Every time you post a piece of content that no one engages with (e.g. product content usually gets very low engagement), the social media platform’s algorithm learns that users don’t like your content.

As a result, the algorithm will show your next post to less people, so your opportunities for engagement have now decreased.
Thus, your 2nd post will most likely get less engagement than your 1st post.

The algorithm will now show your 3rd post to even LESS people, which will further decrease your opportunities for engagement.
And this keeps going and going in vicious downward spiral, so that posts that used to get 1,000s of views, now get 100s of views (or less)!

Unfortunately, I’ve seen many companies go down this path by consistently posting product-based content. You can see their engagement dramatically decrease quickly and then you just don’t see their posts at all anymore because the algorithm has learned not to show it to you.


So, how do you avoid this? Post content that will add value to your target audience!


Solve their pain points, give free tips and content and information they can’t get elsewhere. When you do talk about your company, talk about DEI initiatives or things you are doing to help local communities.

The focus your content should be about THEM, your target audience, and what will add value to their lives.

If you do that, you will get more views and engagement, and generate more awareness and more business opportunities as a result.

Recently, LinkedIn asked me (since “you’ve been posting some great stuff on LinkedIn” – wow, pretty cool!) what trends I see for 2019.

My answer: MORE

Strategy-level:

MORE mobile, digital, social and more data-driven and customer-centric decision-making and experimentation with innovations like AI and AR.

Tactics:

MORE social selling. I get so many spam calls, I don’t budge when my phone rings now, and I get so much spam email that I only view my Focused folder in Outlook. Social media will go from a “nice to have” to a “must have” for sales + business development.

MORE creativity with advertising. TV and traditional display ads get less eyeballs by the second. Companies will get more and more creative with advertising. For example:

• “In-game” TV ads – so you can’t DVR past them – that appear during sporting events today. These will become more prevalent,
• Ads on voice technology like Alexa – or even sponsored results, which gets dicey because you wouldn’t know if it’s the “best” answer or a sponsored answer
• “Anti-beacons” like Burger King’s new Whopper campaign. I’ve never understood why mall stores don’t have anti-beacons set up for their competitors’ stores. If I’m running Gap, I’m sending someone an offer every time they walk into H&M.
• Ads inside of video games – Roblox already does this. I saw an Aquaman movie ad on the wall of a building inside my son’s Xbox game recently. Integrated video game advertising!
• As automatic cars start to take off, how long will it be before we start seeing ads on our windshields?

MORE automation, and not always in a good way. Everyone wants to automate everything in marketing and sales, but many companies lack processes to support the automation, so they end up spamming the heck out of people, or they never follow-up outside of their automated sends, and thus, miss opportunities.

MORE video. As video comprises more and more of the internet’s content, everyone will be doing video in 2019. Facebook and LinkedIn already favor video over all other content. Those that are reluctant to do video in 2018, will be forced to do it in 2019 to sustain their current reach.

This will be an exciting year with a lot of big leaps forward in marketing in sales. It will be fun to watch it all unfold!

Words matter. For example, “financial advisor” is searched for 10x more than “financial professional.”) When your team writes LinkedIn profiles, websites and sales materials, use words your prospects typically use. This will allow you to get found and be more easily understood.

Other surprising results:

• “Sales” 70x more than “business development” – no one wants to say they do sales, but you are much more likely to be found if you do
• “Innovation” 2x more than “innovative” – craft your content to use that tense instead
• “Strategy” 50% more than “strategies”
• “Online” 10x more searches than “digital” – an oldie, but a goodie
• “Digital marketing” 10x more searches than “online marketing” – but not when it comes to marketing
• “SEM” 20x more than “search engine marketing” – abbreviate this one
• “SEO” 15% more than “search engine optimization” – this one doesn’t matter at much
• “Social media” 80x more than “social networks” – it may not be grammatically correct at times, but using “social media” will get you found more
• “Facebook” 80x more than “social media” – if you are talking about Facebook, say “Facebook”

Want to run some searches on your own? Check our Google Trends (https://trends.google.com) to do comparisons between 2 or more words or phrases.

