Marketing That Connects and Converts

John Jantsch ( 00: 00.767 )

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. Talia Wolf is the guest of honor today. She’s an internationally recognized conversion optimization expert keynote speaker and founder of GetUplift, a leading CRO agency. Talia is renowned for her pioneering work in customer-centric marketing and emotional targeting, helping brands all over the world dramatically increase conversion rates by focusing on what their customers actually feel and need.

We’re gonna talk about our latest book, Emotional Targeting. When hearts boost sales, own the market. Talia, welcome to the show.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 00: 37.88 )

Thank you for having me, I’m excited.

John Jantsch ( 00: 40.499 )

So let’s just define what is emotional targeting, because I think people would have a lot of definitions for it.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 00: 48.436 )

Emotional targeting is the art of creating websites and channels that appeal and communicate to people’s emotions, according to Wikipedia. I run a conversion optimization agency and my role is to help brands increase conversions. And the emotional targeting framework is what I developed to help companies increase conversions using emotion.

because people choose actions based on emotion.

John Jantsch ( 01: 19.125 )

So let’s try to make it even more tangible. you, can you walk through a time when you, know, the typical sort of feature first, you know, web page that, you know, here’s all of our stuff and what it does. can, can you kind of walk through somebody that you were called in? You could see how their conversions were hampered, and you eventually persuaded them to change their language and improve the outcome.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 01: 41.142 )

Yes, we’ve done this with hundreds of brands, actually, but the main takeaway is that the majority of websites are incredibly focused on pricing, features, technology, being powered by AI, we’ve got that stuff, and forget that X is the only platform that is powered by AI or that we’re the number one platform for something else.

John Jantsch ( 01: 59.059 )

We’re gluten free, right?

Yes. Yes.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 02: 10.826 )

So everyone sounds the same and looks the same and done this with multiple companies from Strata, Identity Orchestration to Teamwork, which is a project management solution to also e-commerce sites and really a lot of different types of companies. Normally what happens is one notice that there is a very big kind of focus on highlighting the technology and the pricing. And what we’ve forgotten is that there are people who are watching us through the screens.

are making decisions that aren’t just about integrations and the technology behind it. So what we do is conduct emotional targeting research to understand why people actually purchase from them. So once they’ve checked the pricing and it’s like in their category and the integrations all work and that they have all the features that they made in their little shopping list, how do they make a decision? What matters to them?

What are they currently feeling like? What are they struggling with? What suffering do they experience? And how do they want to feel after finding a solution? And we map those all out onto the customer journey, and we run experiments to see if different messaging, different design, different UX can help increase conversions when we make it more customer focused about their results.

John Jantsch ( 30.207 ) 03:

So, know, traditional marketing is like we have personas and we have segments and we have demographics and psychographics of our clients. I think more and more people are realizing that their best clients don’t all want to fit into a persona. mean, they’re, they have a need or a problem or a pain. They may look completely different, right? So how do you kind of zero in on the emotional triggers, and how do you use the word triggers?

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 03: 56.94 )

Yes. So I love that differentiation because, you know, we’ve been told for decades that we need to be data driven and data driven means knowing personas like their segmentation, their agenda, location, the browsers that they’re using, the devices, their age. So we kind of quantify people into segments. And then it’s really, really difficult to write copy, choose images, or even know what to even say to convert.

But when you start zeroing in on the pains, we actually notice that most people, no matter if they’re a 70 year old man in Nebraska or a 15 year old kid from the UK, they’re all kind of experiencing the same emotional issues and they have the same pains and hesitations and concerns and they want to feel certain ways. Therefore, we conduct research, which is qualitative research, as we do.

which means we conduct interviews on customers. We do surveys both on customers and on visitors. Additionally, we conduct an emotional competitor analysis as well as social listening and review mining. So essentially we are listening to the conversations that are happening on Reddit, on Linked In, on Quora. We are looking through all the reviews your competition is receiving or those books.

that are trying to solve the same thing as your product or your service are doing. And we’re listening to how people describe their problems and their issues and what’s keeping them up at night.

John Jantsch ( 05: 36. 159 )

So how do you balance the fact that some emotional targeting is actually manipulative? You can go buy something if you’re really afraid of it because I’m going to make you more afraid, or I’m going to create scarcity so you’re worried you won’t get it. So how much of that is manipulative? How much of that is authentic?

