It’s the nature of the business.… There is an invisible barrier that separates your Funeral Home from other businesses and from the very people you serve. This means that you as a funeral director, even if you are fairly active in your community, are in effect an outsider. Unless you find a proactive way to personally connect, you carry with you a stigma; you are a symbol of the end of life, something that most people don’t want to deal with until they absolutely have to.
If you have your own website and a Facebook page, you are well on your way to dissipating that barrier. One of the best ways to enhance your online presence is to become a “blogger.” Blogs are a powerful way to reach out and engage the people who one day will be desperately searching for someone to get them through the worst experience of their lives—the death of a loved one.
Blogging lets you address a myriad of issues that face family members when a loved one dies. By bringing these up in your blogs, you start to help people become comfortable with even talking about them. In your blogs, you can pass on advice as to how to go about setting up a funeral service. You can alert your readers as to what essential tasks must be done and give them an idea as to when to do them. You can talk about dealing with family members, how to write an obituary, how to avoid being scammed when they are shopping for caskets or burial plots, even ways to honor their deceased with little touches like photos and mementos.
Post your blog on the homepage of your website. After a week or two, move it to your archive file on your site and post a new blog. Make sure that visitors to your site can see and easily click on the titles of your older blogs in case they are interested in one of those topics. Keep your homepage fresh and comforting with images and inspiring quotes, as well as links to take your visitors to other pages of interest.
It’s all about building relationships. Since 2/3 of people who use the Internet spend time on Facebook—that’s 143.4 million people—and some of them probably live in your community, reaching out to them through Facebook can help you establish trusted relationships with them.
Use your Facebook page as a means of reaching out to your community as well as bringing visitors to your own website. On your Facebook, post the first paragraph or so of the current blog from your website. At the bottom of this excerpt, give readers a link to click that will take them directly to your website so that they can read the entire blog . Just under the blog, have a space for readers to post their responses. You may even be able to start a thread about that topic as you comment back and others jump in with their opinions.
Your Facebook page should not be weighed down with funeral home photos and reminders. Instead, let it be a comfortable place for people to express their feelings and responses to pithy quotes, inspiring artwork and encouraging messages from you. Touch their hearts. Let the community start to get to know who you are, how you think, and how much you care. As you build trusting relationships with individuals from your community, you will start to see that emotional barrier dissolve away.
