How Trust Fills Your Funeral Home - Win Their Heart Before They Need You

 What do HVAC plumbing, electrical, and funeral services all have in common? Sit on that for a minute. I wanna share a quick story with you. The year is 1904, and automobiles have recently been invented. The automobile companies are all competing against each other for the ultra wealthy because they're the only ones who can afford them.

Henry Ford has a mission. He has a vision. He wants to provide automobiles for the masses. He believes that everyday people should have just as much access to transportation as the ultra wealthy. So while his competitors are going to each other to seek out innovation, he goes somewhere very different. He goes to the Swift and Company meat packing plant in Chicago.

What he saw there was a rail that would carry the pig carcass from start to finish with each worker cutting off one piece of meat. What this ultimately led to was Henry Ford taking this innovation of the pig disassembly line and bringing it back into his own industry, referred to as the assembly line.

This gave him the scale that he needed to be able to produce cars at a much faster pace and bring automobiles to the masses.

I shared this story with you because so often by just looking at innovations from within our own industry, we can become blind to the opportunities and the problems that have been solved from other industries. And so as we talk through today how to market funeral homes, I want to encourage you to keep an open mind as I bring in what other industries have spent years of blood, sweat, and tears learning about how to market their essential businesses.

So what do funeral services HVAC, plumbing, electricians, and insurance companies all have in common? They are all grudge buys. Put another way, no one wants to spend money on them. No one wants to think about them, and yet they are essential. This you're more likely to win the lottery than you are that your social media posts will go viral and you're marketing is just fundamentally different from most businesses.

So again, my encouragement to you would be be like Henry Ford. Allow yourself to think outside the box as we have this conversation.

As we get started, I would love to know to what extent do you currently view marketing as a cost against your bottom line or your EBITDA versus is the primary driver of growth? Is it more something that you do because you feel like you should, or you just don't do it at all?

Or are you actually getting enough business from it? You're actually getting enough calls from it that it's making it well worth it.

For context as we get started. my name is Matt Willis with Wizard of Ads, and we specialize in large part in helping grow essential businesses like funeral service businesses. So what I'm anticipating, is you do marketing to the extent that you do not because you get a whole lot from it.

But because other funeral homes are doing it and so you feel like you kind of should. So before we move forward, I want to map out the most important part of all of this. Before we get into marketing tactics or anything like that, I wanna talk about your customer, since we know that most people don't plan ahead for a death in the family.

What tends to happen is an individual experiences the death of a loved one. From there, they have a few paths that they can take. The first one would be that they go to Google. They type in something like funeral home near me, and they see just strangers. There's no trust that exists between them and the funeral home, and so they compare based on what's easiest to compare: price and location. This is what they perceive as safe, given this context. This person is your most expensive lead and your least loyal customer, while as we'll get into later, there's not a whole lot of shopping around that goes on in this process.

That which does happen in this industry, comes in this category. Now, path number two is they experience a death in the family and they go to Facebook. In other words, they are seeking recommendations from people that they at least trust from a distance, or they remember a funeral home that they've seen in their feed previously that felt warm and hum as opposed to just a any other cold business.

Interestingly, 40% of families in 2025 used a funeral home that they found through Facebook, which is nearly double what it was in 2023. In this context, trust with the community determines who gets mentioned. If you haven't been showing up in that community for years, you won't be in anyone's memory When someone asks path number three is they call someone they trust.

This could be a friend or a neighbor or a pastor, hospice nurse, fill in the blank. They want a name from someone they already trust. That referral carries enormous weight and is almost always acted upon

in this context. Your name flows through people, not algorithms, and this is why your relationship with your community, including referral sources like hospice nurses and pastors matters so much. So as we're moving through these, I would imagine that most of you are thinking, okay, these are getting progressively more and more desirable as far as calls that we could get.

And you're exactly right. So then what is path number four? Path number four is they come straight to you. This is the goal. This is what every funeral home wants. In this context, the family has already decided before this moment arrived. They type your name directly into the search bar. In other words, price is pretty much irrelevant. They're not shopping. They just need to know what to do next. This is what we're aiming for, not to win and search, but to make this search basically irrelevant so is it safe to say you would much prefer them come straight to you than shop around for you?

