The internet is a big place. That makes it incredibly difficult to stand out, even if you have an excellent business with amazing products and services to offer the world. If you’re trying to compete with millions of other business owners, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to gain any momentum.
But what if you compete in a more specific niche?
With the right strategic approach, you can come to dominate a niche online and enjoy much greater visibility and a better reputation.
What Does It Mean to “Dominate a Niche”?
In this context, a niche is a narrow slice of a market, usually associated with specific target demographics and their specific needs. For example, there’s a niche for simple board games, and there’s a niche for designer skateboards. There’s a niche for almost anything you can think of.
What does it mean to dominate a niche? Essentially, it means that you and your business are almost universally recognized as the top name in the niche. When people are learning about the subject for the first time, your name is the first one that comes up. When experienced people think about buying a product or service, your name is the one that pops into their head. In the industry, most other people defer to your authority. And even people unfamiliar with the niche may have heard of you.
This is an all-encompassing quality and one that’s not necessarily easy to achieve. To be truly dominant, you need to be at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), omnipresent on social media, and with great general visibility and brand awareness.
How do we do it?
How to Dominate a Niche Online
This is how you dominate a niche online in the modern era:
- Choose a niche. Everything starts with you choosing a niche. You probably already have an idea of what your business is or what subject you want to cover. But if you’re going to become truly dominant, you need to narrow the scope a little bit. That could mean covering one specific sub-topic within the umbrella of your broader topic, appealing to a specific target demographic, or even targeting people in a specific area. The more specific you are, the easier it is to become dominant since you’ll have fewer competitors to contend with.
- Hire a marketing agency. Hiring a Denver marketing agency is an excellent move in pursuit of marketing and advertising dominance. Assuming you have the resources, having access to a team of professionals can introduce you to better strategies, help you achieve visibility in a wider array of channels, and ultimately troubleshoot issues so you can continue growing unabated. If you can’t hire a marketing agency, at least make sure you have some marketing professionals on staff or on call to help you with your toughest challenges.
- Prepare to measure. How do you know when you’re competitively dominant? There’s no way to know for sure unless you have a system of measurement and analysis in place. Use a variety of analytics tools to measure everything you can, including things like search rankings, organic traffic, social media followers, direct traffic, and brand awareness. These metrics will help you figure out whether your strategies are actually working.
- Competitively differentiate. If there are significant competitors in this space, you need to find a way to differentiate from them. In other words, what can your brand do that these brands can’t do? Why would someone choose you over them? There are many viable answers here, but you’ll need at least one to stand out.
- Become an expert. Next, make it your mission to become an expert. If you’re already an expert, you can skip this step. Otherwise, take some deep dives so you can become better acquainted with this material and speak about it competently.
- Write excellent content. Google looks for content that follows E-E-A-T criteria; they want content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. If you’re a genuine expert, this shouldn’t be an especially difficult challenge. Focus on covering topics in depth, with plenty of credible citations, and always emphasize your personal experience.
- Promote your content. Good content by itself doesn’t do much to promote your brand or attract people to your website. You have to promote your content to make it more visible. That means sharing it on social media, encouraging other people to share it, and potentially even advertising it via PPC ads.
- Engage on social media. Get active on social media and get involved in discussions related to your niche. If you’re thoughtful and engaging, it’s only a matter of time before you build a following.
- Build and attract links. Links are still indispensable for SEO. Ideally, you’ll be able to naturally attract links with your quality content. You may also want to achieve more steady progress by building links; if you do, practice natural link-building to minimize the risk of a penalty.
- Get feedback and improve. Finally, get some feedback from your biggest fans and use that feedback to improve your offerings. There’s always room for improvement.
Dominating a niche isn’t easy, especially if you’re not sure what your niche is. But if you’re willing to do a little bit of experimentation, if you work with true professionals, and you commit to producing the best content available, this is a realistically achievable goal.
Featured image provided by Antoni Shkraba; Pexels; Thanks!
