Hello there, a little bit of background on my experience as a GM as I believe its pertinent. I've been playing wargames/skirmish games most of my life (Started back in 4th edition Warhammer 40,000) and had played DnD a little bit before the release of the TTRPG Imperium Maledictum (a 40k rpg) and I have ran a grand total of 5 totally homebrewed campaigns for 5 different groups (with 1 player being in all five) under my belt so far. I've written additional rules and things for the game to add to the specific genre of those particular campaigns when needed (A sanity system for the cosmic horror campaign etc.) The groups I've GM'ed for have mostly been 3-5 players and one campaign that had a grand total of 9 players, which lasted for about a year.
Now my reason for posting is that those previous campaigns have all been for close friends and friends of friends/their partners, and other than external things not pertaining to the campaigns themselves, they've been quite enjoyable and good fun for everyone. (Even if wrangling nine people around a table to engage in a murder mystery is akin to herding feral cats). But this new campaign im running is for a group of 7ish players who are not close friends. I run a Necromunda Narrative Campaign (miniature skirmish game) at a local gaming store weekly, and when I had mentioned about Maledictum to them they all were very excited to join in. about 3 of the players have played ttrpg's before and the others are newer and this will be their first campaign. I'm quite well versed with onboarding new players, especially those who haven't played a ttrpg before, so that's not a problem, however I find myself feeling unsure about a lot of things concerning how to approach this particular campaign.
When running campaigns in the past I've had background noise and music to help assist setting the mood, I've known the players rather well so I knew what to say and do to get them invested in the story and pull at their heart strings and get them amped or scared, and generally with being so familiar with the players has, I think at least, done a lot of the heavy lifting for me.
So what would you advise I do, or what steps would you advise I take when approaching my first campaign outside my immediate friend group?
TLDR: Kind of experienced DM running their first campaign outside of their friend group, please advise - Thanks