Many funeral directors are just beginning to recognize the incredible value of an effective social media strategy. With over 500 million people on Facebook, there is a huge opportunity to leverage that platform to grow your funeral home!

The basis of such a strategy includes publishing your obituaries on Facebook to accomplish 3 goals:

1. Build your brand and a following
2. Drive traffic back to your website
3. Educate and inform your community

To accomplish this, a funeral director must carefully consider how best to promote obituaries on Facebook. Many funeral directors are struggling with the basics of effectively promoting obituaries on Facebook, so I'm going to provide some tips and advice.

Create a Facebook Page for your funeral home

You want to build a brand around your funeral home, and it's important to keep that effort separate from your personal profile on Facebook. So the first thing you must do is create a Facebook page. It's easy to do (here are some instructions), and is a powerful first step to build a lasting brand on following on Facebook.

When creating your Facebook Page, be careful filling out the name, since you will NOT be able to change this down the line. 

Automate it!

Face it, you've got better things to do as a Funeral Director than constantly updating Facebook with every obituary. It's 2010 - these kinds of things should be automatic!

Fortunately Funeral Innovations, through our UNITE initiative, lets you automatically publish your obituaries to Facebook AND Twitter. We believe that for a social media strategy to be effective, it also needs to be easy. So with UNITE, you create the obituary once and publish it everywhere: to your website, to Facebook, to Twitter, and to the UNITE Directory.

Drive traffic to your site

Your social media strategy is all about building your brand and driving traffic to your site. That's why every link in your publicized obituaries, whether it's on Facebook or some 3rd party directory, should go directly to your funeral home's website.

Do not pad the pockets of some other company over your own!

There are many 3rd party obituary services and directories that leech your traffic by showing the full obituary on their own site with only a small link back to yours. Avoid these services at all costs because they are using your customer's obituary to benefit themselves rather than help you grow your business.

Another tip: Facebook Pages let you synchronize an RSS feed of obituaries to the profile. However, you want to avoid this approach because it will not provide a link back to your site. Instead, the link will simply show the full obituary content right within Facebook itself. Instead, you should use a 3rd party application like what we provide for free with our UNITE initiative. We customize the feed entry to include the right obituary information with the links going straight back to the obituary on your website!

Anatomy of a Facebook Obituary

Ryan Thogmartin of Connecting Directors has some good tips and observations on Facebook obituaries. He advises not to post too much information in the obituary because you don't want to annoy your followers. 

However, I believe his advice goes a bit too far in the minimalist approach. The reason is that it's important to engage and catch the attention of your followers. Remember, every time they login to Facebook they are bombarded with hundreds of updates. Yours needs to stand out!

I do completely agree with Ryan that you must ensure you don't annoy your followers; otherwise they won't be your followers for long. So here is the recipe for an effective Facebook obituary.

1. Including a photo is a must!

By including a photo in the obituary, your update is much more engaging, stands out more, and results in a higher click through rate. Pictures make your update personal, and your followers will appreciate that.

2. Include enough content to be useful.

Your ultimate goal is to provide a service that is valuable for your followers. They will repay you by paying more attention to your updates and by trusting you to provide them value. Additionally, if you provide enough valuable content in the update, they will click the all-important "Share" link to promote it to their own network and initiative the viral behavior that can cause your follower count to explode!

3. All links should go back to your site.

If you provide your followers with valuable content, and they like what they see, they will click through to see more. Make sure that the people who want more information go back to your site! It's important that the links from your obituaries go straight to that obituary on your funeral home's website, rather than some 3rd party service or staying stuck on Facebook.

Summary

Starting an effective social media strategy for your funeral home is easy if you use the right tools. At a minimum, you should have a Facebook Page that is automatically updated with your obituaries with high quality content, a picture, and prominent links back to the obituary on your funeral home's website.

If you want to get started with social media, or want a more effective presence, contact us. We have free services available and are happy to help you get started!

Obituaries are by far the most trafficked pages on a funeral home's website. Increasingly that traffic is coming from search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo; as such, search engine optimization (or SEO) is one of the most important factors for having a successful web presence. 

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving how pages of your website rank for particular search phrases within the search engine. In other words, how high in the search results do your pages appear when visitors search for content that you've got.

How important is having a top search result in Google?

Studies have shown that the #1 listed search result is clicked on twice as often as the #2 result, and it falls off rapidly after that. This means that proper search engine optimization holds the key to your website's success.

