Marketing for independent funeral homes
We make certain yours is on that list, and that it is the one they trust.
F&M has worked with independent, family-held firms and no one else since 2009
68
22+
2009
0
The state of play
None of this is a failure of effort. It is what happens to a profession that became very good at serving families and was never given a reason to become good at being found by them.
61%
Cremation passed burial nationally and rises a point or two most years. A cremation call brings a fraction of what a traditional funeral brings, which means the same number of calls is worth less every twelve months. Firms chasing call count alone are running to stand still. The work now is mix- services attached to cremation, and pre-need signed years ahead of the day it is needed.
83%
On a typical firm's website, obituary pages take the overwhelming majority of all visits. Most are slow, unindexed, awkward to share and lead nowhere - no service details a search engine can read, no flower or donation path, no reason to return. It is the largest wasted asset in the profession, and it already belongs to you.
3
Someone whose mother died an hour ago does not compare six websites. They look at the first three local results and telephone one. If your profile is thin, your holiday hours wrong, your photographs from 2014 or your last review four years old, you are not among those three-however long your family has stood on Main Street.
1 in 7
We measure answer rate on every account from the first week. Across firms new to us, roughly one first call in seven is never picked up by a person - nights, lunch hours, and the twenty minutes when everyone is at a graveside. A family that reaches a recording rings the next name on the list. It is the cheapest problem in this profession to fix and the most expensive to leave it.
~20%
When a group buys the firm two towns over, it arrives with a media budget you cannot match and a brand built to look local. You do not win that on spend. You win it on the one thing that cannot be purchased: being the family that has buried this town's families for four generations and being visible enough that people remember it.
The work
Divided the way the profession itself divides. Most firms need the first two. Almost every firm needs the third, and almost none ask for it - which is usually apparent the moment you walk through the door.
Being found, and being chosen, in the hour it actually matters.
Filling a calendar with arrangement appointments that become signed contracts.
How the firm looks and reads - in the hand, and on the street.
The world is changing. Your story still matters.
How we work
A genuine sequence, not a diagram. Nothing in the third stage functions if the second was skipped, which is why we will not skip it for you.
We pull your share of deaths in the county, your visibility against every firm you compete with by name, your answer rate across a fortnight of real calls, and where your obituary traffic actually goes. It arrives as a written report and a ninety-minute conversation. You keep it either way.
TWO WEEKS . NO CHARGE
Profile corrected, site made fast and indexable, obituary templates rebuilt, call tracking installed, review flow wired into your aftercare. Unglamorous, and the reason everything afterwards works. We do not run campaigns into a broken funnel.
WEEKS 3 - 8
Pre-need mail and digital weighted toward autumn, when people plan. At-need visibility held year-round and pressed harder from December through February, when your call volume rises whether or not you are ready for it.
MONTH 3 ONWARD
One page, every month, on the same day. Calls, answer rate, appointments set, contracts signed, cost per appointment, share of county. If a line is not moving we say so in writing before you have to ask, along with what we intend to do about it.
MONTHLY, ONGOING
A clearer tomorrow for the families you serve.
One idea in full
Consider what an obituary actually is, in traffic terms. Several hundred people read it within seventy-two hours. Nearly all of them live within thirty miles of your building. Every one of them has a personal reason to be reading it, and a meaningful share will need a funeral home themselves within the decade.
“An obituary is the only page on a funeral home's website that people share voluntarily, at scale, without ever being asked to.”
There is no advertisement you could buy that would reach that audience in that frame of mind. You are already publishing it several times a week, and giving it away.
Then look at what most firms do with it. A photograph squeezed into a template. Service times written where a search engine cannot read them. A guest book that demands registration. No path to flowers or a memorial donation. And nothing at the foot of the page but a copyright line from a website built in 2016.
Repaired properly, the same page carries the family gently toward the things they are already looking for, ranks for the name being searched, loads in under two seconds on a phone, and quietly reminds four hundred neighbours who you are. No pop-up. Nothing that would embarrass you if the family saw it - because they will.
What it’s worth
Marketing in this profession is usually argued in impressions. It is better argued in calls, because you already know exactly what a call is worth to you. Use your own figures - nothing here is sent anywhere.
An estimate on the figures you entered, before cost of sale. Our retainers run from $2,400 to $7,500 a month.
Case notes
Anonymised at the firms' request. Figures taken from their reporting, not ours.
FOUR GENERATIONS TWO LOCATIONS SOUTHERN OHIO
A group bought the firm eleven miles north and spent heavily for three years. Our client had lost nine points of county share and could not say precisely where it went. We rebuilt the obituary system, corrected two badly duplicated profiles, and put a proper pre-need mail programme in front of 9,400 households.
SINGLE LOCATION 78% CREMATION COASTAL MAINE
A well-run firm with a high cremation mix and a website that buried its own obituaries. No structured service details, no sharing that worked by text, eleven reviews in nine years. We rebuilt the templates, added an aftercare sequence, and left the rest of the site alone because it did not need us.
"For years I was told we needed to be on social media. What we actually needed was for the telephone to be answered at two in the morning, and for our obituaries to come up when somebody searched a name. Nobody had ever put it to me that plainly before."
FOURTH-GENERATION OWNER THREE LOCATIONS UPSTATE NEW YORK
Checked before it runs
Everything we write for you is read against the FTC Funeral Rule before it is published — price claims, package language, every "starting at" figure, and how the General Price List is presented on the website.
If a campaign idea will not survive the Rule, you hear it from us at the concept stage rather than after have paid for the print run. We are not attorneys and we will say so; for anything genuinely close to the line, we will tell you to ask yours.
Terms & questions
The things directors ask on the first call, answered before you have to ask them.
Retainers run from $2,400 a month for a single location to $7,500 for multi-location firms with substantial print work. Media and postage are billed at cost and itemised. The market audit is free and carries no obligation.
The market audit is free and carries no obligation. We will discuss the terms of any ongoing engagement with you before work begins.
One firm per market. If we already work with a firm in your market, we will tell you in our first reply.
We start with the audit to understand what needs attention. As in our coastal Maine case note, we can rebuild the obituary templates and leave the rest of a site alone when it does not need us.
Pre-need is one of our three bodies of work, from planning guides and direct mail to appointment setting and reporting on signed contracts. We will discuss the right scope for your firm during the audit.
Our work is built around your firm, your market and your own enquiries. Ask us about your requirements during the initial conversation.
We are a marketing firm working with independent, family-held funeral firms. The audit conversation is an opportunity to discuss who will work on your engagement and how the work will be handled.
Begin here
Two weeks of work, a written report on your market and your firm's standing within it, and ninety minutes of our time to walk you through what it says.
Or simply get in touch:
By Appointment Only