to manage our appointment setting engine. Because of that, we have the flexibility to call and schedule appointments for your family service counselors from anywhere.

We are working hard to ensure that funeral homes and families are taken care of, and their needs are met during this difficult time.

I’m grateful for our Domani team and their commitment to providing exceptional value during this challenging time and extremely thankful for our funeral home partners and the critical, selfless work they do today and every day.

We are inspired by those funeral homes that are pivoting as well by allowing family service counselors to meet with families in creative ways to prepare and fund their preplanned funeral policies.

We are easily able to adapt to these changes and will continue to innovate and ensure that families are given exactly what they need.

In order to best serve the families that are struggling the most during this difficult time, who may not be able to have friends and family nearby, we are offering Domanicare, our award-winning, text message aftercare program for free for 60 days so you can focus on your at-need families and allow us to take care of your aftercare families.

We are in this with you and are not going anywhere. Together we can rise above this and provide even better value to the wonderful families we all have the blessing to serve each day. It’s our privilege to work with each of you, thank you for your continued trust in us!

Warm regards,

Jon

2019 In Review: A Message From the CEO

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 18:02:40 GMT

Thank you for helping make 2019 so special.

On behalf of all of us at Domanicare, I wanted to reach out and wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Thank you so much for making 2019 so special. It has been an honor for us to reach out and help grieving families all across this country in such a meaningful and powerful way. We are grateful for the opportunity to do good each day and to reach out to help the one in need during the most difficult time in their life. We know how challenging this time of year can be for so many of the families you serve. It is incredible what a simple text message can do to brighten someone's day.

As we have made meaningful connections with thousands of grieving families, it has furthered our commitment and resolve to continue to enhance Aftercare efforts together with our leading Funeral Home partners. We know how challenging this can be to stay on top of, and we are grateful for the opportunity to do our part. 2020 will be another incredible year as we continue to enhance our services to make an even bigger impact.

Thank you for the very important work you do each day. I hope that this holiday season is filled with love, and joyful memories with those you love most!

From our family to yours, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

-Jon

Google Review Gating: Why It Matters for Your Funeral Home

caden@thedomanigroup.com (Caden Rhoton) — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 23:21:14 GMT

As a funeral home owner or the owner of any small business for that matter, it’s essential to pay attention to your Google My Business profile and ratings. Improving your rating profile is a great way to stand out from the competition and win more at-need business.

If you’re new or unfamiliar with Google’s policies when it comes to generating reviews for your business, take some time to understand what Google’s policies are and make sure that your funeral home

complies.

The topic we’ll address here is known as “Review Gating.” Review gating is the process of filtering candidates before asking them to leave a review. Often this is done by sending all customers an email template and asking them if they had a positive or negative experience. If they indicate a positive experience, they are asked to leave a review on Google, but if they indicate a negative experience, they are prompted to leave private feedback and never have the option to leave a review publicly.

The exact language Google uses to prevent review gating is: “Don’t discourage or prohibit negative reviews or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers.”

Combating gating is vital for review sites like Google because the reviews on their website are only worth something to their users if they trust them. If businesses are only asking those who they know will leave a positive review, consumers begin to lose trust in the reviews because of the biased nature of the approach. Some review sites, like Yelp, for example, don’t allow businesses to request reviews from customers proactively.

Google allows businesses to ask for reviews, as long as they comply with its policy and content guidelines. Allowing review solicitation might explain how Google has quickly become the world’s top review website, surpassing sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor in terms of where consumers choose to read and write online reviews.

There are a few different ways to interpret and implement compliance with the gating policy, but the most popular practice is to ask everyone regardless of their level of satisfaction and whether or not you think they’ll leave a positive or negative review.

Don’t be afraid of a potential negative review, studies have shown that in some cases, the way a company responds to a negative review can be better for the business than if the review had been positive in the first place.

Consumers today are smart and recognize that not every customer will be completely satisfied all the time. Some even look for reasons to become upset. But the way a business responds to negative reviews shows what type of business you are and gives a peek into what it is like to do business with you. As a general rule, always “strive for five” (stars), but don’t be discouraged if you receive a review, and it’s less than 5-stars.

At Domani, we take pride in the relationships that we help build and strengthen with your families through text messaging and the results and increases in Google reviews we’ve seen for our partners across the country. The overwhelming majority (90%+) of the reviews we’ve generated for funeral homes are 5-stars. This success is because of the high level of attention and care that our partnered funeral homes provide families at the time of need.

We also are keeping a close eye on Google’s terms of service and making sure to stay in complete compliance.

The more you know about the importance of Google reviews and how they can help your funeral home, the more you will be able to stand out from the competition and increase your at-need call volume.

To learn more about Domanicare, the funeral profession’s first, and highest-performing text message aftercare program, schedule a free demo.

A Funeral Home's Guide to Online Reviews

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 19:21:06 GMT

It is no secret that online reviews play a significant part in the purchasing decisions that Americans make every day. Did you know that over 90% of consumers say that online reviews have an impact on their purchase decision?

The same is true when it comes to funeral service. At the time of need, if a family doesn't know where to go, they turn to the internet. Over 2,000 people every month Google the phrase, "funeral home near me."

That means that potentially 2,000 families every month don't know initially which funeral home to use at the time of need. This statistic isn't surprising when you know that the average American moves 11 times in his/her lifetime. The days of the local funeral home serving the same family for generations are all but gone, and funeral homes need to adapt.

Your online profile is how families in your community not only find you but form an opinion about who you are, and how you do business. Your reviews play a major part in how your community perceives your business. Your rating and number of reviews are the most important factors. But people also look at how you, as a business, respond and interact with reviewers. It reflects what type of business you are.

Here are some tips on managing your reviews. At the end, you'll find suggestions on gaining more positive reviews.

Positive Reviews

Respond

When someone takes the time to leave a review for your funeral home, especially a positive one, that effort should be rewarded with a response from the funeral home itself. A simple, "It was a pleasure to serve you" or "Thank you for the kind review. We do our best to make sure every family has a positive experience with our staff" goes a long way. It helps the family know that they are still important to you.

Promote

One of the best marketing messages you can have are testimonials from actual customers. Once you have several positive reviews, you now have social proof that you are the type of business that others should want to do business with. Share your positive reviews on your website and tell price shoppers to look at your reviews when making a decision. A strong online reputation is a surefire way to growing your call volume.

Negative Reviews

Just because you got a one-star review, doesn't mean that you don't offer excellent service. And it doesn't mean that you can't still win business through your reviews. It just means that you have to work a little harder. People understand that there will always be people who find reasons to get upset. How the company deals with those people can help sway a lot of new families your way.

Apologize

The first thing you should do, whether the complaint was real or not is to apologize. When apologizing, acknowledge the frustration or feelings of the customer.

Stay Calm

It can be frustrating to read a negative review. Especially when you know that you went above and beyond for that particular customer. When responding and apologizing, it is important not to let emotions get in the way or to become defensive. Staying calm and maintaining a cool head will ensure that it doesn't escalate any further.

Offer a Solution

In your response, show that you are willing to make things right. Offer a personalized solution for that specific family. If you are offering the same answer for every family, it won't seem personal anymore and may come across like you don't care.

Move Things Offline

The last thing you want to have with a disgruntled customer is a long, back-and-forth dialogue that lives on your online profile forever. The best thing you can do is refer them to someone on your staff who can serve as a customer service rep and help remediate the situation. It's easier to communicate over the phone and will be more personal for the individual.

How to Gain Reviews

Funeral homes work hard to serve the families in their community and offer a very valuable, important service. Unfortunately, that value is often so personal and infrequent, that it doesn't always compute in the minds of your families to leave a review.

When trying a new restaurant they like, people are eager to share that with friends and family so they can have the same positive experience. With funeral service, families don't want their loved ones to experience a funeral soon. This might be why funeral homes have a tougher time obtaining reviews.

That doesn't mean that the service isn't appreciated and very valuable; it just means that the funeral home has to be a little more proactive. Below is a video explaining how to generate more reviews, and if you're interested in learning more, here's our guide to generating more funeral home reviews.

Infographic: The Impact of Preneed Appointment Setting

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 21:14:52 GMT

Appointment Setting Can Help Your Preneed Program Reach New Heights

Preneed is important. For funeral homes, it's a way to secure future business and grow their existing market share. For families, it's an avenue to peace of mind. Knowing and trusting their funeral arrangements will be managed with care is a great gift to leave children and loved ones.

Although it's vital to the growth and health of a funeral home's business, often, a preneed program is not maximized as much as it could be. One way to maximize the success of a preneed program is to outsource your preneed appointment setting.

The main reason for that is because your Advanced Funeral Planners many times wear many hats and help with a lot of different tasks at the funeral home. Many don't have time to manage a queue of people and continuously be calling to follow up and schedule appointments.

Not only that, but their job is to sell preneed! They should spend their time doing just that; meeting with families and selling preneed. It can take a lot of time and energy to fill a calendar by calling to schedule appointments.

Another reason to outsource your preneed appointment setting to a funeral profession-specific organization is so that none of your families fall through the cracks. Often, we see funeral homes that spend precious resources to market and advertise their preneed program, generate leads, and only call on those families once or twice.

Did you know that 87% of phone calls made today go unanswered? If you're calling once or twice, there's a higher chance that the family won't answer the phone than that you'll set a preneed appointment.

Professional appointment setting centers have software to track all your leads and when to call to set a high-quality appointment.

Below you'll see an infographic of how big of an impact preneed appointment setting can have on a funeral home's preneed program:

The Domani Group brings years of preneed appointment setting experience to the table to help your funeral home and preneed program run at full capacity. Click here to schedule your free preneed appointment setting demo .

