April Sunshine Hawkins is a StoryBrand workshop facilitator, keynote speaker, and co-host of the Marketing Made Simple podcast (which has 2 million downloads).
She helps businesses simplify their messaging and loves teaching business leaders how to use the StoryBrand framework to simplify what they’re trying to say.
Read on to find out her three tips for telling stories, selling what you love, and turning the customer into a hero.
1. Lead with what you love.
If this sounds a little too similar to Liz Gilbert’s sermons in the Eat, pray for lovebear with me; it is associated with marketing.
Don’t “do what brings you the most money”… Just do something for joy. Plain and simple.
“You have to sell the products that bring you the most joy. Why push something you hate to do? Don’t do it,” Hawkins tells me.
“I know so many people, especially in the SMB space, who are in a rut because they’ve supported themselves selling something they don’t really like to sell,” she says.
That doesn’t mean you have to stop offering those products altogether, especially if the lights are on.
But when you care about what you’re selling, Hawkins says, your customers can feel it. Lean on the stories or values that matter most to you and you’ll find you connect more deeply with your audience.
How do I make a career out of reading rom-coms and drinking frozen margs?
2. Your customer is the hero. Not you.
Hawkins sees too many marketers positioning their brand as heroes and says that’s one of the biggest mistakes marketers can make.
“Everyone be the hero of their own story. Your customers, the people you’re trying to attract… The story should be about them.”
In other words, you’re not Batman – you’re Alfred.
Take a recent example: Hawkins worked with a jewelry brand that manufactures products in Malawi and pays its workers 3-5x minimum wage. Of course, they wanted to shout it from the rooftops. Who wouldn’t?
But Hawkins stepped in to point out that the brand shouldn’t be the hero. It’s a customer.
“We redesigned the campaign to ask, ‘How can these pieces help people celebrate a milestone — like a promotion, an anniversary, a birthday?’
Suddenly, jewelry wasn’t just jewelry; it has become a badge of customers’ big (and small) life moments.
Have you ever sat down on a website and read the first few sentences and thought, Wow, is this person in my head? That’s the endgame: making your customers feel like you got them.
“When we can position our products to match what our customers feel, it creates that ‘ding, ding, ding’ moment — ‘That’s me! This is for me!'” says Hawkins. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
3. Marketing is all about storytelling.
April Sunshine Hawkins, as it turns out, is exactly what you’d expect — bright, warm, and extremely joyful.
He also likes a good story, which is why he works for the company (StoryBrand) that helps businesses sharpen their messages through a provided framework.
“It’s nice to have a frame you can go to, so when you say, ‘Oh no, the cursor is flashing again. What can I say?’ You have a framework to work with,” she tells me.
Here’s a nugget of wisdom: As marketers, we don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. If marketing is really all about storytelling, then it’s vital that you treat your messaging the same way you would a novel—with a hero, an overcomeable challenge, and a triumphant ending.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/youre-not-the-hero
