Oxford Dictionary defines a marketing campaign as an organized course of action designed to sell a product or service.
In my 10-step Checklist for Growing Your Funeral Home Business, step #9 is to leverage the power of marketing campaigns. If you want to increase your at-need or preneed funeral business, one of the best ways is to leverage the power of marketing campaigns.
By the way, a marketing campaign will ALWAYS outperform an individual advertisement. If you’ve spent money on advertising this year and did not get an ROI, this newsletter will help you understand what went wrong.
The common building block of most funeral home marketing is hope.
You advertise and hope someone will remember you when they experience a loss.
You spend time with the local hospice managers and hope they will refer families your way.
You care for an at-need family and hope they will remember you next time.
You conduct a flawless funeral and hope the guests who attend the service will remember you when their time comes.
Hope is usually a good thing. But in today’s super-competitive world, you can’t build your funeral home business on hope alone.
I believe that the common building block of your funeral home marketing should be relationships.
The primary goal of all of your marketing is not to hope that someone will remember you. It’s to start and nurture a relationship so that, eventually, you will win the call.
How do you market your funeral home so that you start and nurture a relationship? You leverage marketing campaigns.
marketing campaign (noun) – an organized course of action designed to sell a product or service.
In my case, I am in the business of providing marketing services to funeral home owners. I write this newsletter every week as part of my marketing campaign. I nurture a relationship by giving my subscribers valuable and practical business-building advice.
But have you ever seen a “Buy Now” button in one of my newsletters? No.
Asking you to become a client before we build a relationship would be like asking someone to get married on a first date. It won’t work, and you’ll probably never see the person again.
Instead, now and then, my newsletter contains an easy first step like a Google Audit. If you request an audit, we will trade some emails and have a face-to-face Zoom call. If we both feel like it could be win-win relationship and the timing is right, we will sign an agreement, and I’ll take you on as a client.
Here is a slightly different definition of marketing campaigns for funeral home owners.
marketing campaign (noun) – an organized course of action designed to start and nurture a relationship that leads to you winning the call and serving the family.
Most people, including too many marketers, think of a marketing campaign as a series of advertisements. In fact, the ads are only a tiny part of a complete campaign. For example, your campaign might include the following.
- Facebook ads
- Google ads
- TV commercials
- Special landing pages on a website
- Downloadable documents (e.g., planning guide)
- Follow up emails
- Scripts for how to answer the phone when someone responds
- Presentation materials and handouts for meeting with a family
- Packages to simplify the purchase decision
- Follow-up materials if they decide to move forward later.
When designing a custom campaign for a client, I begin by writing a campaign master. This is a short document that outlines the main points of the campaign.
- Controlling idea – What is the underlying theme of the campaign
- Story question – What question do we want someone to ask themself as a result of the campaign?
- Agitate the problem – How can we connect the theme to a problem in their life?
- Stakes – What is at stake if they don’t fix the problem?
- Guide statement – How do we position ourselves as the guide who can help them get through this experience?
- Plan – What is the three-step plan for resolving the problem?
- Call-to-action – What do we want them to do?
- Foreshadow the climatic scene – What does success look like?
Then, as you create various campaign pieces, you always draw the content from the campaign master. As a result, you have a consistent theme throughout the campaign, significantly improving the ROI.
Each person has different needs, which will change as they step through the campaign process. When designing a marketing campaign, the key is that at each step in the process, you should ask yourself, “How can I help this person?”.
If you focus on helping at every step of the process, you will be able to nurture the relationship and eventually win the call.
This will be my last newsletter of 2023. I’ll be traveling the next two weeks, visiting family & friends. We have a bunch of flights to catch, and hopefully, our luggage decides to take the same flights this time (that’s been a problem for us in the past).
I look forward to helping you win more calls in 2024. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
John