Aftercare Marketing: Why High Read Rates Don't Cut It

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 21:17:24 GMT

Of the statistics that determine the success of any campaign in marketing, read rate is one of the least definitive.

That’s why sending out cards or direct mail as a means of aftercare alone doesn’t cut it.

Although read rates do provide useful information, they should not be the determining factor in selecting one aftercare or marketing service over another.

For example, even though Domanicare has one of the highest read rates of any aftercare program, we rely on other, more telling statistics to prove our worth.

While we pride ourselves in using an aftercare communication method with a 98% read rate, we prefer to rely on how many positive reviews we generate, how many preneed appointments we set, and how many people we help through grief support.

So what statistics really matter? Which ones determine the success of a marketing or aftercare campaign?

Let’s examine the marketing funnel to discover which data points are the most useful in determining the success of our aftercare program.

The Aftercare Marketing Funnel

What exactly is a marketing funnel?

Single Grain describes the marketing funnel as “a way of breaking down the customer journey all the way from the “awareness” stage (when they first learn about your business) to the “purchase” stage (when they're ready to buy your product or service).”

Let’s look at an example. The customer journey for a department store has a few stages:

The customer sees your store.
They walk into the store.
They see an item they like.
They put it in their cart.
They wait in line.
They purchase the item.

Saying read rate is the determining factor in the success of your aftercare is like saying that your store is successful because lots of people see it.

The truth is that just because people see your store, it doesn’t mean they’ll walk in, pick an item, put it in their shopping cart, and finally purchase it.

When it comes to your funeral aftercare program, the marketing funnel becomes a means of breaking down the effectiveness of your communication method, the conversations you’re having, the resources you provide to your families, and the number of families who fulfill the goal you’ve set (whether that goal is to set a preneed appointment or generate a 5-star review).

In order to measure the success and effectiveness of your aftercare program, let’s look at our very own Aftercare Marketing Funnel:

Read Rate
Response Rate
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Conversion Rate

Whether it’s a read rate for texting, impressions for social posts, or simply foot traffic for billboards or stores, this is the highest in the funnel, least informative, and the most indeterminate statistic in the funnel (that’s how marketing funnels work — the higher up in the funnel, the wider the gate and the vaguer the data point).

We’ve already reviewed the four stages of the aftercare marketing funnel: Read rate, response rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate.

But which stage is the most important?

The truth is that every stage contributes to the bottom line. And because every company, service, process, and campaign is unique, the efficiency of each individual stage will differ.

That’s why you need to have high read rates, high response rates, AND high click rates in order to have high conversion rates.

However, most of the time, one stage in the marketing funnel underperforms more than the rest. For example, a department store may have a great product selection, wonderful employees, and a wide entrance, but if the store only has one cashier then lines will be long and customers will leave, obliterating their bottom line.

Your aftercare communication reacts in the same way.

The success of your aftercare program will largely be determined by how well you identify and remedy inefficiencies in your aftercare funnel.

How to Increase the Bottom Line in Your Aftercare Funnel

As we’ve already established, you increase the conversion rate by increasing the success of every part of your sales funnel.

So let’s take a look at each stage of your funeral aftercare program.

Increasing Read Rate

The first and obvious answer to increasing read rates is to send more messages — the higher the total number of messages sent, the more people will read the message. In aftercare, this means you need more at-need customers or you need to collect more phone numbers. Can you collect numbers from multiple individuals from each at-need family?

Besides increasing the total number of messages sent, you should also increase the quality of the messages you’re sending. Message quality includes the number you’re sending from, the message itself, and the time the message is being sent. Use a 10-digit phone number to let your aftercare families know that it’s a personal text from the get-go (5-digit phone numbers are widely regarded as marketing messages and are trusted less).

The message itself should convey sensitivity to the family’s mourning. As funeral directors, nobody knows better than you how to talk to a grieving family. Use these messages as a tool to extend your heartfelt condolences and ask the family member a specific question that begs to be answered. For example, you can ask aftercare families whether they would like another death certificate, any grief resources, or any additional service you can provide.

Overall, your initial message is extremely important, so test the read rates of different messages against each other to find which is most effective.

Increasing Response Rate

The key to response rates on any device or platform is personalized conversations. If you can make an immediate connection with the people you are talking to then they are much more likely to respond to your messages.

Start out by declaring that you are someone that they’ve met and spoken with before. For example, “Hey Sarah, this is Jon from ABC Funeral Home. I spoke with you right after the funeral a few weeks ago...”

The individual will recognize the connection and begin to consider the rest of your message. At this point, express condolences and state quickly the reason for your message, which should be to extend help or resources.

Your call to action (every message campaign should have a call to action) should be immediately recognized as helpful to the aftercare family. If your CTA is to generate positive reviews, you should not ask for a review until you’ve done all you can to help the individual AND they’ve expressed gratitude.

Increasing CTR (Click Through Rate)

Click through rates for mobile text messaging are already much higher than most other communication methods (that’s just one reason we recommend text messaging aftercare). According to CallHub , “the average click through rate for links in SMS messages stands at 19% while the click through rate for e-mail marketing is at 3.2%”

However, if your click through rate is suffering, there may be a few ways to identify the problem.

The first possible problem is the improper placement of links. For example, if you provide the aftercare family with a link to an online grief support resource when the individual has not expressed interest or feels they do not need grief support, they will not click the link. If you ask the individual to leave a review when he or she hasn’t expressed positive feelings about your company, it’s not likely that they will respond. Do not provide links that seem out of place, unsolicited, or inappropriate.

The second possible problem could be a technical issue. If your link is broken, your click through rates will suffer greatly. It is possible that the link you provided may work on your PC, but doesn’t work for mobile devices or tablets. It is also possible that your link will not open in specific browsers. Make sure that your links are clickable on any device.

Increasing Conversion Rate

There are two reasons why all other aftercare metrics determine the success of the conversion rate:

All other aftercare metrics make up the overall experience. Experience-focused marketing takes into account the entire customer journey from the first to the final step. In the case of a funeral home, this would mean that you examine the experience of aftercare families from the first time they heard about your funeral home or even the moment they’re loved one passed away.
The number of customers at the first stage determines the number at the end. By way of example, let’s examine how many aftercare families might set a preneed appointment (the goal/conversion stage) if we assume average success rates at each stage with 500 initial text recipients. If you send your initial message to 500 aftercare families and 490 actually see the message (98% read rate), then about 245 will respond (50% average), while 49 individuals click the link you gave them (20% average), and around 24 will convert by leaving a review, setting a preneed appointment, etc. (assuming a 50% average conversion rate). 24 out of the initial 500 recipients might convert as a result of your aftercare campaign assuming averages at each stage. However, quality aftercare programs like Domanicare will see higher than average rates at every stage of the funnel.

You will find that your conversion rate will fluctuate. That’s completely normal; the reason for it is because each time you make a change to your aftercare program, there is a ripple effect through the stages of the funnel. However, the alterations you make to your aftercare marketing should increase the overall experience of your aftercare families.

When you provide quality at-need service and outstanding aftercare resources (grief support, personalized follow-up, appointment setting, etc.), your customers will notice the difference, return to your funeral home, and recommend it to friends and family.

Why Only 15.75% of Your Aftercare Families Can Leave Reviews

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 19:23:42 GMT

At-need families find your funeral home in one of three ways:

1. Family tradition

2. Referral

3. Online

Though some families still maintain the tradition of using the same funeral home for generations, finding a funeral home online is more popular than any other search method.

Families who move into a new home in a new town have no other resource than the web for finding a funeral home. And when a researching customer uses the web to find a funeral service, they rely on funeral home reviews to make a decision.

Positive funeral home reviews are now more important than ever. In fact, 4 out of 5 people don’t shop around for a funeral home ( NFDA Consumer Survey ). They go with the first funeral home they call. That means that being #1 in Google is vital.

So how do you generate reviews for your funeral home?

More importantly, how do you generate POSITIVE reviews for your funeral home?

Great question. I’ll tell you, and I think it’s important for you to realize you aren’t the first person to ask this question!

Let’s begin.

Why Your Aftercare Families Can't Leave Reviews

First, it is important to understand that Google is on the consumer’s team.

It shows your funeral home in comparison to all other funeral homes in the local market and shows the satisfaction ratings of your funeral home in the form of customer reviews.

So imagine your funeral home is the highest rated funeral home in your local market, has 100 more 5-star reviews than your competition, and rakes in just 50% of the local funeral home search traffic each month — in major cities, that’s anywhere from 100 to 200 potential calls per month.

That would be great.

There’s just one problem:

And if you can only communicate with 15.75% of your families, you are only tapping into a fraction of the positive experiences your at-need families have had.

Studies show that funeral homes can only communicate with up to 15.75% of their aftercare families through any one of the traditional communication methods ( email - 15.75% open rate, direct mail - 1% return rate, phone calls - 13% answer rate).

In other words, 84% of your aftercare families can’t leave reviews, because you aren’t communicating with them.

You can do better.

What you need is a communication method that is 1) fast, 2) personal, and 3) effective.

Text messaging is the perfect answer.

Aftercare communication through text messaging has proven to revolutionize the funeral aftercare profession.

If you use aftercare text messaging the right way, you could boost the number of conversations you’re able to have with families by over 300%.

How to Get a 98% Read Rate and 45% Response Rate through Funeral Aftercare

When you use text messaging to contact your families through aftercare services, the vast majority respond within a few minutes with words of both gratitude and grief.

You should ask yourself what’s the best service you can provide to these grieving families.

How will you respond if they say they aren’t able to handle the loss? How will you respond if they ask for help? How can you maximize the amount of 5-star reviews you generate from aftercare families?

