Find out how database marketing can improve your targeting success to this sought-after group.

Although many lead-generation firms targeting the college crowd like to tout their ability to deliver "high quality" leads, what does that really mean? And how can you determine whether you are getting high quality leads?

Throughout the past year the online lead-generation market experienced a "flight to quality." That is, the focus of lead buyers moved as the industry matured. Quality rather than quantity has become the driving factor behind lead purchases, and traditional direct marketing is giving way to more targeted messaging, with positive results.

Many companies no longer send massive blasts of communication to large, undifferentiated lists. Instead, forward-thinking marketers are focusing their efforts on smaller campaigns using demographic targeting of those individuals most likely to respond. The results are two-fold: decreased costs and increased conversion and revenue.

But in the value chain for lead procurement, a disconnect exists between the education institutions who buy leads and the venues through which those leads are generated -- websites and email or online advertising campaigns. The disconnect is a lack of detailed characteristics that constitute a good prospect for the school. This information is not always shared with the lead generators, the partners who need it most. The internet provides direct marketers with a powerful information-gathering tool, and the means for tracking and measuring performance and controlling offer display is even greater. Yet many companies still do not take advantage of these strategies to specifically target the college-bound crowd.

The disconnect
Targeting this demographic is not difficult. At a basic level, if you know the profile of your ideal college prospect, you should be able to exclusively target that profile within the overall pool of prospects and thereby increase your ability to acquire applicants from that demographic. Furthermore, if university and continuing education marketers contact only the targeted demographic, their odds of success will be significantly higher.

The disconnect in this value chain occurs because prospect profile information -- what the college demographic is today and how it has changed over time -- is not effectively communicated to the point of contact in the internet lead-generation chain. Publishers and providers attempt to gather leads into a massive pool with little or no information about what types of leads they should be seeking. The scarce information they do have is proprietary and not shared with other points of contact. This lack of foresight greatly limits the effectiveness of this process.

But high quality lead generation can be achieved efficiently, particularly through the application of database marketing and data analysis techniques typically used in other verticals.

Using data to improve partner performance
Educational institutions buy leads from various sources in order to increase the admissions pool and fill seats in their programs. Yet each institution has a different set of offerings, a different appeal to students, and a correspondingly different target demographic that works best with their offerings.

For example, basic information such as the gender mix of the student pool can vary by school, or even from program to program, but this information is generally not leveraged at the point of lead connection. Considering the omission, it is no wonder that a school website with 80 percent male visitors would produce lower-converting leads for a program with 75 percent female enrollment. With more specific data from the school, however, that same site may still be able to produce quality leads for the right programs.

Let's look at a more detailed example. UniversityOne has contracted a new source for producing internet leads, SiteA.com. The average overall enrollment rate for UniversityOne has traditionally been 2 percent, and this has been set as the cutoff for online vendors. After an initial test period in which sufficient leads were collected to establish statistical significance for quality, it is determined that SiteA.com has only a 1 percent conversion rate. With no further ado, UniversityOne, or its partner aggregator, cuts SiteA.com from the lead purchase. But is this always the right decision?

Suppose, with deeper analysis, we find that one group of education programs on SiteA converts extremely well -- at 3 to 4 percent -- but another group, although producing a higher total number of leads, converts very poorly, at less than 1 percent. Together, these two extremes cause the average conversion rate for SiteA to fall below the 2 percent cutoff. But this degree of detail also makes it obvious that UniversityOne should buy more leads of the highly converting programs from SiteA -- perhaps even more than from other vendors -- and not buy any leads for the poorly converting programs.

The power of database marketing
While many companies take a transactional approach to lead generation (they cast their nets, collect the leads and hand them over), a true database marketing approach focuses on putting the right offer in front of the right prospect at the right time, using what is known about the prospect to increase the rate of success. This targeted marketing approach focuses on all aspects of the enrollment cycle, from initial search engine terms to specific school inquiry to enrollment, ensuring that prospective students are matched with the programs and institutions best suited for them.

How database marketing can work for you
The first rule of a database marketing analysis is "the better the input, the better the output." That is, without access to the right information, best guesses will not yield optimal results. The more data about your target demographic you share with your lead-generation partners, the better the outcome in high converting leads.

The key to a successful search marketing process is continuous monitoring, measurement and adjustment. It takes time and commitment to improve, but it is always worth the effort. The application of database marketing and strategic analysis to academic recruitment enables schools to improve lead quality and forge strong partnerships with their lead generators, further enhancing the communication channel and ensuring the upward cycle of marketing gains.

Greg Titus is CEO, CourseAdvisor. Read full bio.