Let’s assume for a minute that your funeral home is already active on Facebook. You’re posting some links you think your followers will love, you’re sharing your events, and maybe you’re even posting some pictures of your building and staff. These are all fantastic things to be doing. When it comes to posting your obituaries, maybe you’re not sure if you should be sharing them. You may have read an article telling you it’s a bad idea, or maybe it’s not something you’re in the habit of doing.
We’ll just say this: if you’re not posting obituaries, then you could be losing valuable site visitors.
How Do You Use Facebook?
When you use Facebook, do you navigate directly to a page that you follow, or do you somehow—almost magically—always see posts that you care about by pages that you follow in your own timeline? Families use Facebook the same way. You really don’t need to worry about clogging your newsfeed.
The majority of people won’t bother visiting your Facebook page to look at your posts. Instead, posts to your page will appear in a follower’s newsfeed if Facebook decides the post is relevant to that individual.
Facebook’s algorithm is exceptionally good at determining what information is relevant to specific users. Trust that the right people will see your obituary postings.
If obituaries were irrelevant content, more people would unfollow funeral home pages because of them.
Instead, obits drive traffic to your website.
Obituaries are Fuel for Traffic Generation
Take a look at your Facebook page insights to see which posts are getting the most engagement on your page. There’s a really good chance it’s your obituaries. Some funeral home sites see upward of 30% of their website traffic coming from obituary posts. Most of the time, obituaries posted to Facebook receive excellent engagement in the form of reactions, shares, and click-through rate.
This is because your audience has to click through to your website in order to view the full obituary post. As a bonus, those users are looking at more than just the obituary page—usually around 1.3-1.5 pages per visit. Sure, not everyone is going to be a prospective client, but many will be.
That’s where retargeting comes into play.
Show Your Ads to the Right People
Retargeting allows you to show ads to people who are already familiar with your brand. Remember: not everyone who visits your site is a prospective client, but you can use geographic and demographic targeting to focus in on the people who are good candidates.
Using Facebook, Google AdWords, and Yahoo!-Bing’s platforms, you can use your website traffic to create a custom audience of people to show ads to. You can literally use your obituary traffic to fuel an online lead-generation funnel. It’s been working in other industries for years, and now is prime time for funeral homes to seize the opportunity.
Understand Your Options
Each and every business is unique, so it’s important to understand that certain tactics will be more effective in some markets than others. We’d hate to see you waste money on something that’s not going to meet your needs, so we’re happy to talk to you about a personalized digital marketing solution that will work toward your goals.
Give us a call at 1-800-480-6467, or email jmanuge@funeraltech.com to set up an appointment.