How do I know if my SEO is any good?

We know that funeral directors realize the importance of search engine optimization, especially when it comes to obituaries. However, SEO is a very technical topic, and funeral directors don't have time to become SEO experts. They expect their web hosts to provide that expertise. 

Unfortunately, while most web hosts play lip service to search engine optimization, we've found that very few actually know what they are doing. They promise the funeral director their obituaries will rank high in Google search results, but don't actually have a plan for making it happen. 

We want to shed light on what constitutes good SEO, particularly in improving the search rankings of your obituaries. We strive to help funeral directors learn about the process so that they know if their SEO strategy is working, and so they can recognize empty promises from web hosts when they hear them.

The Funeral Innovations SEO Policy

Funeral Innovations wants to make sure our customers have the best SEO in the industry. We realized that in order to accomplish this, we need to be systematic and consistent with our SEO strategy. Even with our extensive industry experience, we recognized that we had room to improve. That's why we spent several months putting together the Funeral Innovations SEO Policy, a detailed checklist of the best search engine optimization techniques for funeral home websites and obituaries. We are now in the process of applying our SEO Policy to all of our hosted websites and obituaries.

Since SEO tactics evolve, so will our SEO Policy, but we feel it's important to help funeral directors understand what goes into good SEO. That's why we're taking the unprecedented action of making our SEO Policy public to our customers, our potential customers, and even our competitors!

You can find the Funeral Innovations SEO Policy here.

Search Engine Optimization for Obituaries in Plain English

You can read the full version of the Funeral Innovations SEO Policy from the link above, but I would like to talk more generally about what aspects of SEO are most important to improve the search rankings of your website and obituaries.

While there are dozens of individual techniques to improve your site's SEO, they generally boil down to the following two categories: 

1. Authority

Your website's authority is how important the search engine considers your domain to be. Google calls this "PageRank", after their page ranking algorithm that Larry and Sergey (the founders) developed while at Stanford.

PageRank is affected by a number of factors, but the most critical are:

1. Inbound Links - In other words, how many other sites link back to yours? And even more important, are the sites that link to yours considered "high authority" within your industry? Funeral Innovations increases your site's inbound links through social media integration, inclusion in our funeral home directories (more to come!), and propagation of your obituary links throughout our growing network.
2. Domain Stability - This takes into account various criteria, including whether there are keywords in your root domain, how responsive/available your site is when Google's scripts "crawl" it, and how long your domain has been active. Funeral Innovations improves domain stability by ensuring our hosted websites are fast with near 100% uptime.

2. Content

The content and page structure of your site is of critical importance and can be highly affected by proper SEO techniques. Most generally, your web pages should be richly concentrated with your targeted keywords and included original content. Here are some hints:

1. Identify Targeted Keywords - These are the words for which you want your site to be rankly highly within user's search results on Google, Bing, or Yahoo. For many funeral homes, your targeted keywords should include your city, state, and the words "funeral home", "mortuary", "obituaries" and/or "cremation". When identifying keywords it's importance to be concise: the more focused you can be, the better chance that you can optimize your site for those specific keywords.
2. Keywords in Your Content - Once you've identified your targeted keywords, it's important to consistently use them throughout the content of your site. There are a few caveats:
   • Ensure the keywords are used within the title tag of your site (the part that shows up at the top of the window or tab)
   • Ensure the keywords are used in the larger headers on your home page
   • Be sure that when you use the keywords they are text, not within images, since Google and other crawlers cannot read the words within images
   • Use the keywords through the copy of your site, particularly on the home page
3. Create lots of good, original content. This is best done through the use of a blog or other pages that are updated often.
4. Meta Tags - This is invisible content in the code of your page that targets search engines to provide information about your site.
5. Link Text - As mentioned above, one of the biggest criteria for good SEO is the abundance of inbound links to your site, from high-PageRank domains. But not all links are created equal: you want the clickable part of the inbound link to contain your targeted keywords. In other words, it's better to have a link like this: Click here to learn more about the best Funeral Home in Webster City, than this: click here to learn about Foster Funeral Home.
6. Keywords in the URL - Most search engines give a bump to URLs that contain the words that a user is searching for. That why our SEO Policy requires that our customers' obituaries contain the deceased's name right within the URL. However, it's important to keep in mind that Google and other search engines split up the URL based on dashes and underscores, and therefore if a user searches for "Stanley L Hale", this URL will match the search phrases: http://www.carsonandson.com/obituary/4042/Stanley_L_Hale, while this one will not: http://www.carsonandson.com/obituary/4042/StanleyLHale
7. Measure the results - There's a business saying that "you make what you measure", meaning you will not improve the aspects of your business that you don't track, measure, and analyze. That's why it's important to include web analytics software such as Google Analytics on your site and obituaries so you know how much traffic is coming from search engines, and what search phrases are driving those clicks. Knowing this will allow you to improve on your weaknesses and focus on your strengths. Otherwise you will never know whether your SEO techniques are working!

