Garrett Sussman: Talia Wolf is a keynote speaker, author, and the founder and CEO of Get Uplift. You ready to have your emotions tweaked to tap into it to get very emotional? Because she’s done some nuts things. She’s jumped out of a a plane over 1,000 times. I’ve I’ve never jumped out of a plane, and I don’t think my wife will let me at this point. She’s a comic book nerd who grew up reading comics and was obsessed with anything to do with Marvel or DC, team Marvel, and she once participated in a reality TV show with fellow skydivers called the Human Tetris, in which her team had to somehow fit through cutouts in a large 13 feet by 7.5e feet Styrofoam wall moving towards them as they fell. You are nuts. Okay. She’s pretty cool too. Presenting Stop Chasing Conversions. Win more customers with an Emotion-first CRO strategy That Actually Works, please welcome Talia Wolf.

Talia Wolf: Hello. I want to tell you that about ten years ago, I stood on stage at a search conference and did a similar talk to what I’m going to be doing today. And the feedback was, this is irrelevant to SEO. I’m going to teach it today because it is irrelevant and important and we all have to stop chasing traffic. And that’s why we’re gonna be breaking up with the different things that we’ve been doing for so long and learn a new system. I’m gonna be talking about conversion optimization, which is my favorite topic. And I’m gonna start by talking about the process.

What does conversion optimization usually look like? We start by finding the leak in the funnel. So most of us can use GA 4, kind of, sucks, but we can find the leak in the funnel. We know if it is the product page, if it’s a landing page, if it’s our home page. Then we need to create a new variation. This does not work. There we go. We need to create a new variation that will increase conversions. We move into launching a test and experiment, and we analyze the test. Right? That is the go to process of conversion optimization. Now finding the leak in the funnel, pretty simple. Launching an experiment, if you have the right tools, the right software, the right developers, you can do that. And also, when it comes to analyzing a test, that is also quite easy. But knowing what changes to make on a freaking page that will actually increase conversions, that’s the biggest black box that there is in CRO. No one actually knows. No one tells us. Okay. Great. The product page is underperforming. It’s a landing page. How do I know what to change? Now what we do, because we have no idea how to test what is going on, We start collecting data. We know their age, their geographical location. We look at browsers. We look at devices. We are collecting data like they’re Pokemons. And then we stare at our reports and we’re like, I have no idea what to do. In fact, 82% percent of this is not working. Where am I pointing at? Nope. It doesn’t wanna tell me. Okay. 82% of marketers just feel that they can’t analyze their results, can’t pull any insights because we’re just pulling numbers. We’re not actually generating any insights. And what happens is because we have no idea what to test, we end up running these random AB tests that are basically just taking a page, duplicating it, and changing one element on the page. And we’re like, okay, hopefully a blue button will increase our conversions. And that doesn’t really work. Right? You’re Okay. Great. It increased conversions. Now what? Am I gonna am I gonna just change everything to blue on the website? Probably not. 

So what happens is we end up on what I like to call the deadly hamster wheel of optimization. It starts, you know, in a basic way where we’re like, okay, let’s Google some best practices. What am I gonna test? I will Google some stuff. I’ll listen to the neighbor. Maybe my manager knows what to do. We’re just kind of looking at LinkedIn influencers, maybe they know what to do, and someone says, reduce form fields because that’s going to work. And we test a bunch of random stuff, and we’re spending a lot of time doing that, and we get zero results. And even if we increase conversions, there’s nothing to learn from it. There’s nothing to be able to do with it. So after we’ve spent a lot of time testing random stuff, we move into what everyone does. Copying competitors. Now, we are convinced that our competitors know what they’re doing, so we just start copying everything that they do. And what ends up happening is everyone sounds the same. And here’s the thing. I want you guys to be super kind of honest with yourself. If you took your own logo today and switched it out with your competitors, would anyone know the difference? Probably not. Because we’re all copying each other and we’re all trying to be in this rat race of just getting there. So once we have tested best practices, we’re copying competitors, we’re sounding like everyone else, along comes the great, great solution, tools. Tools are going to save us. We will spend so much money on actually onboarding tools and paying money and spending time and getting everyone on the team on board with this tool. You’ve got a fancy new landing page builder, or you have a lovely A/B testing tool, or an automation, or personalization tool, and then it’s set up and you’re ready to go, and you’re like, now what? What am I going to test on the landing page? Oh, I know.

