By Lauchlan Mackinnon, August 29th 2019. A Bit of Background … In my last post, Rethinking Ikigai: How To Find Work You Love And Make A Difference, I took a deep dive into examining a common vocational planning tool – the Ikigai diagram. I pointed out that the Ikigai model was created by taking […]
If you are in business for yourself, you do marketing – in some form or another.
So do your competitors.
But what gives you a competitive advantage in your marketing?
One answer is provided by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, in their book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth.
Weinberg and Mares teach a way to think differently about your marketing than your competitors do.
The crux of the approach is to think carefully about your marketing channels in relation to what you have used and what other people use in your industry – and then add different marketing channels to your mix.
The book was originally written for startups, but the ideas apply for any business.
The Short Version:
To differentiate yourself and scale out your marketing, apply the Bullseye model:
1. Identify all the possible marketing channels that you could use
2. Test the most promising marketing channels
3. Optimise and scale the marketing channels that worked best
But how exactly does the Bullseye model work?
Can the bullseye model be extended and improved?
And what are the 19 marketing channels used by startups?
Read on to find out.
There’s a very popular model for finding work you love.
It’s doing the rounds now.
It’s the Ikigai Venn diagram:
Ikigai, the model tells us, is our “reason for being” – and if we find what is at the intersection of these four circles, we will know our Ikigai.
This is very helpful and motivational for people going through career reinvention, or who want to find their niche in business.
But to use it effectively, it helps to understand some more about it.
Where did the Ikigai diagram come from?
What is the Japanese concept of Ikigai anyway?
Is Ikigai the best model to use to find my purpose or vocation?
Let’s find out …
A lot of new business owners struggle to find their niche.
“Niching is so restricting.”
“I don’t want to pigeonhole myself like that.”
But what if there was another way to look at it?
What if a niche was simply a choice of where to focus?
Some common advice given in marketing circles is to “date your niche” – not to marry it.
This advice tells us to try out the niche, to give it a go. It’s not our whole life, we don’t have to do it for forever if it doesn’t work out.
But what does it really mean to date a niche?