Conclusion

We've just touched the surface of SEO in this blog post. The Funeral Innovations SEO Policy covers even more specifics for improving your website and obituaries SEO.

Hopefully we've provided you with at least a basis for understanding proper search engine optimization for your funeral home and obituaries. We don't expect you to become an expert, but we do want to educate you enough to know if your web host is doing the right things to improve your search engine standings. 

Knowing what you know now, you should ask your web host a few questions:

• Do you have an SEO Policy or Guidelines that you follow?
• What specific techniques are you using to improve my SEO?
• Can you show me whether my SEO is working or not?

If they cannot give you straight, understandable or convincing answers to those questions, it's time to seek another web host. Your web presence is too valuable to leave in the hands of someone who doesn't care.

Is there anything else you'd like to know about SEO that wasn't covered here?  Would you like to learn about other techniques included in the Funeral Innovations SEO Policy? If so, just leave a comment on this post or ask us on Twitter and we'll be happy to answer your questions!

Since Funeral Innovations provides our own premium online obituaries, we of course have strong opinions about all of the choices mentioned above. And we'll express our thoughts in a series of posts explaining how you ought to choose your obituaries provider.

However, for now we'd like to expose a trap that can torpedo the long term success of many funeral homes' web strategy. It's a mistake that's made easily and often, because most funeral directors don't know the potential negative impact until it's far too late. I want to warn you about the dangers of a closed obituary system.

What's Wrong with Closed Obituaries?

Most funeral directors fall prey to closed obituaries because they aren't even aware of what they are! Simply put, closed obituaries lock you down with a single web host, whereas open obituaries will work no matter who hosts your site or even if you change hosts down the line. 

Consider this common scenario: as a funeral director you're not necessarily an expert in web technologies, so you put your trust in some firm to build your website. They say they'll include online obituaries, which is great because you'll need to display those on your site. All is well, until a couple years later when the web firm you initially trusted no longer has kept up with the latest technologies. On the web, 2 years is like a generation; during that time you've found that another web firm offers far superior products, websites, and hosting. The only problem is that you've got years worth of obituaries built up and your current host will not let you take your obituaries if you leave. As a false show of support, your host offers to provide you a dump of your obituary data, but you soon discover that your new firm is unwilling to write a custom program required to migrate this data.

In short, you are out of luck.

Because of this difficulty, you stay with your current, obsolete web property while your competitors adopt the latest technology and start eating away at your market share.

Unfortunately, this shady business practice happens all the time! Last week a customer wanted to come on board with our solutions. When their existing host found out, they provided a dump of the obituary data in a nearly unreadable form, then gave the customer 2 days before shutting down their current site. Fortunately we were able to write a custom script to recover all 2,000 of their obituaries into our open system, however most software companies will not be so flexible.

Open = Freedom/Flexibility

Compare that scenario with the customers of open obituaries. If you use Funeral Innovations' premium open obituaries, your data remains YOURS for life. You don't even need to host with us; but if you do and you ever decide to leave, you can bring your obituaries with you with no extra work required. That's because open obituaries work with any host, any website, and any system. That means you get the freedom and flexibility of choosing all the best solutions for your business, and never have to worry about being locked in to a single provider or host.

What You Need to Know

Choosing a closed obituary system is one of the biggest dangers facing a funeral director when planning a web strategy. Closed obituaries can negatively affect your business in many ways:

• Locks you in to a single provider forever
• Obstructs forward progress of your web strategy
• Prevents competition, resulting in lower quality obituaries
• Removes your freedom of choice and flexibility

As you are looking to upgrade your funeral home's web strategy, here are three questions you absolutely MUST ask any potential technology providers:

1. Are the obituaries open?
2. Can I use the obituaries with any web host?
3. Do I retain ownership of the obituary data?

If they say "no" to any of those questions, you owe it to yourself and your business to say "no" to them!

