Start of Funeral Futurist

Rob Heppell: Welcome back to the Funeral X podcast. I am Rob Heppell and I’m joined with my Funeral Results business partner, JJ. Hey Jake, how’s it going today?

JJ: Hey, Rob. Very good.

Rob Heppell: Great. Well, enjoyed the story of Johnson Consulting and after that, we were talking. He said, “Okay. Well, you need to do… You need to give the story behind Funeral Results Marketing,” so I think we’ll tackle that today.

JJ: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it goes without saying. How did you start to offer websites and other marketing services? Give me a little more background on that.

Rob Heppell: Yes, for sure. So I’ll give you a little bit of the early part and then will get into Funeral Results. So I started with McCalls in Victoria in ’86 right out of high school as a funeral director, and then lots of things go in 10-year chunks. So in 1996, I helped McCalls with their first website, and then for myself, I thought, “Oh, you know what? I should get heppell.com,” and I got it and get this, Jake, this is from Network Solutions and it was $20, and I guess that was too much money. They felt that they were charging too much, so they actually sent me a t-shirt, and I’ll take a picture of it and I’ll put it in the show notes because it’s quite funny. It’s not looking too great, but it was good quality. It’s nice and thick.

So as things progressed, in 2002 I met Todd Abrams and the unique thing about Todd is his family’s funeral home is the one directly north of my uncle and grandfather’s funeral home in Ontario. So there’s Bolton, which was Egan’s, and then if you drive north, the next one was Abram’s Funeral Home in Tottenham, and I ran into Todd at a trade show. It was an FSAC in Whistler, and we got talking and I’m like, “Hey, I think your name sounds familiar,” and here he is, he’s this tech guy from Texas. Yes, he didn’t stay with the funeral, got into technology, started websites, and so I started working for him, representing his company through Canada and they became Aldor Solutions and FDMS, and FDMS is a very familiar company to both you and me, and continue to work with them.

So it’s just funny how these things start and how they continue to circle back and continue to be part of the story. I went back to school, to university, got my business degree in entrepreneur management, took marketing courses, and this would’ve been early 2000s, and 2006 I created a website for myself off of WordPress, and I noticed that it was quite easy to use compared to… I played around with HTML and it was starting to get over my head, and WordPress made it a lot easier, and at this time, I’d left Aldor Solutions. I was doing more SEO and offering those services plus different training. Being in Victoria, our cremation rate when I started in ’86 was 67%, and I believe in the mid-2000s, it was around 88%, and now it’s 93%. So we were kind of always on the verge of something new, everyone else had… And Victoria to this day still probably has one of the highest cremation rates in all of North America to 93%, but it’s been steady at that rate for about five years.

JJ: Yes, it makes you wonder, something like that, like just where the cremation rate ends up across the US. Of course, we’re all wondering what that answer’s going to be as we head towards it. I don’t know. I was just thinking about that when you said that.

Rob Heppell: Yes. I think there’s going to be certain number of people, there are different ethnic groups here in Victoria, and then with also there’s people are looking at green burial and natural burial, so there’s going to be, I think, a certain plateau and it looks like 93 or so is where we’ve been here for the last number of years, but what was happening though was people were phoning the funeral home and asking us like, “Hey, how do you deal with all this cremation?” And Dave McCall, the owner, he didn’t want to deal with them, so he would just put them on with me, and that’s how I kind of got into the consulting part.

So I left Aldor, started doing this and part of it, more of a hobby, was the SEO part of how to rank, and as you remember, you used to go to these, like Alta Vista, you’d put your URL in and you’d submit it, and I’d do this on a regular basis, and what I found out though was I set up a Google alerts for my name, and then I wrote a blog post, put it in there, and 10 minutes later, my Google alerts went off and I’m like, “Wow. Google actually knows it that quickly?” And one of the things and probably get to here is I like to connect the dots like okay, I see this being used outside of funeral service, how does it apply to funeral service? And I thought, “You know what? I bet you could do that with obituaries,” because I’m sure when someone dies and people hear, “Oh, Rob died,” and they start searching the name and the information isn’t coming up, but we never knew that because what happened… and when looking at Aldor Solutions and even before that, I believe, Mike Turkiewicz from FuneralNet was the first to put obituaries on the internet, but they were in a database that couldn’t be crawled by this search engine, and so this kind of changed it, and not that this was setting a trend, but it was a great way for me to promote it. And what we started noticing was not only was it just me, but when we’d set this up for the first couple of clients, that people were Googling the name of the person that died. So it was a great way to kind of launch, “Hey, these are search-friendly websites,” and I think… Well, we’ve alluded to this before Jake, but you were wondering why my website was outranking your website, and so you picked up the phone and gave me the call and we’ve talked about that story, but this is kind of all at that same time.

