Early, Early Bird Registration Fee: $799
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OPENING NIGHT – Reception & Opening Session
Arrival Gift: “Your Personal Market’s Potential.”
This short custom report includes the number of deaths, burials and cremations occurring in your market at several radii from your business address.
DAY 1 – All About the Cremation Business
Profitably Traverse the Cremation Revolution
As their local Florida market’s cremation rate soared from 21% to over 70% over 21 years, Anderson McQueen Funeral Home tried many different responses, which included two different approaches to growing cremation brands. The result was jumping from 450 calls to over 2500 calls. President John McQueen, our special guest presenter, will discuss what specifically worked and what didn’t as they changed their funeral home approach, added cremation brands, enhanced services, changed prices, trained employees and other tactics – ultimately growing calls rapidly across all entities in their family of brands.
Exploring Cremation Business Models in Use Today
We’ll examine three different cremation-oriented business models in use today, discussing the key competitive differences between the most popular of these: low cost cremation business vs a cremation society vs a hybrid funeral home/cremation-business model. Learn what’s working where, how to attractively position and approach marketing for each model, and the competitive strengths and weaknesses of each model.
How to Successfully Launch a Cremation Brand
Perhaps the most common question today is “should I launch a cremation brand,” and the accompanying considerations that go with it: How should I brand it? How large a market do I need to succeed? What’s beneficial or challenging about connecting my cremation brand to my funeral home brand vs keeping them separate? How do I not cannibalize my funeral home business? How can I keep my preneed staff motivated? This presentation answers these critical questions and others in detail, based on real life success and failure stories from around the continent. You will learn how to effectively position a cremation brand, craft packages and more in ways that are embraced rather than resented.
Discussion – “Better Positioning High and Low End Brands”
Having now heard several hours of examples, statistics and paradigm-challenging material, the group discussion lets you specifically vet, explore and digest the concepts and examples you have heard. The moderator will use focus questions to help move the conversation along and draw attention to the major points made in the preceding sessions. Sharing personal experience or market conditions is encouraged as each attendee considers the possibilities in the specific context of their own market situation and the type of funeral care business they work at or are considering.
New Technology Tools For Streamlining Operations
Rising costs and decreasing revenues are driving the demand for new tools that streamline operational tasks. See what types of new third party tools from the larger business technology industry have recently been leveraged successfully by deathcare business owners to centralize and simplify communications, organization, scheduling, tasking, task-tracking and reporting, getting legitimate digital signatures, and other important time-saving functions.
DAY 2 – Marketing Cremation
Mastering the Largest Online Advertising Spaces on Earth
While managing one’s own online advertising has become far easier, so has losing or wasting a lot of money while doing it. Learn how to cost-effectively advertise for cremation-related searches in Google, Facebook and other key Pay-Per-Click (PPC) mediums. Learn about the major components determining how your ads will rank on Google AdWords, and why higher-ranking ads often cost less per click than lower ranking ads – opposite of most people’s expectations.
How to Win With Hospice: the Most Valuable Lead Source in Funeral Care
Ninety percent of families select the cremation provider a hospice nurse “unofficially recommends.” Now consider that over 44% off U.S. deaths occur under hospice care, and that the average hospice nurse carries 10 cases – 36% of which die within 6 days. If you do the math, it is obvious why a well- rounded marketing strategy must cultivate hospice referrals to decrease long term cost-per-client-acquisition expenses while locking down local market share. Learn how to reach the real “front line” hospice workers and win recommendations for low cost cremations (and even full-cost funerals).
Staying On Top In The Rapidly Changing Search Engine Optimization Game
Google makes over 500 changes per year to their search algorithms. The last two years have seen some massive changes that are particularly effecting cremation oriented searches. The competition for Google rankings is not at the “website” level, but at the “web page” level. Understanding the key components effecting how your pages rank is something every business owner grasp. What is Google looking for, and what content does it rank the highest in search results? Learn the answers to these questions and more as you learn how to optimize your website for this new smartphone-dominant “responsive” era.
Offer Website Content That Impresses Cremation Shoppers
How do you stand out to cremation shoppers in a market with several cremation businesses, or even as a funeral home against other funeral homes? How can a “first to market” or new cremation business quickly generate the kind of “appeal” and trust needed to drive online sales? In general, no area is more deficient in funeral industry websites than that of content, especially cremation-oriented content. Learn the topics and details you need to address, and the blend of methods in dispensing that material you must leverage to stand out and win calls. Done right, these techniques can help you outsell competitors that are offering lower price points.
Maximize Website Performance and ROI Like a Fortune 500 Company
How can you be certain that your website’s content is appealing, or that the web traffic you paid to obtain via advertising is impressed by your website and brand? How can you discover which content is less appealing in your market and in need of revision, or where untapped opportunities are hiding? Meet “Google Analytics.” This free tool gives loads of deeply insightful information to help you dial in your website’s power to engage and impress shoppers. It helps you determine things like
- how each channel in your advertising strategy is performing,
- where your web traffic is and is not coming from
- what devices shoppers are using
- which pages are getting visited for how long
- which pages shoppers “bounce” or “abandon” from, and more
In this presentation you will learn your way around Google Analytics, be shown where to look for the most important website performance metrics, and more.
Parting Gift: Take Home Binder
You will receive a binder containing highlights, check lists and guides to help you remember and implement the key skills taught at the conference.
*Optional – “Your Web Presence & Competitive Analysis Audit”
In a 20 minute, onn-on-one session, we’ll quickly evaluate how well your/your competitor’s website(s) is performing with regards to:
- SEO – strengths and weaknesses influencing current Google page rank
- Advertising – how much is occurring in your market, it’s strengths and weaknesses
- Content – how effective is the information, and presentation of that information
- Market Potential/Threats – at-a-glance evaluation of competitiveness and ease-of-entry into your 35-50 mile market radius