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 06: 00.504 )

Thank you so much for that question. I want to be absolutely crystal-clear. Yeah, emotional targeting is not manipulative. You’re not trying to make anyone feel anything. The entire framework is built on the idea and the fact that everyone we make in life is based on emotions, and people are visiting our websites already feeling things.

Our role and our job as marketers is to relate to them, to appeal to the emotions that they’re already feeling and help solve those problems. Anyone who attempts to manipulate others, to scare, to spread fear, or anything else is not emotional targeting. Emotional targeting is really just understanding the underlying emotions that are already there, appealing to them and creating an experience

that answers people’s questions and actually helps them.

John Jantsch ( 07: 01.801 )

Yes. You have me, so in many ways, you have the ultimate test: you want the reader to go. I mean, would that, would that be accurate? Yes.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 07: 08.066 )

Yes, and I think that’s the point because as yeah, like as I mentioned before, at the end of the day, once we’ve gone through our shopping list of the mandatory stuff, we’re left with trying to decide, okay, but how do I make a decision between product A, B and C that all look the same, all have the same features, all have the same technology and more or less the same pricing, it’s down to that emotional hook. Does this business address the particular problem that people enjoy?

John Jantsch ( 07: 16.979 )

Mm-hmm.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 07: 37.934 )

like me have, and we’ve seen this a lot. So even with Teamwork, for example, which is a project management solution, can everyone in the world use their project management solution? They absolutely have a fantastic product. But if you are a person, a company that serves clients, so if you face clients, if you are an agency, a consultant, if you are a creative team that serves clients and you have retainers and

projects that are client facing, Teamwork is the best product for you. And they’ve made sure that when you visit their website as an agency owner, you know Teamwork was created for your kind of work. Both in their products and in their marketing. And you know that because they’re talking about their specific problems that agency owners and project managers and agencies and client facing teams face.

knowing whether Pam on accounting is actually doing her work or not, and knowing whether or not you are profitable every day, is what it is. So you could just say, we have great reporting, which is what everyone does. But teamwork and the work that we’ve done with them over the years has really helped solidify the fact that when someone comes in, they can clearly see that this product was built for them for the work that they do that solves their particular issues and problems.

And I believe that many businesses are afraid to do that because they fear excluding potential customers. But we don’t understand that by speaking to everyone, we’re actually alienating the people that actually would buy from us, would stay with us, and would continue to buy from us.

John Jantsch ( 09: 21. 129 )

You know, one of the things I really, admire is when a company admits like this part of the process is going to be hard, you know, let’s just face it. It’s, know, and they really honest about that. We recently did some research for a new CRM provider for email, and we found a category that was,” I mean, line them all up and they all say the same thing.” however, the company we went with.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 9: 29.579 )

Yeah.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 09: 40.782 )

Yep.

John Jantsch ( 09: 43.589 )

was the business that spent the most time telling us how difficult it was to move but how committed they were to support us every step of the way. And they were not even going to charge you until we’ve migrated you. And that was the deal with us because they all appear to be doing the same thing on the surface. But our pain was, it’s a pain in the butt to switch. And that was their focus.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 10: 06.476 )

I love that and I think the fact that they recognize that because I talk a lot in my book about the unconscious and the subconscious stuff. So we say things that we believe are true, such as the feature, the pricing, or the fact that there are so many fears. Like what if I migrate all our emails and something happens and a freak accident happens and everything gets deleted and everything gets lost. Like that’s a real fear. What if I take a product on board?

John Jantsch ( 10: 32.693 )

Yes, yes.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 10: 35.5 )

and everyone hates it and thinks, you know, I failed. In a process like that, there are so many emotions involved. So actually knowing and saying, hey, look, this is hard, this sucks. We are going to help you, but we know you’ve tried all of these other things. We’re gonna be there every step of the way. That’s knowing your audience and understanding their pains. And that is incredible.

John Jantsch ( 10: 39.903 )

Yeah.

John Jantsch ( 10: 56. 565 )

Yes. So we’ve gotten halfway through and I haven’t actually asked you to outline. You have a four-step emotional targeting framework, which I believe is in chapter two. So, without giving everything away here, you probably ought to at least set up the four steps.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 11: 09.335 )

Hahaha!

