September 2020

Page A10 SEPTEMBER 2020 FUNERAL HOME & CEMETERY NEWS S ec t i on A Reaching Your Target Audience for Free FUNERAL HOME & CEMETERY NEWS www.nomispublications.com Monthly Columns online at Dr. Troyer’s free library of Facebook tutorial videos can be found at www.JasonTroyer.com. Dr. Jason Troyer is a grief expert, author, former psychology profes- sor, and therapist. He helps funeral homes and cemeteries connect with their communities through Facebook content and grief sup- port materials. He frequently provides community presentations, professional workshops, and trainings across the country. In addition to providing his Facebook content service and presen- tations, he also works at Smith Funeral & Cremation Service & Grandview Cemetery in Maryville, TN. Dr. Troyer can be reached at DrJasonTroyer@gmail.com. You can view all of his video tutorials and learn more at www.JasonTroyer.com. By Jason Troyer, PhD Facebook Made Easy and direct way to reach a much higher percentage of your target market by building your Facebook page. Furthermore, your Facebook page has several other ad- vantages over printed ads. For example, Facebook pages are designed for community engagement. Or to say it an- other way, Facebook allows your biggest fans to tell their friends how great you are by commenting on your posts and sharing your content with their friends and family. I’m guessing that it would be pretty rare for someone to take your newspaper ad and walk over to their friend’s house and say, “Did you see this great advertisement for the local funeral home!” – I just don’t think that happens. But every day people share Facebook posts with their friends. So, if you are looking for a cost-effective way to build connections in your community without relying on paid print advertisements, then building your Facebook page can help you reach more people and have more control. “But Dr.Troyer – youmight be making all of these numbers up!” If you contact me by email, I’ll share the name of the ac- tual funeral home and you can check the numbers yourself: DrJasonTroyer@gmail.com. You can also find free Facebook tutorial videos on my website: www.JasonTroyer.com. particularly interested in the town’s inhabitants who are aged 35 or older. Census data for the city says that 8,352 people in the town are over the age of 35. That is our target audience. Why is that the target audience? While we want to have a strong reputation and good relationships with people of all ages in our community, we are especially interested in those who may be planning their own funerals as well as adult chil- dren who may be planning a service for a parent – hence we use those who are aged 35 or older. We can see from Facebook Insights that 81% of the Follow- ers on Mr. Albers’s Facebook page are over the age of 35 – this means that out of the 2,832 total followers of his Facebook page, 2,294 are in our target audience. That’s who we are espe- cially interested in connecting with. If we divide the number of Followers in our target age group (2,294) by the total num- ber of similarly aged people in the entire town (8,352), we dis- cover that we have over 27% of the community members in our target age group (35+) already follow our Facebook page. Well – so what?! Put another way, Mr. Albers has a FREE and DIRECT way to connect to almost 30% of the target de- mographic in his community. It may be helpful to compare this to other outreach strategies. Do you place an occasional advertisement or notice in the local newspaper? Recent sta- tistics show that about 10% of households receive a printed newspaper. So you can pay to put an advertisement in a news- paper that very few people will see OR you can have a free I often get questions and comments like, “How many people does Facebook actually reach?” and “I don’t need to reach people around the world, I need to reach people in my hometown.” The answer is that Facebook can provide you with a FREE and DIRECT way to reach 25% or more of your target audience in your community. I often share the statistic that about 66% of Baby Boom- ers have Facebook accounts. But it is even more powerful if we could calculate how many people you could have direct contact with (i.e., they “Follow” your Facebook page). So let’s take an absolutely real-life example of one of my Face- book clients. The owner’s name has been changed, but the details are real. Mr. Albers owns a funeral home in a county in Alabama; he has two competitors in the same town. Mr. Albers has de- cided to invest the time and energy to nurture his Facebook audience by posting helpful, inspiring, and supportive con- tent. Over time, he has built his Facebook audience up to a total of 2,832 Followers. (If you think that is a lot, I have fu- neral home clients in rural areas with over 9,500 Followers!) Having 2,832 Followers doesn’t mean much until we know how big the community is. The service area for the funeral home is primarily the city which has a total popula- tion of 14,875. Of course, we are not expecting 8-year-old children to have a Facebook account and people under the age of 30 rarely follow funeral home Facebook pages. We are www. vischerfuneralsupplies.com SCI declares Quarterly Cash Dividend and increases Share Repurchase Authorization HOUSTON,TX— Service Corporation Internation- al announced that its Board of Directors has approved a quarterly cash dividend of nineteen cents per share of common stock. The quarterly cash dividend announced today is payable on September 30, 2020 to shareholders of record at the close of business on September 15, 2020. While the Company intends to pay regular quarterly cash dividends for the foreseeable future, all subsequent div- idends, and the establishment of record and payment dates, are subject to final determination by the Board of Directors each quarter after its review of the Company’s financial performance. The Company also announced that its Board of Di- rectors has increased the authorized level of repurchas- es of its common stock by approximately $431 million. When combined with approximately $69 million of au- thority remaining under the existing program, this repre- sents a total of $500 million of current share repurchase authority effective August 12, 2020. Service Corporation International (NYSE: SCI), head- quartered in Houston, is North America’s leading provid- er of deathcare products and services. At June 30, 2020, we owned and operated 1,472 funeral service locations and 483 cemeteries (of which 296 are combination loca- tions) in 44 states, eight Canadian provinces, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Through our businesses, we market the Dignity Memorial ® brand which offers as- surance of quality, value, caring service, and exceptional customer satisfaction. For more information, please visit www.sci- corp.com or www.dignitymemorial.com. 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