A Blogger’s Guide to Successful Content Marketing in a Saturated Niche
If you’re publishing content in a saturated niche, you can’t skate by with basic content marketing strategies. You need to become the center of attention within your market and position yourself above your competitors.
Success in a saturated niche requires an extensive marketing budget. PPC ads will cost more and so will any other advertising methods that rely on keyword bidding for placemen. No matter how good your content is, you won’t get noticed unless you have the budget to get your content in front of the right people.
Instead of working harder and spending more money with no guarantees, it makes more sense to refine your target market until you’ve got a more specific group of people you’re speaking to. Here’s how to get started:
Narrow down your niche
The easiest way to become the center of attention and a trusted source in your niche is to eliminate the competition. You can’t push people out of your niche, but you can narrow down your target market until you’re in a micro-niche with less competition.
A micro-niche is a specific segment within a niche. For example, targeting dog owners is a general niche. Narrow it down to people who own Labradoodles and you’ve got a micro-niche. It’s possible but less likely for a micro-niche to be saturated. With less competition, your content has a better chance at being seen.
Why a micro-niche is more effective
Generally speaking, a broad niche will generate plenty of traffic, but will have a low conversion rate and won’t be effective for email marketing. It’s hard to market to a general audience because you can’t speak to them with any level of specificity. Specificity is what sells. Consumers want to know if a product or service is specifically for them and you can’t get that message across in a general niche.
With a micro-niche, you can provide specialized content
The more variety of content you can produce, the better. Marketing to a micro-niche allows you to provide extra content that complements or supports your main content. For instance, if you run a blog about camping, you can write specialized content for your readers to explain the difference between starting a fire in a wood stove vs. a fireplace. Some people aren’t aware of the major differences. Plenty of people go camping in cabins that don’t have central heat and if they’ve never used a wood stove before, they might struggle to build a fire.
Why less traffic in a micro-niche is irrelevant
It might seem like a disadvantage that a micro-niche generates less traffic, but traffic alone is irrelevant. What matters is your conversion rate. For example, say you have two identical websites. The first site generates 100,000 unique visitors this month but only gets 10 sales. Your conversion rate would be 0.01%. Say your second site generates 1,000 unique visitors and gets the same 10 sales – that’s a 1% conversion rate. In terms of your bottom line, the additional 99,000 visitors to your first website didn’t make any difference at all; they didn’t buy.
A less-saturated niche will see less traffic because it’s aimed at a narrow group of people. The point isn’t to generate endless traffic; it’s to generate targeted traffic that converts.
Market to multiple micro-niches
You don’t have to abandon a saturated niche, and you’re not stuck with one micro-niche. Market to as many micro-niches as you can come up with. Create content that speaks to underserved channels. Anytime you think of a new subset of your market, find out if there’s a unique message you can use to reach that group of people and test it out.
The great thing about a blog is you can create as many categories as you want. You can market to ten different micro-niches, keep promoting what works, and ditch what doesn’t.
Content marketing is not just about content
Content marketing requires being firmly planted in the right niche. Aim to publish content for a highly specialized micro-niche. General blogs are a dime a dozen and aren’t worth the time and money to market. If you’re not experiencing success in a saturated niche, don’t abandon your niche. Find a narrow market within your niche and restructure your blog around that narrow market. You’ll find marketing easier, and there will be less competition.