To Pay or Not to Pay… for Advertising
I don’t like to be rude to people, even on the telephone, so when I get a call from the Asian Sub-Continent telling me that the warranty has expired on our twenty year old television, I usually thank them for their concern before hanging up. I do draw the line when I’m told that I’ve had an accident that wasn’t my fault — I usually tell them to ‘Go away.’, then hang up; very occasionally I do use slightly stronger language.
The difficulty with establishing one’s practice of being a funeral celebrant is getting known and for people to find you when they need you. It is for that reason that I have started to look at different places for advertising.
Maybe I’m being too unambitious but I don’t want to spend too much money, preferably none. There are a few places where it is possible to advertise services free. Two of the ones that I am trying are Google and Yell.com. The main reason for choosing those is that it makes more likely that I will rank a little higher in the Google rankings when people search for ‘Humanist Celebrant near Lichfield’, or ‘Local non-religious celebrant’. Either way, I want them to click through to my website: www.humanist.org.uk/marktaylor
Google are relatively benign, as long as you can cope with a few emails from them, suggesting that you tweak you entry, or that a premium (paid for) listing will achieve so much more. The signing on and creation process is fairly simple too.
Yell.com are a little more tricky in several ways; I found it a bit harder to work out what goes where in terms of creating my free listing and then there are the telephone calls… like Google, they have to make money out of advertising, I don’t have a problem with that because free stuff still has to be paid for somewhere, but unlike Google, they don’t have the economies of scale and they need to make more money from fewer people. As such, they have to chase the pennies. They’re good at it too.
What it means is, even if you create a free listing, you are likely to be rung up and assisted in maximising the potential of your entry. Actually, that has been good and very helpful. They have helped me to make a few changes that have been positive, although they still don’t know what a Funeral Celebrant is and I still have to go under the broad category of ‘Funeral Director’, which I’m not.
A couple of days ago, I was called by Albert from Yell.com’s something or other section. He was interesting to chat with and wanted to know what it was that I did. Being fairly young, it didn’t sound as though he had been to very many funerals and it’s not surprising that he didn’t know too much about the processes. He was able to tweak my free listing and make some positive changes and I’m pleased that I talked to him, although it did all take over an hour.
Albert’s big selling point was all about reviews and ratings. For £40+ per month, Yell.com could chase up people who had used my services and try to persuade them to rate my performance and the quality of the funeral. However, he could discount this to £30 something + vat. He noted that the reviews that I had put on my webpage; www.humanist.org.uk/marktaylor, had all been very positive and he didn’t think that it would be a problem to email them again and ask them to repeat all this on Yell.
I tried to explain that there are some problems with this approach; the first is that if you have just buried or cremated your husband, or whoever, the first thing on your mind would not be ‘Oh, I must just go and rate the funeral on the internet.’ — It’ a little different from buying a washing machine!
The second thing that I gently tried to point out was that of being professional. I spent most of my working life in education, apart from a few years at the start, road building, and managing an auction room and lorry driving for a slightly dodgy firm in Ipswich, but that’s another life completely. There are some tales to tell but not here.
Despite professing to be quite the reverse, the one thing that I always knew was that my duty to the children and parents came ahead of everything else. My professional duty. That covered a lot of unspoken things and it’s not something that can be taught in college or written in a book or policy, even though OfSTED insist on trying to measure it, along with everything else.
There is a very important professional relationship between the celebrant and the client. There is a duty of care and there are things that you simply cannot do or ask.
The bottom line is that I feel uncomfortable putting a reply paid card to Humanists UK with tick boxes in with the presentation script of the funeral that I give to the family. I do it but very, very few get returned and I’m not surprised, not because of the quality of my funeral but because grieving people do not feel like doing something so impersonal. I draw the line at asking that they log on to a website and ‘Rate Your Funeral’, or whatever.