Random stuff because we don’t have any strategy. Now, if we want to increase conversions and if we really want to drive meaningful results, it’s time for us to go to the foundation, back to what really, really matters, and that is understanding what are conversions. The root of every conversion is a decision. If we can understand how our customers make decisions, we’ll be able to understand what they care about and how to create a better experience for them. Now, we’ve all been trained to think that this is how people make decisions. We go for this elaborate process of pros and cons and thinking logically and making a decision of, does this make sense? It doesn’t make sense. I should do this. I shouldn’t. I will now buy this product. This is not how people make decisions in life. In fact, neuroscientists, psychologists, and the biggest brands in the world will tell you that this isn’t how. This is how people make decisions in life. Every single decision in life is based on emotion. Yes, we will rationalize it later, but there’s a primary emotion in there. In fact, there are studies that prove that without emotion, we lack the ability to make any kind of decision. Antonio Di Macio is a fantastic neurologist who ran a scientist who ran an incredible study a few years ago on people that have very specific brain damage. These people could not feel any emotion. And what he found is that they could go around their lives and do everything just like everyone else, but the one thing they couldn’t do is make any decisions. They were unable to even decide what sandwich they were going to eat. It was crazy because without emotion, we lack the ability to make any decisions. Now if you’re sitting in here right now and you’re like, Talia, I get this. Like, of course, if I’m buying a watch, if I’m buying a car, it’s emotional. But in B2B, that’s not the thing. Let me just tell you, it is even more important in b to b to leverage emotion. To tap into your customer’s emotions.

Because actually, there is so much research out there showing you that buying a solution for your team or for your business is even more emotional than a personal decision. In fact, think what Google found that that B2B purchases are 50% more likely to buy a product if they see personal value for themselves. And they’re eight times more likely to buy a product if they see personal value, and it will be even if it’s more expensive, they will buy it. It matters. Emotion really matters. But so many companies are ignoring this. No one’s really paying attention. So when I ask people, hey, why do you who are you selling to? Who are your customers? I get a long list of this generic persona of like, oh, we know their age, their location, their job title, we know their gender, and we know the browser and device that they’re using. It’s all very shallow. And then I ask, okay, fine. Why do people buy from you? And the answers are all about the product. Well, you know, it’s our AI, it’s our technology, we have these incredible features, it’s our pricing. Nothing about the person behind the screen. It’s all about the product, its technology, and how it works. And what ends up happening is that we end up talking to the building instead of the person inside. Okay. But some of you might say, look, Talia, we’re it’s AI. We can use AI to write high converting landing pages. We’ll get everything that we need. Cool. No problem. So I went into ChatGPT and I said, hey, I have this incredible product. It’s a soda and everyone loves it. Everyone is my target audience. This is their gender. This is their age. By the way, I need this landing page to have all the best practices. 

I want you to have a great title, a great call to action. Don’t forget that we only cost $14 and we come in a variety of different ways that you can buy us, and we’re a 140 calories, whatever. Tell me what landing page I should create. Chat’s like, oh, great product, man. Here’s what you should do. Use a headline. Use these great things. Don’t forget to say, order now. Get 24 cans for just $14. I’m like, thanks, AI. You just made my job so much easier. Will you ever see a landing page like this from Coca Cola? No. You will never see anything like this from Coca Cola but we’re all doing it. We’re all like, we’re number one. We’re powered by AI. No one cares. We’re all doing this. And the funny thing is, every single search online is filled with emotion. I don’t have to tell you this. Also, us shows you this so easily. You go in, you put in the number one keyword that people use to actually get to your website. I have no idea with SEO. I’m a CRO person and I use this tool daily. Hey, what other keywords are people using to get to my website? This is all emotional. It’s all about, can I do this by myself? Am I okay? Do I have to hire someone? Do I need this? Is it going to be super expensive? This is what people are searching for. These are the landing pages. All your business on one platform. Automate your invoice management today and the number one UK’s favorite tax filing software. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was very very helpful. You’ve got people on one side saying, can I do this myself? Can I stop worrying about this? How do I know this is for me? And companies on the other side going, we’re number one. It’s an all in one platform. We’re powered by AI. It’s driving me nuts. Like, we don’t even care about the people behind the screen. We’re treating them like robots.

