With all the clutter on the Internet and social media, attracting and keeping an audience is often an uphill battle. This is especially overwhelming if you are entering a new niche or tackling a new client. How to develop a traffic generating and engagement strategy in a niche which is new to you? How to quickly figure out where to start and what may work? Here are 5 steps:

Step 1: Come up with a brand name that sticks

If you are launching a new project or a new product, coming up with a name is your first step, of course. At this point you need to find a name that could:

• Include your keyword to create instant niche associations
• Be short and memorable enough for easier type-in traffic
• Be sticky enough for your target customers to remember it

Note that your whole marketing will revolve around your brand name, so this step is crucial. You want your name to inspire you when it comes to creating your brand identity.

Namify is a cool tool to come up with a brand name. Unlike other domain name generators, this one suggests meaningful and snappy names that you will actually love:

Namify also checks social media platforms and informs you if your brand name is available everywhere. Besides, it will even help you with branding offering some logo and color palette suggestions:

Step 2: Find where your competitors are getting traffic from

Competitive audit is always my number #1 step when creating a strategy, and not to start copying their tactics right away but to educate yourself and see which digital marketing tricks exist and what works for them. 

One of the first tools I always consult with is Ahrefs which shows you where any site currently stands, which keywords have been working for them and how much traffic they are bringing to their sites.

This chart gives you a good high-level overview of searching patterns in your niche, and what you may want to start focusing on.

Keep a master spreadsheet of search queries that seem to make sense for your site. If you are working on an existing site, content gap analysis is another great step to take. Content gap analysis shows which keywords your competitors are ranking for but your site is not. This is a great way to develop an SEO strategy for a well-established site in a new niche:

Site Checker allows you to determine your competitors’ traffic sources including their traffic-driving keywords (both organic and PPC), their other sources (including social media and email marketing) and even referring pages that send the most clicks:

You can run the report for your own site, and then for your competitors to see where you are falling behind and whether you can “steal” some of that visibility.

Step 3: Plan your content strategy

Competitor research gives some initial ideas on which search queries are driving traffic to your competitors, and which content assets they created to rank for those queries. From there, you may want to:

• Extend those competitors’ queries further to discover more specific and niche content angles (those will be easier to rank for with a new website). There’s an older article on selecting keywords but the process hasn’t changed much from there. 
• Discover related and underlying concepts to build your content strategy around those.

When it comes to identifying related terms and concepts to create your content strategy, Text Optimizer is always a go-to tool. It uses semantic analysis to analyse Google’s search snippets and extracts underlying concepts and entities giving you a good overview of your niche:

They also offer a Google Chrome extension and Google Docs add-on to help you optimise your content for related terms and make it more semantically relevant to your target search query:

Step 4: Diversify your traffic engagement tactics

Obviously, most of us would love for every site visitors to buy our product. Sadly, more often than not, that’s not going to be the case. 

Regardless of the traffic source, your conversions will largely depend on the intent (whether your site visitor had intended to buy anything or were they just researching?)

Besides, there are too many brands competing for your customers’ attention, so there’s always a possibility your site visitor is distracted and then they may go to your competitor.

To minimise your odds of losing your customers, you need to come up with various ways to engage them and tie them to your brand. There may be several ways to accomplish that:

• Invite them to subscribe to your updates or your special offers. Here’s a detailed guide on setting up an email newsletter. 
• Set up a lead generation form requesting more info. Here’s an easy online form builder to use for that.
• Get them to create an account to use your free trial
• Set up a survey for your customers to help you conduct market research and collect your customers’ email addresses as well. You can use free Google Forms for that.
• Invite them to allow web push notifications from your brand.

The latter one is the latest trend and it comes with some cool perks, like an ability to reach your customers in real time as well as segment your current subscribers by their demographics or recent actions on your site. Push Monkey allows to easily set up web push notifications as well as personalize them for better engagement:

Step 5: Build your sales funnels

Finally, having your analytics running at the very start is important as you don’t want to miss the data from your launch marketing campaign. Understanding your customers’ buying journeys is important for you to make the most of that traffic you are generating. 

Every click counts. Even if that site visitor left, you’ll end up owning that data. Thanks to that data, you will later be able to retarget those people through Facebook, Google or on-site retargeting campaigns. Think about your first several months as the time you invest in data, so web analytics is crucial.

Finteza is a cool web analytics solution with a huge focus on tracking and measuring engagement and conversions. It is extremely easy to set up and comes with sales funnel visualisation. 

But the reason I prefer the solution is its remarketing feature that allows you to personalise your customers’ CTAs and special offers based on their prior engagement with the site:

Conclusion

The first thing you should consider when creating a digital marketing strategy in a new niche is your goals. After all, how can you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve?

Your goals, whether they are to generate sales, drive website traffic, increase brand awareness, or engage your audience, will point you in the direction of what type of content to create, who to create it for, and what metrics to track.