When we spoke at the OGR conference in Colorado Springs, we were overwhelmed by the response and discussion generated during our session on using social media for your funeral home.

It was immediately clear that the interest in social media within the funeral industry has never been higher. Many people are still unsure how to get started using social media, and how to use it most effectively. And virtually nobody was aware of the revenue generating opportunities the web, and social media, introduce. 

So over the next couple weeks I'll be breaking down the basics of social media, the misconceptions, and the advanced techniques for driving traffic and making money.

To start, I want to address some of the most common questions we've been hearing, and which immediately came up during our OGR session. Here are the top 5 most common questions about social media in the funeral industry. Note: I'll be focusing on Twitter and Facebook here, but will discuss other forms of social media, such as blogging, in follow up posts.

1. Why should I use social media? aka "Isn't my website enough?"

This is both the most common and most basic question about social media. The prerequisite to having a successful social media strategy is understanding why you should use it in the first place. And the underlying implication of this question often is "why isn't my website enough?" 

Many people wonder why the content they'd post to Twitter or Facebook doesn't just go straight to their website. The answer is that it all comes down to distribution. Social media's intent is to build a brand and leverage that for distribution.

Your website itself probably doesn't get many people checking back each day for new content. And for good reason: if I had to individually visit every website of every business I might come in contact with, most of which will only change once a year, I wouldn't have enough minutes in the day. Nobody will visit your website consistently without a big, underlying reason!

Your social media strategy relies on consistent and significant updates that convince people to check back often. And since social media is structured in such a way that people can more easily track multiple resources, via RSS readers, Twitter clients, and Facebook feeds, they are more apt to follow your content because it's much less of an investment than individually visiting a bunch of websites

Now, there is still a barrier in order to convince people to add your blog, Twitter feed, or Facebook page to their daily consumption patterns. The way to do it is by providing consistent value through your content. In other words, you need to commit to updating your blog, your Twitter feed, and your Facebook page with interesting and useful content on a consistent basis. It's not easy, but it also doesn't need to be hard. In the end, it will be well worth it.

So the short answer is this: social media should be used to gain distribution by creating consistent and valuable content in a format that is easily consumed by users. That distribution should then be monetized to open up new revenue channels (I'll blog about this in the weeks to come!)

2. Which is better: Twitter or Facebook?

A trick question! Many folks still ask this question, typically because the thought of keeping up multiple social media sources seems intimidating and time consuming. However, if you make it a part of your daily routine, and use 3rd party tools to streamline your contributions, there's no reason using both Twitter and Facebook needs to take away from your time spent on your core business. 

Instead of just saying "both", let's at least try to understand the differences between what Twitter and Facebook will provide your funeral home. 

Facebook is the "original" social network. While others came before it, Facebook was the first social network to really stick, and hit the mainstream audience. Your social media strategy on Facebook will differ slightly from how you might personally use the social networking site. With your personal profile, you connect with your friends on the site and typically only your friends can see your profile. For your funeral home, however, you'll create a Facebook "Page", which is targeted towards businesses. Anyone on Facebook can see your page, which is also viewable to the public and indexed by Google. Facebook users also have an option to "Like" your page, which is the equivalent to becoming a fan. Those users will receive any updates you post to your page (such as obituary notices) within their news feed the next time they log in to Facebook

Twitter is all about fast and frequent updates. Tips, thoughts, opinions, links and promotions are "tweeted" quickly - often multiple times per day. On Twitter, you get a list of tweets from the people you choose to follow. Likewise, the people who follow you receive your tweets. Thus, it's beneficial to generate a following within the funeral industry and to leverage Twitter to build your brand by tweeting relevant links, local news, or area obituaries.

The demographics of Facebook and Twitter users are different as well. Facebook trends towards a younger demographic, while Twitter is skewed towards a slightly older (not many teens, at least) and business-oriented audience for your content.

3. What should I post about?

The answer of course is "it depends." But that's not real helpful, so I'll expand a bit! 

On Facebook, you should primarily post obituary notices and relevant news related to your funeral home or the death industry in your area. 

Twitter is a little more complicated. There is a different expectation among folks on Twitter, and there is a greater appetite for faster and more frequent updates. You'll want to be careful to strike the right balance between fast and frequent tweets, yet keeping them relevant and respectful. Remember, you are the voice of your company!

The litmus test for whether you should tweet something is to ask yourself: "Is this tweet industry specific and does it add value to people interested in my funeral home or the death care industry?"