Now, let’s get to it. Okay? There are 223 emotional triggers that I have found that impact buying decisions. But don’t worry, there are two clusters of emotions you should all be focusing on. Okay? These are the two most common emotions that impact your customer’s decisions, so pay attention. Cluster number one, self image. This is how people want to feel about themselves after finding a solution. I want to feel effective. I want to feel hopeful. I want to feel that I love myself more. I want to feel confident. I want to feel good. I just want to feel better about myself. Your customers, your prospects are coming to your website and they’re asking themselves, how will I feel about myself after I purchase this product? Okay. Great. This is important. Shopify doesn’t actually sell you software, it sells a possibility. The dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Great. Self image, super important. The second one which I would argue is actually even more common is social image. How do I want other people to think about me after I buy a solution? You know, we care. We can tell ourselves that we don’t care, but everyone cares. How do I want to feel? I want to be looked up to. I want to be appreciated. I want to be the go to person in my office. I want to feel that I’m meaningful. I want to feel that I have an impact. And you know, in B2B or in B2C, this matters. There is a risk to making a decision when you’re buying something for your company. You have to think about that. In the 70s, there was a really cool saying, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. I mean, yeah, they understood. You need to de riskify, or if that’s a word, the actual decision that you’re making. And Intel doesn’t talk about what they’re actually selling, they’re talking about, hey, we have you covered. Everything’s here.

This is probably my favorite B2B ad of all times. If you don’t know this, you’re too young. This is the epic split. Jeez. I really hope you guys know this. Okay. Listen. This company spent $4 million getting Van Dam to do the split. I mean, epic. The this company is selling trucks or lorries depending on where you’re from. Okay? Trucks. You know how much money they made from this ad that has nothing to do with their tracks? With their trucks? $270 million. They spent $4 million. That sounds like good ROI to me using emotion. Okay. So you’re not actually speaking to this person. Your customers have loads and loads of questions. Will people see me as the go to? Will I feel more confident? Will I get the career advancement that I want? Will I get this promotion? Will I finally stop worrying about this? Will I feel better about myself? So how do we actually start tapping into these emotions? And how can we go from just writing generic stuff and creating generic content, and actually making it about our customers? The framework that I’m going to walk you through is called emotional targeting. And it is the framework that I’ve been using to help optimize brands, hundreds of brands really, and increase their conversions. And really what it is is it takes you from this process which we discussed at the top. Right? Finding a leak in the funnel, kind of struggling to figure out, hey, okay, let’s create a variation quickly. What should I do? Let me Google this. Launch an experiment. If it fails, you’re like, damn, this failed. And if it succeeds, you’re like, yay, conversions. This framework that I want to teach you is about actually doing it in a different way. 

So you start with customer first research. You start by identifying the real why. Why are people buying from me? Then you go to your website and you’re like, I know all this stuff about my customers now. Let me read through everything and see. Am I actually serving people? Am I actually doing the right stuff? Oh, no. Here’s the problem. I’m not using I’m not actually speaking to the self image of people that they really care about. Then you launch an experiment. And you’re like, great. Cool. I increased conversions. Yes. Amazing. I decreased conversions. It did not increase conversions. Still a success because we’re learning. When you test meaningfully, when you run meaningful tests, it doesn’t actually matter if you increase conversions or not because you’re learning from every single test that you run. Okay. So you start with the research. What does that actually look like? You want to uncover the real why. What are the real motives and why do people buy from you? 

Well, there’s a few questions you want to be asking yourself. Number one is you want to identify the top three challenges and pains that people feel before converting. You can ask a question like, hey, what was going on in your life today that made you come to our website? Not, hey, why are you here? But actually thinking about the pain point. What brought people to your website? What are the top three desired outcomes? How do people want to feel after finding a solution? A great question, by the way, to figure that out is to ask people, if you could no longer use our product, what would you miss the most? Not, hey, how are our features? Which is our favorite feature? If I took this thing from you today, what’s the number one thing you missed? That’s your value. That’s what people love. It’s that pain. It’s that little thing that you helped them achieve or reduced for them. That is your value and that’s what you should be talking about. And lastly, you wanna figure out the top hesitations and concerns. You wanna fill out Figure out those roadblocks. What is stopping people from converting? Because if you figure that out, you can actually use real social proof to dismantle their problems. You can say, hey, I know you were worried about doing this yourself but we have a team that does this for you and you can show a testimonial that does that. So you start creating content people actually care about. So you start with meaningful research. Now when you do meaningful research, it takes you from these kinds of answers of like, hey, you add all the features, we had to switch a tool or it came down to pricing and technology. We needed one place to do it all. These are the usual answers you will see when you conduct a survey or an interview. But when you do real research and you ask meaningful questions about their intent, you get answers that are so much deeper. We have used platforms in the past and a lot of them are not designed for professional service like we are. We had trouble finding technology that understood the way we worked.

