Every funeral home owner I work with wants to grow their business. They may want to sell someday, but for now, they are focused on increasing their call volume, total revenue, and bottom-line profit.
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to growing a funeral home business is identifying the problem holding you back and developing a plan to resolve it. Some of the issues are related to marketing, but not all.
If you pick the right problem, you can quickly take your business to the next level. If you focus on the wrong problem, you can waste a lot of time and money.
I’ve owned a lot of cars over the years. One of my favorites was a 1995 SAAB 9000 CS 2.3L Turbo. Designed by a Swedish company that also made fighter jets, the SAAB 9000 was an engineering marvel. It looked like a conservative sedan, but it drove like a sports car with incredible acceleration and handling.
It was usually a joy to drive. But when something broke, getting it fixed was a nightmare.
The problem was that the SAAB engineers designed a car that didn’t work like other cars. They were easy to repair if you understood how they worked but mind-boggling if you didn’t.
One time, my SAAB wouldn’t start. The battery was charged, and the engine would crank, but it wouldn’t start.
I took it to the same mechanic who had repaired my cars for years. He ran his diagnostics and concluded that the starter needed to be replaced. He ordered a new starter, and we waited two weeks for it to arrive from Sweden.
He installed the new starter, but the car still wouldn’t start.
He ordered and installed three more parts. It still wouldn’t start.
After two months of trying to fix the problem, he gave up and suggested I sell the car for parts.
In a last attempt to save my favorite car, I had it towed 60 miles to the closest SAAB-certified expert. It took their mechanic 30 minutes to diagnose the problem and another hour to fix it. I was back on the road the same day.
It turns out that my mechanic was chasing electrical problems; the real problem was a vacuum leak. As I said, SAABs were easy to repair if you understood how they worked and mind-boggling if you didn’t.
I was thinking about my SAAB this week when I was contacted by a funeral home owner in the Chicago area who was looking for help with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) problem. He wanted to rank higher in the search engines, but his current website vendor was struggling to make any progress.
I had my technical guys investigate, and it didn’t take long to identify the problem.
The funeral home is in Highland Park, Illinois, just north of Chicago. Yet the SEO vendor was targeting the term “Chicago Funeral Home” because that was the larger market.
The vendor should have been trying to outrank the handful of funeral homes in Highland Park. Instead, they were trying to outrank the hundreds of funeral homes in Chicago.
Would families from all over the Chicago area drive to Highland Park when they need a funeral home? No.
Digging a little further, we found that the funeral home did not even rank in the top three Google Business Profiles for the term “Highland Park Funeral Home”. This is a major problem because Google Business Profiles get over 70% of the search engine traffic for local businesses.
The vendor was doing a bad job of chasing an SEO problem, and yes, we could fix that issue. However, the real issue was that they were chasing the wrong problem in the first place and should have been focusing on the client’s Google Business Profile.
In this case, the website/seo vendor was unfamiliar with the funeral industry and assumed that the entire city of Chicago was the target market. They were wrong.
That’s like my regular mechanic chasing an electric problem on my SAAB when the real problem was a vacuum leak.
Fixing the marketing of a funeral home is a lot like fixing my old SAAB. It’s easy to repair if you understand how funeral home marketing works but mind-boggling if you don’t.
You can download my 10-Step Checklist for Growing Your Funeral Home at this link.
In this report, I discuss 10 steps you should take to grow a great funeral home business. Each step is related to a specific marketing problem preventing you from growing your call volume, revenue per call, or bottom-line profits.
Step 1 – Create a superior funeral experience.
Step 2 – Create new products to offer.
Step 3 – Establish a unique market position
Step 4 – Do a better job of telling your story
Step 5 – Upgrade your web presence
Step 6 – Dominate Google
Step 7 – Become the top-rated funeral home in town
Step 8 – Leverage social media
Step 9 – Leverage the power of marketing campaigns
Step 10 – Don’t grow your funeral business alone
Many funeral home owners waste a tremendous amount of time and money following the advice of vendors who are chasing the wrong problem. Often, it is because the vendor simply doesn’t understand the industry.
Sometimes, this happens even when the vendor specializes in the funeral industry.
Click here to download the 10-step checklist.
If you want my help growing your funeral home, the process starts with a conversation. We can discuss your situation, and I’ll explain how I help funeral home owners. Then, you can decide if you’d like to become a client.
Sound good? Click here to schedule a call with me.
Until next time
John