Since the launch of the new LinkedIn user interface, users have lamented that the Advanced Search is gone, it only exists in Sales Navigator now, and you have to pay for it.

I was upgraded to the new user interface last night, and I noticed something interesting: Advanced search isn’t gone.

The “Advanced” button that used to be next to the search bar is gone. That’s true:

OLD top nav:

NEW top nav:

However, you can still do advanced searches in regular LinkedIn. They are just more integrated into the regular search functionality.

To start, type what you are searching for in the search bar. For example, if I wanted to find VPs of Marketing at Wells Fargo in the St. Louis area. I would start by searching for “Wells Fargo,” waiting a second, and then clicking “People who work at Wells Fargo” from the possible options. Here are the results I get:

Okay, so 394,392 results. If I’m looking to find, connect, and start a relationship with VPs at Wells Fargo in St. Louis, that is an unmanageable number.

However, if you look on the right side of the page, you will see many of the filters you used to see in Advanced Search. They’re not gone, they have just been moved.

So, I will filter by 1^st and 2^nd for Connections, the Greater St. Louis area as Location, Wells Fargo as the Current Company, and finally, Financial Services or Marketing and Advertising as the Industry. (Note: you can also filter on Profile language, Nonprofit interests and schools).

Once I add these filters, here’s what I see:

Now, we are down to 170 results. That’s muuuuuch better. If I needed to, I could review this list one-by-one and find those VPs that are in Marketing roles, but that would be time-consuming.

The biggest challenge is that the title filter is no longer available in the regular version of LinkedIn. With the new LinkedIn interface, it’s only available in Sales Navigator.

BUT…actually, that’s not entirely true. If you click on “Structuring your search,” LinkedIn gives you helpful tips on how to write your search queries:

The page overlay that appears shows you how to do complex searches…in the regular version of LinkedIn, AND YOU CAN STILL SEARCH BY TITLE!!

(Here is the URL for that page: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/76015  – note: besides that page there are also a lot of other helpful tips in that same section of LinkedIn Help)

So, let’s start over. With this new information, I would type my search like this:

title: (VP OR Vice President) AND company: “Wells Fargo”

Here are my initial results:

My new initial results set is a much smaller number (29,209 vs. 394,392), and they are all VPs, meaning: I JUST SEARCHED BY TITLE IN THE NEW LINKEDIN USER INTERFACE!

Now, if I run the same filters I ran before, my results look like this:

I could trim this further with more advanced Boolean searches (e.g. exclude Assistant Vice President and Senior Vice President), but even without doing that, I’m down to 86 opportunities, which gets me much closer to my target audience.

My advice: I always recommend that my clients upgrade to Sales Navigator. I’ve been using for years, and it keeps getting better and better from my perspective. However, if you can’t afford it, or don’t want to make that investment, I recommend you get really good at writing Boolean searches. Once you get the hang of it, then they roll off your tongue/fingertips. LinkedIn even has videos that help you write them on the LinkedIn Learning site: (https://www.linkedin.com/learning/search?keywords=boolean%20search)

Key Takeaways

• Advanced Search is not gone from regular LinkedIn
• You can still search by title in regular LinkedIn

If you find any other hidden nuggets in the new user interface, please share!

About the author

Robert Knop is Founder and CEO of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping organizations GAIN + RETAIN clients using digital strategy and social media. He’s a proud member of the Wave3 network of consultants, and always happy to talk strategy, digital and social selling. To learn more about how to evolve your marketing and sales approaches for the digital age, reach out to Robert.

Photo: Rafiq Sarlie

Recently, I spoke with a friend of mine who is an insurance salesman. He predominately sells life insurance and property and casualty insurance. When we talked at a local bar, he confided in me that for the first time since the financial crisis in 2008, he is not going to hit his sales goal.