Specifically, some types of content that fit that criteria are:

• Funeral related links
• Funeral or death care tips
• Obituaries
• Promotions or events
• Relevant news in your area

What should you avoid posting to Facebook or Twitter?

• What you ate for breakfast
• Politics
• Polarizing opinions that may reflect poorly on your company
• Anything not related to your business or industry

You can have multiple Twitter accounts, one for your personal use and one for your business use, so keep your personal stuff off your business account!

4. What about privacy?

It's important to remember that anything you post to Twitter or Facebook will live in eternity as soon as you hit "submit." Even if you try to delete it moments later, the information will still be found in cached search results, people's Twitter clients, and various repositories on the internet. So be sure to keep your content relevant, on topic, and safe!

Also you should keep in mind the audience. On Facebook, if you post to a Facebook Page, it will be public to anyone on the internet. Facebook pages are not restricted to just friends, like personal Facebook profiles are. Anything you post will be viewable by anyone else.

Likewise, your Twitter account will be viewable by anyone on the web, even though it's only pushed to the people who follow you. For instance, you can see our tweets here, even if you aren't following us on Twitter (even though you should be!)

While it's possible to restrict the privacy of your Twitter account, that kind of defeats the purpose of using your business account for spreading the word and obtaining distribution!

5. How do I build a Twitter following?

Your social media strategy isn't much good if nobody is following you. But how do you get people to follow you when you first start out?

The keys are to consistently post good information within your industry. If you do that, you will gradually gain a following. But there are some other ways to kick start the process.

Promote your accounts. Our Twitter account is at http://twitter.com/funeralinnovate. Be sure to promote your accounts in your email footer, on your business cards, verbally to people you meet, and in your presentations. Make sure people know where to find you on the web!

Follow other people. On Twitter, if you follow other people and businesses, many times they will follow you back.

Post your account on your website. Folks who visit your site are probably somewhat interested in your business so are likely to follow your account if you show them the way.

Participate in conversations. If you find conversations occurring around a relevant topic or news story, chime in with your opinion or retweet other people's tweets. This is a good way to show up within popular threads, which in turn exposes you to new followers.

Add yourself to directories. There are directories where you can list your Twitter account based on industry keywords. One prominent directory is called WeFollow.

Patience and consistency. Keep posting good content, do it consistently, and follow the practices above and the word will spread over time. That's the power of social media!

Summary

I'm just scratching the surface of these questions, and there are of course hundreds of other good questions that I haven't addressed. Over the coming weeks I'll reveal additional ways of leveraging social media to increase your website and obituary distribution, and ultimately how to use that traffic to make real revenue. So keep checking back to learn more!

         

Click here to download:

getting-traffic-and-making-money-via-social-media-ogr-preview-ixCotmcjIleisCAhFHie.zip (399 KB)

More specifically, we'll be showing attendees how they can leverage social media to gain significant traction for their websites, obituaries, and announcements. And even more importantly, we'll show folks how they can convert that traffic into actual dollars!

Here I'll present a preview of the concepts we'll cover in the presentation. If you're attending OGR, this should whet your appetite for the talk. If you're not attending, be sure to let me know in the comments which concepts you'll like me to expand on more in future blog posts. If you're interested in getting the full presentation, let me know and I'll send it to you.

First, it's important to recognize that the funeral industry is changing. It's changing because of the internet, web-based software, cloud computing, and social media. 

Some people are intimidated by the thought of this change. They are afraid because they are unsure how to take advantage of the new opportunities, and they feel their competitors will benefit more than they do. Unfortunately, most people who are afraid of change refuse to take action. 

There is no stopping this change. A year from now, those who embrace the internet, web-based software and social media will see dramatic increases in revenue and market share. Those who continue to fear it will begin a long and gradual decline. 

The good news is that through Funeral Innovations' solutions, our OGR presentation, and right here on our blog, we'll educate you on the steps you need to take to use this change to your benefit. You'll learn how to be one of the funeral homes that comes out on top!

Do you even know how social media began or even what it is? More importantly, where is social media going in the future and how can you prepare for that? Facebook announced some mind-blowing new features that provide an insight into the future of social media. We'll talk about how those effect you, and how you can be the first to leverage them in order to drive more traffic.

