Marketing 2.0: Education Providers Need to Get in the Game

This post from Andrew Chen, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow, explains what he calls "10 obvious strategies" to acquire users. These strategies are not so obvious to marketers outside Silicon Valley. To illustrate, I challenge you to go to a marketer at any post-secondary online education provider and ask them the top 10 ways they drive potential customers to their website. It would be buying from lead vendors, adwords buying, email recircs and - I'm drawing a blank. They don't even have 10 strategies. Any for-profit educator that formulates a strategy to successfully leverage social networking, blogs, and Internet viral marketing tools will zip away in a Ferrari, leaving their Model T driving competitors in the dust.

10 (obvious) strategies to acquire users

1. Email/IM features for invites and content
2. Blog/MySpace widgets
3. Auto-invite for email, social networks, etc
4. Auto-embed for blog widgets
5. A/B tested signup pages
6. Smart adwords buying
7. Viral referrals
8. SEO/landing page generation
9. Push through RSS/Email, etc.
10. Reduce user "drag" through the entire funnel