The business of death: How funeral directors think about marketing

The average person will organise just two funerals in their life. Those send-offs will most often be for parents or partners.

That puts funeral directors in an almost uniquely difficult marketing position. Through a potential customer’s life – more than 80 years – a director is going to have just two opportunities to win business, deliver a great product and build trust. And that all has to happen in a very brief window, while the customer is possibly having the worst time ever.

“We know we only have a fairly short window normally, but we also have to find the right person in the family. So you might have five people in your family doing searches, but only one of you is really making that decision.”

Asha Dooley (Mumbrella)

Asha Dooley is both the president of Funerals Australia – the biggest national association of funeral professionals – and a funeral director in a family business. As Mumbrella sits down with her on the margins of a two-day cemeteries and crematoria conference, she appears warm, engaging and entirely unsuited to the adjective “funereal”.

Dooley is taking Mumbrella through a funeral director’s view of the marketing challenge, which as it turns out, is heavily search-focussed.

“ It’s incredibly competitive, particularly local area by local area. If you go and Google ‘funerals near me’, you’ll see how many people are doing paid search, how many people are fighting for those, number one, two, and three spots, how many people are on the map.”

Her family business, Grace Funerals, runs out of three locations in Sydney, with the original office based in Emu Plains on the city’s western fringe.

Over 180,000 people die in Australia each year (ABS, image Grace Funerals)

“I believe that in a five kilometer radius of my office in Emu Plains, I have 18 direct competitors,” she says. “It’s probably the most competitive market in Australia for funerals.”

“As a result, marketing has been incredibly important to me, to make sure that we are sitting top of mind for people whenever they’re looking for funeral needs.”

Dooley says the standard rules of marketing a location-based business apply, in that a funeral director needs to build brand awareness through local newsletters, newspapers, and attending events.

“The idea behind that is you can recognise my brand. You know my name. You’ve seen me quite a few times. But the reality is that when it comes to point of actual decision … a client family will go to a few things.”

Those few things are all digital: searching for funeral services on Google and then systematically cross-checking social media and websites to ensure the legitimacy of the business. As Dooley explains, for a business looking for customers, determining who the actual decision maker is in the aftermath of a death is challenging.

The dynamic often involves adult children making sure an aged surviving parent is not being taken for a ride.

“ I can’t do any call-to-action marketing because you have to be a key decision maker, which is unusual, and you have to have a need, meaning someone must be imminently about to pass away or they have passed away and you are one of the one or two people in the family that will be the person that makes that decision. So we’ve got a very niche audience that we are looking at.”

Screenshot of the my_aussie_death_bff Instagram account

To reach that niche, Dooley estimates she is sinking 70% of her marketing budget into Google search. In standard operational mode, she uses Facebook and her own website to validate the business – “they are just ‘check channels’ for me” – but she is also now experimenting with Instagram account “to create awareness around death”.

“I did get some PR help to set up what I am calling my ‘death-fluencer’ account,” she says.

“Your Aussie death bff” – set up with agency The 152 Project – has broached subjects such as released doves that plummet to the ground, US mobile viewing vans and “death events” as an alternative to funerals.

Because the funeral business is so heavily reliant on Google search, it is also exposed to the potential loss of referral traffic resulting from AI Overviews and summary by other Large Language Models (LLMs). Dooley says she is alarmed by the change in general search behaviour and is currently investigating how overviews and direct LLM queries could change the dynamic.

In general, however, she says the business is resistant to change – not because of the industry – but because of its clients.

“Everything else in the world is progressing so much that people are ready for that to happen in funerals, and I have to say the funeral directors are ready for it.

“But my observation of client families is that they’re only doing one or two funerals in their lifetime … they’re in a grief state. A grief state means you want to go to something you understand, and what you understand is the ritual of what a funeral looks like, and that is what it has always looked like.

The ABS says there are around 3000 funeral directors in Australian (image from the Funerals Australia site)

“So even our non-religious services have an element of religious basis to them because we follow a similar structure and people find comfort in that.”

While a lot of funeral businesses have been “in the family” for generations, Dooley’s experience is different. Her father Tom worked at management level in hospitality and events before buying a funeral directing business when she was a teenager. After school, Dooley worked in hotels nationally and internationally before returning to Australia and signing up with her dad in 2012 to test the waters.

“I said, ‘I’ll give you 12 months. I don’t know how the death thing will go’. But then you get into the weeds of a family business and there’s always so much going on and I really enjoy what we do.”

“Being a funeral director is running events, it’s logistics, it’s being organised. But at the end of the day, I work in customer service and so having had that background in customer service in the hotels has been really strong … it’s really how we run our business.

Dooley was elected to lead the AFDA – the Australian Funeral Directors Association – in May. The 90-year-old organisation, whose members handle around 60-65% of all funerals nationally, decided to rebrand and engaged Melbourne-based agency Taylor & Grace.

 ”They helped guide us through and lead us through a really big strategic branding project. So the first thing we did was to go through and survey members, stakeholders and people that are important in the industry.”

Dooley said the need for a new name was driven by a desire to get away from acronyms. They settled on “Funerals Australia.”

“It  says what it does on the box. We are funeral directors in Australia, so we’re Funerals Australia. It allows us to over time expand what we are doing. It’s not an acronym. It’s easy to understand. We thought it would be clearer for people from the general public.”

The association’s new name and branding echoes what Dooley says is an important part of the funeral business: the need for straightforwardness and clarity. Dooley herself seems to represent these characteristics, and in casual conversation with Mumbrella after our interview concludes, a related issue comes up: her use of the euphemistic “passed away” instead of “died”.

It is one of the first things cadet journalists are taught: use “dead”, “die”, “died” and “death” and not all the other evasive words and phrases. Dooley agrees and says she prefers all the D words – the research into grief says straighter is better – but she also believes the Australian public just isn’t ready for it. That’s ok too.

“I know that we make a really hard time easier, and that’s really fulfilling,” she says. “ You have to be a specific type of person to work in the industry …. no one in my team has ever asked me, or even themselves, ‘How did I contribute to the world today?'”