For decades, funeral directors have walked a tightrope between their clients and the newspapers, which control the deadline, publication and, crucially, accuracy of death and funeral notices for the bereaved.
A missed deadline, a misspelt name, a wrong date or time, the often exorbitant cost of newspaper notices! All of these can have a devastating effect on grieving families, not to mention the reputation of the funeral director. The funeral director becomes the proverbial meat in the sandwich between the client and the newspaper and often cops the blame for the newspaper’s inflexibility and mistakes and is inevitably left to pick up the pieces.
But the newspaper industry’s dominance of death and funeral notices is nearing its end and a new era has already begun, where funeral directors directly control the publication of death and funeral notices and obituaries.
Advertisements for job vacancies, real estate, cars and death and funeral notices used to be the domain of newspapers – their so-called rivers of gold – and advertisers, including funeral directors and grieving friends and families, had to abide their inflexible timeframes and costs.
But websites such as SEEK have taken over the jobs vacancy advertising space, Domain and realestate.com.au rule the real estate advertising market and carsales.com.au dictates car sales advertisements. And that’s not mentioning the multitude of social media platforms that people use for advertising. Newspapers are no longer part of the advertising equation.
Now it’s the turn of death and funeral notices to leave behind the constraints of newspaper advertising and create their own online advertising space. A space where funeral directors are in charge of publishing deadlines, the content of death and funeral notices, their accuracy and, importantly, eliminating the cost to families sometimes already overwhelmed by sudden and often unexpected expenses.
GOOP Digital, a leading regional developer of websites in Geelong, has developed an affordable and effective obituaries package for funeral directors to publish death and funeral notices on their own websites.
As well as death and funeral notices that funeral directors can publish 24 hours a day, seven days a week to a worldwide audience, the notices incorporate dates, times and smartphone-friendly Google maps which lead mourners who have to travel distances directly to funeral services.
And there is also the added feature where friends, family members and associates can publish personal tributes to the bereaved, free of charge. All tributes are moderated and not published without the funeral director’s approval and have the facility to be published to Facebook.
The biggest bonuses of the online tributes are their immediacy, their availability worldwide and, perhaps most important of all, their prominence in search engine Google. People searching the name of the bereaved will find their death and funeral notices online, and funeral directors already with a website through GOOP Digital, such as Quinn Funerals in Colac, have their notices appearing ahead of those of the websites of major metropolitan newspapers. The benefits for mourners seeking details are obvious but there is also the added advertising bonus for funeral directors.
GOOP Digital managing director Karl Morris will speak about the online opportunities for funeral directors at a series of Australian Funeral Directors Association meetings in coming weeks.
Karl has a Masters of Virtual Communications and more than 20 years in the advertising business. He and wife Amanda started GOOP Digital nine years ago after Karl recognised the emerging dominance of Google and the demise of Yellow Pages. Their Geelong websites business is now a leading provider of websites across regional Australia.