He talked about how he has a solid client base. However, every year he loses life clients to lapses and old age, or property and casualty customers that change policies based on $5/month difference.

In the past, he has always been able to replace this yearly runoff. However, this year, he’s had trouble replacing these customers. He complained about his inability to get prospects to talk with him.

“No one picks up the phone when I call, and no one ever calls me back.” He said. “When I email people, they rarely write me back – even if I’ve been referred to them by someone we both know!” He lamented.

After a couple of beers, he said “I don’t understand – I’m doing what I’ve always done.”

“That’s the problem,” I interjected “you’re doing things the way you’ve always done them.”

I’m writing this piece because my friend isn’t the only one having troubles making his sales numbers this year. I’ve been hearing this same story a lot in the past few months.

So what’s the solution? You have to modernize your sales toolbox.

Here’s how to do it:

1)     Have a strategy. Many individuals (and even some companies) don’t have a strategic plan for sales. They just target people in their territory that they get from a list they bought, a tool their company uses, or folks they get as referrals. Are these the RIGHT people to target? Maybe … maybe not. The product you’re selling may not be a fit depending on what life stage the person is in currently.

Here’s a quick way to create a strategy and go to market plan:

• First, define who your ideal customer is – who typically buys your products? Who is your product designed for?
• Next, segment your customers into different groups based on different behaviors like what type of products they typically purchase or where they are in the purchase journey.
• Then, find where they live and breathe and go there with messages that are tailored to their needs via channels where they spend their time. For example, if your target audience is recent college grads, are you going to more successful with direct mail or Snapchat? (Hint: You better start learning how to use Snapchat!)

2)     Remove cold calling and blast email from your toolbox. Notice I didn’t say remove calling and email. It’s the “cold” and “blast” adjectives that are the problem. You need to do research on your prospects before reaching out to them.

These two acquisition methods have declining in value for years, and a recent study by Baylor University showed that cold calling results in a meeting about 1% of the time. I read an article last week that touted the “success” a cold caller had by calling 1,250 people to get 18 meetings. That’s a 0.01% meeting rate!

3)     Add social media to your toolbox.  I get over a 50% meeting rate for some my clients using social media and social selling. Thus, at that rate, they have to reach out to 30 people on LinkedIn to get those same 18 meetings that the cold caller generated (and without annoying and alienating 1,232 other people to do it)!

Social media is also great for getting signals such as buying a home, birth of a child, getting married and switching jobs. These are big pivot points from a needs perspective, and you can get notified when your current and prospective customers hit one of these milestones.

4)     Personalize your outreach. In today’s world, it’s all about the customer experience. Everyone has bought from Amazon or Zappos or has used an American Express credit card or flown on Southwest Airlines. They know what great, personalized customer service looks like.

When you reach out to a customer via phone, email, social media or even by sky writing, if it’s the same generic message, you’ve lost most of them before you’ve started. Go to LinkedIn. Go to Twitter. Go to Facebook. You can find out an enormous amount information on a potential client, and it’s all free.

Use this information to tailor your message to that person. If you can’t think of a problem your prospect has that your product solves, then maybe you shouldn’t reach out to them.

5)     Tailor your message to the medium. Not only personalize the message to the individual, but to where it will be read as well. You wouldn’t use the same words in an email as you would in a face-to-face conversation. However, many business just cut and paste their direct mail pieces email into social media. Don’t be surprised when those messages don’t work! Direct mail and social media readers are different audiences, so the voice, tone and content need to be adjusted accordingly.

In addition, most emails and social media posts are now read on a mobile device, so when you are crafting your message, make sure it is in a short, easily-readable format. Tip: send emails and phone messages (and blog posts too if you are daring!) to your phone before you send them. Do you have to scroll and scroll and scroll to read it? Would a prospect actually scroll that much in an email from a stranger?

