Funeral Directors: Does Market Share Matter?

Market share is a way to measure how well you are doing compared to other Funeral Directors in your area, or in the UK industry as a whole. A higher market share can help with things such as supplier costs which in turn can help with competitive pricing. Having a good share of the funerals in your local area helps sustain your funeral home for future generations and can help it grow towards opening a new branch if so desired.

Maintaining market share is arguably more important to an established independent than growing market share. You will already be doing the fundamentals of this as part of day to day business such as providing excellent customer service and quality care. Unlike some other industries now, word of mouth is still invaluable for Funeral Directors and these recommendations are achieved through your hard work and excellence.

If you are looking at other ways to help maintain or grow your market share, there are a few ways we can help, for free. We'll explore a few of them below.

Advertising is one of the most obvious ways to grow market share. Many of you will use local newspapers, news websites, internet search engines such as Google, social media platforms, local organisations, charities or hospitals for your advertising already. This is paid for advertising and the results can vary depending on your budget and the reach of the advertising.

No budget to advertise? Social media is now an invaluable tool for free advertising through brand awareness and community engagement. You can read more about social media in our previous blog here.

Free digital advertising is also available to all Funeral Directors on funeral-notices.co.uk, as a thank you for choosing us to provide notices on your own website. If you have a Reach Plc print title close by, we can also offer you a free 1/3 page testimonial advert on the funeral-notices page of the paper too. If not, we'll match the value in additional online advertising on funeral-notices.co.uk.

Your logo speaks volumes about who you are and should be instantly recognisable as belonging to your funeral home. To help with this recognition, all of our online notices are published beside your logo and allow our audience to see how many notices you are publishing. As an example, take a look at today's notices published in the Stoke Sentinel. As you scroll down the page the notices placed by Funeral Directors, displaying their company logo, really stand out. This is the same when people search our site via area too, so every Funeral Director benefits from the prominence of their logo featuring in all local and regional search results.

The more notices you publish, the more likely it is your business will be seen by people. In addition, getting 100% of your notices published online makes your business look like it is thriving too - success breeds success!

We can offer free online notices to any Funeral Director using funeral-notices to display notices on their website. If you would like a free trial of these, click the 'Request a call/email' button at the bottom of this page.

Again this is something we can help with by providing you with a way to display notices on your own website. Once a notice is published, you can advise families to view their notices via your own website. You can read more on the benefits of having notices on your website here or contact us using the button below.

Innovation: changing with the times.

Giving people a reason to visit your website pre-need is a great one for this. This can be achieved not only by having notices on your website, but also online donations (available on all notices on funeral-notices.co.uk) or blogs. Social media is also a great tool to increase visits to your website. Many Funeral Directors now also offer memorial gifts which are another way to bring people to your website.

Honest Reviews

Every Funeral Director placing notices on funeral-notices.co.uk can display their Google or Feefo reviews on both their listing page in our Find a Funeral Directory and on their funeral notice history page.

Reviews are helpful for those choosing a Funeral Director and displaying your reviews on your website suggests transparency and can reinforce the good name you've worked so hard to create.

Thank you for reading - we hope you have found this brief insight into market share useful.

For help getting notices on your website, to start your free trial of online funeral notices or for more information, contact us now using the button below. We would love to hear from you.

For further help with maintaining or increasing market share, request a free online health check from our digital experts at Reach Solutions.

Their FREE no-obligation online health check gives you quick and easy access to a detailed report about your online profile including website compatibility, social media presence, and search ranking and they can advise on the best solutions for your funeral home.