Okay. Some interesting stats about the funeral service industry. Most of the decisions that happen happen in the midst of the worst moment in someone's life. 

Next. I wanna share some fascinating research with you that needs to inform any strategy that a funeral home has. 75 to 83% of funeral home selections happen at time of need, despite near universal acknowledgement that planning ahead is important. In other words, they're making an impulse decision about something that costs several thousand dollars usually.

In the worst emotional state of their life. Additionally, two thirds of families contact zero other funeral homes before deciding, which means the decision is either already made or they're going with someone who feels safest. They're not primarily comparison shopping, they're reaching for safety, and when no prior relationship exists, cheapest and closest becomes the only safety signal they have.

Put another way, safe equals trust equals preference. Those three words in this context are really interchangeable. if they feel safe with you, they'll trust you. And if they trust you, they will prefer you. And if you're their preference, you'll win when they need to make a call. So one of the challenges that the industry typically faces is the marketing that funeral homes do, tends to be all about the transaction. And when I talk about transactional marketing, I'm talking about just that you're focusing on the price, you're focusing on the services or the availability.

Nothing that makes you human. And the challenge there is when you promote your price, when you promote your services, all people have to compare you against is your price and your services. And in the absence of an emotional connection, people will always choose the cheapest price. When you train the market to evaluate you on price, you invite a race to the bottom, 

And in that race, the funeral home with the deepest pockets that can run on the lowest margin will win every time. You can't win that race sustainably.

Now I know what you're probably thinking. We work in a sensitive industry and it feels wrong, maybe even exploitive to market our business. And trust me, I do hear that and I want to respect your perspective on that. But when I'm talking about stuff like relational marketing and building your brand, I'm not talking primarily about self-promotion, it's more of a community service.

I see it as people are going to need to make a decision on who to go with eventually. You are helping them understand who you are before they enter that heightened emotional state. You are helping them make an informed decision ahead of time.

There is a significant difference. Between a funeral home that runs price-based ads and one that shares why they do this work, what they believe, what it means to be trusted at the hardest moment of someone's life. The first one is selling. The second one is serving. And frankly, this is why I love getting to do what I do.

I spent over a decade in corporate helping them grow their businesses. And what I found transparently is there were a lot of people who were making a lot of money, and it didn't feel like any of them had their soul intact. The reason I love growing smaller businesses is typically, this is personal. It's meaningful.

You find tremendous joy, value, and purpose in what you do. And I find so much more joy in serving people like you than serving corporate people and helping them raise their stock valuation. All relational marketing is doing is helping people to know, like, and trust you so they can make an informed decision.

From my experience, funeral directors are some of the most purpose driven professionals I've ever had The joy of coming across. You do work that no one else would do that they don't even want to think about because you believe that families deserve to be cared for at the worst moment of their life.

It's not a job, it's a calling.

And almost none of you have anyone in your corner helping you tell that story. And frankly, that bothers me. And that's part of why I'm thankful and excited to be here. What you do deserves to be known, not because it's good for your business, though it is, but because the families in your community deserve to know who you are before they're standing at your door in crisis.

It's not about marketing. At least that's what I believe.

So let's talk about the science behind how trust actually gets built so that you can connect with hearts before they need what you offer. The science behind trust states that 84% of people will choose a brand that they preferred before they entered the market.

I put another way, if someone already likes you and has a draw toward your funeral home before a loved one passes away, they're 84% likely, if not higher, to select you. That's what we're talking about today. It's how can we become the most liked, trusted, and preferred funeral home in your region? I would argue that funeral homes likely sit at the high end of that range too, because people aren't doing months of research.

They're typically going to reach for whoever already feels like the answer. So most of funeral home marketing from my experience, focuses on people who are actively in the market. This means two to maybe 5% of the total market, is actively being marketed to. And there's a number of challenges here. One, they're a very small piece of the pie, and two, they're mostly already decided.

And three, this is the most expensive time to acquire a new lead or a call because Google, for example, wants a cut. And they run an auction. And so if for example, you're doing Google ads, you're competing against all the other funeral homes in the area for that lead. They also tend to be the most cost conscious.

