interview with Keith Hartman
digital strategist for Golden Considerations
I have included the full transcript below, and there are a few important insights here that I don’t want you to miss. So, I wanted to lay these important points out here for you first.
Podcast take aways…
- Direct-mail is NOT dead! The ‘community survey’ pre-need funeral marketing strategy continues to be an effective way to generate new pre-need funeral sales leads. We have simply taken that proven marketing method and applied it to the digital arena and specifically in this case, facebook marketing for pre-need funeral sales.
- This is a powerful example of how the pandemic changed the marketplace and in this case created MORE opportunity for you should you decide to take advantage of it.
- Time is of the essence when responding to your pre-need funeral sales leads
- Your pre-need funeral leads are all on facebook! 77% of them!!!
- Testing is the key to great facebook marketing and we’ve done ALL the testing for YOU which saves you both time and money.
- Pre-need funeral leads are converting better when you keep them on facebook and don’t drive them to a separate landing page.
- Facebook Lead Forms are a powerful tool and facebook is VERY VERY good at continuing to find prospects who are both good prospects and who are more likely to complete your forms and opt-in.
Here’s the full transcript of the interview
–Mr Preneed
Yeah, absolutely. So we started off utilizing what we call the community survey concept, which was kind of born out of the, the direct piece mailer. That’s a, almost a 20 questionnaire that goes out in the mail, um, via direct mail, so forth. And what would happen is, you know, people would fill it out, they’d send it back. And obviously when they send it back, it’s usually sometimes two, three weeks later. And in doing so, we, we realized real quickly the time is of the essence when it comes to any kind of campaign that we run. And when we sat down and really evaluated digitally, what we could do differently with that concept, we looked at all the platforms, you know, whether it be, you know, Google, Facebook, Instagram, you know, there’s so many different platforms out there right now that we had to really evaluate what would really capture the audience that we’re going after.
And with the funeral home industry, it’s, it really is becoming more increasingly that, that 55 plus year old audience, right. That’s really more engaged in learning more about preplanning. Um, so in looking at that, it’s, it’s one of those things where we, we observed Facebook and I wouldn’t say it was the right timing, but when I got hired in 2020, it was February. Um, and then all of a sudden the pandemic hit, and this is where it just kind of went crazy where, you know, people were now being confined in their homes, uh, and not being able to actually be out there with their families any longer cause of the pandemic with COVID. And I will never say it was the right timing, but it tend to help our industry in a way that, of digitally being in front of the audience in a way it’s never done, been done before.
And we saw the growth, um, right outta the gates, probably in the first, I’d say three or four months on Facebook, we saw a huge impact of that, that audience they used to, they call it the silent generation. Those who are born, um, that are usually 65 and older, uh, I guess we still term it baby boomers, but they, they look at that as far as the people that really boomed hate to use that term, but really exploded onto that platform more than ever before. And for, and looking back, I think in 2019, it was roughly around 46% of the audience, as far as on, on Facebook, soon as 2020 hit with a COVID pandemic, it grew to almost 76, 70 8% in that quick of a time period. And that’s just cause of users being more, wanting to be tied to their family some way, staying in touch with them, seeing videos, seeing pictures and so forth.
So when we started launching this campaign, we really had to come at it really soft. And we really looked at the strategy of the wording to not be coming across as ambulance chasers in any way. And we tested, we found two different kind of wordings that worked very well. What I mean, how we, we, how we test the wording is based on engagement. We’re looking at in an engagement of being, you know, somewhere between one and 2% as being healthy with any kind of ad concept, especially with this format that you see here with the community survey. And it, it really was leading back in the day being kind of minimized. We took that 20, uh, piece questionnaire and turned it into six to 10 questions only because people were targeting on Facebook are mobilely they’re on mobile devices. So they’re not on desktop, they’re on mobile devices and on mobile, if, if anyone looks at mobile nowadays, it’s kind of that, that 30 seconds and gone your next month to the next element that you’re looking for in your mobile device.
You’re not on it for too long. So you want something that is quick, simple, um, and people can continue on with their day without being kind of tasked like they’re being drawn away from something for too long. So at first launch with the concept, we actually went out and actually utilized landing pages. We still do that today with some clients who like, and prefer using landing pages. And it was our, it was our concept for about almost a year and a half where we were sending people to landing pages that mocked up and looked identically to that client’s website to a T. We were able to clone that, that look and feel. And it gave a sense of trust to the users who knew and trusted the funeral homes that when they went to that landing page, that they didn’t think it was anything the spammy, or it was thinking that it was something that they’re, you know, they’re being taken off guard.
And in fact that, you know, we had so many good submissions that way, but what we realized is people over time didn’t wanna leave the Facebook we experience, they didn’t wanna be taken out of Facebook. They were in the app and, and if you had to let ’em outside the app is like, you’re just taking away the experience from them. So we found a better way about a year and a half using Facebook’s lead form match it’s called lead generation. And it keeps them within the actual app itself and keeps it kind of a, when you click on the actual learn more or download options on the actual ad, it keeps ’em within, inside the Facebook app, they don’t leave the engaging part of the app itself. So they can actually answer all those questions very fast, very efficiently and move on to the next part of their day, which is nice. And we found out, uh, almost went from, I’d say a 3% lead generation tall, close to 30 to 40% lead generation when it comes to conversions, which was phenomenal.