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When I was in business school, they taught us about the Golden Triangle: Good, Fast, and Cheap. They taught us that we needed to “own” two of those things. We could own Good and Fast or Fast and Cheap, but we didn’t need to own all three.

These days, we live in a consumer-driven marketplace where two out of three isn’t enough. Consumers want it all: they want it good, they want it fast, and they want it cheap. If you can’t provide them with all three of those things, you won’t be in business long.

We also live in a global marketplace. You are in competition with big box retailers and big online entities even if you’re a small, local shop. How do you separate yourself from big box stores? How do you become a successful business when your competition is big and your customers want it all?

The Secret to Building a Strong Business 

The secret to building a strong business in a competitive, consumer-driven marketplace is to put your personality into your business operations. Whether it’s your own personality or your corporate culture, make sure you’re known for how you do business just as much as you’re known for the products or services you offer.

Are you a fun-loving guy who sells widgets? Infuse fun into your store so that every time someone shops there, it’s a blast. People will quickly learn that they’re going to have a heck of a good time doing business with you, and that their purchasing experience will be fun as a result.

Are you a rock-steady dame who can “own” helpfulness and customer service? Do it! Show your customers that when they do business with you, your service, your steadiness, and your helpfulness carry over into every part of your business — from what goes on online to what happens on the shop floor, to how you manage your phone calls. Be the rock steady business in your trade. 

Make yourself human to you customers, and they’ll want to do business with you. When you bring your personality into your business, your customers will build the kinds of relationships with you that will inspire them to go out of their way to buy from your store or hire you for the service they need fulfilled. 

Your Biggest Asset 

Bringing your personality into your business turns doing business with you from a transaction into an experience. And when customers have a great experience doing business with you, it builds their trust.

Your biggest asset in your business isn’t what you sell, it’s your personality.  Put yourself into your brand, put yourself into your social media, and put yourself into your real world interactions, and you’ll be a lot more successful than that big box retailer online or down the road. Put some personality into your business and they will come, they will most definitely come.

Follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, give us a shout out there in comments below this blog post. I’m Gus Wagner, I own The Rocket Group and I look forward to learning more about your personality soon. 

Thanks a lot!

Gus Wagner speaking at the Simonsen Business Academy in Jefferson City, Missouri 

What if we told you that the two simple things you needed to do to persuade your audience to make the decision you want them to make both amounts to something as simple as HAM? Yes, HAM.

What we’ve learned at The Rocket Group is that HAM is what persuasion is all about.

How do you make people buy a product, advocate for a cause, or vote for a candidate? Whether you hope that a consumer will buy something or become a fan of something, or whether you hope a constituent will vote for something, the same two things have to happen: you need to capture that person’s heart and their mind. You need to win their ham.

Whether it’s an idea, an issue, a person, a product, or anything else you’re trying to convince someone about, you need to win their hearts and their minds. Win the heart and you’ve won the emotional appeal; win the head and you’ve won the logical appeal. Win them both, and you’ve got their vote, their transaction, or their donation.

If you can convince somebody’s HAM, you’ll have them in your wheelhouse to make the purchase that you want them to make, make the decision that you want them to make, or to vote for the candidate you want them to vote for.

Need help finding the hearts and minds of your current, potential, and future audiences? Drop a line anytime! 

One thing that we do here at The Rocket Group is present. We give trainings, we speak at meetings, and we teach at conferences. We educate, inform and entertain our audiences when we have the microphone, but sometimes, our audiences educate, inform, or entertain us, instead.

When I spoke at the Jefferson City West Rotary Club, I was introduction by Stephanie Johnson,  the President of the Rotary Club. Jill shared a story about calling a business and being asked for her pin number.

“It was an automated voice,” Stephanie said. “Normally you hear, ‘Please enter your pin or account number followed by the pound sign,’ but this little-automated voice said to me, ‘Please enter your pin followed by the hashtag.’ We are living in a Gus Wagner world,’” she said. “We have evolved.”

I was so flattered by Stephanie’s words, “We are living in Gus Wagner world. We have evolved.”

It just goes to show that social media doesn’t stop on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube. Social media has infiltrated our culture, and businesses, organizations, and nonprofits that want to be relevant in a social media world will embrace social media culture if they haven’t done so yet.

Listen to what else Stephanie has to say about The Rocket Group in this video clip, and in the meantime, if you’d like to have me speak to your group, business or convention, just hit the speaking and training link above!

Facebook gives you everything you need to know about how your content is working—and when it’s working—absolutely free in its Facebook Insights. Unfortunately, most businesses, organizations, and nonprofits I’ve talked to don’t use their Insights.

If your business wants to get ahead of the competition (most of which isn’t using Insights), keep reading. I’ll tell you what your Facebook Insights are, where to find them, and what the most important thing is that you can use Insights for.

First, you need to find your Insights. When you look at your company’s Facebook page, Insights is right there at the top. Click on the Insights button, and you’ll be sent to the Insights start page. When something bumps or spikes in your content, you’ll see it here.

From that Start Page, you’ll see “Likes”, “Reach”, “Visits”, “Posts”, and “People” at the top. If you click on any one of these buttons, you’ll see more information about each of those analytics.

Read this: Quit Liking Things on Facebook

Insights shows you page likes, page reach, and even complaints about spam. It shows you what posts people have responded best to, and it shows you how they’ve interacted with them. You can see how your paid posts performed alongside your organic posts, too. Insights helps you track what kind of content is most successful. When you know what works, you can do more of that and less of what doesn’t work.