Conclusion

Add these tips to your toolbox, and you’ll be well on your way to hitting your sales goal for next year. Remember, you are not reinventing the wheel, you’re just moving the race track.

(Note: I’m happy to say that my friend has enrolled in some training that his company offers to help learn modern selling tools. He’s a great salesman so I’m confident he’ll hit his numbers next year.)

About the author

Robert Knop is Founder and CEO of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping organizations accelerate new customer acquisition and increase client retention using digital strategy and social media. He’s a proud member of the Wave3 network of consultants, and always happy to talk strategy, digital and social selling. To learn more about how to evolve your marketing and sales approaches for the digital age, please fill out the form below:

[contact-form] 

Photo: Tara Hunt

Today, LinkedIn rolls out their new Sales Navigator Inbox. I got a sneak preview, and I must say, it’s like a sales and social media dashboard / command center / mini-CRM all wrapped into one page.

Here are the highlights – it:

1)     Allows you to search for someone to write to – both within and outside of your current connections.

2)     Gives you the name, picture and description of the person you have selected to send to, and also allows you to view their profile (opens in a new window). Note: if you are not connected to that individual, the “View profile” button says “Connect” instead, and allows you to send an invitation to connect.

3)     Also pulls in that person’s phone number, email address and website URL from their contact information (so you can follow-up in the off chance that your InMail is not answered)

4)     Shows you the connections in common with that person. For example, I have 59 shared connections with Craig, to whom I am writing this note. These connections are a great conversation starter to get a warm referral (a warm referral is definitely the best way to reach out).

5)     Shows you LinkedIn groups that you are both a part of – another potential ice-breaker for a prospect.

6)     Shows you what that person has posted/shared on LinkedIn recently – another great thing to reach out to someone about – especially if they wrote it. Engaging with someone’s content is the purest form of flattery!

7)     Creates a signature for you…automatically. I didn’t type any this information. I assume the Inbox is pulling this content from my contact information. I like it – less work for me.

Also, in the new InMail experience, when you send someone an InMail, the window pops up on the right side of the page, so you can still see all the vital information about the person, and all the of features I mentioned about the Inbox are available in that window as well.

Conclusion

You used to have to search all over in LinkedIn for this information. Now, the new Sales Navigator Inbox and InMail experience provides it all to you, and at the right time and in the place where you need it most, when you are reaching out to someone. Great stuff. Let me know what you think of the new Sales Navigator Inbox in the comments.

Related Articles:

Big new Sales Navigator changes announced at LinkedIn’s Sales Connect conference

Connect with your pizza boy on LinkedIn

NEW FEATURE in LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes company research faster and easier

About the Author

Robert Knop is Founder and CEO of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping companies transform their social media programs from driving engagement to driving sales. He’s a proud member of the Wave3 network of consultants, and always happy to talk strategy, digital and social selling.

If you’d like to learn how to evolve your marketing and sales strategy for the new, digital age, train your teams how to use a sales-driving social selling approach at your organization, or talk University of Michigan football, feel free to reach out to us:

Every year, LinkedIn brings together sales leaders from around the globe at their annual Sales Connect conference. This year, it is clear that Sales Navigator is a big priority for LinkedIn. They are continuously investing and expanding the capabilities of Sales Navigator, and today they announced a slew of new features focused on 5 key areas to create what they are calling a “System of Engagement.”

1) Tags and Notes – you can now write tags and notes and organize information on leads or accounts and categorize any way you want – such as where you met, how to follow-up, or the contents of your last conversation. Tags and Notes launched a couple of weeks ago. Personally, I’ve been hoping for this one for quite a while, and I have been loving it so far. Here’s what it looks like in action:

2) CRM – LinkedIn announced an integration with Salesforce a while back, and now through their CRM Partner Program, they will be allowing other CRM companies to create apps that plug Sales Navigator into other CRM platforms. The first batch of partners are Oracle, SAP, SugarCRM, HubSpot and NetSuite.