Okay, so there’s four steps. The first step is running meaningful research, customer research, which I kind of spoke about before, but in the book, I really explain how to run this research and how to actually ask the right questions, how to know how much information to actually collect. The second step is making up the study. And this is actually really important because a lot of the times we’re collecting a ton of data, but we don’t know how to…

Turn it into useful insights So I discuss the most prevalent emotional triggers that people have. How can I tell when something is a pain when something is a trigger when something is more of a desired outcome? in step number three

We take all of our research and we audit our website. And this is extremely crucial because when we consider a CRO audit, we often think,” OK, I’ll do a heuristic analysis.” I’ll check that I have one CTA and not two. However, I’m actually talking about an emotional targeting audit when I’m talking about an audit, which are self-assessment questions. Am I appealing on an emotional level? Can people clearly see their specific pains reflected?

Can others see what is in it for them? So there’s a set of questions that you ask yourself and you kind of make a check for every time you’ve done that. And before I get to the next step, I believe what’s incredible about this is that the hardest part of conversion optimization isn’t conducting tests and not finding the root cause of the issue. It’s knowing what the heck is wrong and what changes should I make on a page? When you’ve done this research and you start doing the audit,

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 12: 57. 866 )

It’s incredible how quickly you can see the problems. we’re using narratives that don’t make sense. We’re highlighting features people don’t care about. We’re talking about outcomes people don’t care about. So it’s much simpler to understand why people aren’t converting and developing a hypothesis, which brings us to step four, which is conducting meaningful tests. That’s when we say, okay, my hypothesis is let’s say people can’t…

clearly and clearly visible that this product was created specifically for them. So now I’m going to try and show this on the page, on my comparison page, on my homepage, in my navigation, and I’m going to see if by weaving in stories and testimonials and the features that people care about, will that increase conversions? So we do research, synthesizing, emotional audit, and running meaningful experiments that aren’t button tests.

John Jantsch ( 13: 49.033 )

Okay.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 13: 55.01 )

but are actually strategic in nature so that you can take lessons from them even if you don’t improve conversion rates.

John Jantsch ( 14: 01.407 )

You know, you talked about reviews and, you know, looking at reviews, analysis, looking at questions on core room thing and things, you know, we have found over the years that, that, that, you know, the, best messaging usually comes up right out of the mouth of a customer. and it’s in their words and voice that it’s referred to as. It’s probably not what we consider to be particularly seductive, but it’s actually what they’re feeling. And, and it’s amazing. Additionally,

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 14: 15.81 )

Yes.

John Jantsch ( 14: 25.609 )

What has 14 minutes left? I’m first mentioned of AI. However, I believe one of the biggest benefits of AI is that many people use it for writing, but it also provides amazing analysis. So now you can take tons and tons of data. You take all your sales call transcripts and just dump them all in there. And it’s going to be able to synthesize, you know, here’s the themes.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 14: 47.342 )

100 %, you know, garbage in, garbage out. So if you can only feed AI with segmentation and raw data, that’s what you’re going to get back. And when you’re trying to write copy with it, and that’s the information you fed it, you’re going to get really bad copy. However, you’re going to get really bad insights aside from that. When you feed it valuable insights, and you ask the right questions in AI, and you’re asking it to, hey, tell me what are the top

John Jantsch ( 15: 16: 629 )

.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 15: 16.654 )

three pains people mention from this thousands, like 1000 answers in my customer survey, what are the top three pains people mentioned? The magic happens when you ask the right questions and have really valuable data. That’s when you get incredible things from AI that you can actually use. Additionally, you can use it for writing copy. But what’s happening right now is people are just, you know, using basically feeding it garbage data.

And then that’s why when you go online and you’re searching for any kind of solution, everything looks the same and you could probably just swap out logos and you wouldn’t even know the difference.

John Jantsch ( 15: 54.385 )

Yeah, no question. In fact, I think you could probably check the logos of five different websites to see if anyone can recognize one of them. Because they’ll even read everybody else’s and theirs and go, I don’t know. So talk a little bit about A-B testing, because I think that’s a category that is so valuable, but so under your.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 16: 12 )

easy.

