← Social Media Marketing Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript59 lines
- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Hey there, Mike Stelzner. Before we get started with today's podcast, picture this. While your peers are struggling with basic chat GPT prompts, you're the marketer everyone turns to for AI solutions. You're automating tasks that used to take hours, creating stunning visuals in minutes and analyzing data like a pro. This, my friends, is not a fantasy. It's exactly what's happening to marketers. It's in the AI Business society. When you join the AI Business Society, you get monthly live training from leading experts, real world examples you can implement immediately, and a community of innovators pushing the AI boundaries. Don't let this moment pass you by. Visit Social Media Examiner.com AI and start your AI transformation today. Before we get on to today's show, here is something that might surprise you. Every marketer using AI is at one of four distinct readiness levels. Here's what's scary. Most marketers, they have no idea which level they're actually at. While you're wondering what AI skill to tackle next, your competition is already a couple steps ahead of you. Because they have a clear roadmap, they know exactly what to focus on because they understand their AI readiness level. The difference they took our free AI readiness assessment. It doesn't just tell you where you stand. It gives you a personalized 30 day plan designed specifically for your level. Stop guessing, start progressing. Find your AI readiness level in just a few minutes by visiting social media examiner.com Aiassessment Again, social media examiner.com pause this podcast. Take the assessment right now. Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, Hello, Hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more lead and more sales. Let me ask you, do you run tests on your website? Are you finding that your products aren't really converting properly and you're just trying to change things and just nothing's working? Well, today I have an incredible guest. She's going to help you understand how to run split tests and with emotions at the core of it. Yes, I said emotions. She's going to make the case that when you understand and she's going to tell you exactly how to understand the core emotions that are driving prospects and customers to become ultimately customers, this yields incredible output so that you can increase your conversions. And who does not want more Sales. My guest today is Talia Wolf. By the way, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to the incredible wisdom from Talia Wolfe, helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Talia Wolf. If you don't know who Talia is, she is a conversion rate optimization strategist who helps marketers drive more leads and and sells. Her book is called Emotional Targeting. Win hearts, boost sales, own the market. She's also the founder of Get Uplift, an agency that specializes in conversion rate optimization for websites and landing pages. Her course is called Emotion Sells. The Accelerator. Talia, welcome back to the show. How you doing?
- [03:50]
Talia Wolf
I'm so excited to be here again. Thank you so much for having me. How are you?
- [03:55]
Michael Stelzner
I'm great. It's exciting to have you back. Today, Talia and I are going to explore emotions and targeting and how all that can help you with more leads and sales. And the last time Talia was on the show was a long time ago, 2018, and that feels like forever ago. So we're going to just start out today's show with tell us a little bit about what's been going on, you know, in the last seven years with you and the book and all the great stuff that you've been working on. Then we'll get into the goods.
- [04:22]
Talia Wolf
So, I mean, obviously over the past years, what I've been working on is building the agency. So Get Uplift and helping me many, many different types of brands just optimize their funnels and their websites. And as you mentioned, I literally recently launched a book called Emotional Targeting, which is the combination, I guess, of like 15 years of work in conversion optimization. And it spells out the entire framework and how we do customer first optimization, how we focus on emotion and psychology and just help brands scale. And I'm really excited about it. I'm also, I'm excited about the book itself. I'm excited about the feedback we're getting. And yeah, it's not being a roller coaster. Writing a book is hard.
- [05:12]
Michael Stelzner
Well, and for those that have been longtime followers of things we've done here at Social Media examiner, you may remember that Talia was in season two of our documentary called the Journey, and we hired her as we were growing Social media marketing world to really help us dial in the messaging for, for social media marketing world and that was successful. So for those of you That's a flashback. For those of you that are like, what are you talking about? Well, you can go on YouTube. We published it on Facebook back in the day, and YouTube and Talia has been a really great asset for our company. So I'm excited to bring her on the show and to explore this concept that she's writing about in her brand new book. Now, let me start with an important question, which is we have a lot of marketers listening right now who have been doing their craft for a very long time and might be a little skeptical of like, emotions, like why emotions in their marketing. Said another way, if people employ what we're about to talk about today, what is the upside? What could it make possible for them?
