Part 1 - The Hero

Introduction

In this special series of build-your-own-story sprints, we're going to dive into one of the many brand storytelling frameworks and learn how you can create a story for your own business in just half a day.

To make the story interesting for your customer, make them the hero.

Your hero is going to be your ideal customer. So, just to be very clear at the beginning, many businesses put themselves in the role of the hero here and that’s where they fail. 

In today's episode, Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber will show you how to identify your hero.

To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below): 

wantauthentic.com/brandscript

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Join marketing experts Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber on Authentic Marketing, the biweekly podcast that provides proven marketing tips to improve your marketing efforts and help your business grow.

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Episode Transcript

The reason that so many great businesses fail to generate sales or capture the attention of their customers is that they aren't able to explain what they do quickly and effectively. People don't buy the best products, they buy the products and the services that they understand the quickest. We've discussed this many times before on this podcast, but there's a quick and easy way. That you can implement within just a few hours that will help you grow your sales pipeline and help you close deals more easily. In this special series of build your own story sprints, we're going to dive into one of the many brand storytelling frameworks that are out there. and you'll learn how you can create a story for your own business in just half a day. So keep watching your podcast app, as the episodes in this series are going to be coming thick and fast. So let's get started. Hi there, I'm your host Simon Harvey and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice that will help you create marketing that works. So, despite the terrible weather out there, that many of us in Europe certainly have seen over the last few months, it finally seems like summer's on the way. So, to celebrate the vacation season, we thought, like, we'd do something a little bit different and put together a few special episodes for you over the summer. So to help you fill those sort of quiet evenings out in your mountain lodge or the afternoon sat down by the beach, what we thought we'd do is to spend the summer going through the whole of the storytelling process that we typically follow. And over the course of the next six episodes, we're going to break that down. So each episode, we're going to look at one element of the storytelling process, and then we'll give you a quick task that you can do at the end of that. The other thing that we're going to do is we're going to speed up our episodes. So rather than pushing out one episode per week, like we normally do, we're going to take the Netflix afloat and give you something to binge listen to. So you'll get two or three episodes coming out each week that you can listen to. And hopefully by the course of a couple of weeks, you'll be able to have your brand script complete and come out of the summer ready and raring to go with a new and fresh story that you can tell about your business. So with me today is Daniel as always. Hi there, Daniel. Hello Simon. And yeah, today we're gonna go through and we're gonna start at the beginning of the brand script process. So for the first episode, we are gonna dig in and we're gonna start with the hero. But before we do that, just to let you know if you want to follow along with us, if you want to create your own brand script, then of course you can do so. We've got a template that you can download and you can find that by going to want authentic.com. Slash brand script. So I'll put that into the show notes as well. So you can download it from there. But it's want authentic.com/brand script. There you'll find a template that's Word document or a uh Google Docs doc with each of the individual sections that we're gonna go through and you can fill that out and walk through it with us as we go. So good to have you here, Daniel. So whereabouts are we gonna start? What's section number one that we're gonna look at today?

Thank you very much, Simon. Um, today we're going to have a look at the hero. The

hero, yeah.

Yes, that's the big fundament of the story, I would say.

Uh huh, indeed.

And yeah, why don't you explain us what the hero is and how to identify the hero as a business?

Sure, so I would give you two things to think about from the perspective of a hero. Your hero is going to be your ideal customer. So, just to be very clear at the beginning, many businesses put themselves in the role of the hero here. We'll come on to the role that you play in a couple of steps. But the hero of your brand story It's going to be your customer. So to think about that, basically, it's a little bit like building a persona when you're doing your marketing, what you want to think about is what makes your ideal customer. So if you're a startup that doesn't have any customers, then you probably need to think about the type of people that you believe will get the most value out of your offering. If you've already got customers, then I would say that you need to think about. Think about all your customers and then choose the top five of those. Choose the five customers out of your customer list that you think best get value out of what you do, that you most enjoy working with, you know, the ones that really appreciate working with you. And then for both of those audiences, what you want to try and do is is to identify things that make them unique. So if you've got those five customers, think of the five things, join each of those five customers together that makes them stand out above and beyond everybody else. So, for example, they may all be of a similar size. They might all be other small businesses, you know, 50 to 100 people businesses. They may be all based geographically in the area, so your best customers might be based locally to you. Or your best customers may be an organization where you have a relationship with, say, a financial officer there or somebody in the sales department. Um, you know, think of who it is as well as the type of company that you're looking at. And your hero is going to be that combination. So your hero is not going to be one individual. If you're talking about a B2B story here, your hero is going to be that overall company, that overall entity. If you're selling to consumers, then you're thinking about a specific individual and what makes up that type of person. So, if it's a person, you might think more about the age, the sort of interests that they have, the gender that they are. Those sorts of things are probably more relevant to a person. Does that give you a few thoughts there?

Yes, that was perfect. Thank you. But, um, you know, to make it more relatable for our listeners, could you maybe give us an example?

