Are you looking for a new way to get more customers or clients for your funeral or cremation business than you are getting right now?

Then you’ve come to the right place.

 

I will show you how to get more out of your company’s marketing budget for your funeral home by running ads on social media sites, Facebook, and the like to earn upward of 2-10x more than you are currently earning for your business right now,

to sell pre-paid funeral packages as well as funeral/cremation services from those already need it.

Both strategies will be outlined for you in detail on this article. 

Example Ad From The Following Case Study

Caption: You will be able to see the results of our previous campaigns like this and see the remarkable 4,178% ROI we have been able to generate on campaigns in the funeral/cremation business.

 

If you have tried to make money using display ad campaigns on Facebook or other social sites in the past and failed, you will be pleased with the information I am about to give you here. This is a small series of actual case studies from campaigns that are out there working today.

I will show you what it will take to enable you to make a profit using this practical and useful information.

Making money and leveraging opportunities available by using display ads doesn’t have to be a frustrating experience. As you will see by the following case studies, this can work in almost any industry, including the not-so-glamorous funeral services industry.

 

Example Display Ad Case Study #1: Spending $6,223 to generate $260,000 in revenue by selling prepaid funeral plans on Facebook

This first company is a primary example of developing display advertising that works for your company and on Facebook.

We will start with what our company used to promote this multi-location funeral home company selling prepaid funeral packages.

 

The Campaign

Caption: Example of the display ad we used to sell prepaid funeral services.

 

We used this ad to sell pre-paid funeral services in the few markets that made this campaign work for the client. 

The most important thing when it comes to getting results out of display ads and actually making campaigns work is to not simply focus on selling what you really want to sell; otherwise, your ads will just look like those of any other company out there.

Instead, use whatever will give you the maximum number of opportunities, using as much of the ad space that is available in your market as possible.

While we could have taken the easy route to develop a campaign to sell a prepaid funeral package with our ad, it would be competing with other offers out there and would look pretty much the same.

Our firm instead decided to go the extra mile with our offer. We wanted the highest possible chance of response and therefore, more sales opportunities. So, we went directly to our audience to educate them about how to pay for a funeral for themselves. This got a much higher response and lowered our costs to do business and our campaigns in general, which is the key to success when running ads like this.

Making a sale with this type of campaign process is explained later in this article.

Keep in mind, what we were selling is information first, and packaged in a way that will make it convenient for the proposed buyer to consume and make it easy to take a step to making a sales process. ie. “Free In-Home Consultation!” and generate as leads as cheaply as possible with the ad budget that was given.

With the offer to get this campaign to work, we were able to add a time limit to respond, to force the  prospects to not procrastinate. This is another big secret that gets these kinds of ad campaigns to work.

 

Campaign Targeting

As for targeting the offer itself, we originally used prospects in our market to reach out to clients so we would have an excuse to call them on the phone to get this campaign to work.

However, through research conducted on this campaign, we discovered that we would need to be exclusively targeting the 65 and above demographic for the offer and campaign in question and would need to thoroughly review our company’s past sales records in order to have success with these ads.

 

Landing Page

A specialized landing page was created for the campaign to get the desired outcome and response that we wanted, starting with the features discussed below.

Not only was our target page catered to our audience in question, we made the font bigger for the hard-of-sight to clearly see our offer, which made a dramatic difference when running offers to older audiences such as this.

Similarly, our landing page focused on allowing our prospects to respond in their preferred way (by phone), thus giving us every possible opportunity for a sale.

Campaign Summary & Results

As a result of all the features you have seen above, it was a smashing success.

We had over 6,000 views of the landing page with this offer in the key southern market, leading to over 300 requests for consultations the first day the campaign was launched, with no further revisions needed.

Caption: Campaign cost per click, with the following offer coming in at a total of .91 cents each.

 

As for the 300-plus total requests for appointments, one out of every five of those leads turned into customers for the company ( a 20% closing rate), with the average deal size of $4,000.

Here’s how the math turned out for this campaign once the initial results came in from our tests:

Ad spend = $6,223 (as seen from the screenshot above).

325 consultations x 20% close rate = 65 deals.

65 deals x $4,000 (avg. deal size) = $260,000 generated.