Now, from my experience working with essential businesses like yours, is that the real opportunity is in connecting with the 95%. These people you can build a relationship with before they need you and make people fall a little bit in love with you so that when the triggering event happens, a death in the family or a close loved one, they don't just search, they straight up call you.

Then once you've had the opportunity to serve them. Then they begin telling others and the cycle continues. Investing in brand investing in relationship offers compound interest, unlike trying to market to people who are actively in the market.

So then the natural question would be, how do we build trust or preference through our marketing? There are really four ingredients that go into it. The first one is building an emotional connection and showing empathy. Put another way the heart decides.

The brain just writes the explanation afterward. People don't bond with organizations, they bond with people. So emotional connection and empathy is about using your marketing to share who you are, why you got into this work, what you believe, and the stories that make you human. Because humans trust humans, not organizations.

It's the same concept within marriage. You don't fall in love with a brochure. You fall in love with a human. And you deepen that bond by showing more and more and more of your heart, and by hearing more and more and more of theirs. 

how many in your community know yours?

Ingredient Number two is competence. Families don't just want to know that you can do a cremation, for example, that you can host a ceremony. They want to believe that if something goes terribly wrong, you'll run interference.

They're going to trust you at the worst moment of their lives. Competence means I know that no matter what happens, you'll make this as easy and as honoring as possible. The vast majority of you, I believe, do phenomenal work and would move heaven and earth to help a family. This is what marketers would refer to as an unleveraged asset, meaning you're doing the thing but nobody knows.

Competence can be demonstrated, for example, through happy stories, which we'll get into in just a few minutes. Ingredient number three, for building trust and preference. Within your community would be having your marketing be consistent. And to clarify, when I'm talking about your marketing, I'm not simply talking about your flyers that you send out.

I'm talking about everything. Everything from your flyers to your website, to how you answer the call to the customer's experience, the family's experience when they walk through your doors. Literally every part of your business needs to be consistent with who you're portraying yourself to be.

Because when there is a lack of alignment between how we perceive someone to be and how they actually are, trust breaks. So if, for example, your marketing is all warm and fuzzy, but the person answering the call is kind of cold and distant. Trust is broken and it takes time to rebuild it. So making sure that across all of the experiences that families have with your brand are consistent is a vital importance.

Number four, frequency. Just like you don't fall in love with a person after a single impression from them, it takes time. It's the same thing with marketing. In order to build trust and preference within your community at large, it requires consistently showing up and increasingly building their understanding of who you are, what you believe, and what you value.

Just like you don't build a friendship by meeting, once you build it by showing up again and again in small ways over time. Your potential future customers are no different.

Frequency is what turns a name into a feeling.

So let's recap. First, people don't tend to research funeral services before they need them. Instead they choose the funeral home they have an emotional preference with. If they don't, they ask a trusted advisor. And if they don't have a trusted advisor, they go to Google. If you're competing for people in the market, you're paying top dollar for price sensitive leads. And if you build emotional preference with people before they're in the market.

They'll come directly to you and be much less cost sensitive. If I were to summarize all of this in one sentence, it would be in the absence of an emotional connection, people always choose the lowest price. So there's a lot of talk, lately about how funeral homes margins are being squeezed. Is it possible that if you built an emotional connection with your community at large, that you wouldn't be competing on price anymore. And trust me, I get it. There's still that potential bug in your ear that's saying, but we're talking about death. We're talking about funeral homes. This isn't the type of message that people wants to hear over the radio or see on tv.

Is that even possible? And the answer is yes. And of course it requires being sensitive. There are really three main messages that come to mind that'll be most deeply impactful and relevant for your line of business. The first one would be reflective storytelling.

Okay. Reflective storytelling is about sharing your story behind your funeral home, why you got into this work, what you believe, how your values show up every day,

and doing it in a way that connects with people's hearts.

An example of what this could look like, could be. " I grew up watching my father serve this community for 40 years.