The other thing though that I found as we were building these websites and I started to use a couple of people locally and also use someone from the States as a more of a developer was that since these websites were so search engine-friendly, trying to sell search engine optimization services was kind of hard, right? Because if we’re selling the benefits of being found in Google because it’s built from the ground up, it’s really hard to then add on additional SEO services. Now, it is a little different with SEO being… Funeral homes could fall under local SEO where there’s your keywords and your geographical terms, and then there’s your overall organic SEO, which would apply to John’s consulting group and Funeral Results Marketing where it’s not necessarily location-based, but back then it was really hard to kind of balance the two.

So what we did was we, when I say we, it was myself and my team, started offering the funeral home websites, and then we started using that platform for cremation arrangement websites, and one of the things that… And again, I think Turkiewicz was one of the first to do that, but it really replicated the arrangement processes, just how you’d sit down with the family, take their stats information, go through the forms, do the selections, ask for payment at the end, it was just replicating that, and I think the internet consumer is going to… They don’t want to worry about all that other stuff. Someone’s died, they want to deal with the cremation and just get it done, and I think for them, and that was my hypothesis, was they probably just wanted to get it over with.

So we kind of flipped the order and got them to do the selection first and pay for it, and then do stats and then do the forms, and I like to say to clients and prospects, I’d rather chase someone around for vital stats information than chase around for a credit card, right? Because then if you have the credit card, you know they’re committed. What we started doing next was looking how to promote these websites, and this is now under kind of the brand of Funeral Futurist, and the way I came up with that name was because of the story I told you, people were kind of looking towards us in Victoria, McCall’s. It was kind of like we were living in the future. We were kind of ahead of everyone. So that’s where kind of the background of that name. And so at this time, I was going by Funeral Futurist Websites, Funeral Futurist Marketing.

With additional services, I started then looking at Google AdWords and I was a big proponent of SEO first and like, “Oh, you have to pay for Google AdWords,” but now since we had the SEO kind of baked into the website, I started looking at AdWords, went through certifications and I discovered this other part, which was the difference between funeral prices and funeral costs. So as you know, Jake, we talk about price shoppers, our general price list. It’s a GPL. It’s not like the general cost list, it’s price list and price shoppers, and that. And so when I went into the keyword planner, and unfortunately Google has taken some of these tools away, but kind of back then you could use a keyword planner. So I put in funeral costs and I put in funeral prices and twice as many people were searching for costs because when you need a new roof for your house, you’re not going to say, “I wonder what the price is of a new roof?” You’re going to like, “What’s this going to cost me?” You don’t say what the average price is, you say what is the average cost.

From the consumer side, the consumers are using the word cost and from the vendor side, no matter what it is, they’re thinking price, like what’s the price tag. It’s not called the cost tag, right? But what I also found was so there’s twice as many people searching for cost over prices, but for the results, there were twice as many results in Google for funeral prices than funeral costs. So it was actually a fourfold swing. So that was something that we could take advantage of shortly, and then after a while, people kind of catch up to that.

JJ: Yes, I always found that I thought… I always thought Google AdWords was a neat way to see how people are finding me, and I don’t think business owners, well, they don’t know how to or they don’t use somebody like yourself to really explore that on their own business. It really reveals a lot about what you should be saying in your website to me. I mean, it’s a very powerful tool, not just for what it does from marketing directing, if you will, but also just what it tells you from the analytics. It’s very interesting.

Rob Heppell: Oh, absolutely. I didn’t really go over my probably in the mid to late 2000s there, I was starting to study internet marketing. So it was great learning the different internet marketing experts out there, and they would always refer back to all these old school advertisers and marketers, so Claude Hopkins who wrote Scientific Advertising and Robert Collier, one of his statements or sayings was “enter the conversation going on in the consumer’s mind” which is exactly what you just said. What are the people, what are they thinking? Not what we’ve heard this. We don’t want to use jargon, but even some of our non-jargon terms are from the supplier’s perspective, not from the consumer’s perspective. It’s basic consumer behavior, but we kind of get lost, and I think companies do this all the time. They kind of get lost in their own vocabulary, not just jargon, but even just from their point of view.

