written and produced by john c ashworth
full transcript
Speaker 1: (00:00)
o if you think about it right now, the task of a funeral home website is actually a big one. It's a tall one because you're trying to do a lot of things at once, and you have to remember a few important things here. First one is three most visited pages on your website. Number one, of course, are the obituaries. That's why 85% of your website visitors have come to your website today. So you wanna make those easy to find. You wanna make that experience amazing, and you do not wanna underestimate not just the experience, but the infrastructure on which that obituary and tri wall platform is built. And that is easy to do when you don't have the technologically technological savvy to do it. I talk to funeral directors and funeral homeowners all the time who admit, candidly, John, I'm not that technologically savvy, but boy, I have a lot of trust in you and your expertise and your team at Fraser and attribute technology.
Speaker 1: (01:00)
Now, I'm gonna put this in your hands. Just let me know what you need from me so we can accomplish something special. That's a truly unique and amazing experience for both the customer and for us. I mean, to have that level of trust from your customers is amazing. It's a really important thing to be cognizant of and to be aware of and to admit that you can't and don't know everything when it comes to this technology because every single one of the obituaries that you lay down on your funeral home website is a new page on your website, which is enhancing your search engine optimization. It is building what I like to call now your online real estate. You really have to start thinking about it that way. And actually, you should have started thinking about that way like 10 years ago, but that's okay.
Speaker 1: (01:48)
Get on board now and you won't fall behind if you don't get on board. Now, I'm afraid you might fall behind, and this is really, really important. Design of your website is also a very important component. Component. This is a reflection of you, your brand, your website, your funeral home website, as I like to say, is a living, breathing, communication and messaging system that you use on a daily basis to reach the families you're serving, including the people who have lost the loved one and their extended networks, and everyone and anyone else who comes into contact with your website today to look for that obituary. 85% of those folks because then the second most visited page on your website is your services page. People wanna know more about your services, and as a side note, it's important to remember that more than 90% of the time, people don't shop more than one funeral home website, more than one funeral, funeral home.
Speaker 1: (02:45)
They hire the first one that they visit online. So you wanna make sure that you're getting people there to begin with. That goes back to the search engine optimization, the tribute wall, the engagement that's happening there, because another really important thing that's happening on that tribute wall, which is how long is someone there before they leave otherwise known in the industry as bounce rate? How long is somebody on your website before they bounce away? The longer they're there, the more authority that builds for you. Your funeral home website, your funeral home brand, but your online real estate and your authority in the eyes of Google and all the other big search engines. So 85% of the website traffic is coming to visit an obituary, and then they're going to your services pages, and then where are they going next? You can guess, right? That's right.
Speaker 1: (03:31)
It's your about us page about you, and this is a major missed opportunity on 80% or more of the funeral home websites that I visit and look at on a daily basis. Missing incomplete, boring, unexciting information and bios and stories on your funeral home website. Your history is important. Your legacy is amazing. The tradition of your funeral home passed down through the ages. That is all fantastic and that all needs and should be there, but you need to do this in a fully engaging way. You need to do it with great imagery and not just great imagery, but imagery that an expert design team can take and tweak and crop and shape and put in all the right places on your funeral home website so that the finished product is just as unique as you are. We hear the complaint all the time. I don't want another cookie cutter website.
Speaker 1: (04:26)
All funeral home websites look the same, and I think all of us get a bad rap for that because we can build you something super custom and super unique. The first thing is you need to invest in it. It's not free. You can get a free funeral home website and that's fine. But if you want the expert Frazier design team to fully engage with you and your brand and your unique messaging and your unique mission and everything you're trying to accomplish with this new online presence with your online real estate, you need to invest in it time. It takes time, energy, and money for us to create that for you. That is most often what draws a new Frazier website customer into the fold is our designs. But going back to finish that point that I was on, how we get a bad rap, A lot of funeral home websites look the same because most funeral home owners approach the project the same.
Speaker 1: (05:20)
Take it from good to great, and you can do that with just a little more time, energy, and engagement. And by hiring the right team, partnering with the right company like Frazier, third, that about us section, make it unique, make it interesting, add video. There's some additional content here, and additional resources I've created you as part of this sequence of content that I've created for you is the power of video on your funeral home website. You know, when I first got to Frazier way back in 2018, January, 2018, that was the year, actually, it was the year before that, and that was the year everybody started talking about video. You gotta have video, you gotta do video. I've been doing video for 20 years. Of course you need to do video. It's amazing, and it can produce amazing results for you. And when you incorporate more video into your About Us concept, don't think about it as one page.
Speaker 1: (06:14)
That's where it starts. Bios of you and your staff. People want to see who you are, they want to know who you are, they want to understand who you are, and they don't want to be bored while you're doing that. So keep that in mind. It's kind of a tall task. And again, this goes back to the beginning of this podcast, which is so these are the three most important parts of your funeral home website and look at how different they are On one end, it's the consumer facing stuff, the 85% of people who are there to find an obituary, to leave, hopefully a condolence message, maybe send flowers or order a memorial tree or a tribute book, or buy some legacy, touch, fingerprint, jewelry, all things you can do now on a funeral home website built by Frazier consultants. That's the largest group of individuals, but some of those individuals are good pre-need prospects.
Speaker 1: (07:01)
Some of those individuals are gonna need you in your funeral home in the relatively near future. How do you take them from the obituary to expressing interest in what you do or reaching them after they've been on your website with retargeting ads, for example, on Facebook, and then getting them to opt in somewhere else so that you can corral them into your universe and teach them about how awesome you are and unique you are, so that when their need does arise, you are the place that they call in. And remember, more than 90% of those folks don't shop around. Your website has to accomplish all three of those things, and the job is never done. It is ongoing and should be ongoing, and you can make it better and more powerful over time with more and more engaging and powerful content, which starts with your obituaries because that's what most people are there to do.
Speaker 1: (07:54)
But then expands outward into things like the digital marketing system for Facebook, the growth engine technology, your blog, putting video on your website, learning how to convert website visitors into subscribers and other people who subscribe to the obituary listings and other forms of content and other opportunities. You have to opt in so that when the time comes, for example, for you to run a pre-need event, you've got a big list to pull from. You can market to that list and you can put people in those seats a lot more easily and be more successful. Your website, again, is at the hub of all of this, and it is vital and crucial and important that you do not underestimate how just, I mean, just how important this is right now, because like I said, you can continue to ignore it and most will, but those that don't will be far ahead of the competition in the coming years. You mark my words. I would love to talk with you more about that here at Frazier Consultants. My name is John Ashworth. I'm an account executive, otherwise
Speaker 1: (08:55)
Known as salesperson here at Fraser with a ton of passion in a lot of different departments. But the main one being sales, marketing, and technology for your funeral home. It starts with a Fraser website and we expand outward from there into amazing content, amazing design, and amazing ways to engage the people visiting those websites. But then also with case management software, marketing software, and a variety of other really amazing products like our new guiding grief library that you can make available on your tri. Hope to hear from you soon. Take care, John Ashworth signing off.
