Is your local market saturated? Here’s an approach to finding students beyond your backyard

I recently spoke with the enrollment team at a small, private institution in a highly saturated market in the Midwest. Their online child development master’s program already captures an impressive 80% of local market share. But like many programs, they’re under immense pressure to increase enrollment—and uncertain about how they can grow when they’ve already saturated their local market.

Didn’t Hit Your Enrollment Goals? You’re Not Alone

If achieving your growth goals means you need to expand your geographic reach, there’s an approach you may not be familiar with: consumer database-driven targeting. While big brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Amazon have long used consumer analytics to better reach customers, this tactic is newer to higher ed.

Here’s what your team needs to know about using consumer database targeting to grow your pool of prospective grad and adult learners.

What is consumer database-driven targeting?

At its core, consumer database targeting involves matching your existing student data to a database of US adults. You’re in these databases, I’m in the databases, and your past, current, and future students are in there, too. The database we use to help our Adult Learner Recruitment partners expand their prospect pools includes more than 220 million adults. Each person in the database has dozens of attributes listed, including demographic data, household composition, interests, and behaviors. No wonder I keep receiving REI ads for bike gear—REI can see that I recently bought a new bike helmet and have been researching trails for my upcoming ride.

Our data scientists then use advanced machine learning to identify individuals from the consumer database who closely resemble your historical students across key variables. Or, for programs looking to shape future enrollment to look different from past enrollments, our team adjusts the criteria we look for to find tens of thousands of students who fit your new ideal applicant profile.

Why should enrollment leaders care?

As a former university CMO myself, there are a few reasons I find using a consumer database to be such a valuable lead source:

1. Expand your prospect pool: When we apply the custom model (based on your historical student data) against the consumer database, we’re able to generate a list of tens of thousands of prospective students from the database. This list is extremely targeted to include prospects who are similar to your historical or ideal students, meaning they are more likely to convert. As enrollment teams know all too well, it’s critical to invest in the leads that are most likely to convert at a time when generating leads is so expensive.
2. Reach students beyond your backyard: Some schools we work with are looking to grow in their local and regional markets, while others are looking to find new pockets of prospects. Either way, you can identify students in the database with extreme geographic precision.
3. A new source of domestic leads: As international students become a less reliable source of grad enrollments, having a sound domestic enrollment strategy is even more important. But finding enough leads domestically is a perennial challenge, exacerbated by growing non-consumption, population decline, and changes to federal aid policy for graduate and professional students. Consumer data offers a more reliable domestic pipeline to offset enrollment headwinds.
4. You’re able to reach students before your competitors: It’s not enough to just grow your prospect pool. Schools also need to reach students as early as possible in their enrollment journey to stand out. Our team prioritizes targeting students from the database with digital ads before they go to Google and encounter a feeding frenzy of paid ads from dozens of competitors. And with answer-rich AI summaries driving click-through rates down on paid and organic search listings, relying solely on search visibility is no longer a viable strategy.
5. Understand your students at a more granular level and better personalize marketing: With granular insights into interest and lifestyles from the database, you can elevate marketing messages from generic to tailored and meaningful. For the 200+ schools we work with to grow grad and adult enrollment, our team takes care of the downstream nurturing of those leads with marketing messages informed, in part, by the information in the database.

Of course, no good lead generation strategy relies on just a handful of lead sources. From test-taker lists to paid search and organic traffic, each lead source has its benefits and downsides. And with the domestic market tightening, it’s critical that marketing and enrollment teams leave no stone unturned when generating leads. Consumer analytics is one targeted way to grow your domestic prospect pool at a time when every lead counts.