John Jantsch ( 16: 21.429 )

This is our best chance because a lot of people go, so put it out there. Why isn’t it working? You know, as opposed to, you know, and again, you know, one of the promises of AI is all of sudden now we’ve got potential for dynamic and personalization to where, you know, people can actually come and hear the message that we believe will be relevant to them. Why don’t people do more testing, then? A and B, guess would be part of that question would be how to do it effectively.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 16: 49.986 )

Well, testing is hard, right? It’s really, really hard. Like it’s not really simple if we go back to being truthful and telling our customers. Avery testing is hard, but I think it’s also hard for most people because we’re on a hamster wheel. And I mention this a little bit in my book about this.

John Jantsch ( 16: 51.945 )

Yeah.

John Jantsch ( 16: 57.575 )

No, don’t forget it, then. I want the magic pill. Give me the magic potion.

John Jantsch ( 17: 09.439 )

Yeah.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 17: 13.922 )

We googling or looking for best practices when we start A-B testing, and we copy our competitors, sort of like we’re guessing. And then we throw stuff on this like whatever tool that we’re using and we’re like, it doesn’t even work. It doesn’t even boost conversion. So why am I even wasting my time? And that’s because we’re running meaningless tests with no strategy behind it. Not to mention, you must sell your ideas in addition to the obvious fact that you need to get everyone involved with A-B testing.

There’s a lot of pushback. always feels a lot like politics inside the organization, and it’s difficult. But actually this is why emotional targeting is so great because when you are doing the hard research and you finally have a good hypothesis, you can A, get internal buy-in really quickly because you could say, look, guys, I’ve done the research. Here’s what our customers and our prospects are saying. And here’s what we’re saying on our website. Like we’re completely missing the mark.

I have an idea, but I’m not going to do a homepage redesign, so don’t worry, I’m going to send out a few emails and will just check this or test this on a landing page and see. So first you get buy-in. Second, when you run emotion-based tests that are based on a real hypothesis, a meaningful hypothesis, whether you increase conversions or not, you’re going to learn something.

There is nothing you can do with this test if you’re just testing a blue button against a red button and it only reduces or increases conversions. Like you can’t actually say, I’m gonna change all my buttons to red now. as opposed to the fact that there isn’t anything to do with it. But when you learn that, let’s say, my prospects are deeply impacted by their social image. They really care about what other people think about them and buying this product.

makes other people’s opinions of them differ, which is important. You can weave that into your ads, your emails, your landing pages, your comparison page, like everything. So I believe the reason it’s so difficult is that it feels like we’re just passing pointless tests once more. It’s technically hard. You need a lot of people, you need a lot of buy-in, but if you do it the right way, it’s super rewarding and you can break all those silos in the company and say, look, we tested this, we learned this. You ought to be using this content, sales team. Hey,

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 1979 ): 31.

product team, we’re learning that people really care about it. You should be talking about this product this way and this feature this way. Yes.

John Jantsch ( 19: 41.533 )

It is pretty amazing. know, over the years it’s part, it’s largely accidental on my part, but over the years, you know, we’ll change something because it’s not working. And then all of sudden it’s like, all we did was change the headline. And now everyone enjoys making appointments. It’s like magical. It’s incredible. So, so you end the book with a call to action, to employing people, imploring people to become emotional detectives.

So how does that play out in your work?

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 20: 18: 51 )

Well, most of all work when we become emotional detectives is doing the research and really identifying those emotions and why people buy because I truly believe that if we whatever you’re selling, if you can identify the real why behind the purchase, there’s no stopping you. Nothing can you do to optimize every single page, which you won’t be able to.

and asset that you create. the book and my website and my courses and, and, know, the consulting, the agency, everything is about helping teams become emotional detectives, getting to understand more about their customers than just their behavioral data, but really understanding the people behind the screens so that they can create user experiences and websites that people want to convert to and actually like.

John Jantsch ( 21: 17.269 )

I’ll tell you, appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there a place you’d invite people to connect with you, find out about your work, and most importantly, learn about the book?

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 21: 25.26 )

Yeah, well you can get the book at taliawolf.com slash book or you can follow me on Linked In. I’m happy to connect with you. And also on our website, get uplift. my agency, www.co.co.

John Jantsch ( 21: 38.901 )

Again, thanks for spending a few moments with us. On the way to the road, we’ll probably run into you one of these days.

Talia Wolf|

Getuplift ( 21: 43.95 )

I appreciate you having me.