Will’s Masterclass: Relationship Marketing for Funeral Home Success #31

If you run a funeral home or a direct cremation brand, you already feel it. Competition keeps climbing. Digital marketing costs keep rising. New cremation brands pop up fast, and the same families still expect compassion, speed, and clarity.

In this episode of The Direct Cremation Podcast, Tyler Yamasaki (Parting Pro) flips the format and brings co-host Will DeMichelis into the guest seat. Will spent more than a decade growing Omega Society into a high-volume cremation brand serving over 4,500 families per year. When Tyler asks for the biggest driver of Omega’s success, Will gives an answer that cuts through the noise.

Relationship marketing.

Not in the vague “network more” sense. In the boots-on-the-ground, hospice-first, long-tail-referrals sense that quietly builds a machine you can throttle up or down.

The Smartest Marketing Channel in Death Care

Will frames the current landscape with a reality check. Death care marketing gets more expensive every year, especially online. You can pour money into cremation ads, cremation advertising, and paid search, and you can absolutely grow with it. The catch is simple: when you shut off spend, cases drop.

Relationship marketing works differently. When you build trust with hospice nurses and social workers, you create referral momentum that persists. Will points to multiple high-volume operators who scaled with hospice relationships as a primary engine, including Omega Society, Leaf Cremation, and Cremation Society of Minnesota.

The common thread: hospice and hospital teams hold enormous influence when families need help fast. Families receive provider lists, but the human recommendation shapes who gets called first.

Omega’s Referral Engine: Earn Trust, Then Execute

At Omega, Will’s team visited hospices repeatedly in the early years. They educated staff, solved problems, and became a go-to resource. Over time, they reached a point where they didn’t need to “go back as often” to maintain referrals.

Why? Because Omega kept delivering five-star experiences for referred families. Hospice teams remembered the outcomes. They trusted that when a family called Omega, the family would get a clean, compassionate experience. That trust created a long tail of referrals.

Will describes it like this: once you earn the relationship, your job becomes execution. When you execute consistently and communicate well, referrals keep coming.

Why Most “In-services” Fall Flat

Tyler asks the question most funeral home owners have: what made Omega’s approach different from the typical “lunch and a GPL” visit?

Will doesn’t sugarcoat it. Bagels and muffins plus pricing sheets will not set you apart.

Omega built in-services around education and tools. They identified recurring hospice pain points, then created materials hospice workers could actually use, reuse, copy, and share with families.

That shift matters for funeral website marketing, too. When you position your firm as the resource that helps hospice teams do their jobs better, you build credibility that no cremation website headline can manufacture.

A Concrete Example: The Power of Attorney Trap

Will shares one of the most practical examples from the field: Power of Attorney documents.

Hospice teams often rely on a POA or advanced directive while the patient is alive. But after death, the “right to control disposition” can follow different legal rules. Families and hospice staff can walk into an avoidable conflict, and it reflects poorly on everyone.

Omega taught hospice teams how to spot the difference between documents that work during care versus documents that authorize cremation arrangements or burial decisions after death. Then Omega offered a simple next step: “Email it to us if you’re unsure.”

That move did two things at once:

It made hospice staff more effective and confident.
It created early, trust-based contact with the family and the hospice team.

The Real Cost Advantage

Tyler digs into the numbers. Digital ads can cost a meaningful percentage of a contract value. With relationship marketing, Omega’s later-year cost to maintain volume dropped to essentially zero. The team had already built trust, and the referrals sustained themselves through consistent service delivery.

Will also highlights a powerful operational benefit: relationship marketing gives you stability. If you already have a steady referral flow, you can use digital marketing as a controllable booster when you want to fill capacity, rather than as a lifeline you can’t unplug.

Where Funeral Tech Fits

This episode focuses on relationships, but the implications land directly on systems. When referrals rise, you need consistent delivery. That means clean processes and reliable tools, whether you run funeral home software, a funeral management system, or a modern funeral arrangement software stack that supports online funeral arrangements.

Strong cremation software and an organized funeral home management workflow help your team move fast, communicate clearly, and avoid the mistakes that trigger hospice frustration and negative reviews. In a referral-driven model, small failures cost you future volume.

Takeaways You Can Act on This Week

Pick a short list of hospices and hospitals that serve the most families in your area.
Ask for the administrator who coordinates the interdisciplinary team.
Pitch education, not promotion.
Bring tools hospice staff can keep and reuse.
Offer support even when the family chooses a different provider.
Track outcomes, then train your team to deliver the same five-star experience every time.

Omega didn’t win by spending the most. Omega won by becoming the trusted partner hospice teams relied on, then delivering the level of care that kept those referrals coming back.

Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/Meo1cgTIXIo