Your text messaging service should include:

Live text responders: While you should certainly have an entire team helping respond to aftercare families, you should not resort to chatbots to contact families. This is about creating relationships, not exchanging blanket messages.
Grief resources: Domanicare has found that 40 percent of aftercare families request grief and bereavement resources. Be ready to fulfill any need the family might request, whether it’s an additional death certificate, grief resources, or headstone recommendations.
Brand Champion Identification: Your text responders should be trained to identify the families who’ve had the best experience with your funeral home. All of your brand champions should be selected and set aside until the time is right to request a review.
Review Generation: Only ask for reviews from your brand champions and only ask them for reviews at the right time. How do you know what the right time is? Only ask for reviews after you’ve done everything you can to help the customer, the customer has no lingering needs, AND the customer has expressed gratitude. In other words, ask when you’ve already helped the aftercare family/individual overcome their needs.

Families are more likely to respond if they feel that the message they have received was sent out of care and respect. This is accomplished by reaching out to check-in and make sure they’re doing well. Your aftercare text messaging should include offers of help and support.

If the aftercare family requests bereavement resources, you should have a wide range of grief resources available to fit each individual’s unique situation.

Why Are Funeral Home Reviews So Difficult to Generate?

Funeral home owners are not the only ones to struggle with generating reviews, but the funeral profession does have additional roadblocks to generating reviews.

First of all, “funeral home customers” are families who’ve just lost a loved one. Asking for a review after a funeral is not only difficult, it’s incredibly awkward for the funeral home.

Requesting a customer review from aftercare families must be done at the right time and in the right way or it will be considered inappropriate.

Review generation also requires a high degree of dedication and commitment to staying organized. Not only must you have relationship-building conversations with aftercare families, but you must also track those conversations, reviews requested, and reviews generated.

Because the review generation process includes much more than just asking for the review (it involves aftercare communication, grief support, AND THEN review generation), it is a monumental task.

Most funeral homes either don’t do review generation correctly or they give up in frustration way before the “ask for review” phase.

What Tools Are There for Funeral Home Review Generation?

Besides Domanicare, there are a few aftercare text-messaging programs available. However, these tools have several fatal flaws.

The first of which is the fact that all other aftercare communication must be performed by the funeral home itself under the guise of “funeral homes get to control the message.” This adds a huge workload onto the shoulders of funeral home directors and owners and doesn’t end up helping the funeral home as much as advertised.

On the other hand, Domanicare live text responders are trained to provide the highest quality of help and support to aftercare families. As for messaging control, every funeral home owner has the power to alter aftercare messaging and receives a monthly transcript detailing every message and conversation.

Another flaw of third-rate aftercare services is the fact that their form of “review generation” is just a link or survey that redirects people to a review landing page. It is insincere, low-quality aftercare that fails to help families heal.

Domanicare was born after I noticed certain holes between the funeral homes and the families they serve through my own grief experience — it was created to care for families AND help funeral homes generate reviews, not one or the other.

Aftercare for the Digital Age

Whether you choose to create your own text-messaging aftercare company that generates reviews, provides grief support, and allows for appointment setting or you’d rather hire a digital aftercare company, the important thing is that you do aftercare correctly.

Funeral homes should be helping families heal and move forward — it’s not only beneficial to the families, but it’s also beneficial to the funeral home.

Our aftercare families are ready and willing to leave reviews; they just need the right pathway.

And text-messaging based aftercare is the pathway that we’ve been waiting for.

Aftercare and Social Media: A Dynamic Duo

Wed, 17 Jul 2019 18:53:27 GMT

Ryan Thogmartin, CEO of Disrupt Media, stops by Domanicare to film an exciting new episode of DisruptU!

During his visit to Domanicare headquarters, Ryan spoke briefly with Jon Lefrandt about where Domanicare came from, how it helps funeral homes support their families through aftercare, and how social media will play a huge part in our future.

The partnership between Domanicare and Disrupt Media will allow us to reach even more families and build relationships in the digital age. Because the funeral profession has long relied on more traditional forms of outreach, Domanicare, as an innovative form of communication, has already seen a tremendous amount of success.

Paired with Disrupt Media, we at Domanicare are certain of reaching an even higher level of success in helping families grieve in a healthy way.

As Connecting Directors points out, "The combination of social media strategy, personalized interactions through text, and one-of-a-kind REAL grief content will set your funeral home up for success and most importantly show the families you serve that YOU care."

To learn more about this partnership, please reach out through Domanicare or Disrupt Media .

Funeral Home Marketing: Using Google My Business Posts to Boost Traffic

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 17:40:42 GMT

Funeral home owners nationwide are missing out on valuable marketing opportunities.

As a marketing-focused funeral home owner, you have two types of online traffic you need to track and grow: paid traffic and organic traffic.

Paid traffic is… well, the traffic you pay for. Google ads, LinkedIn ads, Right Page ads, boosted social posts, and Facebook ads for funeral homes fall under this category.

Organic traffic is free traffic. If you rank highly in Google for a valuable keyword like “Best Funeral Home,” you’re likely going to have a lot of organic traffic flowing into your site, ready to become customers.

In this article, we’re going to focus on organic traffic and one of the most important local ranking factors for funeral homes: Google My Business (GMB).

“Businesses that are in a competitive location and industry should use Google My Business optimizing strategies and features like posts if they want to get an edge on their competition.”

— Ben Fisher, Co-founder of Steady Demand

Read on to learn how to maximize your funeral home's visibility on Google.

Google My Business Basics: Does It Work?

Think about it. When customers want to find your number, where is the first place they’ll look?

Google.

Google created Google My Business to quickly answer any questions that searchers might have about your brand.

It’s a place to put content that informs your customers about your company before they even reach your website.

With GMB, you can:

Add photos
Add videos
Detail business hours
Describe your company
Provide questions and answers
Add a “book appointment” feature
Communicate with customers
Respond to reviews
Create Google My Business posts

But, does Google My Business actually help your funeral home get more traffic and more at-need families?

According to leading research into Google My Business , GMB “signals” make up 25% of the total factors that Google uses for local pack rankings.

This means that everything you put on your funeral home’s GMB profile will contribute to your overall local ranking.

Are you using Google My Business to boost your local Google ranking?

Google My Business Posts Help Funeral Homes Rank Better

Google My Business also allows you to create posts — almost 60% of local businesses are posting on Google My Business.

In fact, according to further Moz research , more people are clicking on GMB posts than are seeing the actual business.

When someone views a business directly, there are post clicks almost 100% of the time. This is an outstanding number. GMB posts are almost guaranteed to get reads.

This is a good thing.

It means that each person who sees your funeral home will likely click on multiple posts when they search your funeral home.

If you take the time to create an impactful and impressionable marketing message through your GMB posts, those leads will be even more likely to turn into customers.

But what kind of content do you post on GMB?

Think of GMB posts as mini ads for your company. The different Google My Business posts types are:

Update
Event
Offer
Product

Funeral home owners with an eye for marketing will immediately recognize the benefit of Event posts, as both aftercare and preneed marketing involve events in customer acquisition.

Funeral homes can also use Offer posts to draw potential preneed and at-need families to their funeral home with discounts.

Update and Product posts will also prove useful to funeral home owners who want to keep customers up-to-date on news and any new products/services.

All of these posts have Call to Action options (CTAs) available. You can place a Book, Order Online, Buy, Learn More, Sign Up, Get Offer, and Call Now CTA in your GMB post.

According to Google , GMB posts have 4 main benefits:

Facilitate direct communication from you to your local customers
Improve customer experience with timely information
Promote your sales, specials, events, news, and offers
Appeal to your customers with engaging videos and photos

Because posts go dark after 7 days, you should be posting at least weekly.

It is recommended that every time you post on Google My Business, you also share the post on all of your social media channels.

You should also remember that only the first 100 words are visible on screen. That’s where you should put the most valuable information — this will draw searchers in and influence them to click on your post to read more.

How to Post on Google My Business

Posts are incredibly easy to create with Google My Business.

Just sign in or verify your Google My Business account .

Once you’ve signed in, you can either go to the “Posts” section of your profile or simply click “Create post.”

Choose the post type you’d like and then create your post by adding a photo, writing the post itself, and inserting an appropriate CTA.

You did it!

You can view the analytics behind your GMB posts on your Google My Business dashboard.

Complete Guide to Funeral Home Facebook Advertising

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 18:17:55 GMT

Facebook advertising is one of the most effective advertising options for funeral homes for three reasons:

It is the easiest option for targeting a local audience.
Speed of digital ads means your message gets out fast and the results come in quickly.
Funeral home target audience is more likely to be on Facebook than any other social media platform.

The problem is learning to create high-performing Facebook ads takes time. And time is a rare commodity for funeral home owners.

Alongside SEO for funeral homes , digital advertising is one of the most important marketing skills you can learn as a small business owner.

You just don’t have the time to read through 10 different guides on Facebook advertising for funeral homes.

We’ve created this complete step-by-step guide for funeral home Facebook ads.

If you know your audience (most funeral home owners know their audience extremely well), you have everything you need to create a high-performance Facebook Ad for your funeral home.

How to Create a Successful Facebook Ad Campaign for Your Funeral Home

Follow the steps below to create your first Facebook ad campaign targeted directly to your funeral home’s audience:

Create Campaign and Select Your Objective

Set Up Your Campaign and Account

Creating Your Ad Set and Target Audience

Choose Ad Placement

Set Your Budget, Schedule

Create the Ad

Step 1 - Create Campaign and Select Your Objective

First things first, you need to login to Facebook Ads Manager by clicking “Manage Ads” from the top-right dropdown menu on Facebook.