So as you said, seeing it from the consumer’s point of view and that’s by looking at what people are actually searching for, you can see the differences there. So that was another discovery. And then another real benefit about WordPress is that I don’t need to have the best developers in the world because WordPress as a CMS or content management system, they have the best developers in the world working on this all the time. So I don’t have to worry about that. I just, as I said before, just have to connect the dots, how does this work for funeral service? So back around 2015 or so, there’s this thing called Mobilegeddon, where Google was going to start with the use of mobile devices increasing rapidly, and this is right about the time when internet traffic was hitting that 50% mark, where people were using their cell phones or tablets more than they were using their desktops.

And we watched this through Google Analytics shift, and now it’s probably two thirds, one third, but at that time, lots of people were offering like, “Here’s your website, and then here’s your mobile website,” and what Google said is they would prefer to have a website that was mobile responsive, which means that it would shrink and expand depending on the width of the display instead of having to pinch the screen on your phone or expand it with your thumb and your finger, they would just want it automatically change. And once again, I didn’t have to design that. WordPress had already made that happen. We just had to make sure that our themes were compatible and that gave us another advantage, short-term advantage, right, and then people would catch up, competitors would catch up.

Then the company was growing. We’d been doing this now for almost 10 years, and I started to listen to a guy named John Warrillow, and he wrote this book called Built to Sell, and it talks more about your side of the business, Jake, of mergers and acquisitions, but in the book that he wrote, he wrote it from the perspective of a digital marketing agency and you should create your packages or create your products and just making them easier to offer, making them easier to apply to your customers, having a number of standard operating procedures or SOPs, and so that really started me to make the agency more efficient, and then from there, going back to Claude Hopkins in Scientific Advertising, chapter 20 is about naming your business.

He has a very specific strategy about that and not to use names or words that you would have to explain what they mean, and even though I thought Funeral Futurist, Funeral Futurist Websites, Funeral Futurist Marketing, people could kind of get it, and the kind of Funeral Futurist brand, whether I liked it or not, was kind of more associated with me, which would mean that it’s probably less sellable or not as sellable as a better term. So I changed the name in 2016 to Funeral Results Marketing because Funeral Results Marketing, I believe, says what it is. It’s funeral, it’s marketing, and it gets results. Just like a friend of mine has a sign shop, and he was telling me that, “Rob, whenever we do a sample sign, we call it Eat at Joe’s because it says what to do and where to do it within three words.” I try to stay with that strategy.

And then what I started noticing was search engine optimization was starting to get more complicated, so we did start to offer those even though our websites were SEO-friendly from the ground up. On-site SEO is just about 20, 25% of the whole SEO picture. So there’re 75 to 80% of the other factors that go on beyond the website, so that would be business link listings, backlinks, online reviews from Google. That’s where we started to build that part out of our business and then also to provide those results. So then, Jake, we get up to 2019, 2020, and you and I had been talking, we had been doing business back and forth with both the Johnson Consulting website and the Menke website and kept in touch, and then we started our conversation about becoming partners and we’ve documented that there. So that’s kind of the timeline of where we’ve gotten up to about a year or so ago, and building it from there.

JJ: Well, I think it’s incredible. I mean, when I go back to 1996, where I believe that was a date which was the first website with McCall’s all the way to today, and for those who’ve been around and could remember their first website or this notion of the internet and what have you, I mean, that’s… I tell people, “I think Rob’s one of the OGs,” is the word I like to use, “Of internet marketing and websites, and I’ve always found it fascinating.” So now we’re partners in this, so it goes with saying and I’m aware of some of this, but you might go in the background of where we now with Funeral Results Marketing and how we help our clients in funeral service.

Rob Heppell: Yes, for sure. Yes, and this partnership has been great. Now there’s lots of structure and have a bigger team and we can provide better support, and I think too, again, based on both of our experiences of being kind of lifers in funeral service is that if we want to help our clients serve more client families is kind of how I try to drill it right down, and we have our three main service offerings, our website development, website hosting and support, and then our digital marketing services.

JJ: That’s awesome. And there’s a lot to that when you say that, so if break down each one of those into the specific offerings within those.