Yeah, sure. Okay. So if you're, for example, a gardening company, you know, maybe you're selling gardening services, you might look for a certain type of person based on the special skills that you bring in. So you might just be a general gardener, in which case you're possibly looking around for people that live in affluent areas that have got big gardens, that have got money to spend on a gardener and probably need some help because they've got a lot of space that they can do. The other side of that is maybe you're a gardener that specializes in small spaces. So your speciality there might be working with raised beds, for example, or pot plants on balconies. You know, that might be what you're really good at. In which case, you know, again, there's no point in looking for big houses because they've got a lot of space. You want to look for people that live in apartments. And again, maybe you want to look around for people that live in areas that are, you know, generally nicer looking areas because people might care more about the balconies and the look of their gardens and things on the balconies there. So think about those sorts of things. I think that would be a couple of examples that I could give there.

Very good. Very good, Simon. Thank you very much. All right. And let's say I made the step and I identified who my hero is. Yeah. Now, what do I do with it?

Okay, so once you've identified who your hero is, then the next step that you need to think about is what is it exactly that they want? So, you know, hero, every hero wants something in their lives. So going back to the gardening, you know, they might want a garden or they might want a great looking garden. They might just want to tidy up their balcony, something like that. If it's a business, they might want security for their data. You know, they've got a lot of customer data and things. They might want that data to be secure, or they might want an easier way of tracking the hours that their staff work. So they might want some simple way of doing that. So think about something that that organization or that individual wants that you can help them to provide basically.

Okay. I understand. And, um, Now, we have to think about something that they want. Yeah. Mm hmm. And if, if it's something that we can help them with, they must be wanting our products, right?

Can you give me an example?

Like, let's say We're selling the gardening services, then they need our product, the service itself, right?

Um, they do need that, but that's something that when you're thinking about this section here, I would say think a step further than that. So some people might know that they want a gardener, that's great, but actually what we want to think about here is we want to think a little bit more aspirationally and take that a step further for them. What they want the way we want to position what they want is we want to position it as more being the result of what we do that they want as opposed to technically what they do. So going back to the gardening example there, I would say that what the customer wants is they want, a clean garden, or they want a great looking balcony, they want something that attracts the visitors, or calls in the neighbours, something like that. So think about maybe the results of what you do, rather than the fact that they just want a gardener. Does that help?

Yes, that definitely helps. So they want the result.

Yeah, exactly. So again, if you think about business in there, they might want a piece of software for tracking the time associated with the people that But that they're working, you know, that might be technically what the software is doing. But actually, when we're positioning it from a marketing possession, we want to think a stage further. So what they actually want is an easy way of being able to capture how long their staff are working for other organizations. So they want an easy way of capturing billable hours, basically something along those lines.

I understand. Yes. All right, so that gives me a good idea. So, we figure out who our hero is, and then we figure out what our hero wants.

Yeah, exactly that.

And when we figured out those two things, what can we do then with the hero?

So, um, I think at that point, you've got those sort of two parts used. So what we're going to do with that, we'll use that in the next few steps. So identifying the hero is essential here, because what we're then going to do is we're going to Think much more about the individual hero that you've got and we're going to look at how we're going to help them in a unique fashion and the challenges that that person has. So that's one thing. The other place that this hero is going to be useful as you're going forwards is in other marketing materials in other areas. So again, it becomes somebody that you can picture in your mind that individual or that organization. And you can say to yourself, you know, I want to run some LinkedIn ads, or I want to run some Google ads, or I want to create some social, uh, media posts to target these individual people that these people will be interested in. And if you've got the picture of that hero in your mind, it makes it much easier to create authentic materials, basically.

Okay, alright, that's great. I think, uh, that wraps up everything about the hero part of the story, and, uh, yeah. Is there anything else that you would like to add, Simon?

Um, yeah, I think that's probably the core parts of it. I think you've got enough there to take away now and to start to build the hero of your story. One thing that I would just say as we go through this is, you know, What we're going to build here over the next few days is something that is going to change. You know, you're going to come up with ideas here as to who your ideal hero is. And when you start to test these ideas out in the market on your website, you're going to find stuff that's changing. So, you know, don't be afraid to start with something and test something. You're better to get something out there and work with it now rather than get it absolutely perfect to start off with. So as you go out there, you know, I really encourage you. Stay consistent with this initial message as you start to work with people, stay consistent with that initial audience, and if it doesn't work, you know, listen to what you're hearing as we go forwards, and then you can refine. So it's going to be all about testing and refining, uh, this overall process here.

Good.

So thank you very much, Daniel. I look forward to chatting to you again, um, when we look at the next section. So, for today's 15 minute task, what I'd like is for you to fill in the hero section of your brand script. So if you haven't already done so, then don't forget that you can download that by going to wantauthentic. com slash brand script. And then, You can listen back to this conversation that Daniel and I have had. And basically I want you to just spend the next 10 or 15 minutes going through and describing your hero. So think about the things that make your perfect customer and what makes them sort of unique and make them stand out from other people. Of course, if you're having troubles with that, you want help creating your own story or you want somebody just to test any of those ideas on, then you can do that in a safe environment in our authentic engagement coaching community. So if you're interested in that, just go along to wantauthentic. com. Again, under the coaching tab there, you can join me. You can join a group of like minded other small business owners, people that are helping each other to communicate clearly and grow our own businesses. So, yep, thanks for joining us. That's it for today's episode. Thanks for listening. If it's your first time, Don't forget to bookmark the show. And if you found this useful and you think there's other people that might find this whole storytelling process of interest, then please share it with them. It's the thing that we can do to help each other to help small businesses along, basically. So thank you very much for joining us. And I look forward to talking to you again in the next episode.