He used to say, the measure of a funeral wasn't the flowers. It was whether the family walked out feeling like they'd honored someone who mattered. That's still our standard notice." There's no pitch, there's no price. Just a story that reveals the values. What's the story behind why you or your family got into this work?

Start thinking about how can I articulate that in just a few sentences? That story could well be the foundation of a phenomenal relational marketing campaign. Number two,

authenticity and vulnerability. The concept here is allowing your human truth to dissolve objections that they might have. Being real helps people relate to you and dissolves any potential assumption that your goal is to profit off of their grief. A moment of genuine honesty about the weight of this work

the privilege of being trusted at the hardest moment is more powerful than any tagline that you or I could come up with. To be honest, this one is remarkably hard to coach. One because people tend to be resistant to being vulnerable, and two, it's hard to be vulnerable without coming across as artificially vulnerable as we've seen on social media, for example.

So what could this actually look like? An example could be, " there are days in this work that stay with me. A mother who lost her 19-year-old, a husband who didn't know what to say when he called us. I've learned that presence matters more than words. That's what we bring every time."

This doesn't make people necessarily think about death. It makes them think about care. And there's a big distinction there. Vulnerability also addresses the elephant in the room, which is the assumption that you may be trying to profit off of someone's worst day. When you share the burden you are carrying in this work, that assumption begins to evaporate.

And the reality is there are a lot of happy stories that happen within the funeral home industry as well. And these can be used to help calm people's fears when the crisis arrives. For example, sharing stories of your team going above and beyond a ceremony that was exceptionally beautiful, or a family who came back to say thank you.

These stories are doing something very specific. They're letting future families rehearse in their head what it would be like to go through this with you

and they come away from that marketing feeling like, I think I'd actually be okay. An example of what this kind of marketing could look like would be " one of our families wanted to honor their father, his graveside with his favorite song, playing from a vintage record player that he'd owned for 50 years.

Our team tracked one down. Learned how to operate it and set it up that morning and the family still talks about it." See this story in what two sentences? It communicates competence as well as heart and going above and beyond in their time of need. You don't have to share cases that you've worked on.

You can share the types of experiences, the spirit of it and the values that they reveal.

Next, I wanna share with you what an ad from start to finish could sound like. And I want you to not only listen to what is said, but also what's missing.

He raised the light bulb and gazed into it, like it held some special power. I figured it was something master electricians did. But then he said, whatever you do, let your brilliance shine bright. 'cause people are gonna see it if you serve them well. They'll remember at the time, I didn't appreciate what he was trying to teach me.

I guess that's the way it can be with kids. By the time I understood it was too late to thank him, he said, true brilliance means no shortcuts. You have to be willing to sacrifice, treat every job and every customer like your reputation depends on. Because it does. That's how you earn the right to help others.

I'm David Hutton. You've probably seen our blue and orange trucks, the ones with the bright light bulb and my dad's name on the side. When your home's heating, air conditioning, or electrical system needs help, it would be an honor if you'd let me show my dad I was paying attention. Hutton Electric and Air, go to call hutton.com.

That's called H-U-T-T-O n.com.

 What was missing? There was no price. There was no pitch, no unsubstantiated claims about we're the best. It was him sharing his heart, him sharing his stories, and communicating values through it, communicating why he does what he does, and yes, it even touches on death, but it leaves you feeling a sense of connection.

Now, if you were in Norfolk, Virginia and your HVAC went out, would you just after hearing that, would you just Google HVAC near me, or would you type David's name in because you would want his team to work on your HVAC? That's what you're capable of. That's what relational advertising does, even when the subject is death.

Frankly, maybe especially when the subject is death. So another question I want to ask you, what percentage of your current marketing budget promotes a transaction? For example, complete cremation $995, versus building a relationship with families.

From my experience work, from my experience talking with funeral homes, my guess is less than 25% of funeral homes marketing is geared toward promoting relationships as opposed to transactions including pre-need. And the problem. There's a number of problems, but some of which we've already gotten to.

Going back to that previous study, about 84% of buyers choosing who they were already biased towards. You guys already know all of the funeral homes in the area, I'm sure. So let's lean into HVAC for a moment. Can you name two HVAC companies in your town if you can, and if either of them have some level of emotional meaning to you.