Then click the dropdown menu near the top-left of the page and select “Ads Manager.”

Next, you’ll click “create” to get started with your first campaign.

You’ll want to select the first creation option “Create complete campaigns,” which is better for first-time Facebook advertisers.

The first thing Facebook wants to know when you begin your ad creation is the objective of the ad itself. If you’re looking to sell a product on Facebook, you’ll be targeting a specific audience.

Facebook tracks user behaviors and knows which users are more likely to convert into leads and which are more likely to follow a Facebook page. So if your objective is simply to get more Facebook page followers or increase your brand awareness, you should select “Brand Awareness.”

As funeral home owners, your target audience is researching and preparing for funerals. These are people who are ready to accept your services.

There are 11 total objective types you can choose from. But, there are specific objective types that will fit your funeral home best. Here are the objectives you should consider to reach your target audience:

Traffic : If you just want to send people to your site.
Messages : If you want to talk directly to your audience. This option works well when you are targeting funeral preneed customers.
Video views : If you want to showcase a unique service with a video to drive leads.
Lead generation : If you want to collect contact information quickly and easily.
Brand awareness : If you want to increase the visibility of your funeral home in your local market.

Step 2 - Set Up Your Campaign and Account

Choose a name for your campaign and enter it into the text box. You will also have two campaign options here. You can either turn on Create Split Test or Campaign Budget Optimization.

Create Split Test : A split test on Facebook is simply a way to A/B test different ads to find and emphasize the highest performing ads.

Campaign Budget Optimization : This option allows you to optimize your budget spend on the best ads depending on your specified preferences.

You can experiment with these options later on. For now, let’s leave both options off and continue with our basic ad.

The next screen you’ll see is the account setup screen.

Simply select your desired country, currency, time zone, and ad account name. These settings are final. If you’d like to change any of these settings, later on, you’ll have to create a new ad account.

Step 3 - Creating Your Ad Set and Target Audience

There are a number of different options in this section. You’ll want to individualize this to your own ad.

Ad Set Name: An ad set on Facebook will be viewable in reporting during and after the ad is published. An ad set is a group of ads that have the same schedule, budget, delivery settings, and targeting.

You’ll want the name to revolve around the type of ads you are planning on creating. If you are pushing an article, name the ad set “US - Article Ads” to differentiate between lead ads or video ads.

Traffic : Select where you’d like to drive traffic. In our case, we’d like the traffic to end up reading an article on our site. So we chose “website.”

You can also choose an app, messenger, or WhatsApp.

Dynamic Creative : You can upload multiple videos, images, and captions. This means Facebook will automatically combine captions with different videos and images to find the combination that converts the most traffic or gets the best engagement.

Offer : If you can provide a discount for those who convert using this ad, you should do that here.

Audience : You can create a new audience or use a saved audience in this new campaign. You can add a saved audience to the new audience you are creating.

Customizable audience parameters include age, gender, language, detailed targeting, and connections. With detailed targeting, include all behaviors, interests, and demographics that may pertain to your target audience.

I also recommend checking the box that says “expand detailed targeting criteria when it may improve performance at a lower cost per result.”

Connections will narrow your audience further. For example, if you select a connection of people who like your page, then your target audience will pool from those who like your page already.

Step 4 - Choose Ad Placement

You can choose to customize where you place your ads and on which devices they are seen. I recommend using automatic placements for the first time.

If you do opt to customize ad placement yourself, you may choose to target the following platforms and assets:

Facebook: Feeds, Instant Articles, In-Stream Videos, Right Column Ads, Suggested Videos, Marketplace, Stories
Instagram : Feeds, Stories
Audience Network : Native, Banner, Interstitial, In-Stream Videos, Rewarded Videos
Messenger : Inbox, Stories, Sponsored Messages

Automatic placements will appear on Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Audience Network (HuffPost, Vice, Time Inc., etc.), and Instagram.

Step 5 - Budget and Schedule

Budgeting will depend entirely on how much you’re willing to spend for the desired outcome.

Optimization for Ad Delivery: This is your desired outcome for the ad. You can choose one of the following outcomes:

Landing page views
Link clicks
Impressions
Daily unique reach

Cost Control: You can set the desired Cost per Click. This means that you can control the maximum cost for each click to your site. Cost control is optional and I recommend you do not use it if you are not confident in your average CPC estimation.

Budget and Schedule : You can either set a daily budget (ex: $5 per day for 10 days) or you set a lifetime budget (ex: $50 total on this ad).

You may also limit the ad duration by selecting a start and end date or you can run the ad continuously.

You should also know that Facebook ads work much better when they last longer.

Facebook’s algorithm goes through a learning period that can last several weeks. After this learning period, your Facebook ad will likely perform better.

Step 6 - Create the Ad

The ad you use should depend on the desired outcome. Some ads are more useful for growing your fan base while others are more suited to attracting engagement.

For example, if you want subscribers to your blog, you should set aside a budget for a Lead Ad.

Here are all of the different kinds of ads for Facebook available to you:

Carousel Ads - Highlighting several different points of one service OR several different services/products. You can use up to 10 different photos or videos on the carousel ad.

Collection Ads - An ad created exclusively for use on mobile phones. Users who see a collection ad may simply click a product they want to buy.

Dynamic Ads - Dynamic ads are those targeted at users who may have a visited your page or a similar page. These ads are meant to follow up on those who already have an interested. If you are targeting an audience that may already be interested in your service, dynamic ads are your best bet (this is the best option for funeral homes marketing to potential families).

Instant Experience Ads - These ads are full-screen ads that appear once a user interacts with your ad. Instant Experience Ads give you the ability to showcase your entire service instantly.

Lead Ads - These ads allow you to gather names, phone numbers, emails, and other information from Facebook users. Leads ads should be shorter, easier to interact with, and are generally used to gather sign-ups and subscribers.

Messenger Ads - You can also use Facebook Messenger to target your audience. Messenger ads include carousel ads, dynamic ads, photo ads, and video ads. Though some may consider messenger ads to be a bit more intrusive, they are useful to fulfill certain objectives. For example, a messenger ad may be more appropriate for opportunity ads or giveaways. If you are offering something free, a user may be more likely to trust you and respond.

Photo Ads - Photos ads are by far the easiest option for funeral homes. However, they may not be the most effective for your target audience. Simply boost a post that you’ve already created to use a photo ad.

Slideshow Ads - If you have a backlog of video and image content, then you could likely put together a pretty convincing slideshow. Showcase the many services and benefits of your funeral home with a slideshow ad.

Video Ads - It’s already common knowledge that video ads perform better than static images on social media. What about your target audience? Do you think they would prefer to watch videos about your service than see a photo ad? Test video ads against photo ads to see which performs better.

You may also want to create a unique link for Google Analytics to track all of the clicks gained from this specific campaign.

Though you’ll be able to see the results of your campaign in the Facebook Ads Manager, creating a unique link will allow you to make further insights in Google Analytics, such as where the links end up on your site after the landing page.

You could also answer questions like:

Do Facebook leads from this campaign convert into customers more than my last campaign?
Do Facebook Ads convert better for me than LinkedIn, Google, or Twitter Ads?

Answering questions like these will help you identify which ads and platforms are best for attracting new customers.

Pro Tip: CPC Tracking

When judging whether an ad is successful or not, you’ll want to pay attention to the CPC, or Cost Per Click. Essentially, the CPC is the amount you are spending to on each individual click.

Good news: older audiences generally click more on ads. This means that the average CPC for funeral homes will be lower.

If I spend $40 total on a Facebook ad and end up getting 40 clicks, my CPC is $1, which isn’t actually that bad compared to other industries.

However, for the funeral industry, you should aim for a CPC of $0.70. If you have an ad that has less than $0.70 CPC, then you’ve created a highly successful ad.

Ads should be up for at least 3 days. You need to let the ad work its way through Facebook’s algorithm. I would spend $5-$10 on the first 5 ads for a week. Then I’d spend $50+ on the highest performing ad.

Pro Tip: A/B Test Pivoting

A/B testing is the practice of comparing the results of two different variants in order to discover which performs best. For example, if I wanted to discover which soda people like better, I’d label one soda “A” and another “B” and give them to 1,000 people.

The test participants would pick their favorite one and we’d have our answer backed up by data.

In digital advertising, A/B testing is more rewarding and much more informative. And with the right tests, you can create the perfect Facebook ad for your funeral home.

If you learn to A/B test while pivoting to the highest performing ads (lowest CPC), you’ll easily grow your online presence. Here’s how to use A/B test pivoting to maximize the results of your funeral home facebook ads:

Create 5 different ads.
Target the same audience.
Allocate a very small budget for each ad.
Identify which ad performs best.
Allocate a large budget to the highest performing ad.
Repeat process after the highest performing ad campaign finishes; include your best performing ad from the previous 5 tests in the next 5 tests.

Jon Lefrandt's Grief Story Is Reshaping an Entire Industry

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 17:10:48 GMT

The weeks after a funeral are some of the loneliest that families can experience, even when surrounded by friends.

Until recently, the funeral profession had not found an effective aftercare solution to one enormous problem: the ever-widening emotional gap between funeral homes and their families after the funeral services.

Yes, there are decent funeral aftercare services.

But, traditional aftercare has still been too impersonal and too disconnected. After all, at-need families are the highest priority for a funeral home.

Either personal, compassionate communication is too difficult to manage long-term or quality grief therapy is too expensive to provide — these are the problems that Domanicare has solved.

Funer al directors have begun creating customized, in-house aftercare services. These can be difficult to manage, exp ensive, and time -consuming.

So what makes Domanicare any different from the other aftercare services out there? Why is Domanicare successful when so many other programs miss the mark?