Rob Heppell: Sure, Yes. You bet. Yes, for websites and all of our websites are built on the WordPress platform, so that’s the content management system that we use and we have our funeral home marketing websites, and when you and I have been talking, you like to stress the marketing side of that, and even when it was the Funeral Futurist part, there’s websites and there’s two groups, right? There’s your technology companies and there are a number of technology companies in funeral service that we compete against, but we’re friendly with, and so I kind of see it as they see a website as technology, and I see websites as a marketing tool because I’m coming at it from the marketing side.

And I like how you kind of stress this like, “Rob, these are funeral home marketing websites,” and although a funeral home website could get up to a million visitors in a year, a number of our clients get a 100,000 visitors a month, but 95% of that or even more are obituary traffic or they’re looking up donations or directions, but mostly, it’s obituaries and condolences, but there’s that 5% of people who need to do business with the funeral home. So there’s the funeral home marketing websites, then we have our cremation arrangement website platform that over the last decade we’ve fine-tuned and really make it like a new… It’s its own virtual business.

Obviously, any business that comes in through that, the logistics need to be looked after from the funeral home staff or their third-party partners, and then we also create funeral related websites, such as cemetery sites or industry vendor sites, but all of them were built on the WordPress platform. And just to make it easier for folks, we have a website calculator on Funeralresultsmarketing.com where clients can go and pick and choose what features they would like on the website. With that, it will build out the price right there and then we can build that custom website for them.

JJ: Yes, and just when I think about the websites, I mean, for those that know or would know, I mean, WordPress just where… You and I, we’re talking about this before when we started this podcast and today and just where WordPress has come from and where it is today, to me, it’s just a no-brainer. It really was very good foresight on your part to just be so involved with it that early on to where it is today. It’s unbelievable.

Rob Heppell: Well, yes, probably we should dive into maybe a more specific WordPress episode just to go through because it is neat. I had the choice. I remember talking with a guy, a local guy in Victoria, and at that time there was WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, and he said, “Well, I can make a site in all three, but I think what you want is WordPress.” So by fluke that’s the way I went, and Yes, maybe for the next time I’ll get some stats, but it’s amazing the internet footprint that WordPress has on all the websites online.

JJ: That’s very cool.

Rob Heppell: So that’s our development part, and then we have our hosting, and what I’ve found is there’s a lot of not necessarily inside funeral service, but a number of funeral homes have their websites built by a local marketing company, and they might have a number of things that they’re doing, they’re doing maybe a brand and a style guide and messaging, but they’ll have some developers, but not many of them focus on the hosting, like what we focus on. So we have a number of people that have a funeral home marketing website built on WordPress, developed by a local marketing company, and we can easily migrate that over onto our servers, and the difference is we have a team that focuses on supporting that for our clients. We use a high-performance WordPress-specific servers.

We try to get any request done within a couple of business days, but usually within 24 hours, and we also train our clients with how to maximize their traffic for obituary promotion, really trying to get numbers up to that 100,000. My gauge is about 500 visitors per obituary if you’re to measure that, and it’s just the exposure that you can get because the more people that are on your website, the more times that part of the community is exposed to your virtual brand and why not have them reading the obituary, looking at the condolences, adding a condolence, watching the video tribute, and even now especially with the pandemic, watching the livestream or the replay of the service itself.

Those two focus on the websites, and then we have our digital marketing services. So we have those broken down into four areas. So we have our Google Ads management, so that used to be called Google AdWords, but they’ve recently changed it just to Google Ads, and our services include managing the account, keyword optimization, managing the ads themselves, and the ads are ever-changing, then also optimizing the landing pages, so the actual page that people land on after clicking the ad. I don’t recommend people going to the homepage because there’s all this other noise going on there, there’s grief help, there are obituaries, there are directions, and if you’re driving people with a specific message, send them to a specific page, which again, is another benefit of WordPress, we can easily create landing pages.

And then also conversion tracking and competitor tracking, but one thing, Jake, that I’ve really found on our Google Ads management, that Google tries to make it… They try to make it easier with their AI, their artificial intelligence, and they’re always making suggestions, but here’s the problem: They don’t understand our business, and I know people will say, “Well, our business is different.” Well, the way I can prove that is Google thinks that funerals, cremation, cemeteries and obituaries are synonymous, so they don’t see the difference. They used to.