Or if this comes up, I had previously worked with this competitor, but nothing that I thought was perfect a perfect fit for an agency. This competitor was too rigid. I knew I was going to have to start paying more. Or I saw people like us using it and talking about it. It gave me the confidence that I needed to know that this will work for me. Now, this is the research that we ran for teamwork dot com which is a project management solution which is in a very saturated market. We all know how many brands there are out there that you can use for project management. Think Monday, ClickUp, Asana. Teamwork is right in there in the middle. And when we started working with them, one of the biggest ideas was how do we tap into these emotions? And look, they’re saying that the most generic things that everyone is saying. This is not a dig at Teamwork. This is what everyone is saying like, easy to use project management, the one thing you know, the one thing you can do. What we understood is at the end of the day, the people behind the screen, the people that they were serving were client service teams. People that were doing actual client works. Think about agencies or law firms or creative teams. And that meant that we needed to change the whole script. 

We needed to make it about the agency owner. The person who can finally manage resources clearly, that they can figure out what is actually happening on in my agency and am I spending money the right way. So we created a new landing page, a new homepage for them and tested it against the existing one. Just really focusing on the fact of who these customers are, what they’re trying to achieve was what helped us increase their conversions. And I’ll show you some more examples along the way of other pages that we did for them. But taking the conversation away from the product and making it about the customer is what actually increased our conversions. Okay. We’ve done our research. We’ve done interviews. We’ve done customer surveys. We’ve done review mining. We’ve done social listening on LinkedIn, on Reddit, on Quora. We’re seeing these conversations happening. People are talking about what they care about, what they hate, what they love, and we’re now using it. What would be the next step? The next step is running a strategic CRO audit. When people think about a CRO audit, they immediately think, okay, heuristic analysis. Let’s do a UX analysis. Let me make sure that I don’t have two call to action buttons or that I have a carousel. Let me make sure that all the standard best practices are there. This is not it. This is a strategic CRO audit that’s focused on asking important questions to uncover what’s not working. Because when you are armed with the insights that your customers care about the most, then you can create beautiful experiences. Then you can say, oh, I am just speaking about things people don’t care about. I’m talking about the stuff that people don’t resonate with. And here’s some questions that you can ask yourself. You wanna ask, are you making it about yourself or your customer? Are you describing the real challenges and obstacles? Can people immediately see the why? What’s in it for them? Are you using the words and descriptions prospects relate to? What aren’t you saying that people need to see or hear or feel? And are you including the social proof that people care about?

One of my favorite examples is Strata Identity. Strata Identity is an identity orchestration company, super complex. I barely understand half of it but super cool. And they have a brilliant product and an amazing team that’s dedicated to helping their customers. But the sheer technicality of this product makes it so hard to understand what they do and who they’re speaking to and why they should buy from them or not the biggest competitors in the market. One of the things that we understood with this company is that their customers are actually identity heroes. They are the they are the people that are protecting their company, that are making it safe. And what we did is we decided to focus on that. The hero the hero that reduces tech debt and modernizes all these apps without accepting risks. Now, you don’t have to understand what this means just to see the difference. Right? Between saying the identity orchestration company and make modern identity work everywhere. Or asking them, hey, does this work for you? What are you looking to do? What are you trying to achieve? What’s interesting here is that when we took the conversation away from the product, we were able to increase conversions. And again, it’s not just on landing pages. Their ads used to be multi cloud identity fragmentation or what else did they have? Let’s see. Identity orchestration makes multi cloud work or make identity secure on any cloud. These are very specific and generic visuals and words that people were using. Instead, we said, okay, securing nonstandard apps is easier than you think or win today’s identity battles and become the hero your company needs. We actually even did this on a billboard if I oh, there we are. Just taking the conversation away from the product and making it about them. We were not We wouldn’t be able to do this if we didn’t do that emotional audit. If we didn’t look and ask ourselves the strategic questions that no one actually asks. 

