Rachel from Writing With Meaning recently posed this question to the D/C Think Tank:

I love this site and your blog articles. I agree with all you have to say about word-of-mouth marketing, but I am completely stumped at how to start the WOM ball rolling.

I’m a sole proprietorship and the service I offer is writing coaching, so I think I really have to get in front of people to get them to see the value of my service. Blanket advertising has little effect, as does pestering my friends and family network for referrals.

How does a one-person business, whose product is essentially a combination of personality and know-how, get in front of its target market?

Dear Rachel,

Thanks for the great question.

Everything about WOM starts with the target market. Go ahead and pick one you’re passionate about. You’ll find that the more narrowly you target, the more opportunities emerge. Let’s say you think you’d like to work with attorneys (god knows they need the help). That’s a big group so you might want to narrow your focus to something like attorneys specializing in environmental law.

Within this group there will be nodes of influence. A node can be a person, organization, a trusted information source, etc. Your goal, then, is to figure out which nodes you want and what it would take to get them to want to talk about you (for tips on that, see the post on Relevance, Credibility and Value.)

The simplest short term strategy would be to find someone in your target market (it could be a friend or a friend of a friend) and take them out to lunch to brainstorm about what would rock his colleagues’ world. If you find they’re a good WOM candidate, then do whatever you have to do to give them an experience with your work that they can talk about.

For a larger strategy, consider the bigger nodes. If there’s an environmental law newsletter, call up the editor and offer to write a story on power of good legal writing.

Or, you could target selected firms with a specialized lunch-time writing seminar that would be held in their office. If you do that, keep in mind that they’re going to have filters in place to keep out the pitches, so your initial target might be paralegals, office managers or receptionists.

The next step would be to create ways for them to spread the word. It could be a blog, follow-up seminars to which they can invite their colleagues, useful how-to documents they can forward around, etc.

You might also want to look into possible cross-promotion partnerships. If you could link with others in the professional development field you might be able to create something even more relevant, credible and valuable than you could on your own. AND you would immediately gain access to their network.

I hope that helps.

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