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Funeral Home Marketing: Using Google My Business Posts to Boost Traffic
Chad Zollinger • June 25, 2019
Funeral home owners nationwide are missing out on valuable marketing opportunities.
As a marketing-focused funeral home owner, you have two types of online traffic you need to track and grow: paid traffic and organic traffic.
Paid traffic is… well, the traffic you pay for. Google ads, LinkedIn ads, Right Page ads, boosted social posts, and Facebook ads for funeral homes
fall under this category.
Organic traffic is free traffic. If you rank highly in Google for a valuable keyword like “Best Funeral Home,” you’re likely going to have a lot of organic traffic flowing into your site, ready to become customers.
In this article, we’re going to focus on organic traffic and one of the most important local ranking factors for funeral homes: Google My Business (GMB).
“Businesses that are in a competitive location and industry should use Google My Business optimizing strategies and features like posts if they want to get an edge on their competition.”
— Ben Fisher, Co-founder of Steady Demand
Read on to learn how to maximize your funeral home's visibility on Google.
Google My Business Basics: Does It Work?
Think about it. When customers want to find your number, where is the first place they’ll look?
Google.
Google created Google My Business to quickly answer any questions that searchers might have about your brand.
It’s a place to put content that informs your customers about your company before they even reach your website.
With GMB, you can:
- Add photos
- Add videos
- Detail business hours
- Describe your company
- Provide questions and answers
- Add a “book appointment” feature
- Communicate with customers
- Respond to reviews
- Create Google My Business posts
But, does Google My Business actually help your funeral home get more traffic and more at-need families?
According to leading research into Google My Business, GMB “signals” make up 25% of the total factors that Google uses for local pack rankings.
This means that everything you put on your funeral home’s GMB profile will contribute to your overall local ranking.
Are you using Google My Business to boost your local Google ranking?
Google My Business Posts Help Funeral Homes Rank Better
Google My Business also allows you to create posts — almost 60% of local businesses are posting on Google My Business.
In fact, according to further Moz research, more people are clicking on GMB posts than are seeing the actual business.
When someone views a business directly, there are post clicks almost 100% of the time. This is an outstanding number. GMB posts are almost guaranteed to get reads.
This is a good thing.
It means that each person who sees your funeral home will likely click on multiple posts when they search your funeral home.
If you take the time to create an impactful and impressionable marketing message through your GMB posts, those leads will be even more likely to turn into customers.
But what kind of content do you post on GMB?
Think of GMB posts as mini ads for your company. The different Google My Business posts types are:
- Update
- Event
- Offer
- Product
Funeral home owners with an eye for marketing will immediately recognize the benefit of Event posts, as both aftercare and preneed marketing involve events in customer acquisition.
Funeral homes can also use Offer posts to draw potential preneed and at-need families to their funeral home with discounts.
Update and Product posts will also prove useful to funeral home owners who want to keep customers up-to-date on news and any new products/services.
All of these posts have Call to Action options (CTAs) available. You can place a Book, Order Online, Buy, Learn More, Sign Up, Get Offer, and Call Now CTA in your GMB post.
According to Google, GMB posts have 4 main benefits:
- Facilitate direct communication from you to your local customers
- Improve customer experience with timely information
- Promote your sales, specials, events, news, and offers
- Appeal to your customers with engaging videos and photos
Because posts go dark after 7 days, you should be posting at least weekly.
It is recommended that every time you post on Google My Business, you also share the post on all of your social media channels.
You should also remember that only the first 100 words are visible on screen. That’s where you should put the most valuable information — this will draw searchers in and influence them to click on your post to read more.
How to Post on Google My Business
Posts are incredibly easy to create with Google My Business.
Just sign in or verify your Google My Business account.
Once you’ve signed in, you can either go to the “Posts” section of your profile or simply click “Create post.”
Choose the post type you’d like and then create your post by adding a photo, writing the post itself, and inserting an appropriate CTA.
You did it!
You can view the analytics behind your GMB posts on your Google My Business dashboard.
Funeral Home Articles
If there's one thing we've learned in 2020, it's that it's difficult to predict the future, and there will all be surprises that lie ahead. Businesses and individuals need to stay agile and adaptable to be ready for whatever life throws at them. 2020 has been a challenging year for the funeral profession and others as well. Still, we've seen that those funeral homes and funeral professionals who have focused on making their consumer experience as comforting and easy as possible are those that are winning. At Domani, we exist to help funeral homes help their families have a better experience. Through the power of text messaging, we follow up with families and give them the support and resources they need following a loss. That great experience then leads to a positive online review and helps others looking for a positive experience to find that funeral home. It's a virtuous cycle that helps grow a funeral home's at-need business. When it comes to preneed, the same principle holds. If funeral homes can provide the experience a family is looking for, that will be the funeral home that wins. During 2020, our preneed appointment setting team has found great success in scheduling remote appointments. Funeral homes that have been willing to adapt and find new ways to do business have grown even during difficult circumstances. We firmly believe that technology will help us as a funeral profession provide those better experiences for families, but simply using technology for technology's sake is not the answer. We need to leverage technology to help provide personal, engaging experiences with families. We shouldn't use technology as a crutch or an excuse. It's another way to help the ones we serve and provide them the support they need during a difficult time. As we approach the end of the year and look forward to 2020, take some time to think about how your funeral home is providing meaningful experiences for families and how/what you can do to improve that in the coming year. If you're interested in learning more about Domanicare or Domani Appoinment Setting, please schedule a demo by clicking the link below.
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