The most powerful marketing tool available to funeral home owners in 2021 is Facebook advertising.
The key to leveraging Facebook ads is…audience management. I’ll explain why in this newsletter.
To be honest, I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. As a consumer, I am not a Facebook fan and rarely check my personal page. Do I need to see pictures of what my cousins ate for dinner last night? No.
But as a marketing professional, I am a huge fan of Facebook advertising.
I run Facebook ads for my own business and manage campaigns for my clients. I’ve also spent a lot of time and money with Facebook experts learning how to leverage Facebook without letting them suck every last penny from my bank account.
What is Facebook audience management, and why should you care? You could write a thesis on that topic, but here’s the short version of the answer.
Facebook has 2.6 billion users. Facebook audiences are how you carve out a slice of those users so that you can put your ad in front of them.
You can carve out a slice based on geography, demographics, interests, internet activity, and dozens of other factors.
For example, for my marketing consulting business, I might target someone who likes NFDA, lives in North America, and is interested in entrepreneurship. If I want to fine-tune it even more, I might filter on age (40+) and their net worth (yes, Facebook has that info too).
Facebook campaigns for funeral homes typically target people who live within ten miles of the funeral home and then add different filters based on what you are advertising. For example, if it’s a preneed ad with a woman in the image, we’ll aim for women aged 45+, but we might target a broader audience if it’s a grief workshop.
But this type of targeting only scratches the surface of what is possible with Facebook audiences.
Another strategy is to let Facebook track people who visited your website. That’s called the Facebook tracking pixel if you’re curious about the correct terminology.
For example, Facebook will let me target website visitors based upon when they visited your site. Using this, I can put a grief workshop invitation ad in front of people who visited in the last 30 days and then put a preneed ad in front of those who visited more than 30 days ago.
We’ve taken over several funeral home campaigns from other marketing firms. A common problem we see is a preneed ad targeting someone immediately after they visited the funeral home’s website. That’s just rude….
Targeting an audience based on geography, demographics, or website activity are pretty standard Facebook Advertising strategies.
Here’s a couple of more advanced strategies…
Not only can you target people who came to your website, but you can also build an audience based on what pages they visited.
Would you like to put a veteran’s ad in front of anyone who visited the veteran’s page on your website? No problem.
How about a cremation ad for people who visited your cremation page? No problem.
How about a preplanning ad for someone who started planning online but didn’t finish? No problem.
As you can see, this strategy opens up a lot of interesting possibilities.
Another advanced strategy is to build audiences based on how much they consume your Facebook content. More specifically, video content.
Using this feature, I might create a video about the benefits of preplanning and target the person who started preplanning but didn’t finish.
If they watch that video but still don’t finish preplanning, I might target them with a testimonial video.
If they watch that video but still don’t take action, I might try a Frequently Asked Questions video.
Every video contains a gentle nudge to encourage them to finish their arrangements or call us for help.
The strategies I’ve discussed so far are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Facebook advertising. It used to be as simple as pressing the “boost” button on a post, but now that’s just a great way to throw away your money.
Facebook…you might love or hate the consumer side of it, but the advertising side of it is a marketers dream come true. If you ignore it you’ll be missing out on the biggest media opportunity since the advent of television.
By the way, 75% of Baby Boomers are on Facebook. That’s why mastering Facebook advertising is a critical part of catching the Baby Boomer wave.
Click here to watch my new webinar and learn what else you will need to do to catch the wave and serve the 70+ million boomers.
Until next time
John