The answer is in our story.

Jon Lefrandt's Grief Story

Jon Lefrandt, like many others, has walked the lonely path of grief.

As the Co-Founder and CEO of Domanicare, his grief story has shaped his life, his company, and has already begun reshaping the funeral aftercare industry as a whole.

As the oldest of seven children, Jon stepped in to help his mother and younger siblings when his father passed away.

The burden of grief was amplified by the task of planning his father’s funeral along with the responsibility he had to his own young family.

On top of it all, Jon had never planned a funeral before.

He didn’t know how to balance the trauma of losing a parent, the financial obligations of a funeral, and the final wishes of his father.

He figured that, as he had done with most things in life, he could just grind out the work and eventually the grief would pass with time — he thought he could simply move on with life.

He was wrong.

Jon loved his family, gained support from friends, and found comfort in faith, but there was a problem: in ignoring his grief, Jon was distancing himself from those around him.

Five long years passed and his grief remained.

Jon thought “it was better to not have any connection at all, then to go through this experience again… It wreaked havoc on my life and my emotional wellbeing.”

Eventually, Jon’s wife convinced him that he needed additional help.

With the professional help of trained therapists, he was able to come to terms with the grief of losing his father — he went from ignoring the grief to accepting it.

Over time, Jon realized that there were certain negative experiences in his grief story that could have been prevented.

Domanicare was partly created to eliminate harmful experiences in grief and provide a clear path to wellness for aftercare families.

Jon’s personal grief experience is what gives Domanicare the insight and power to succeed.

Domanicare: Personal, Innovative, and Effective Funeral Aftercare

So, what exactly does Domanicare do?

Domanicare includes four vital funeral aftercare services that resolve negative experiences for aftercare families:

Text-Message Based Aftercare
Online Grief Support
Review Generation
Pathways Appointment Setting

Through our text-messaging based aftercare , funeral homes are able to get in touch with a large number of families in a personal way and much quicker than traditional aftercare communication methods.

Domani for Grief & Loss is our online grief support that includes free grief courses from trained therapists, 24/7 grief coaching, in-person therapy sessions with trained, Domani-certified therapists, and supplemental grief support content.

We also provide review generation, which helps amplify the visibility of the most quality funeral homes. This helps families who’ve just lost a loved one find the best funeral home in at-need situations.

Our pathways appointment setting service connects or reconnects aftercare families to preneed counselors if the family is interested in preplanning their funerals. Funeral homes may desire simply to follow-up with the family or provide additional support.

Why Domanicare Matters

There are 13 million grievers annually due to death in the United States alone. ( Grief Dialogues )

There are 13 million sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers that are grieving the loss of a loved one each year.

Grief doesn’t just hurt for a while — it can be lifelong and be the catalyst to more serious consequences.

Unresolved grief can lead to drug addiction . It can infect and ruin healthy relationships. It can tear families apart.

The relief of accepting and coping with grief will likely never be as intense as the pain of loss itself, but it does provide space for happiness once again.

When a funeral home, hospice, or care facility provides an aftercare program that effectively addresses the unendurable pain of grief, the gratitude from aftercare families is staggering to witness.

Domanicare isn’t a hollow pitch or a marketing scheme.

It isn’t just a new service for funeral homes and hospices.

It isn’t just a successful new company.

Domanicare really is an empathetic service created from one man’s grief story .

And it really is reshaping the aftercare industry.

How to Gather Positive Reviews For Your Funeral Home

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 21:06:11 GMT

Over 2,500 people per month search the phrase, “funeral home near me.” If someone searches for a funeral home in your market, will yours be the one they call?

In this article, we’re going to show you how to beat your competition through funeral home review generation in three easy steps.

Step 1: Provide Effective Aftercare

To start off, if you’re not keeping in contact with your families after the funeral through aftercare, you’re likely not going to good reviews. Even if your funeral home does receive some good reviews, you likely aren’t going to get many.

Staying in touch with families through aftercare allows you to maintain the relationship your funeral home has with the family, build brand loyalty, and if done correctly, can provide the families with a way to ask questions and tie up any loose ends that may exist after the funeral service.

If your funeral home is not doing any sort of aftercare, we suggest you start. Some examples of ways that funeral homes keep in touch with their families after the funeral service include:

Sending cards
Making personal phone calls
Sending personal text messages
Hiring an in-house aftercare specialist
Choosing an effective third-party aftercare program

No matter what you choose when it comes to aftercare, the important thing is that you choose to do aftercare. You will strengthen the relationships with your families and build brand loyalty by maintaining open communication.

In addition to building and strengthening the relationship, one of the benefits for funeral homes of running an aftercare program is the ability to maintain the conversation.

Step 2: Identify Brand Champions

Through conversations with your families after the funeral service, you’re able to identify your brand champions. In other words, those who had a great experience with your funeral home and would be willing to share that experience in the form of an online review.

We understand that not everything goes exactly according to plan all the time. But by maintaining the conversation with your families, you can also identify those who may not be as satisfied initially and turn them into brand champions through your aftercare efforts.

Step 3: Ask For the Review

The last part of funeral home review generation is simply, “Ask for the review.” Though seemingly simple, it can be the hardest step for funeral homes if not done correctly.

Funeral directors often feel uncomfortable asking the question during the at-need arrangement conference or immediately following the funeral service. This awkwardness is yet another reason to implement an effective aftercare program.

For those that don’t provide effective aftercare, can you imagine the response when asking for a review? To the families, it seems abrupt and self-serving. But when it’s simply a part of the larger aftercare dialogue and conversation, the results are incredible.

Your funeral home has fans in your community. Your job as a funeral home owner or funeral director is to turn those fans into ambassadors by inviting them to leave reviews for your funeral home.

To ensure the best results with your review generation efforts, you should only ask for reviews from those who meet the following requirements:

Those who expressed gratitude for your services.
Those to whom you have provided with aftercare communication, whether it’s grief support, additional death certificates, miscellaneous questions/support.

That’s all there is to it!

Communicate with and help your families,
Identify your brand champions, and
Ask for the review.

Domanicare has helped funeral homes across the country generate thousands of five-star reviews.

If you’re interested in learning how Domanicare can help your funeral home run an effective aftercare program as well as generate 5-star reviews for your business, schedule your free demo.

Funeral Aftercare Is Changing: Domanicare Is the Reason

Thu, 09 May 2019 18:21:37 GMT

The funeral profession is changing quickly and Domanicare is leading the charge in funeral aftercare technology.

Funeral homes must contend with two seemingly opposing realities: 1) that at-need is priority #1 and 2) that integrating tech into funeral business operations is becoming a necessity because of increased competition in the funeral profession.

The truth is that integrating tech in funeral aftercare doesn’t have to take away from your focus on at-need — this is why we built Domanicare.

“Since making the decision to add Domanicare to our aftercare programs, we eliminated the need for any other program.”

— S cott Glover, Alsip & Persons Funeral Chapel

At-need will always remain as the most important service a funeral home can offer; that’s not going to change anytime soon.

As more funeral options become available, competition is increasing rapidly. This has led the funeral profession to rely on tech to differentiate funeral homes.

Domanicare is a funeral tech and service that doesn’t steal your time or focus from at-need.

It is funeral aftercare that wins brand champions, leads customers back through your sales funnel, and ultimately aids your at-need capabilities.

This article will show how funeral aftercare is changing and why Domanicare is the only quality aftercare service for the digital age.

How Domanicare Is Changing the Funeral Aftercare Profession

Domanicare is comprised of four vital funeral aftercare services :

Aftercare Text Messaging
Review Generation
Domani for Grief (Online Grief Support)
Appointment Setting

Funeral home aftercare services are usually segmented or separate from at-need and preneed services.

Until recently, funeral services have been separated into three distinct silos: at-need marketing, preneed, and aftercare.

Most other industries experience a breaking down of silos within a business once tech makes its appearance in the industry or profession.

After all, one of the main advantages of adding tech to your business plan is the increased fluidity between your different services (death tech is no exception).

We’ll show you exactly how Domanicare breaks down silos, creates fluidity between different funeral home services, and ultimately leads to increased at-need revenue.

Aftercare Text Messaging

Funeral directors work hard to create funeral services that help families grieve in a healthy way.

Healing is a vital part of the funeral profession. As funeral homes become more involved in the healing process with families, brand loyalty skyrockets.

In short, aftercare increases brand loyalty. There’s just one problem...

Response rates to the traditional forms of communication (mailers, email, and phone calls) are alarmingly low.

This leads us to a very important question: how can you help your aftercare families if you can only communicate with less than 15% of them?

Domanicare’s text messaging service has a 98% read rate and 48.22% response rate.

Most respond within an hour of receiving the message — these are numbers previously unseen in the aftercare industry.

By integrating text messaging in your funeral aftercare program, you will open the floodgates to more customer reviews, preneed leads, and insights that will help you improve your at-need services.

Review Generation

As you increase the number of aftercare families and individuals you are able to communicate with, you will be blown away by the positive responses from your families.

“...families rant and rave over the communication and follow-up they receive.”

— S cott Glover, Alsip & Persons Funeral Chapel

Time and time again, our text responders find families are incredibly grateful for the respectful way that funeral directors have arranged their funeral services.

In response to our reaching out via text message, one customer didn’t think a “thank you” through text message was enough. She actually wrote and sent a handwritten note to our funeral home partner:

It reads:

“Thank you so much for reaching out to me. I am doing fine — my motto is “Be happy and stay busy.” In two weeks I’ll be flying out [name] to the family plot in Indiana — next to his mom — which he always requested. You folks have been so loving and caring and it was highly appreciated. And I’m sorry it took me so long to thank you!”

