April Sunshine Hawkins is a StoryBrand workshop facilitator, keynote speaker, and co-host of the Advertising and marketing 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 study her three ideas relating to storytelling, promoting what you like, and making the client the hero.
1. Lead with what you like.
If this sounds just a little too much like the preachings of Liz Gilbert in Eat Pray Love, bear with me; it connects to advertising.
Don’t “do what brings you probably the most cash”… Simply do one thing for the enjoyment of it. Plain and easy.
“You want to be promoting the merchandise that carry you probably 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 it’s worthwhile to cease providing these merchandise solely, particularly in the event that they’re maintaining the lights on.
However if 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 ingesting 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.
“All people 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 current instance: Hawkins was working with a jewellery model that creates merchandise in Malawi and pays their employees 3-5X the minimal wage. Naturally, they wished to shout that from the rooftops. Who would not?
However Hawkins stepped in and identified that the model is not imagined to be the hero. The shopper is.
“We rewrote the marketing campaign to ask, ‘How can these items assist individuals rejoice a milestone — like a promotion, an anniversary, a birthday?”
Immediately, the jewellery wasn’t simply jewellery; it turned a badge of a buyer’s large (and small) life moments.
Have you ever ever landed on an internet site and skim the primary few sentences and thought, Wow, is that this particular person in my head? That is the end-game: On your clients to really feel such as you get them.
“After 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 in search of.”
3. Advertising and marketing is simply storytelling.
April Sunshine Hawkins is, because it seems, precisely what you’d anticipate — shiny, heat, and exceptionally joyful.
She additionally loves a superb story, which is why she works for an organization (StoryBrand) that helps companies sharpen their messaging via a offered framework.
“It is simply good to have a framework to go to, so if you’re like, ‘Oh no, there is a blinking cursor once more. What am I imagined to say?’ You could have a framework to work off of,” she tells me.
This is the nugget of knowledge: As entrepreneurs, we do not all the time need to reinvent the wheel. If advertising is de facto simply storytelling, then it is important to deal with your messaging the identical means you’d write a novel — with a hero, a surmountable problem, and a triumphant ending.