Again, there's an 84% likelihood that you'll go with them. Being on that short list is hugely important for yourself as a funeral home. You do not want them going to Google and typing in funeral home near me. You want them coming straight to you, and both parties will have a much better experience so. How do you actually reach people?

Let's say you recognize that there is a need for connecting on a more heart and soul level. We've talked through the three different types of me that you can use. How do you actually get the word out? Broadly speaking, there's two different types of means by which to get marketing out. For example, there's targeted marketing and that tends to focus on those that are at need, those that are in crisis.

And that's going to be stuff like Google Search, that's gonna be stuff like stuff that's primarily focused on the transaction right then and there. Then there's Mass Media. Mass media focuses on the 95 to 97% of people who are not actively in the market, but will one day be. In this case, I don't recommend putting 100% of your budget into mass media type marketing, but.

Broadly speaking, there are two forms of marketing. There's targeted marketing and mass media marketing. Targeted marketing would be trying to naturally target people who are actively in the market for what you offer. So those three to 5% of people, whereas mass media marketing would be more about blanketing everyone with your message.

Targeted marketing tends to be very expensive on a per person level. Mass media tends to be remarkably inexpensive per person. So there is a time and place, and I do not recommend putting 100% of your budget in either, but what's the role? What's the role of mass media versus targeting?

What's the role of offline marketing versus online? Well, first offline marketing would be anything that doesn't happen on a computer or a smartphone. Offline marketing tends to be phenomenal at building relationships if used well. Online, whether that's social media, whether that's Google, et cetera.

Your website tends to be better at simply confirming the relationship that they already have with you. So for example, you could use radio or streaming audio to reach people in everyday life before they need what you offer. You could use broadcast or connected TV to add the visual component, which adds an emotional layer to it.

You could also do every door direct mail through the post office, which allows you to reach the unfiltered masses via direct mail. Now I'll clarify sending flyers for transactions via every door direct mail. Is still transactional marketing. So with all three of these different avenues, I'm talking about using your story, communicating values, building relationship.

These are just the means by which to do so. So then what's the role of online? Your website, for example, has one job, and that is to reassure them that they're seeing exactly what they expected. It's not the relationship, it's the validation of the relationship that you've already built. Next would be reviews.

Again, their goal is to validate what they already have been led to believe through your marketing efforts. They don't actually create trust from scratch, and next social content can show the human side of your business so that to people that are already primed. So what does all of this look like?

Put another way online is the confirmation, not the foundation. I, so what does all of this look like when executed properly? I will share a number of real examples for you. An HVAC client of ours in Northern California was pretty flat for two years at 5 million in revenue. They decided to scrap their transactional type marketing and focus on trust building, focus on relational marketing via radio and tv.

Over the next four years, they grew from 5 million in revenue to 22 million in revenue. Now I'm well aware that it's not all about money, especially for funeral homes who care so deeply about people. And so there are other tremendous benefits that come from leaning into relational marketing, including families being pre-sold when they enter the market.

An example of this is an electrician in Norfolk, Virginia, said within two years that he shows up at his client's door and feels like they already know him and already like him and already trust him. You can imagine that when he shows up, they're not planning on bidding him around.

And trying to negotiate art against him. They just want to know what's the next steps, what's it gonna cost? I'm ready to sign. That's what relational marketing is capable of. And next, a plumbing company in Louisville, Kentucky. After three years of building their brand with relational type marketing, a mother reached out.

To the business owner saying that her 10-year-old son views him as a celebrity because of the ads that he absolutely loves and asked if he'd be willing to come to her son's birthday party. He did. Now, I bring this up for a number of reasons, but one of 'em is funeral home industry is not nearly appreciated Enough.

I think we saw this clear as day during COVID where truck drivers and healthcare professionals were given great appreciation, but frankly, I don't remember anything being said about funeral homes and those in the death care industry. Imagine if your community knew you, liked you, trusted you, and felt a deep appreciation for you and the work that you do.

