Which market segments should we target through which online marketing tools?

This is really about knowing your target markets and what their characteristics, lifestyle and media habits are. You can find this out through customer surveys and simply observing, and talking to, members of your target audiences. I find “persona” exercises to also be quite useful in this regard. You build a persona of a representative imaginary individual from each of your target market segments. Name them, describe their situation and characteristics, and talk about how they might use the web. Then test your assumptions on a few real individuals.

Once you put yourself in the shoes of your potential audiences like this, you can get a feel for the online marketing tools they are likely to use in their day-to-day life. From there, you can identify priorities.

Of course there are always other considerations in which tools you should prioritise, like the amount of investment, ongoing resource or specialist skill that is required from your end.

It’s important to ensure that you have tracking and measuring in place for the tools you use, as that way you can assess and monitor their effectiveness and adapt accordingly.

Warning: this post is somewhat convoluted!

As with any channel, it is really important to know the media's market segments and then figure how that dovetails with various segments of your own market, their engagement strategy with that media product and even how that may change over the course of a day or from section to section of the media. 

I always find it useful to think about an issue in a differnt medium to get my thinking straight on the medium I need to deal with first. So, thinking about broadsheet newspapers, a key segment for a broadsheet is educated, middle aged professionals who live in suburbs close to a city's centre. If that is also a market you attract, knowing which sections they read and how they read those sections is important. Let's suppose they read news, business and listings. How they read and extract relevant information from those sections is quite different, and if you want to promote the benefits of your art form to them you need to communicate information which makes sense in each section. For instance in news, if your ad is communicating news of some sort, then the readers in their new fact finding discovery mode of reading will be more likely to connect with your ad whereas an ad in the business section with a message about increasing value of some sort, through networking etc may be a relevant connection and finally, in the listing sections using copy that speaks about experience and contains dates, times and venues would provide the type of information people are after when reading that section.

So going back to the online world, if you knew that a key segment online is young single women, think about how that connects with your consumer profile. Then try to connect your online presence with their  purpose for being online. In some cases understanding their online behaviour may prompt you to slightly change the way you segment your audience and therefore how you communicate in a relevant way to them. For instance, you know there are young women online, and you know you attract young women, make sure that what they are doing online fits. Say a portion of them were browsing profiles on an online dating sites, advertising on some those sites with adverts that promote all the greating dating opportunities your artform provides may be a way to connect and excite them enough to way to attend. There could be lots of creative ways to do that, if you were promoting theatres could you have a funky gif that runs the dialogue from a scene from Romeo and Juliet and finishes with a plug for the show. The copy could be the top 10 pick up lines from plays, finishing with something about using one of those fail safe lines in your next message.

 So in closing my ramble, understanding your segments is an important first step, understanding how those people become defined as part of a different segment by their online prupose is the second step in ensure the way you communicate benefit to them connects with them in a relevant way.

Yes, and it's easy to put in a landing page that leads to the your main site. Like if you know your art form provides great opportunities for business networking, peop[le come for that reason, and there are people online looking for netwroking ops, then using an ad word could catch someone searching for "business networking", you link could go to a landing page which is all about networking and reinforces what is you do that works, and then links to your main site from that brings those people there and they'd looking at your site and see your products and be assessing those with the spin you've put on it.