Okay. Number one, we did the research. Number two, we then audited our website and our customer journey on an emotional level. And then we start running meaningful experiments. What does meaningful experiments mean? It means that you’re not focused on velocity and a b testing tools and AI and whatever things all those LinkedIn gurus are talking about. What you really care about with CRO is three things. That you’re answering critical business and customer questions, that you’re running experiments that inform your entire marketing strategy. I don’t know how to tell you this but CRO isn’t a tactic. It’s not PPC, SEO, CRO. No. CRO should be actually embodying everything. It should bring everyone to the table. Growth and SEO and and PPC. Everyone should be sitting in the same room running these experiments together and aligning on the strategy. That’s what real meaningful CRO does. And it should be breaking those silos between marketing and sales and product that we all know exist. When I talk about meaningful experiments, I think it’s important to say that, you know, when I say emotional targeting, a lot of the times people kind of mistake what that means. They think, oh, fluffy headlines and beautiful images. But emotional targeting is more about weaving those emotions and acknowledging your customer in every step of the way. One of my favorite examples is just testing a menu. Navigation. Think about your website’s navigation. Teamwork used to have the regular thing, know, here’s the overview of our product. Here are all the features and our platform add ons. But we wanted to create something a lot more conversational. Something that when a client working team arrived on the page, they would say, oh, this is for me. Oh, I can find the content that I care about most. I’m not trying to get them to sign up to a free trial.

I want them to actually get their questions answered. So we changed the entire format of their menu. Everyone in SEO was like, oh, okay. Everything you need to know and the features you need to run client work, we actually focused on the specific features. And next to each one of these, we showed a specific case study that was like, and here’s how this company is using it. Then we said, look, we know you’re comparing us. Anyone who comes to this website is comparing us to Monday to click up to Asana. We’re not gonna let you go to Google and look for it or find Reddit. Here you are. We’ve got a you. There’s the comparison. It’s in the freaking menu. Just click and read the whole thing. We’ll tell you everything and we won’t hold back and I’ll show you an example in a second. And we did this with everything. So every single piece of our menu became about the customers. And yes, we increased conversions but that wasn’t the goal. It really was about driving more people to the places that they care about and getting them to go down that rabbit hole and read the information they care about most.

This is just an example of what we did for their comparison page. So usually when you look at a comparison page, you’re like, oh, here’s why choose this company over the other. Here’s a table with all the features. What we did is something different. We directly called out like, hey, no constant upsells. Here’s all the stuff that we do for client work. Then we went even deeper and we said, look, we give you the full financial picture. Wrike doesn’t and we get into the information about it and what Teamwork actually does. Then we said, features matter. Great. Let’s talk about pricing. Let’s talk about the actual results of these features and how they work. Not just, oh, we have board views and we have portfolios. But hey, if you’re trying to see challenges before they cause problems, here are the different actual features you can use and you can leverage. So it’s just changing the narrative. Okay.

Finally, I’m gonna show you two emotion based tests that you can run this month. Actually, it’s the end of April, so in May, that you can start running. Okay. Test number one is current pain versus desired emotional outcome. What are people feeling right now before they find a solution? How do they wanna feel? You don’t have to do a whole, you know, homepage test or a landing page test even in your emails. Send one email that’s specific about the pain that they’re feeling right now. Send another email the next day about how they could feel after finding a solution. What resonates more? Do it in your ads. Super simple.

Next, you can do a solution focus versus customer focus. This is very relevant if you feel like, oh, everything Talia is saying here is right and we’re super we’re super solution focused. We’re only talking about ourselves. This is a great test you can run just making it about the customer, taking one piece. We did this with Upright, is a brilliant product for helping you improve your posture. Usually, when I say this, everyone just kind of sits up. Yep. There you go. We’re all like we’re all sitting in front of our desks for hours, all thinking about, ugh, my back hurts, my knees hurt, everything hurts. How can I increase? How can I improve my posture? And what we found out is that people feel very, very guilty about not being able to improve their posture. And ultimately, they do nothing about it. So we took that guilt away and said, look, your poor posture isn’t your fault but there is something you can do about it. So just by really just saying, okay, solution focused versus customer focused, what can I test in an ad, in a landing page, in a blog post to see what resonates more? Finally, conversion optimization isn’t about changing elements on the page.

It really is about solving people’s problems. And the last thing I will say is that reality really fucking sucks. And it is our job to help people get the results that they want. And if you do it right, you can increase conversions because they will be achieving their goals and so will you. Thank you very much.