You will be able to see LinkedIn information at the contact level. You can set up leads, and act upon that activity more easily – you don’t have to move back and forth between platforms anymore. This lowers the barrier to social selling. No longer will you have to cut and paste information from LinkedIn into your CRM. This is huge.

You can also write directly into your CRM – more things you will no longer have to copy and paste into your CRM system and vice versa.

3) InMail 2.0 – a group of new enhancements to InMail were announced including:

• The current iteration of InMail blocks the entire window when you are sending a message. Now, the window be on the side of the screen on the desktop, similar to Gmail’s interface.
• LinkedIn will also give you icebreakers – common connections and items to include in your messages to improve likelihood of a response – while you are creating your InMail.
• You can include attachments now. Let me repeat that: You. Can. Include. Attachments. Now. Hallelujah! It’s also through a great, interactive, data-rich service method called PointDrive,

4) Search – You will now be able to search by:

• Spotlights – a group of key sets of information that will give you ways to drill deeper into your search results such as how many of your results have changed jobs in the last 90 days, have been mentioned in the news the past 30 days and have posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days
• Department size and revenue (to determine if a company should be in your target audience)
• Senior leadership changes at companies (new people tend to make changes to personnel and technology)
• Zip code of a company’s headquarters (until now any office would appear in search results, but most decision makers are in a company’s headquarters)
• Growth of both company and department (to see the trajectory of a company and department)
• Content (keywords for content they are posting to see what is important to them)

Some of these enhancement are live (Spotlights, department size and senior leadership), and the rest are coming soon.

5) Sales Navigator for Gmail – this integration of Sales Navigator and Gmail brings Sales Navigator directly into your Inbox. You’ll have all the information you would have in Sales Navigator (connections in common, interests, shared companies, more) that you can use to start a conversation now in Gmail.

This one is already live as well. You can this find plug-in in the app store on mobile (search Sales Navigator) or here:

When I spoke with Derek Pando, Senior Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, he related “the new Sales Navigator features are to enhance the overall customer experience of Sales Navigator, and to integrate it into daily workflows to get people the information they need as easily as possible.”

With these new launches, LinkedIn has showed that they realize the way forward for them is through Sales Navigator, and the best way to do that is to help set sales teams up for success by making it as easy as possible to do social selling.

So, Sales Navigator users, what do you think of the new features?

About the Author

Robert Knop is Founder and CEO of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping companies transform their social media programs from driving engagement to driving revenue. He’s a proud member of the Wave3 network of consultants, and always happy to talk strategy, digital and social selling.

If you’d like to learn how to set-up a sales-driving social selling program at your organization, contact Robert at 323-972-3566, or simply complete the short form below.

For years, I told people not to connect on LinkedIn with everyone they knew. I recommended that people connect with the RIGHT people, such as co-workers, people you meet and know from other companies – especially in similar roles, and people you meet at conferences, but don’t connect with just anyone.

When someone would ask me who not to connect with on LinkedIn, the example I would always use was the pizza delivery guy. I’d say something like, “You don’t need to connect with a college student driving his mom’s car around town, delivering pizzas.” I would tell my clients and co-workers that connecting with this guy doesn’t add much value to your network, so don’t worry about it.

Recently, I’ve done a 180-degree turn on this stance for two reasons:

1) I’ve BEEN that delivery guy. 18 years ago, I delivered for restaurants in Burbank and Studio City, CA areas. That was my night job as I followed my dream of building a consulting company from scratch during the day.

Connecting with me at that time (if LinkedIn existed) could have potentially added a lot of value to folks from a digital marketing perspective. Also, since then as my career has matured, I have been in a position to help out a lot of people in many ways from a networking, hiring, digital marketing, e-commerce and social media perspective.

The pizza boy may be a delivery guy now, but he’s working, he’s hustling, and he’s going to make something of himself. Someday, the big tip you gave him, or the connection you made with him, may pay dividends, and worst case scenario, you may help someone out, and that’s never a bad thing.

