Leverage Local Sponsorships to Increase Funeral Home Brand Awareness

Does your funeral home sponsor a soccer team? Do you make an appearance every year in the town parade?

Funeral home leaders know that personalization and a commitment to caring service are essential to building long-term revenue streams, but it’s not always easy to translate those values into marketing. Local sponsorships provide one channel for building appropriate brand awareness with a targeted, geocentric audience.

Partnerships with local organizations such as associations or nonprofits let you expand funeral home marketing reach in a way that enforces your commitment to people and families.

These partnerships position you as a company that cares about the community — a branding platform that resonates with the missions and values of most funeral homes.

And while you’re joining the community to help make it better, you can benefit from a wide variety of local marketing opportunities. Just some benefits of local sponsorships include:

• Local ads on event flyers, programs or banners
• Booths or tents at an event where you can interact directly with potential clientele
• Inclusion of your brand in press releases, news stories and website listings
• Back links to your site from event or organization web pages, newsletters and social media
• Your logo on swag, such as T-shirts, handed out by event organizers or associations

Local sponsorships are branding opportunities, so you don’t always get a direct link to your products or site. And that’s okay.

The branding component, coupled with the fact that local sponsorship activity takes time — event organizers often seek sponsorship commitments months in advance — makes this an opportunity for positioning yourself as an expert provider in the niche rather than a channel for advertising specific products or services.

Obviously, funeral home marketing must walk an appropriate line, and that’s true when you seek local sponsorship opportunities. Partner with organizations or events with values that overlap yours to avoid  branding faux pas.

You can also work with associations that provide parallel services to stack the deck when it comes to target audience. For example, an event geared toward retirement planning is going to draw people who are thinking about the future, making it a good place to showcase your pre-planning services.

However you approach local sponsorships, remember that the opportunities are diverse. You can integrate sponsorships with your existing marketing strategies or use them as a singular channel to drive local branding.

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