We used to be able to bid on the difference between funeral home and funeral homes plural. Funeral home would be probably someone looking for Johnson Funeral Home, but if it was funeral homes, it could be funeral homes in Scottsdale, and that applies to restaurants or lots of other services. Now, Google calls it close variance, but they’re making it a lot less specific. So what we have to do as experts, we utilize negative keywords for all of our different campaigns so that we are able to dial right into those specific cremation searches, specific funeral searches, and then we don’t want any obituary searches at all. So we block all those out.

JJ: I think it’s real important, and there’s a lot of freelance if you will, and companies alike that do Google Ads management, quote, if you will, but to have an intimate knowledge of the profession that you’re doing it in and knowing those negative keywords, positive keywords and what the messaging should look like for something as personal as funeral service, I think there’s a lot to be said about finding somebody who’s done that in the space, and there are people that do that, that understand our space. It’s very important. I think, again, there are so many options for this, but finding those people that actually understand the space, to your point, like the negative keywords, you’re going to save money, you’re going to get higher, as you’d say, click-through rate. I only know the cursory of it, but it’s really important I’ve learned, all the mistakes that I’ve made quite frankly.

Rob Heppell: Well, Yes, that’s true because we have this master negative keyword list that we apply to all of our clients’ Google Ads accounts, and that would include, as an example, careers, training, school. There’s a lot of that. We have to make sure if we don’t have a pet service, that we pets, dogs, cats, horses. It’s crazy the number of animals that kind of sneak through. And if you do have a pet service, that’s fine. We would use those words as positive ones for that campaign. There are so many different things that if we were just to leave it up to Google, they would allow all this traffic to come through.

JJ: Oh, Yes. They’re happy to charge you for it.

Rob Heppell: Yes, exactly. And since they’re not the only game in town, but they’re 80% of it, I feel when we do this for a funeral home or a cremation provider that even though yes, there is a monthly fee to what we charge, it will be less than trying to do it yourself or trying to someone who just doesn’t understand the business and the time that it would take for the funeral home owner or manager to teach the outside company how to do that because we meet with our clients and they would say, “How come you’re bidding on obituaries? How come you’re bidding on careers in funeral service?” Where that doesn’t happen with us because we’ve got all that dialed in.

JJ: Well, I think it’s fascinating to kind of wrap up this point. My one thing that I would say is you go out to get a bid to get your air conditioning fixed, it’s all the same thing, and however people assess their time might be the difference in the cost, but let’s say everybody costs a $1000 or whatever, if you were to apply it to Google Ads management, three different companies saying it would cost you $1000 a month for your spend, what you would actually spend on advertising, not what they’re charging, you would have vastly different result. You can have vastly different results from those three depending on how they perceive to be what the message is and what negative keywords. They’re not all equal, that’s for sure. The same $1000 spend within each three companies does not yield the same results nor go the same distance. It’s really was a learning experience for me.

Rob Heppell: Oh, for sure, Jake. Well, and another thing that is, I think, very unique to funeral service and maybe only a few others is the finite transaction of funeral service. There’s one transaction per human and that’s it, and then it’s over. So if you’re dealing with a marketing company that maybe works for a sports store or a clothing store or a restaurant, “Hey, let’s try to get everyone to buy two sets of shoes. When they go to check out one pair, we’ll offer them a second pair at half price, or let’s try to fill up that restaurant and instead of people coming in once a month, let’s get them come in twice a month or once a week.” Well, as you know, funeral service, there’s one chance to serve that family upon their loved one’s death, and you either win that call or you’ve lost it forever.

When I’m talking potential clients, funeral home or cremation clients, just let them know, and hey, it’s a free marketplace out there, so if they want to use a local company, that’s fine, but there are just a few things that we understand. There are only so many people searching for funeral homes in a given month because there are only so many people that are experiencing a death. So there’s no point in… Once you get it really dialled in that your ad’s showing up for every one of those buying intent searches, it’s over. You can’t spend twice as much money to try to get twice as much business. It just doesn’t happen.

JJ: I think the thing that’s fascinating and it’s why I enjoy doing this blog with you, Rob, is you look at the digital side of this and the gaining of a customer, or I’ll say loss, but whether you just didn’t get the customer, and then I look at it from a value add to a  business. I mean, you’re talking about with the… You can quantify and identify exactly the value of finding that additional customer through correct marketing. It’s about 20 to $30,000 a customer plus, and it’s in equity, in enterprise value, and people don’t look at it that way because they’re not selling their business.

