I wrote about my love/hate relationship with Google two weeks ago. This week, I’ll discuss my other love/hate relationship…Social Media
In my 10-step Checklist for Growing Your Funeral Home Business, step #8 is to leverage social media. Many funeral home owners have active social media programs that reap huge rewards, while others waste a lot of money and get nothing in return. Let’s make sure you are in the first group.
You may be the type of person who rarely posts about their personal life on social media, and that’s okay. You can still leverage social media to grow your funeral home business without sharing your personal life.
With that in mind, here are some things I love and hate about social media.
I love…how you can cultivate local relationships on social media. You can use social media to connect with people on the other side of the world or someone across the street.
Funeral home owners used to build local relationships by attending every chamber of commerce, church, and civic function in town. Now, they can build relationships by leveraging social media.
I love…how social media can drive traffic to your website. Attracting new people to your website is an important part of your marketing process.
One way to increase traffic to your website is to dominate Google. But did you know that social media can also drive a lot of traffic? Most of our clients drive as much, if not more, traffic from social media than they do from Google.
I love…the power of social media advertising tools. Social media companies like Facebook make billions of dollars annually by selling advertising on their platform. The tools they provide advertisers are incredibly powerful.
Social media companies have a massive amount of information about their users. They also provide advertisers with tools that let you use this information to target your advertising dollars.
Would you like to put an ad in front of every Facebook user within ten miles of your funeral home who also likes fishing, veteran’s causes, and the NRA? It’s possible!
But…
I hate…the hostile and judgemental tone of discussions on social media. People say some disgusting things on social media that they would never say in person. I wish social media companies did a better job of filtering posts, but the real problem is the person who made the post in the first place.
As a funeral professional, you put a lot of effort into conducting yourself in a certain manner. When you put something out on Facebook and get a hostile response, you wonder if you want to be part of the online community.
I hate…how the social media algorithm feeds users an endless stream of content that reinforces a thought process.
Whenever someone pauses on something on social media, the algorithm records that as a vote and feeds you more of the same. Facebook has been doing that for years, and TikTok is incredibly good at it.
Personally, I blame this feature for much of the division in our society these days. If you only hear one side of an issue, you lose the ability to have an open conversation with those who disagree, and you’ll never find common ground.
I hate…how social media advertising can drain your wallet if you trust it too much.
For example, we run a lot of Facebook advertisements for our clients. Recently, Facebook introduced a new feature called “Facebook Advantage”. We decided to test it and ran an ad targeting people within ten miles of the funeral home with a budget of $10.
When we checked the results, Facebook initially ran the ad locally but then switched to running it nationwide, overriding our targeting. They quickly used up the $10 budget and started prompting us to give them more money.
“Facebook Advantage” is a great name for this program because it is definitely to Facebook’s advantage, not the advertisers.
I definitely have a love/hate relationship with social media. I always advise my clients to leverage social media, but do it with great caution.
My #1 tip for leveraging social media is to treat it like a garden for local relationships. You have to plant the seeds of a relationship with people in your community, then nurture the relationship, and when the time is right, you can harvest.
If you try to harvest too quickly, you will damage your relationships. Unfortunately, the preneed marketing companies do this all the time when they fill a funeral home’s Facebook page with an endless stream of preneed ads.
Google is a powerful tool when it comes to generating at-need calls.
But social media is better for harvesting near-need or preneed leads.
To build a successful funeral home business, you need both.
Our social media program, Social Leverage, addresses all three steps: plant, nurture, and harvest. If your social media vendor isn’t following this three-step process, they are wasting your money and damaging your relationship garden.
Until next time
John
PS: Contact me if you’d like to leverage social media to generate near-need and preneed leads. Planting and nurturing is hard work, but it’s worth the effort when harvest time comes around.
