I'm holding out for a hero!
How to look at your customer as the hero, how this changes our marketing and why it's an important shift when learning to be a "kind spider" in your content marketing
The idea that we focus on our customers in our writing isn’t a new one. it’s not even compulsory - if you’re all about the personal brand you might get away with making yourself the hero (In our group coaching session a few weeks back I shared a few examples of speakers who do just that! It’s ballsy and it works for them)
I’ve used Donald Miller’s book Building a Storybrand as a starter for this week’s coaching email because he laid it out in a clear way. After working with the material for several years with clients I’ve also tweaked the concept a little and worked out how it best works for small businesses
Miller’s not the only one to talk about the hero’s journey. If you do a quick google you’ll find marketers all over have used this concept. What you might not know is it has its beginnings in psychotherapy with Carl Jung’s writings being used by a guy called Joseph Campbell who used it to analyse the human relationship to a range of religions.
So before we dig into the HERO and who they need to be, first I want to mention how important it is for us to take notice of the things around us. Donald Miller took an idea he may have gleaned from religious studies, mixed it with his love of film and storytelling, and made it into a marketing book.
That’s how you become remembered. There may be nothing new under the sun, but we can create something new and memorable by combining a bunch of different ideas in a fresh way. That’s thought leadership. (as much as I believe that term is overused) That’s how you grow a business through content marketing.
(By the way if you got this as an email, today’s post is the first post that’s paywalled - this is my weekly coaching email that is only for paying subscribers wanting a weekly coaching email and my group coaching clients. I won’t make a habit of sending you this every Wednesday - I wanted to give you the option of joining our CONTENT MASTERWEB LITE coaching series. For most of you, you’ll get my free posts every Friday)
For most of us, turning our eyes outwards and focusing on the customer is hard. We don’t have thousands to spend on focus groups. if we’re starting out, what happens if we get the hero wrong?
Well lucky for us, we’re writing the script. And we can re-edit it any time we need.
I’ve reworked our hero’s story three or four times in the last three years as the world and the economy has changed. It’s due for another refresh again, as I move deeper into a focus on content marketing, and helping small business owners build their own platforms to grow businesses with organic marketing.
Our hero can change - but we first need to identify one hero to get started with, and then we can go from there.
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