You’re Not The Hero — Your Customer Is

April Sunshine Hawkins is a StoryBrand workshop facilitator, keynote speaker, and co-host of the Advertising Made Easy podcast (which has 2M downloads). 

She helps companies streamline their messaging, and loves instructing enterprise leaders to leverage the StoryBrand framework to simplify what they’re making an attempt to say. 

Maintain studying to be taught her three ideas relating to storytelling, promoting what you’re keen on, and making the client the hero. 

1. Lead with what you’re keen on.

If this sounds a bit too just like the preachings of Liz Gilbert in Eat Pray Love, bear with me; it connects to advertising and marketing.

Don’t “do what brings you essentially the most cash”… Simply do one thing for the enjoyment of it. Plain and easy. 

“You might want to be promoting the merchandise that convey you essentially the most pleasure. Why are you pushing one thing you hate doing? Do not try this,” Hawkins tells me. 

“I do know so many individuals, particularly within the SMB house, who’re in a rut as a result of they’ve backed themselves into promoting one thing they do not really like promoting,” she says. 

That doesn’t imply you must cease providing these merchandise solely, particularly in the event that they’re conserving the lights on. 

However while you care about what you’re promoting, Hawkins says, your clients can really feel it. Lean into the tales or values that matter most to you, and you will find your self connecting extra deeply along with your viewers.

Now how do I make a profession out of studying rom-coms and consuming frozen margs? 

2. Your buyer is the hero. Not you. 

Hawkins sees too many entrepreneurs place their model because the heroes, and she or he says it is one of many largest errors entrepreneurs could make.

“Everyone wakes up the hero of their very own story. Your clients, the individuals you are making an attempt to attract in… The story must be about them.”

In different phrases, you’re not Batman — you’re Alfred.

Take a latest instance: Hawkins was working with a jewellery model that creates merchandise in Malawi and pays their staff 3-5X the minimal wage. Naturally, they needed to shout that from the rooftops. Who would not?

However Hawkins stepped in and identified that the model is not alleged to be the hero. The client is. 

“We rewrote the marketing campaign to ask, ‘How can these items assist individuals have fun a milestone — like a promotion, an anniversary, a birthday?” 

Immediately, the jewellery wasn’t simply jewellery; it grew to become a badge of a buyer’s large (and small) life moments.

Have you ever ever landed on a web site and browse the primary few sentences and thought, Wow, is that this individual in my head? That is the end-game: To your clients to really feel such as you get them. 

“Once we can place our merchandise to align with what our clients are feeling, it creates that ‘ding, ding, ding’ second — ‘That is me! That is for me!'” Hawkins says. “That is what we’re searching for.” 

3. Advertising is simply storytelling. 

April Sunshine Hawkins is, because it seems, precisely what you’d count on — vivid, heat, and exceptionally joyful. 

She additionally loves an excellent story, which is why she works for an organization (StoryBrand) that helps companies sharpen their messaging via a supplied framework. 

“It is simply good to have a framework to go to, so while you’re like, ‘Oh no, there is a blinking cursor once more. What am I alleged to say?’ You might have a framework to work off of,” she tells me. 

This is the nugget of knowledge: As entrepreneurs, we do not all the time should reinvent the wheel. If advertising and marketing is actually simply storytelling, then it is important to deal with your messaging the identical method you’d write a novel — with a hero, a surmountable problem, and a triumphant ending.