We identify these satisfied customers as brand champions — they are easy to find and more than happy to refer your funeral home and leave exceptional reviews.

Once we’ve identified a brand champion, we respectfully invite the individual to leave a review for your funeral home.

Because we only request reviews from brand champions , the number of five-star reviews is extremely high.

In fact, over 90% of the total reviews we’ve generated have been five-star reviews.

Additionally, Domanicare increases the average number of reviews for a funeral home by 101%.

Domani for Grief (Online Grief Support)

There are 13 million grievers due to death annually in the United States alone ( Pasadena City College ).

As we said before, the more you aid in your families’ healing process, the greater their brand loyalty will become.

The Domani Group CEO, Jon Lefrandt, is a grief survivor. Having lost his father 10 years ago, Jon had to grapple with debilitating grief that lasted more than five years.

Eventually, Jon found the grief support he needed and overcame the grief that had remained and hurt him so deeply.

Once Jon entered the aftercare profession, his experience left him with one question:

Why aren't funeral aftercare and professional grief support combined?

That’s why we created Domani for Grief as an integral part of Domanicare. As our text responders have conversations with funeral aftercare families, they come across those who may benefit from online, individualized grief support.

We present Domani for Grief to these individuals on behalf of your funeral home, helping your families overcome grief and winning you even more brand champions along the way.

Domani for Grief includes the following services to funeral home families:

24/7 Grief Coaching
Dozens of Free Online Grief Courses
Specialized, Domani-Certified Grief Therapists
Grief Articles and Resources

Appointment Setting

Through Domanicare Text Messaging, Review Generation, and Domani for Grief, your at-need services benefit from a greater online reputation, a more robust offering to at-need families, and brand champions who become returning customers and referrers of your funeral home.

But how does Domanicare boost preneed sales?

Every aftercare family has recently had one of two possible experiences:

Either they planned the funeral beforehand (preplanning) or,
They paid for and planned the funeral following their loved one’s death.

Those who’ve just experienced a loss and preplanned the funeral see the value of preplanning — these customers are preneed prospects.

Those who did not preplan had to endure the emotional and financial stress of at-need services, no matter how helpful the care of the funeral directors. Such customers will also easily see the benefit of setting a preneed appointment.

Domanicare provides appointment setting services to funeral homes who’d like to see a significant boost to their preneed programs.

Funeral Aftercare Problems and Domanicare’s Solutions

Domanicare was created in an effort to tackle some common problems in the funeral profession.

Almost every funeral home owner who partners with Domanicare notes the overwhelmingly positive reaction from their families — that’s because we’ve identified and remedied the right problems.

With Domanicare, funeral directors no longer have to come up with made-from-scratch funeral home aftercare ideas.

Our team of trained text responders will continue the lasting, meaningful relationships you’ve already nurtured through quality at-need services.

“Domanicare provides the gift of aftercare coupled with continuing relationships that I have dreamed about for years…”

— Ginny Sanzo, Bedle Funeral Home

Your Domanicare program will boost your preneed effectiveness, at-need growth, review generation, and brand loyalty.

You will outshine your competition online and in-person through meaningful dialogue in aftercare messaging.

Domanicare Is Leading the Charge for Innovative Funeral Aftercare

Funeral homes across the nation are noticing the difference that Domanicare makes. That’s because we understand that aftercare is meant to be a driving force for good in the lives of the families you serve.

In the first month of the Domani site being live, we saw almost complete nationwide traffic.

Domanicare also won the ICCFA's Best in Personalization KIP Award for 2018. The Best in Personalization award recognizes "outstanding examples of personalization of services or products in the death care profession."

Additionally, our funeral home partners are blown away by the impact that Domanicare has had on their aftercare programs.

We take pride in the habit we’ve formed to exceed client expectations.

Here at Domani, we understand that our growth is in large part due to the wonderful and outstanding services that our funeral home partners provide.

After all, without quality at-need services, aftercare is ineffective. Because of the excellent support from our partners, Domanicare is changing aftercare forever.

And we’ve got news for the funeral aftercare industry: we’re just getting started.

The Funeral Professional's Guide to SEO

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 16:16:51 GMT

Too many funeral professionals think that SEO means "have a blog." It's actually a bit more complicated than that.

In reality, blogging is the minimum effort in modern SEO — there is huge opportunity for funeral homes to generate at-need calls and preneed leads through search optimization.

Funeral homes will have a completely different experience than in other industries when trying to rank in Google. As a funeral home, you need an SEO strategy that is both cost effective and time effective.

An effective aftercare program will actually help you increase your organic ranking by generating positive reviews, increase brand loyalty and exposure, and open up the door for backlink building.

Search engine optimization for funeral homes is easy if you know what you’re doing and are committed to winning the first SERP position.

That said, between technical optimizations, structured data, link building, and review generation, it’s easy to see why some funeral professionals can get lost in the technicalities.

This article is your roadmap for beginning a successful SEO strategy at your funeral home. If you follow these SEO tips for funeral homes, you will outrank your competition and generate more leads online.

Just follow these six simple steps to ensure your funeral home has a stronger online presence than your competitor:

Optimize Your Site Speed
Learn to Blog the Right Way
Win the Reviews Race
Adjust Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Target the Right Search Queries
Target Featured Snippets

Optimize Your Site Speed

Slow site load speeds have two enormous negative impacts:

Google uses page speed as a ranking determiner.
53% of all mobile web users "bounce" from sites that take longer than three seconds to load ( Think With Google ).

Creating a quick, seamless website will give your users a better experience on your site, leading to more leads, more sales, and more customers.

It will also increase the amount of total pages each individual user views on your website. The easier it is to get from one page to another, the more it will happen.

Curious to see if your website has slow site speed? There are plenty of site speed testers, but Google's is probably the most reliable (after all, they're the ones we're trying to impress). Just use Google's PageSpeed Insights tool by inserting your site URL and wait for the tool to do its job.

The tool will then give your site a score for both mobile and desktop websites. Mobile sites are a bit trickier to optimize than desktop sites, so don't be surprised if your mobile site speed is slower than your desktop site speed.

As you can see below, Google will tell you exactly what needs to change on your site in order for it to load faster. Just make the suggested changes and you're good to go.

The vast majority of funeral home websites that have site speed issues are not properly optimizing images.

The process of optimizing images is very easy. Take all the images on your site and put them through an image optimizer tool like TinyPNG or ImageOptimizer (these tools are free so they aren't perfect).

If you want an extremely high quality image optimizer tool, I recommend Kraken.io . Its cheapest plan costs $5 per month and allows you to optimize 500 MB of images each month.

Blogging the Right Way

The three biggest mistakes small businesses (and funeral homes) make in their blogging efforts revolve around article length, article topic, and article optimization. Here’s what you need to know:

Article Length

SEO professionals suggest that articles should be right around 1,900 words. However, since SEO isn’t practiced as aggressively in the funeral industry, the standard will be slightly lower.

The article length rule for the funeral industry: 1,500 words or at least double the length of your best competitor.

In reality, the length of the article doesn’t matter as much as the quality of what you write. If you write a 3,000-word article full of nonsense, it’s not going to rank very well.

On the other hand, the world’s most helpful 1,000-word article will rank on the first page in Google.

So do not become fixated on article length.

In the end, your article’s helpfulness and shareability will be the biggest determiner of success. It is much better to ask yourself “does this article completely answer my reader’s question?” than “have I written enough words?”

It is much better to ask yourself “does this article completely answer my reader’s question?” than “have I written enough words?” Click to Tweet

Article Topic

Your talent for choosing the right topic really depends on two things: how well you know your customers and how well you research keywords. I can’t help you get to know your customers better, but I can help you with keyword research.

Let’s start with the obvious: the most-searched keywords in the funeral industry are the shortest and most broad as far as topic. For example, according to Keywords Everywhere, the term “preneed funeral” is searched 320 times per month.

A less obvious, but equally important tip is that longer, more specific keywords are generally easier to rank for. The term “Preneed Funeral in Tulsa,” would be a great keyword for which to rank.

So, now you know that the article topic “How to Plan a Preneed Funeral in Tulsa” is a good article to write. In actuality, you are competing for multiple keywords and keyword strings by writing this article, including “preneed,” “preneed funeral,” “funeral,” “funeral in Tulsa,” etc.

If you need a tool to determine the estimated search traffic of a term, I suggest Keywords Everywhere , since it’s a free chrome/firefox extension. If you’re willing to invest more money into an SEO tool, I recommend Ahrefs , a multi-tool platform that equips you with all you need to beat your digital marketing competitors.

We've actually compiled a list of 101 funeral home blog articles that would rank highly in Google. Check it out to start blogging the right way.

Article Optimization

Your article will not succeed by only writing long articles and choosing the right topic.

You need to make the article as accessible as possible — remember, article optimization is the process of making an article readable and accessible.

The first thing you should do when you finish an article is publicize it. There are three ways to publicize your work effectively:

Send it out to previous contacts and ask them if they’d share it.
Quote experts and ask them if they’d share it.
Syndication

Every article you write should rely partly on the thoughts and findings of experts in your industry. You will find that industry experts are absolutely willing to provide a quote for your article, share it on social media, and in some cases, link to your article on their site.

You should also syndicate your article on sites like Medium . If you’d like to do a short excerpt and provide a link to the full article, that works just fine.

The next step is to make your article as shareable as possible. Every article that is published on your site should have social share buttons on it. Target the social media sites where your audience is most active (Facebook for older audiences, Twitter for younger audiences, Instagram for both).

Use ClicktoTweet buttons within your article — these will increase the chances of readers sharing your article on their social channels.

One massively overlooked tactic is tone. The tone and voice of your article also contribute to its shareability.