2) On LinkedIn, you can only view profiles of people in your network (1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections). If someone outside of your network appears in search results, the result looks like the screenshot below, and the profile is blank when you click on it (unless you have Sales Navigator Team, where you can view out-of-network profiles).

Currently, I’m working with a lot of restaurants in the certain area, many of which are pizza joints. You know who be helpful to know right now? A BUNCH OF PIZZA DELIVERY GUYS! They could connect me to different restaurant general managers and/or owners of local restaurants. But, alas, I have never connected to a pizza delivery guy due to my shortsightedness.

Now, I’m not saying you should accept every invitation to connect your receive, or to start sending out mass invitations to connect to strangers and people you hardly know. What I am saying is to not discount the people you know and interact with on a daily basis simply based on what they do now. You never know where they (or you) will end up!

So, the next time I order a pizza, I’m going to ask the delivery guy to connect with me on LinkedIn. Sure, he may be a little weirded-out, but hey, he’ll probably be my boss in a few years, so I need to start learning about him now.

Related articles:

Don’t ever click this button on LinkedIn!

NEW FEATURE in LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes company research faster and easier

5 common social media content mistakes (and how to avoid them)

About the Author

Robert Knop is Founder and CEO of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping companies transform their social media programs from driving engagement to driving revenue. He’s a proud member of the Wave3 network of consultants, and always happy to talk strategy, digital and social selling.

If you’d like to learn how to set-up a sales-driving social selling program at your organization, contact Robert at 323-972-3566, or simply complete the short form below.

  [contact-form] 

Photo: Yoshihide Nomura

I loved cartoons ever since I was a kid. Every Saturday morning, I was up at the crack of dawn to watch and watch and watch until my father would drag me outside to help him on his pet project of the day.

As I got older, one of my favorite cartoons was Ren and Stimpy. In one episode, Stimpy was charged with guarding the “History Eraser Button.” The button that erases everything, and the one button you should never push.

LinkedIn has a button like this as well. It doesn’t erase anything, but whatever you do, don’t click this button!

The one button on LinkedIn you should never click is the Connect button in the “People you may know” section in the top right of your home page. The button seems simple and innocuous. However, if you push this button, it will send a generic “I would like to add you to my professional network” Invitation to Connect to that person. You don’t have the opportunity to personalize the invite.

Why is personalizing invitations important?

Say you were getting an invite to a birthday party. If the invite said “I would like you to come to my party,” and you knew the person really well, you would probably go. However, if you weren’t that person’s best friend, and you received that invite, your incentive to attend would be low.

However, if you received an invite that said, “I would love for you to attend my birthday party. I know you like bounce houses, beer and baseball, and this party will have all three.”

Which party invite would make you want to attend the party more – the generic or the personalized invite?

Take this same approach to your Invitations to Connect on LinkedIn. If you are connecting with someone you have known for a long time, “I would like to add you to my professional network” is probably going to get accepted.

However, if you just met the person at a conference last week (along with the other 100 people that person met), they might not even remember you, let alone want to connect. So, give them some reasons – remind them where you met, how you met, what you talked about, things you have in common (schools, former companies, connections).

Most importantly, mention what VALUE are you going to provide. For example, you want to share thoughts and ideas, or you both belong to the same non-profit and you want to help out. For some specific language for Invitations to Connect, check out Brynne Tillman’s recent post.

So where do I connect then?

Always connect from the person’s profile page. To get there from that same “People you may know” section, click on the person’s photo or name instead of clicking on Connect button . You will then be taken to that person’s profile page. From there, you will see a giant, candy-colored blue Connect button. When you click on that button, you can then personalize your invitation, and your invite will have a much higher chance of being accepted!