How would that change how you showed up to work? How would that change how you felt about yourself and the joy that you got from getting to go to work each and every day? I personally believe that you should be celebrated for this work, and relational marketing is how that happens.

So let's talk about budgeting.

How should you budget in order to get these kind of results? Based on research from Les Binet and Peter Fields who specialize in how to maximize your marketing budget, they recommend allocating about 60% or more to those in the priming stage, and that's focused on this type of relational marketing. And then 40 or less 

Go to search ads. Google My business, social media reinforcement. That sort of thing. So a simple illustration would be if you're spending $3,000 a month on marketing right now, that would be $1,800 toward brand building and about $1,200 toward activating sales.

So another question for you. When you think about your pre-need marketing efforts, what's your biggest challenge?

If you're surprised that we're, three quarters of the way through this presentation, and I'm just now mentioning the word pre-need, I'm not surprised. It seems to me that the vast majority of marketing efforts right now are around pre-need, which is super important, but we need to also recognize the time and the place for it.

Pre-need is vitally important. But historically has been remarkably difficult to sell. In fact, while 69% of people believe that pre-planning is important, only about 20% actually do it. Why

that gap exists primarily for two reasons. People avoid thinking about their own death and. They don't have a trusted advisor to help them through it. So for example, sending a mailer to a stranger, asking them to plan their own funeral is asking them to do something that they dread with someone they don't trust.

That is a tremendously hard sell, and yet that's where most pre-need marketing dollars go. My encouragement would be to flip that. Do you remember when I mentioned a few moments ago that relational marketing can help build trust, which turns people into being pre-sold?

Well, trust leads to pre-sold, pre-sold leads to pre need. In that order. When a family already knows, likes and trusts you bringing up pre-planning feels natural. It's not a pitch. It feels like a friend looking out for a friend. The resistance is largely gone because the relationship is already there. If they've already decided that they know, like, and trust you, it's much easier to get them to commit to pre-need.

My encouragement to you would be that pre-need isn't something you market your way into. It's something you relationship your way into. Imagine a family who's been hearing your radio ads for three years. They feel like they know you now. One day the topic of planning comes up at the dinner table.

Who do they call? They don't call whoever ranks first on Google. They call you because you're not a stranger. Your marketing should be leading with relationship. Pre-need is the outcome. It's not the message. What we've talked about so far is the importance to build trust and preference with a masses, and you can leverage reflective storytelling, authenticity, and vulnerability and happy stories. To do that, start by building trust offline and let your online presence confirm it.

I encourage you to invest at least 60% of your budget on building trust. And invest 40% or less on activating sales.

Finally, I mentioned that building trust leads to people being pre-sold, which leads to people buying pre-need in that order. Okay. So final question for the day after today's conversation, where do you find yourself? Are you content with your current approach. You find today interesting, but not really seeing a reason to change?

Would you say you're curious but not quite convinced? Do you see the value and want to make the shift, but not really sure where to start? Or are you ready to act and just need a clear plan for your specific market? My encouragement for you would be to start with these three steps. Start by writing down your why.

Why do you do what you do? How did you get into this business, and why do you keep doing it? This could well be the most valuable piece of the marketing content. That you create. Step two, audit your marketing spend. Pull up your last 12 months of marketing and categorize it. How much reached people who are in crisis?

How much reached people in the priming stage? And what's one shift that you can make this quarter? Step three, pick one mass media channel and commit to at least nine months. Yes, building relationship takes time and we need consistency and frequency. You can choose between radio streaming, audio tv, relational direct mail, but pick one. One consistent story.

Nine months minimum trust requires frequency and time, and nine months is the minimum unit of relationship building in marketing. Anything less, and you're not giving it a fair test. My friends. I know that none of this is easy and there's nuances that go into, for example, how to frame what you're communicating and which mass media channel to pick and a whole lot more.

I'm well aware that there's a lot of complexity that goes beyond what we're able to do in a one hour presentation, and so I want to help if there's anything I can do. You can email me MattWillis@WizardOfAds.com and just use the subject line “Strategy Session” and we will find a time to connect completely free and process through what it would look like to build trust within your market.

It is such a joy to be able to be here with you today, and it is a pleasure serving you.