People share when they feel that the article has explained something personal better than they could themselves; this means your voice needs to mirror or complement the voice of those reading your article.

It’s also important to note that you should post articles on your site at least once a week. Staying current will show Google that you mean business and that your site is a reliable source of information.

Win the Reviews Race

Google reviews do help you rank higher in Google.

Not only are reviews vital for any small business, they are especially impactful in industries where reviews are normally hard to come by. In comparison to other industries, the funeral profession is an untapped goldmine.

A few negative reviews can completely obliterate your online presence. On the other hand, a handful of positive reviews can give you the upper hand over your competition — you’ll be able to tell the difference once you begin to receive calls from online sources.

So what’s the problem? Why are funeral homes struggling to get customer reviews?

The answer is that families are grieving and are too emotionally stressed to leave a review. An added complication is that funeral directors don’t want to ask families for reviews during their grieving process.

So how do you get positive reviews in the funeral industry?

Aftercare Review Generation

Domanicare’s text-message-based aftercare service can completely turn around your review generation efforts .

The truth is that families are much more than willing to leave reviews when funeral homes make conscious efforts to reach out and provide help to grieving families after the funeral.

An effective aftercare program will nurture a healthy emotional state in the funeral home customers. Our funeral home partners have discovered that a thorough, compassionate, and helpful aftercare program results in customers willing to leave highly positive reviews.

For example, a Domanicare partner, Clark Legacy Center, was able to generate 14 positive reviews in the first three days after using Domanicare. Their score improved from a 4.2 average star rating to a 4.7.

Storytelling Review Generation

Another great way to generate reviews for your funeral home is to harness the power of storytelling. The families you’ve helped in the past have powerful stories of healing that can help your other customers overcome their challenges and grief.

Invite your past customers to tell their stories on your site through video or blog format. This opens the door for you to request they also leave an honest review for your site on Google.

Title Tag and Meta Description Adjustments

Your title tag is what Google searchers see when they type in a search query.

For example, when I search “Best Funeral Homes,” the top sites have the title tags “Berg Mortuary - Provo” and “Best Funeral Homes in America.”

One of these title tags is much more optimized than the other.

Each page on your site should have a unique title tag. If you have a pricing page, you need to create a clickable title tag and optimize it for those searching “funeral home prices.”

There are four things you should keep in mind when optimizing for Google: Click-through rate, clicks, impressions, and page rank.

Clicks are the number of people who clicked on your site in Google.

Impressions are the number of people who saw your link in Google.

Click-through rate, or CTR, is the number of people who clicked your link compared to the number of people who saw your link.

Page rank is the position your page currently occupies for a specific search term.

When you optimize your title tag correctly, you may see higher page ranks and higher CTR rates. In other cases, you may see a higher page rank and higher impressions, but a lower CTR, which results in lower clicks.

The trick to title tag optimization is to create tags that customers are more likely to click on. So, targeting the click-through rate is a great way to increase the overall amount of users on your site.

Target the Right Search Queries

You know your audience.

As a funeral director, you speak with families every day about planning and paying for funerals — you know the questions they ask. All you have to do is format those questions for the internet.

Ask yourself how someone might search the questions they ask you everyday. For example, if you always get questions about cremation, are your potential customers more likely to search “what is cremation?,” “how much does cremation cost?,” or “what is the cremation process?”

Your gut instinct is usually the correct one. It’s important not to judge the search query solely off of total search traffic. You need to realistically judge whether or not you can actually win a first-page ranking for each keyword.

Afterall, it’s much better to rank on the first page for “funeral homes in New York” than to rank on the tenth page for “funerals.”

You can also use answerthepublic.com to research question variants on specific search terms.

Target Google's Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are also called position 0 on Google SERPs.

When you make a search query that many people have searched before, Google will find the best answer and place it right at the top of the page in a special snippet format.

Since this snippet is listed above the other results, it has been given the nickname “position 0.”

Featured snippets in the funeral profession tend to revolve around prices and cost (search “funeral cost” for an example), but there is definitely an opportunity for funeral homes to capitalize on the questions their customers always ask.

For example, there are large number of people looking for answers to questions like:

How big is a casket?
How do I plan a funeral?
Can you finance a funeral?
How long does it take to plan a funeral?

These are all good questions to answer in a how-to article. Keep in mind that to rank in position 0, you need to answer the search query better than any of your competitors — in other words, your answer must be clear and concise.

Another important thing to note is that when Google grants a search query a featured snippet, it’s a clue and an additional insight into what your audience is searching.

The fact that Google wants to provide a quick answer to a specific question means you’re on the right track.

Featured snippets are a hint of what we’ll be seeing in the future from Google. Google’s job is to get the answer as quickly as possible for internet users. Voice search will pull heavily from featured snippets and the sites that win the most featured snippets will benefit the most.

The Bottom Line

The question you need answered is this: how do I rank higher in Google?

Content marketers and SEO specialists can complicate the Google game unnecessarily — they’ll answer that question by saying on site optimizations, or thorough content campaigns, or article frequency, or technical SEO optimizations are the most important thing to focus on.

The truth is that all of it is important. But the answer to the question of ranking higher in Google comes down to your ability to help the users of your site.

And, luckily for funeral professionals, no one is better equipped to answer questions about the funeral industry than funeral home owners.

All you have to do is answer your customer’s questions completely, truthfully, and in a way they’ll instantly understand.

Google will see your value when your customers see your value.

The Role of Aftercare in Your Funeral Home Business Plan

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 16:16:51 GMT

Good aftercare services do exist — but great aftercare services are harder to come by.

The Key Features of Effective Aftercare

Aftercare services are any services that assist in the ongoing recovery of those suffering from emotional, psychological, or physical trauma.

Funeral aftercare is a specific type of aftercare that aids those suffering from the grief of losing loved ones. Every funeral home that aspires to be successful should implement some kind of funeral aftercare program.

Many funeral homes attempt to patch together a “homemade aftercare program,” which usually involves just a few aftercare ideas intended to help keep in touch with families.

But why are professional and effective funeral aftercare programs so important?

Effective aftercare services do four important things:

Provide healing, support, and resources to grieving families.
Alleviate, not add to, the funeral home’s day-to-day responsibilities.
Bridge the relationship gap between funeral homes and their families long after funeral services are given.
Establish an effective, unobtrusive, and meaningful communication method.

Let’s explore each of these vital characteristics of effective aftercare programs:

The problem with most aftercare ideas is that funeral homes carry the burden of aftercare responsibilities (building, implementing, and maintaining the aftercare program).

Funeral professionals generally do not have a large abundance of spare time — that’s why a good aftercare service should alleviate time while increasing leads for funeral homes.

Some companies have sprung up to plug the hole that exists in aftercare services, but they actually end up piling too many responsibilities upon the shoulders of the funeral director.

As the funeral director, it is your job to implement compassionate aftercare into your business plan effectively.

So how do you do that?

By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly what you need to do in order to create a manageable, efficient, and effective aftercare program.

Healing and Grief Support

Basic human decency demands that we help others who are in pain. As funeral directors, you see people who are grieving every day. You’ve likely been in many situations that allow you to provide support and consolation.

As the funeral director, your responsibility is to provide a meaningful funeral service that consoles the family of the deceased.

But, as a funeral director, it is not necessarily your responsibility to aid and console families in the grieving process after the funeral is over — this is exactly the reason you should try to do it.

Every effort on the funeral home’s part to console and provide grief support will be seen as “going the extra mile.”

From the business standpoint, providing healing and grief support to customers is a no-brainer.

Recipients of your healing and grief support will show their gratitude by becoming brand champions, recommending your funeral home to friends and family, and leaving positive reviews online.

Over time, your funeral home will rank higher in Google, have many more positive review than your competition, and be the preferred funeral home for hundreds of grateful families in your area.

Alleviate the Burden of Time

While good aftercare ideas can improve an aftercare program, the program itself should be as automated as possible.

Your aftercare program must not add to the responsibilities you now have. Many funeral professionals can make the mistake of neglecting their immediate responsibilities and focusing on marketing or retention.

This neglect will results in negative customer experiences. So what does this mean for your aftercare program?

It means that you need to establish an aftercare foundation that generates leads, brand loyalty, and customer retention without sacrificing your time.

Whether that means automating your marketing processes, hiring a team of marketers, or hiring a third-party marketing agency, be careful not to sacrifice your time.

Bridge the Relationship Gap

The relationship between funeral homes and the families they serve is already quite strong.

However, there is a gap that exists — this gap resides in between two points of contact: the funeral service and the follow up.

Though the follow up may seem like the natural next step, too many funeral homes make the mistake of jumping from “I’m sorry for your loss” to “could you leave us a review?”

Instead, there is an opportunity to bridge that gap by becoming an integral part of the customer’s grieving process. Your funeral home is uniquely positioned to provide grief support resources and other aftercare services.

Establish an Effective Communication Method

Mailers have long been the standard form of aftercare communication for funeral homes. Some funeral homes have experimented with hiring a specialist whose job is to call past customers and check in.

However, digital communication solutions have remained largely untouched in the funeral aftercare industry. An effective aftercare program will utilize effective communication methods beyond simple mailers and phone calls.

The purpose of Domanicare was to create a innovative new solution to all four of these vital aftercare features. By creating Domanicare, The Domani Group has seen these issues, studied them, and resolved them.

What is Domanicare?

Domanicare is an innovative new aftercare service that was created specifically to help funeral professionals establish a strong, emotional connection to the families they serve. But, it was also created to relieve the burden of time from funeral professionals.