They’re just trying to grow it, but when you look at that, which is an exact fact, because that’s what I do on my side of the world, then just how much is that Google Ads management worth to you? Because sometimes people get stuck with the cost of doing it or if they think they can do it themselves, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to risk 20, $30,000 a customer without bringing somebody who’s the expert at it. I learned that as an interesting experience as a value add, which we’ll probably talk about in another podcast, I’m sure.

Rob Heppell: For sure. Yes. No, that would be great. So that’s Google Ads, and then if we then look at SEO management, so that search engine optimization, getting your website as close to the top as possible on the search results page of Google and the other search engines, that service we look at. We do a baseline, we do a local marketing and SEO audit, we look at their online listings such as the Google Business profile, they’ve just changed it from Google My Business page to Google business profile. They love changing the names. And then we also run a competitor’s analysis and we can see, and then this goes back to the obituaries and having the online obituaries, if your funeral home does 300 calls a year, you could expect 300 additional pages to your website roughly speaking.

There’s probably going to be a bit more or there’s a few people that don’t have their obits put on, but in the SEO world, you hear content is king and we need to do content marketing and do blogging, and it’s good to get those messages out there, but unlike any other business, we have this free content that’s created every time we have a funeral or a service, we’re creating a new page and now it’s not business getting information, but it does have the funeral keywords in there, and what that allows us to do as a funeral home with those online obits is to grow that to footprint bigger and bigger and bigger. Some clients that have tens of thousands of pages on their website, so they might be in first place, but second place could be quite far away just due to the setup of the website and then the number of pages are two huge factors of the onsite SEO group of factors.

And then there’s link building, so you would link from… If you have a cremation page and you had other cremation articles, you’d want them to link internally. You don’t want to put too many links this way, but that’s just another way Google likes to see how the information is organized. Then there is the Google Business profile page, so we make sure that that’s optimized and we on an ongoing basis check to make sure that the page load speed is working, is quick. One thing that would happen sometimes is maybe at the funeral home, they have an obituary image and they don’t reduce or optimize the size of the image. Now WordPress will take that large image and they’ll compress it so that it appears that fine, but if it gets clicked on that big 3000 by 2000 pixel image is going to be on the website and it’s taking up some of the resources. So we make sure that those are all getting fine-tuned as we’re improving the onsite performance of their search engine optimization.

Then we offer some online reputation management. What a client would do is provide us with names and email addresses of client families that they’ve served. We then send out information. We do a brief little just a check-in to see if they’re happy or not, and then if they were, there’s a series of emails or even text messages that go out where they would humbly solicit a online review, whether it’s on Facebook or Google. And then also too we’ve had some clients that will… They get a nasty, maybe there’s a riff in the family, and someone’s put out by just maybe family dynamics and the funeral home has to deal with the executor who’s in charge, so someone that’s not part of that, but they’re upset over what’s going on, they take it out on the funeral home in an online review that’s negative. And so we can help our clients respond to those, and one thing is these people who fly off the handle, most of the time, they throw in a hearsay statement.

One of the first ones that I dealt with, this person went on a diatribe about how horrible the funeral home was and then right towards the end, and they made the statement that said, “Yes, and I’ve heard the same from other people as well.” So we look at that, we review it. We, “Oh, that’s hearsay.” Now, Jake, I’m not a lawyer, but I can identify that part, and if there’s any hearsay in that review, Google will usually immediately just delete it. Sometimes they hang themselves when they are going off on some tangent. And then finally, and to connect with the results part of our name, Funeral Results Marketing, we create these reporting dashboards, and what they do is they aggregate the different metrics, whether it’s Google Analytics, Google Ads from Facebook, if the client are using a call tracking service, like CallTrackingMetrics or CallRail, lots of these different online tools can come into one spot, they can get their monthly report or they can just go online and check out this dashboard and just to see how they’re doing, and then based on compare it versus a previous period.

Those are the four main digital marketing services that we offer, and just like our websites, we do have a digital marketing calculator on our website. The one thing, Jake, you and I both agree on is transparency, and I believe we’re the only marketing funeral marketing company that we have all our prices are online. You can pick and choose what you want through the calculators and come up with, so you know exactly what your choices will cost you. We’re not here to hide anything.

