April Sunshine Hawkins is a StoryBrand workshop presenter, keynote speaker and co-host of the Marketing Made Simple podcast (with 2 million downloads).
She helps companies optimize their messaging and loves teaching leaders to use the StoryBrand framework to simplify what they want to say.
Read on to learn her three tips for telling stories, selling what you love, and making the customer the hero.
1. Lead with what you love.
If that sounds a little too similar to Liz Gilbert’s sermons Eat, pray, lovebear with me; it combines with marketing.
Not “Do what makes you the most money”… Just do something for the joy of it. Plain and simple.
“You have to sell the products that bring you the most joy. Why are you pushing for something you hate? Don’t do that,” Hawkins says.
“I know so many people, especially in the SMB space, who get into trouble because they decided to sell something they don’t really like selling,” she says.
That doesn’t mean you have to stop offering these products altogether, especially if they continue to be in circulation.
But if you care about what you’re selling, your customers can feel it, Hawkins says. When you focus on the stories or values that matter most to you, you’ll find that you build a deeper connection with your audience.
So how do I make a career reading romantic comedies and drinking Frozen Margs?
2. Your customer is the hero. Not you.
Hawkins sees too many marketers positioning their brand as a hero, and she says this is one of the biggest mistakes marketers can make.
“Everyone wakes up the hero of their own story. Your customers, the people you want to appeal to… the story has to 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 three to five times the minimum wage. Of course they wanted to shout that from the rooftops. Who wouldn’t do that?
But Hawkins intervened and pointed out that the brand shouldn’t be the hero. The customer is.
“We rewrote the campaign to ask, ‘How can these pieces help people celebrate a milestone – like a promotion, an anniversary, a birthday?'”
Suddenly the jewelry wasn’t just jewelry; It became a symbol of a customer’s big (and small) life moments.
Have you ever landed on a website, read the first few sentences and thought: Wow, is that person in my head? That’s the bottom line: making your customers feel like you understand them.
“When we can position our products to match our customers’ feelings, it creates that ‘clink, clink, clink’ moment – ‘That’s me! This is for me!’” Hawkins says. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
3. Marketing is just storytelling.
As it turns out, April Sunshine Hawkins is exactly what you’d expect – radiant, warm and exceptionally cheerful.
She also loves a good story, which is why she works for a company (StoryBrand), which helps companies sharpen their messages through a provided framework.
“It’s just nice to have a framework that you can access. So if you think, ‘Oh no, there’s another blinking cursor. What can I say?’ “You have a framework to work with,” she tells me.
Here’s the wisdom: As marketers, we don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. If marketing is truly all about storytelling, it’s important to treat your messages the way you would write a novel – with a hero, a surmountable challenge, and a triumphant ending.