Domanicare takes as much of the aftercare responsibility as possible. Funeral home owners are given control of the messaging in our text communication with families, while still allowing Domanicare’s Live Text Responders to do the individual texting — this gives funeral homes the overall control while placing the burden of the work on Domanicare’s shoulders.

Each funeral home is provided with a detailed monthly report that shows the text messages sent and responses to those messages from their customers — this way, funeral professionals can gain insight into how well Domanicare is working.

Domanicare includes features that strengthen relationships and provide healing for grieving families:

Domani for Grief and Loss
Live Text Responders
Review Generation

Domani for Grief and Loss is a grief support platform that allows grieving families to access dozens of free online support courses. Individuals and families can also sign up for 24/7 message-based grief coaching and take advantage of one free face-to-face therapy session.

Domani for Grief also connects struggling individuals to other grieving individuals through online support groups.

As Domanicare offers services and resources like Domani for Grief, brand champions are incredibly easy to spot. These satisfied funeral home customers are more than willing to provide quality reviews and we are happy to provide them the pathway to leave positive reviews.

In this way, Domanicare covers the three vital areas of aftercare service: provides emotional support for customers, alleviates the burden of time for the funeral home, and boosts brand loyalty through relationship building.

Domanicare was never supposed to be the end of all aftercare services.

Instead, it was created to become the firm foundation of your aftercare program. Whether or not it’s with Domanicare, your funeral home’s aftercare program needs to have a strong foundation before anything else.

Creating an Effective Aftercare Program

Your job is to combine the fundamentals of effective aftercare into one program. To do that, you’ll need to choose aftercare methods that fulfill the needs of an effective aftercare program.

Remember, any effective aftercare program will fulfill the four following needs:

Provide Grief Support
Alleviate Time
Relationship Building
Effective Communication

The hope with these aftercare methods is that you can patch together an aftercare program that will fulfill all four needs of an effective aftercare program.

Once you’ve chosen good aftercare ideas for your program, it’s time to assign the responsibilities.

Job responsibility can be assigned to yourself, your employees, or hired out to a third-party company. Each one of these parties will have different pros and cons associated with them.

For example, hiring new employees to handle your aftercare services gives you complete control of your aftercare program. However, it also falls to you to pay, train, and manage those employees.

Once you’ve assigned the responsibilities, you’re well on your way to creating an efficient funeral aftercare program at your funeral home.

Obviously, there are advanced marketing techniques that you need to learn in order to turn aftercare participants into returning/referring customers. But, your effort to provide support to the grieving families you serve will attract more customers, positive reviews, and online reputation success.

As long as your aftercare program in some way alleviates the pain of losing a loved one, it will be successful.

Exactly how successful it is though is up to you.

101 Funeral Article Ideas That Will Rank High in Google

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 23:13:01 GMT

The families you serve are desperate for help and answers.

From an SEO standpoint, you have the opportunity to provide relief and answers to thousands of searchers each month via your funeral home blog.

The problem is you, as a funeral director, don’t have a lot of time to do keyword research and come up with article topics that will rank in Google.

Luckily for you, we’ve decided to put together a list of must-write articles that will rank in Google (as long as you follow the basic rules and tips for blog writing).

Five Tips for Funeral Blog Writing and Ranking

Writing Tip #1

Try to write longer, more informative articles that are around 1,500 words and answer search queries exactly. Articles should include 3-5 subheadings and have correct HTML structure (proper use of header tags, list tags, etc). Check out our funeral home SEO guide for more in-depth instructions.

Writing Tip #2

Write articles yourself to save money or hire a content writer to save time (you can also hire articles out to freelancers, who charge around an average of $50 for every 500 words they write). Post consistency is important in SEO. Try to write between 2-4 articles per month.

Writing Tip #3

Any search traffic for a query makes that query worth targeting. Do not be discouraged if a search query only gets 10/month. This number is usually far below what is accurate and, remember, that one article can rank for many different search queries.

Once you rank for one search query, it is much easier to rank for others, so go ahead and write articles for any funeral home topic that is being searched in Google.

All search traffic numbers are approximations according to the Keywords Everywhere tool. I recommend downloading the Keywords Everywhere chrome extension if you’d like to ensure that your article topics are being searched in Google.

Writing Tip #4

Mix up your content types. Don’t only write articles — include infographics, videos, audio, and slideshows.

Writing Tip #5

Lists, how to’s, and in-depth guides rank well in Google, but only if the content within them is helpful and thorough. If you write a “50 ways to..” article, make sure that every one of the 50 items in the article is helpful.

Funeral Home Blog Article Topics That Will Rank in Google

Whoever writes the articles on your site should only pick the topics that your preferred audience would search on Google.

For example, if your funeral home does not offer cremation services, you may not want to attract those visitors to your site. On the other hand, if someone searches “funeral preplanning in [your area]” then you’ll most likely want to rank high in Google for that search query.

The point is this: only choose article topics that your customers are interested in. What questions and concerns does your ideal customer have? Answer those questions thoroughly with your content and you’re sure to rank in Google.

Here are 101 funeral blog topics to help you get your funeral home blog started on the right foot:

“The Cost of...” Article
How to Plan a Funeral Service
What If You Can’t Afford a Funeral?
Ways to Save Money on Funeral Expenses
“The Complete Guide to...” Article
Funeral Planning Checklist
Cremation vs. Burial Article
Adaptive Funeral Services Options
What to Wear to a Funeral
How Much Does a Burial Vault Cost
What Are the Best Affordable Caskets?
What Is a Celebration of Life Service?
Should I Donate My Body to Science?
Is It Necessary to Embalm a Body?
How to Arrange an Eco-Friendly Funeral Service?
What is Green Burial?
How to Write a Moving Eulogy
15 Most Famous Eulogies Ever Written
How to Make an Awesome Memorial Video
Why You Should/Shouldn’t Euthanize Your Pet
15 Most Popular Flowers for Funerals
How to Tell a Good Funeral Home from a Bad One
How to Handle the Grief of Losing a Loved One
15 Ways to Overcome Grief
What Are the Advantages to Preplanning Your Funeral?
50 Most Popular Songs to Play at Funerals
10 Unique Funeral Traditions from Different Countries
20 Things You Should Never Say to a Grieving Individual
How to Overcome the Death of a Child
How to Discuss the Topic of Death with a Child
How to Help a Child Overcome the Loss of a Parent
What Is a Direct Cremation?
5 Reasons Why Preplanning Is A Great Investment
3 Reasons Why Preplanning Is Like Used Car Shopping
How Today’s Conversations Help Make You Stronger Tomorrow
Zen Hospice: A New Way To See Death
Overcoming Grief: The 7 Phases Of The Acute Loss Period
How Planning Your Funeral Will Help Your Family Heal
5 Things You Didn’t Know about Preplanning Your Own Funeral
5 Things You Need To Know When Planning Your Own End Of Life Care
What To Include In Your Funeral Plans To Make It Beneficial For Your Family
How To Make Sure Your Legacy Lives On After You’re Gone
How To Use Technology To Preserve Your Legacy
How To Write A Journal Your Family Will Love To Read after You’re Gone
Why Keeping A Journal Matters
Why Do We Have Funerals?
Why Funerals Are an Important Part of the Healing Process
A Guide to Funeral Home Services (Everything You Need to Know)
How to Choose a Grave Marker or Monument
Open Casket vs. Closed Casket
The Pros and Cons of Mausoleums
15 Facts You Should Know about Above-Ground Burials
Difference Between a Casket and a Coffin for a Funeral
Mausoleum Prices: What Are My Options?
Mausoleum vs. Crypt
An In-Depth to Your Burial Options
Good Things to Say to Someone after a Funeral
How to Get through Grief and Loss When You Have Depression
Why Grief is Worse after the Funeral
15 Things Funeral Directors Wish You Knew about Funerals before You Plan One
What Happens When a Death Occurs Far from Home?
The Different Types of Pre- and Post-Funeral Events
How Do You Write a Death Notice?
What Is the Difference between a Death Notice and an Obituary?
Unique Ideas for Grave Monuments and Headstones
Popular Grave Tending Services
10 Unique Ways to Preserve the Memory of Your Lost Loved Ones
How to Repair a Sunken Grave
What does officiating a funeral mean?
What Is a Funeral Celebrant and How Are They Different Than a Funeral Director?
The 15 Most Popular Foods to Make for a Funeral Reception
Best Funeral Potatoes Recipes
What Is the Difference between a Funeral and a Wake?
Wake vs. Viewing
ABC’s of the Funeral Profession
How Do I Get On/Off the Organ Donor List?
Best Funeral Stories of 2019
Why Is It Illegal to Spread Ashes?
The 20 Most Popular Cremation Urns
Life Insurance Death Benefit vs. Preneed Insurance
Can You Get State or Federal Assistance to Pay for Funerals?
15 Great Ways to Personalize a Funeral
How to Assist Your Friends in Their Grief Recovery Process
How to Prepare Your Family and Friends for Your Death
What is the Autopsy and Preparation Process?
How to Plan a Happy Funeral Service
Are Celebrations of Life Parties an Excuse to Avoid the Sadness of Death?
Celebration of Life Ideas
What to Do When You Can’t Overcome Grief
What to Consider When Choosing a Cemetery
How to Plan a Celebration of Life
The Best and Worst Funeral Planning Ideas
5 Important Things You Should Say to a Grieving Relative
30 Inspirational Quotes about Overcoming Grief
How to Help Someone Overcome the Grief of Miscarriage
How Does Funeral Preplanning Prepare Us Emotionally?
Healing through Mindfulness Meditation
How Can Yoga Help You Heal Emotionally?
15 Important Questions to Ask Yourself about Funeral Planning
10 Fun Activities to Help Families Overcome Grief
Ranking the 20 Best Funeral Blogs