Any business needs leads to acquire customers. Even our school has looked at ways to generate leads for possible customers, except we haven’t really got a good back office that follows up on such stuff. More often than not, we let leads fall through the gap, failing to call back, failing to ‘close the deal’ successfully, failing to answer customers’ concerns properly…
We’ve used AdWords to generate leads and interest in our blog, which has worked. But optimizing the school website, and getting better page rankings seems to have been a boost to traffic. Of course, realizing that the search engine market leader in Taiwan isn’t Google really helped! It’s Yahoo!
Our most successful methods are very local: flyers, posters and word of mouth efforts have produced most of the customers we have right now. We also rarely run a promotional effort, that can help generate lots of interest, too.
We are looking at how the health insurance industry seems to be quite efficient at generating health insurance leads. While I can’t get stats on success rates per se, they have to have better metrics than ours! Typical companies like Aetna and Cigna were introduced to us by my wife’s sister. They use personal and professional contacts to generate new business. I’ve often wondered if there’s any way our school could do that, too, by creating a referral system similar to an affiliate network.
BTW, do checkout the Glengarry Post earlier this week on a similar issue.