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Introduction
Aardvark is all about providing the independent funeral director with marketing tools that make competing with larger corporate chains a much more even contest. Whether this is in graphic design, website development or promotion and publicity.
Our 'edge' is that not only do we already work within the funeral sector with several key organisations and suppliers, but that our principals have worked within the funeral profession itself. Whether you need to promote funeral plans, memorial masonry or greener funerals then, be assured that we understand the issues, we speak your language.
And best of all, we do not cost the earth - and we work to budget.
Graphic Design
Colour is all around us, and can be used to send out different messages. Black of course is the colour of night, death and surprisingly denotes creativity in those individuals who choose to wear it. Shapes too, have their own vocabulary - as do type faces. Manipulating those elements to project a message that promotes trust, portrays an image of competence, and matches the needs and values of your clients, is where graphic design and marketing meet.
Whether it is in putting together an image that leaps out from the page in print or web, or material to be given out to the bereaved along with their copy of the arrangement, Aardvark is there to help. Packaging the full range of services alongside useful information such as the role of the coroner, how to register a death, and the pros and cons of donations in memory versus floral tributes.
Matched to appropriate copy, such 'silent salesmen' can do double duty as handouts at funeral home open days, events and exhibitions attended by your firm, or when paying visits to schools, care homes, hospitals and potential affinity partners such as accountants and solicitors.
Websites and Application Development
Websites are not - and never have been - an instant route to a rich stream of new and high quality business. Well, at least not for ordinary mortals… But they have become an increasingly necessary tool to flesh out existing marketing efforts. By acting as a 24/7 shop window to back up web addresses quoted in advertisements and printed brochures. By playing a waiting game for incoming traffic from search engines - whether free or paid for.
And last but not least, a website will serve as an additional channel for influence in those vital three or four hours whilst competing arrangement quotations are being mulled over by the family as a group.
All this is now, but what of the future? Are you ready for on-line donations payments, do you wish for clients to be able to build their own funeral plan through a web page? What about offering people the chance to post messages of condolence against current funerals? Or on a more basic level, why not consider expanding any existing death notice listings to include images of the deceased and eulogies?
Lastly, here's something to take away. AardDONATE, our Microsoft Excel based donations recording system. Try it, you'll like it.
Download it from the Funeral Marketing Resources page
HERE
Ask us nicely and perhaps we can be persuaded to put together something similar to provide a quick arrangement calculator for those times after hours and at weekends when your duty funeral director is faced with the need to quote
Promotion and Publicity
Publicity is the oxygen without which a business - whether tinker, tailor, solicitor or funeral director - cannot hope to flourish. A name that is synonymous with a particular town or area, a reputation for giving something back to the community, are all forms of publicity. As is the advertisement run in the family announcements pages of a local daily or weekly newspaper.
But what happens when your market starts to change? Whether it is the looming threat of people living longer and having less to spend on a funeral at the time of need - or a rising new generation with different aspirations who will want a send off for their parents in turn with newer forms of service, more contemporary commemorative options - and perhaps to make up at death, their omissions made in life, by putting on the Ritz with a current Mercedes-Benz hearse.
Promotion and publicity is the reaching out to both new and existing customer groups. Reassuring those who have used your services in the past, and tapping into new markets by demonstrating that your business is in tune with their needs, their world, their style icons, their beliefs.
For a taboo subject such as death, this is a task that can never be tackled head-on. But a funeral home can promote itself extremely effectively by taking an indirect approach. Advertising that stands out by taking a step back from the stark reality of what a funeral director does - and instead presenting a human face through its people. Taking the work done by employees or the company behind the scenes within the community, and using timely press releases to print, web and broadcast media that generate news stories to win
the 'hearts and minds' of your public.
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Sector
Marketing
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