I promised you I’d tell you what the most important thing is that you can use Insights for. The most important thing you can use Insights to figure out is when your friends are online. The sweetest spot to post on Facebook here in mid-Missouri is between 7:00 and 9:30 p.m. That’s when people are at home, multi-screening, playing on the computer, or checking Facebook before bed, and that’s when you should publishing your best content.

I am sure its the same where you are.

 

 

 

One last note here about using Facebook to promote your business: when you say “find our business on Facebook” in advertising, but you don’t put your Facebook URL, it doesn’t work. The reason it doesn’t work is that your business isn’t the only one in the world by the same name. If you don’t give fans your full URL, they’re likely to like a business with the same name as yours, but in some other city or state.

Learn more: Get Found on Facebook – A Strategy for Businesses

If you’re going to spend money promoting your Facebook page, give the reader your full Facebook URL. For instance, if I were advertising our Facebook page for The Rocket Group, I’d use the full URL: Facebook.com/RocketGroup. And once you get people onto your page, use Insights to track what’s working and what isn’t for your business’s content.

If your business needs a hand getting started with Insights, feel free to reach out anytime. For more social media help, follow, Like, and subscribe to our platform!

Thanks for the time,

Ever have someone give you their address on Facebook and see that is is Facebook.com/DavesTowing1234567890? That is because they have not set up the address of their personal or business page correctly.

The video below shows you how to do so in a couple short and easy steps. SPOILER ALERT: Go to Facebook.com/Username and follow the instructions.

Send this to anyone you know with a bunch of numbers in their Facebook URL http://t.co/49kUcOBeZt http://t.co/PLi2ZRfQKv

— Gus Wagner (@RocketGroup) February 10, 2015

I have said it before and I will write here again, “The hashtag is the most powerful tool in social media.” Pretty bold statement, right?

TWEET THIS “The hashtag is the most powerful tool in #SocialMedia.”

We’ve gained a bit of a reputation for our favoritism of the hashtag as it’s a frequent tool used in our speeches and, heck, it is even in our Twitter profile photo!

If you still are not sure what a hashtag is, check out this FAQ video. The hashtag allows the hundreds of thousands of messages which are tweeted and posted every second of every day to be collated around conversation topics and keywords. It is how audiences spread the word at events, how real world communities group together online, and how people, businesses, organizations, and nonprofits brand themselves and improve their bottom lines.

Learn more: What is a hashtag?

Hashtags began on Twitter, and have spread to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more social media platforms. They are most frequently and successfully used on Twitter and Instagram but still work, to varying levels of success, on the other platforms.

The answer to the question you are thinking right now is: YES.

You should be using hashtags in your posts and tweets, no matter the platform. If you want to get more awareness, gain audience, or manage a social media campaign, hashtags are imperative to your success.

Here are a couple of tips for succeeding at implementing hashtags into your social media marketing:

Check it before you hashtag it: Before you strategically begin using a hashtag be sure to check it out on a site like HashAtIt to make sure it is not being used by competitors or connected to any junk you don’t want to be associated with. TWEET THIS

See what others are doing with hashtags: Search your industry or geographic area for any and all relevant hashtags your peers and influencers are using. Then begin using those. No need to create what is already successful and has audiences connected to it. TWEET THIS

It’s not funny: Do not use hashtags to call out the punchlines to your jokes. #AintIAStinker might have worked for Bugs Bunny but it will not work for you and it chews up valuable real estate in tweets where you are limited to 140 characters and on other platforms where shorter posts perform better. TWEET THIS

Know the numbers: Loading up your content with tons of hashtagged keywords and phrases may seem like a great idea but it makes you look like a spammer and turns off new visitors. 2-3 hashtags work best on tweets and Facebook posts. Studies vary as to what is a sweet spot on Instagram but we have found 6 to be a good number. We also include the bulk of those hashtags in the first comment to an Instagram post not in the original caption text. TWEET THIS

Use what you abuse: If you are going to use the hashtagged keywords and phrases in your content, be sure to click them and engage with others online who are using the same hashtags. One important aspect of hashtags is community building…so be part of the community! TWEET THIS

Be the same everywhere: If you are creating a campaign, theme, or contest revolving around a hashtag be sure you are using the same identification on Twitter as you are on Facebook as you are on Instagram, etc. There is no reason to quadruple your work if you do not have to. TWEET THIS

Make it easy on the eyes: Our house policy for hashtags and web addresses is to capitialize the first letter of every word to make it easier to read and remember. #HamburgerHeaven is a lot easier to read than #hamburgerheaven, right? Test it with your message and see what you think. TWEET THIS

These points are by no means the comprehensive guide on how to use hashtags but they are set up to help you improve your outreach with an important, some say the MOST powerful, tool in social media.

If you need any help, feel free to reach out at any time and be sure to connect, follow, Like, and subscribe to our platforms to stay up to date with what is new and working well in modern communications!

Thanks for the time,

You may also be interested in:

Breaking down hashtags on Facebook

How not to look like a spammer on social media

Better know a hashtag: #Missouri edition

As part of our Share The Like philosophy, our News page gathers all of the content which we publish on social media along with all of the content we interact with every day. You can visit this information one or one hundred times a day or you can sign up for a daily #RocketGroupRecap email to be delivered to you.

The screencast below shows you what the page, content, and email are all about. Signing up for the daily email is also highlighted.