Key takeaways:

1. Always personalize your Invitations to Connect
2. Always connect to someone via their profile page, so you can personalize your Invitation to Connect

Related articles:

• NEW FEATURE in LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes company research faster and easier
• The best part of LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index
• 5 common social media content mistakes (and how to avoid them)

About the Author

Robert Knop is a passionate helper of people, and Founder and CEO of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping companies harness the power of social media to add value their customers, build trust and drive sales. He’s always happy to talk all things strategy, digital and social selling.

If you’d like to learn how to set-up a profit-driving social selling program at your organization, whether big or small, feel free to reach out to Robert.

Photo: Doug Belshaw

I recently attended the Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit (#DMFSToronto). Digital leaders from Citi, Facebook, Wells Fargo, MetLife, Allstate, Salesforce and more were there talking about what is working, not working and what is coming next within digital marketing for financial services.

5 accelerating trends:

1) It’s all about the data.

It has ALWAYS been about the data in digital marketing, but now with so many advancements in programmatic advertising, real-time media buying, CRM, data lake technology and data visualization services, it’s easier than ever to track results, test, learn and optimize your marketing efforts.

Hari Pillai from Invesco spoke on a panel about a struggle many companies have – being data rich, but knowledge poor. His keys to success were to create a strong infrastructure for your data, and an API to simply and effectively leverage your data, so you know where the customer is in the journey. In his words, “Data is the secret weapon to move the customer down the journey.”

2) Customers matter more than ever.

As we all know, the dynamic has flipped to a customer being in charge more than ever in the buying process. 57% of the purchase journey is done before a customer ever contacts a supplier per the CEB, so you need to listen to the key needs of your customers and figure out how to solve those needs.

Ramy Nassar from Architech had a great presentation about focusing on customer needs instead of financial products. My favorite line from his presentation was “Think about the need, not the transaction. No one wants to buy a mortgage, they want a house.”

3) Social will soon rule the world.

The typical North American adult checks social media 17 times a day. SEVENTEEN! That seemed high when I first heard it, but now that I think about my own daily habits, that seems a little low.

Combine that with the fact that cold calling and emailing response rates are hovering around 3-4%, and millennials preference for social as the #1 method of contact, and social will soon be taking over as the primary communication vehicle for marketing and sales.

Any financial professional or salesperson that does not have a complete LinkedIn profile, which is optimized for search will slowly begin to lose their client base.

I spoke on the value of social selling to financial institutions in this new digital world, and how to use the power of social media to generate leads and sales.

4) Wearables are not going away.

If you are looking for the next big thing, wearables are it. How long is it until that Fitbit we use on a daily basis to track our steps starts feeding that information to doctors? Insurance companies? Retail stores? It’s a matter of time until everyone knows everything about everyone else. Enjoy your 15 remaining minutes of privacy! And be prepared to have everything measured and managed in real-time.

Rachid Molinary of Banco Popular de Puerto Rico presented an informative use case on how they quickly integrated mobile banking into wearable technology. Now you can check your BPPR account balance in a matter of seconds on your Apple Watch. What was even more impressive was the processes and systems they have put in place to bring this new tech to market in a short period of time.

5) The pace of change is fast (and will get faster).

Mitch Joel gave a fantastic keynote about how fast the world is changing, and how every company thinks they are being innovative. However, to truly create innovation is to “create something that the market did not know that it needed, that then becomes adopted (and paid for) in a way in which we could have never imagined our lives without it.” Not many companies are doing this today.

Erin Elofson from Facebook spoke about their roadmap, and how VR is playing a huge role in their future. To get a small glimpse of their VR capabilities, check out the first film shot with the new Facebook Surround 360 camera. This is just the snowflake on the tip of the iceberg.

So, how will you and your company react to this new digital world in financial services? These changes are coming sooner than anyone expected. Those that adapt quickly, will thrive, those that don’t will struggle to survive.

Related articles

• The value of social selling
• Invalid traffic becoming a bigger problem in programmatic advertising
• 4 steps to social media content success

Photo: Alberto Garcia