1. Promote (your brand) - You must learn how to use social media and the internet to give your company it's own unique branding and "voice." You must position yourself online so that your company stands for something, and customers and partners know what they're getting when they see your name.
2. Distribute (your content) - Distribution via social media can change the way your business operates. Never before have we seen such powerful distribution channels as we are now encountering via Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and search engines. Do you know how to use these channels to push critical traffic to your website and obituaries?
3. Monetize (your traffic) - You're traffic is literally worthless if you have no means to turn the eyeballs to customers. Unfortunately, most funeral directors don't even know where to start in order to monetize their traffic. That's because there are few good solutions out there for turning your website and online obituaries into revenue engines. Over the next few weeks Funeral Innovations will be announcing a revolutionary set of ground-breaking monetization solutions, that will open amazing new revenue streams through your existing web properties. I'll highlight these opportunities at OGR and will be posting more information about them here on the blog. 

Again, this is just a preview of the material we'll be covering on Saturday. If you're in Colorado for the OGR conference, be sure to check out the full presentation. Otherwise check back here on the blog - we'll be creating more posts to help explain these concepts so that you can begin to take full advantage of the web-based change that you're currently facing.

If you'd like access to the full OGR presentation, send us a tweet on Twitter at http://twitter.com/funeralinnovate or send me an email at zack@funeralinnovations.com

Since many families still don't have WiFi, and since it can often be a hassle to connect to someone else's WiFi when you're on the road or in their home, many funeral directors have been waiting for the 3G version of the iPad to be released, which will allow them "always-on" internet access from their iPad via the AT&T cellular network.

Apple has just announced that they'll be releasing the iPad 3G in May and will start shipping it by May 7th April 30. So now's the time to get your pre-order in to ensure you're on of the first to secure a 3G iPad!

If you're still on the fence about whether the iPad is right for you and your business, I'll be giving demos and letting you get some hands-on experience using the iPad at the OGR Conference in Colorado Springs this Friday and Saturday. Come to my (Zack Garbow) presentation on Social Media, and meet up with me during the conference. I'll show you everything you can do on an iPad to increase yours sales!

Previously we introduced to you insight into the future of the funeral industry courtesy of Apple's iPad.

Now we've already got a success story to support this vision!

'If you are looking to simplify your business, this is the solution for you,' says Scott Erickson of Foster Funeral Home.

In anticipation of the iPad release last Saturday, Funeral Innovations spent two months developing the web-based FI Arrangement Kiosk, which greatly simplifies the arrangement process for both at-need and pre-need consultations.

Gone are the days of carrying sales books with your general price list, vault images and casket images.  This week the industry changed forever. You can now step through the entire arrangement process with the family driving the decision process with their fingertip.  

‘It was truly amazing.  I was able to allow the family to make their own decisions on the screen, letting them feel like they were in control.  The Kiosk guided the family through the entire decision process and I was able to consult them along the way," adds Erickson. 

The FI Arrangement Kiosk, a completely web-based product, allows a funeral director to seamlessly enter products from any product vendor with a click of a mouse, or touch of a screen.  Prices can be easily adjusted, giving you a complete virtual sales kit in minutes. Using the Arragenment Kiosk on the iPad puts the customer in control, allowing them to feel comfortable and confident in their selection process.

This is the first step in a roadmap that will result in the best software suite in the industry, all accessible and optimized for the iPad. Each solution, when accessed via the iPad, provides a powerful, portable and always-accessible sales tool, allowing you to consult with families at your facility, the comfort of their own home, or any location of their choice.  

To learn more on how you can make the Arrangement Kiosk and iPad work for you, contact Funeral Innovations at 800.641.0173 or www.funeralinnovations.com. 

If you'd like to talk to a funeral director who is already seeing results using the Arrangement Kiosk on an iPad, feel free to contact Scott Erickson at 515.832.2111.

Funeral Innovations is proud to be a speaker at the International Order of the Golden Rule (OGR) National Conference on April 24 in Colorado Springs.

We're proud to be kicking off a new blog here at Funeral Innovations. This blog is for you, the funeral director, and we're looking forward to interacting with you and hearing your thoughts.

What can you expect from our new blog?

We'll be focusing on the following topics, but will also include any other industry related thoughts that we feel we can expose.

• Industry news and trends; plus how they affect YOU, the funeral director
• Tips for how you can increase your website traffic and generate more revenue
• Social media optimization and tutorials to help you improve your brand and influence
• Product announcements, promotions, and exciting new features

If there's anything else you'd like to see here, let us know through the comments. We're fast to respond and excited to generate some discussion and dialog.

Bookmark this site, add the RSS, follow us on Twitter, and check back often!