April Sunshine Hawkins is a StoryBrand workshop facilitator, keynote speaker, and co-host of the Marketing Made Simple podcast (which has 2M downloads).
She helps businesses streamline their messaging, and loves teaching business leaders to leverage the StoryBrand framework to simplify what they’re trying to say.
Keep reading to learn her three tips when it comes to storytelling, selling what you love, and making the customer the hero.
1. Lead with what you love.
If this sounds a little too similar to the preachings of Liz Gilbert in Eat Pray Love, bear with me; it connects to marketing.
Don’t “do what brings you the most money”… Just do something for the joy of it. Plain and simple.
“You need to be selling the products that bring you the most joy. Why are you pushing something you hate doing? Don’t do that,” Hawkins tells me.
“I know so many people, especially in the SMB space, who are in a rut because they’ve backed themselves into selling something they don’t actually like selling,” she says.
That doesn’t mean you need to stop offering those products entirely, especially if they’re keeping the lights on.
But when you care about what you’re selling, Hawkins says, your customers can feel it. Lean into the stories or values that matter most to you, and you’ll find yourself connecting more deeply with your audience.
Now 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 position their brand as the heroes, and she says it’s one of the biggest mistakes marketers can make.
“Everybody wakes up the hero of their own story. Your customers, the people you’re trying to draw in… The story needs to be about them.”
In other words, you’re not Batman — you’re Alfred.
Take a recent example: Hawkins was working with a jewelry brand that creates products in Malawi and pays their workers 3-5X the minimum wage. Naturally, they wanted to shout that from the rooftops. Who wouldn’t?
But Hawkins stepped in and pointed out that the brand isn’t supposed to 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 badge of a customer’s big (and small) life moments.
Have you ever landed on a website and read the first few sentences and thought, Wow, is this person in my head? That’s the end-game: For your customers to feel like you get them.
“When we can position our products to align with what our customers are feeling, it creates that ‘ding, ding, ding’ moment — ‘That’s me! This is for me!'” Hawkins says. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
3. Marketing is just storytelling.
April Sunshine Hawkins is, as it turns out, exactly what you’d expect — bright, warm, and exceptionally joyful.
She also loves a good story, which is why she works for a company (StoryBrand) that helps businesses sharpen their messaging through a provided framework.
“It’s just nice to have a framework to go to, so when you’re like, ‘Oh no, there’s a blinking cursor again. What am I supposed to say?’ You have a framework to work off of,” she tells me.
Here’s the nugget of wisdom: As marketers, we don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. If marketing is really just storytelling, then it’s vital to treat your messaging the same way you’d write a novel — with a hero, a surmountable challenge, and a triumphant ending.