ROI = [$260,000 – $6,223] / $6,223 x 100% = 4,078%.

With this campaign, the cremation and funeral company got an ROI of 4,078%, which is 41x their initial investment.

 

Here’s a quick recap about what made this campaign work:

Preselling information to a more limited pool of potential customers who are more interested can get you much higher (or good enough) returns to make campaigns profitable.

Offers that are attractive and relevant to the target audience work far better than generic offers and get much higher average returns.

Introducing an element of urgency (“this week only”) to a campaign like this is important to get the response that you want.

An optimized landing page that reflects the offer and caters to the target audience completes the offers loop and ensures that you have locked in the expected returns from your campaigns.

 

As a general rule of thumb and in summary … 

When putting together campaigns like this for your own company to sell something to those who are not necessarily looking for it, it is best to first focus on what it will take to get the maximum number of people to respond to your campaigns. Try this instead of letting your campaigns do the vetting for you if you wish to get the most out of your ads.

 

Example Display Case Study #2: Spending $8,666 to generate $258,500 in revenue selling post-pay funeral services

Like the previous company selling prepaid funeral plans to a small segment of the market, this company’s ad campaign was able to get people to also pre-purchase services.  This may not seem realistic to do in your own market, with all products and services you offer.

With this next campaign, we will show you how to sell to people who already know that they need what you sell. You can get the most sales available in your market using this style of ad.

 

The Offer Used

The approach below would work to sell to someone who already needs the services in our market.

We used the following material to attract those who, statistically, would soon be making a purchase from a business in our market. After they initially showed interest, we would get our sales opportunity out in front of them (shown below).

Caption: Ad being used to sell ‘post-pay‘ funeral service packages in our market.

 

Offer Targeting

Our company developed a plan to get our offer out in front of the intended prospects in our market by identifying an area that would statistically contain prospects who would soon be making a decision to purchase (that is, people who knew they would soon have a death in the family). We wanted to get our ads out in front of the individuals who would want to read our content (ideal locations included hospitals and hospices in their area) This way, we could let the physical targeting of our ads do the work of finding the buyers we wanted.

To accomplish this task, our company determined and proceeded to set up precise targeting around each targeted hospital and hospice for the individual ad accounts in question (seen below):

Caption: Targeting list of all the hospitals in the target area to sell information about our funeral service (all one mile or less from campus center).

 

Landing Page Use

To collect our information seekers’ information, our company used the following lead capture page and then started the sales process with each individual prospect (as shown below):

Caption:  Landing page offer used to get people currently at a hospitals and hospices to initially respond to our company.

 

A similar custom approach to collect and generate leads from a campaign that shares information with your key audience is necessary to achieve similarly high response rates.

Leads who downloaded the information and free ebook got a call from our sales staff, which led to additional sales opportunities, with the high enough percentages that made sense for this campaign. 

 

Results From Our Campaign

With this campaign, our company drove 7,000-plus page views in total, with an average cost of $1.10 per landing page view. As for the results of this campaign using the revised strategy, you can see the adamant levels of responses we were able to acquire using this particular strategy.

Caption: Users responded at a very high rate, coming in at over 2% of all the hospices and hospitals in our area of question in total!

 

As for the results that had been generated from the campaign and offer, the audience we targeted in our hospital setting with our information would go on to generate over a 2% total response and successfully close one customer out of every eight people who downloaded the book. This turned out rather well for how toned down the offer was compared to our previous campaign.

The sales we generated through the campaign were roughly split 50:50 between full funeral packages ($3,000+) and cremation packages ($695). The company offered to cater to both ends of the customer demand spectrum.

 

Our campaign results came out as follows: 

Ad spend = $8,666 (as seen from the screenshot above).

7,884 page views x 11.2% conversion rate = 883 ebook downloads

883 downloads x 12.5% close rate = 110 deals.

110 deals x $2,350 (avg. deal size) = $258,500 generated.

ROI = [$258,500 – $8,666] / $8,666 x 100% = 2,882%.

With this campaign, the cremation company got an ROI of 2,882%, which is 28x their initial investment.