JJ: It’s great, and I think as you mentioned, one thing it’s a good differentiator, but if you were to go further into this, but summarize it, how would you take each of those and say, “Okay, here’s how we differ from others in these that offer these similar services?”

Rob Heppell: Yes. Sure, Yes. Well, and again, we line up perfectly here. Just the two of us, we have over 50 years experience in funeral service and we’re lifers, right? This isn’t just a halftime job. We’re in funeral service 100%. So that’s one thing. There’s others out there that they dabble in funeral service because they think it’s an opportunity, and Yes, some stick around, but I noticed that a lot of folks that they maybe they’re one of these companies that’s local and does their local funeral home and thinks, “Oh. Hey, that was easy. We can do that for everyone,” and then they buy a domain, they have no funeral experience other than this one customer, and I see them on the radar for a bit, and then a couple years later the website’s gone. So they don’t stick around because they just don’t understand it.

Another thing, WordPress, and I think it’d be a good idea to go into that separately. So using WordPress, it’s the world’s most popular platform, and then too, since we’re dealing with these sites all the time, our custom layouts, they’re fast-loading, mobile responsive design, and I think the one big thing that’s differentiates us from most of the other website developers in funeral service is that with us, you purchase your website. It’s not like you’re… A lot of them are a proprietary system that have been built by these technology companies, and you’re going to pay for development and you’re going to pay for hosting, but you don’t own it because you can’t move it because it’s just part of their big system that they have to continually update.

And usually they’re not as quick to stay up to the latest changes of internet and security because we are because WordPress is looking after that even before we know that it’s an issue. That can though be bit of a detriment to us though, Jake, because since it’s a WordPress website, they can move that WordPress website to another, like a local hosting environment or host it on their own. So I like to say we have to work hard to keep your business every month.

JJ: Yes, I think it’s… That’s why I’ve always enjoyed WordPress. The information is so readily available for all this out there, and so we’d like to know a little bit more about and we can learn more about what our options are and what’s available to us, and I think that… I know that with sites like WordPress, if you get hit by a bus, if the company gets attacked or whatever, I mean, WordPress is a very common application out there, and I think those that develop off of custom software, I think at some point that requires updates and what have you. It just doesn’t seem as efficient and redundant, if you will, as WordPress. That’s why I’ve always liked it myself. You’re absolutely right.

Rob Heppell: For sure. Now with our cremation websites, some of the benefits of our platform is that it’s one website. So it’s not a website with your basic static pages and obituaries, and then you go off to another website for the arrangement process. So we have the website, the arrangement process, the obituaries, the online store, all on one platform. So once again, that is getting bigger and bigger with every obituary that you do, with every product that you load on there, that website’s getting bigger and bigger.

JJ: Well, and it’s providing… Oh, there again. I mean, WordPress allows for application integration, but still provides all of the SEO and internet searching. This is my speak, not yours because you’re the expert at this, but it can serve two of purposes rather than one, because when you’re in application development, which we do at J3 Tech, I mean, those are just meant to be applications. As marketing websites, they’re not. I think it’s really handy and cool how you’ve put together these cremation arrangement websites.

Rob Heppell: Well, and again with that flexibility, we conform to our clients’ processes. Sure, we let them know what the best practices are and what works well and what doesn’t, but if they have a different type of logistics or, as you know, different states have different requirements of who signs what forms, we can customize all that and we tailor those builds to our clients’ operations. And another thing too is we don’t increase our fees when a cremation company gets bigger and they go from 10 calls a month to 20 to 50 calls a month. We’ve had some great success stories. As they get busier, we’re not upping the price on them. We’ve built the platform for them and we host it and support it for them, and that’s what it’s going to be, and the busier they get, that’s great for them. We’re not putting our hands in their pockets for that.

JJ: Well, I know as I learned more about Funeral Results Marketing and our partnership, obviously as you know, you and I went through and reviewed how pricing is and how to be even more competitive or offer solutions that these customers are looking for. So I think your recent result of pricing options for these cremation websites is quite attractive quite honestly since-

Rob Heppell: And it’s kind of easy to get going. It is an investment. One of our clients, it was funny, telling me the story where he was talking with his parents and the parent was asking about, “Well, are you going to buying… I heard that there’s this other funeral home for sale. Are you going to be buying that funeral home?” “Well, no, I don’t think so because if I do that, that’s going to be a few million dollars of lane capital investment, and I have to deal with all that. I’m going to focus on the cremation part,” and then after kind of running through the numbers with the parents, the profit was the same because you have all this capital outlay for the funeral home and dealing with all that, and the staff, versus this very lean run website with advertising. And again, you need to be able to provide the logistics, but when the dust settled, the investment to get that profit was a 10th of what was going to be for the… Or weighed even less than a 10th to get the same profit as the physical business to expand.