 

Here’s a quick recap about what made this campaign work:

Preselling products and services to gain access to a wider pool of potential customers can generate a much larger potential set of results

Crafting an offer that’s attractive and relevant to the target audience makes tapping into a soon-to-be-buying audience easier.

Fine-tune targeting (down to specific areas of a city) to ensure that the ad reaches the appropriate audience to significantly drive down your costs and get a prospective customer to your site.

Reference an authoritative figure/expert to add legitimacy to the ad and get more of a response; using one gets a higher response.

Use mini-infographics to highlight and emphasize key numbers in an ad when marketing information contributes to a much higher-than-average result

Framing things negatively can trigger your customers into taking action more than positive framing does

Optimizing the landing page to cater to your target campaign audience is a must when trying to deliver an above-average response to your campaign

 

As a general rule of thumb and in summary … 

You can see by the results how lucrative your social ad campaigns can be when they are set where your customers will be so you can influence their purchase decisions accordingly.

The difference between having a well-targeted offer like this and one that is not so targeted may be the difference in making any money at all out of your campaign, as you will see in the next part of the case study.

 

[COMPARISON] How the difference in setting up the targeting of your ads affects the profitability of your social display campaigns by up to 3,600%

Now we know that using Facebook ads and a precise set of targeting is a great technique you can use to generate a huge amount of revenue from your market, as shown above.

But what would happen if we did not choose to do it this way? If instead, we went straight for the sale or simply ignored the immense targeting of our last campaign?

Would it really affect our results of making a profit running display campaigns in our market that much?

Many will try this and create many of the ads you see out there today. But few people know that these are not actually working, as they do not track things well.

Before we stepped in to help, this client had done just that. You will be able to see the difference for yourself and understand why going straight for the sale tjust doesn’t work …  

Caption: Example of an ineffective ad strategy; our client had run a “low-entry” offer that targeted everyone in the area vs. the precise targeting of our “hospital” and “hospices” campaign that included available upsells for the client.

 

At first glance, this might look like a perfectly decent ad and campaign. It should work by flagging down the customer looking for a good product or service at a great price at the time they need it.

The ad also costs the same as what we were paying on a per-click basis to reach the same members in our market.

While it may be true that customers are being reached with the offer above and that this may get the most serious ones to respond, there are two crucial mistakes that make this opportunity much different than the first campaign.

 

Here is something that is unlike the usual workflow we used on our previous two campaigns to get results:

Customer sees ads offering key information about our product or service that they want, leading them to make a sale > requests more information from our company > gets a call from one of our sales reps > and confirms purchase over the phone and pays.

 

The client promotion was targeted in this way:

Customer sees ads offering something finite for sale > clicks on ad > and confirms purchase over the phone and pays.

 

Instead of trying to earn an initial trust and respect with the prospect, they instead tried to skip all that and head straight for the sale. If all the trust-building that our previous sales process created was included, this ad would have kept a good portion of the people who would have normally responded to our ad from not responding at all.

Besides targeting individuals currently residing in hospitals vs. individuals residing in the city alone, the company rep who had set this offer was also targeting far too broadly to make good use of all the ad space they were purchasing … 

The difference in approach for the exact same business made all the difference in the amount of profit they were able to generate between the two strategies.

 

Here’s the breakdown from the above unoptimized campaign:

Ad spend = $427 (location 1) + $353 (location 2) = $780 

318 + 366 = 684 link clicks x 0.5% landing page conversion = 3 calls

3 calls x ~20% closing rate = 1 total deal.

1 deal x $695 = $695 generated.

ROI = [$695 – $780] / $695 x 100% = -12%.

 

With this shortcut version of the campaign, the funeral company in question was only able to hit an ROI of -12%, vs. the 2,800% return we had with the revised approach, in front of the same exact people we had from both campaigns.

Not only can you see all the extra effort it may take to get your campaigns to work in many markets, you can also see why first building trust and credibility with your prospects to get candidates early on in the sales process can overall be much more productive when developing your own ad campaigns.

 

In Summary

As you can see, there are many ways to find an opportunity in your market to discover customers for your business on social platforms

You can sell almost anything using social ads, as long as you have enough fortitude to find an offer that works for your company, like those shown to you in the examples above.

 

Author:

Corey Zieman

Paid Search Strategist

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