And then finally, Jake, just quickly about our digital marketing services, and we’ve talked about it a bit, just our knowledge of funeral service and knowing these intricacies of how people are searching, and that really gives an advantage. And also too, when we’re host… If we’re hosting a client’s website or we’re hosting their cremation website platform, and we’re doing their digital services, it’s very easy since we can control both ends of. It’s just a lot more efficient and economical to be looking after that.

JJ: Well, I think that was… Sorry to interrupt, but I was just thinking, I mean, you’ve covered the three areas and I think our blogs are fun to do and it’s so easy because, Rob, you and I for quite a while, we’ve always kept in touch and in talking, we have conversations like this, so we could have been doing blogs a long time ago, but I think one purpose of the blog, certainly, it’s cool. It was fun for me to explain my history and background and now we’ve heard yours and I’ve heard yours. There’s a lot of things here I didn’t know, but I think the other purpose of the blog of course is how can all this be helpful and offer some thoughtful tips and things for those that are listening, and I would finish it quite honestly by saying that to go back to my statement of the value of a customer, and how do we find them.

And I always say, because we do surveys to our technology firm, what happens if you lost a customer? Well, I said earlier in the podcast that a customer’s worth 20 to $30,000. So if one of your arrangers offered a bad customer experience and the customer wouldn’t coming back, you can easily qualify that to a $30,000 loss of value, which is straight cash depending on whatever a value horizon is for the owner, and then I look at the owner group and I say, “Look, if somebody lost $30,000, what would you do?” And we can just assume the arranger would be in jail, they’d be arrested, whatever, and you have to hold yourself accountable too as an owner or the principal decision-maker for marketing of this same impact when you’re not implementing the right marketing strategies.

And a lot of this stuff is available and out on the internet in both what John’s consulting does, what J3 Tech does. Information is power and we know what the internet has done, but I can tell you another thing the Internet’s done is that it has caused a lot of us to feel like we can do things ourselves, and then I go to the next statement and that’s especially as an owner, what kind of value you putting on yourself when you’re trying to figure this stuff out? Because I like to think any owner, based on all the valuations that I’ve done, is worth at least $1000 an hour, at least. If you put yourself in $1000 hour paid position, what exactly should you be doing and what exactly should you not be doing?

And I would argue or debate that if you are wanting to have this kind of work done, you go find the experts because you’re going to not only save money, but you’re going to give yourself more time to go be out in the community and what have you. So it’s important thing to think about, but as we wrap up here, it goes without saying, where would the listeners go if they want to get more information?

Rob Heppell: Yes. Well, I think the first step is just go to our website. All of our prices are published there. We’ve got the calculators there, so you can play around with them. You don’t have to enter your email address to use them. You can if you want to get more information, but you can just play around with them, and we also have a free funeral home SEO audit, where we’ll look at your overall web presence and just see how you compare and you could go and claim that by just going to funeralresults.com/audit, A-U-D-I-T, and so that’s FuneralResults.com/audit and takes about 15, 20 minutes to auto-generate and you’ll get an email with that report, and then we could schedule time to go through it and see how we could help you out.

JJ: Well, we’ve talked about a lot of things and we made note to WordPress, so I think it’d be great to dive into that in the future and how that’s been a great advantage for our marketing and information websites.

Rob Heppell: Yes, that sounds great, Jake. Yes, I look forward to it because I think we touched on that a bit here, but I think there’s a little bit bigger story of how that could even help further and we’re starting to see even clients get into that and really turning their websites into their virtual marketing platform. Yes, that’ll be great.

JJ: Makes sense.

Rob Heppell: Great. Okay. Well, I’d like for those listening, thanks a lot for spending your time with us today. As Jake and I have said, it’s our goal to share some of our insights and our experiences and help other funeral professionals serve more client families and provide more meaningful services. So make sure you check back soon for another episode of the Funeral X podcast. Until next time, this has been JJ and Rob Heppell.

 

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