- [06:11]
Talia Wolf
Okay, first I'm going to say that honestly, when you said, I'm going to ask an important question, I honestly thought you were going to say Marvel or dc. And I was like, okay, prepare. So that's where my mind is.
- [06:23]
Michael Stelzner
That's because we were just talking about the new movie Superman, which we're both fans of.
- [06:27]
Talia Wolf
Yeah, okay. So I would say that in order to talk about this, we need to take a few steps back and maybe talk about what anyone who's listening to right now might be struggling with. When it comes to optimization, there's a process, right? You go into Google Analytics and you find the leak in a funnel and maybe you identify that it's your homepage, it's a landing page, it's a product page. And that's great. And you're like, okay, now I need to optimize the page. But. But knowing what changes to make on the page is the biggest black box that there is. When it comes to optimization, no one really tells you. So what we do is we get on what I like to call the deadly hamster wheel of optimization. And that's when we are googling for best practices, or we're using ChatGPT to ask it, you know, how should I optimize my product page? We're copying our competitors because everyone does that. And we all think that our competitors know better than us. We are throwing tools at it. We're like, okay, if we can't figure this out, then maybe a new automation tool, a new landing page builder, a new AB testing tool. We just try throwing everything that we can at the problem and nothing works. And we test buttons, we test pop ups, we reduce form fields, and when that doesn't work, we just start guessing again and again. And the problem is that we're not actually optimizing for the Right things. We are looking for the problem, where the problem is, and we're kind of guesstimating our way to optimization. This is where emotional targeting comes to play. When I started in conversion optimization, I did this. This is me. Like, I tried all the best practices. I was guessing my way through it, and I didn't get the results that I wanted. I was button testing, blue versus red, whatever, all that good stuff, and nothing, nothing got me the results that I wanted. But I understood that if I could reverse engineer how people make buying decisions, then I could influence the buying decision. Right? Because what is a conversion? A conversion is a decision. It is someone coming to your website, looking at what you have to say and saying that I need that in my life. And what I wanted to do along with my team is reverse engineer it. And what we learned when we hit the books and went back to our Batcave and did all the research was that emotion dictates everything that we do. Every single decision that we make in life is based on emotion. Now, this isn't a fluffy, nice to have thing. This is science. I poured for research that actually showed that without emotion, we lack the ability to make any kind of decision. So this was kind of the beginning for me to understand. Okay, if I can identify the emotional drivers of prospect, then I will know what actual copy to write, what design to create, what images to choose, and how to create high converting experiences that resonate on an emotional level and that will increase conversions. So to make a long story short, once we started using this process of identifying the emotions, identifying pains, hesitations, concerns, how people are feeling, how they want to feel. And I think maybe we'll get into that in a minute. But once we did that, it was so much easier for me to look at a page and go, oh, my gosh, we're using the wrong copy. We're using the wrong stories. The social proof makes no sense. No one cares about this. And to start optimizing in a way that resonated and started driving so many conversions for our clients. So, yeah, I guess it is the missing piece to every single marketing team. Whether you're in B2C, B2B, your service provider, you need to be using your emotion.
- [10:17]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so here's what I heard you say. Hamster wheel.
- [10:22]
Talia Wolf
We're on it. You're like, I'm on a hamster wheel.
- [10:24]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, that's the first metaphor, right? Like, we're on a hamster wheel. And I know, because I know I do split tests all the time, and I'm mostly Testing, like the headline or moving pictures around, or moving videos up and down. And it is a never ending process that seems to work and then it doesn't. It seems to work and then it doesn't. And I think everybody who's run tests can relate to this. But, but I think the big upside to what you're talking about here, Talia, is that when you understand the drivers and emotions, for lack of better words, of your perfect customer, that's when some of these other things don't matter as much. Because when you get that messaging down, right, that resonates with them, then you can unlock what you're truly desiring. Did I hear that correctly?
- [11:11]
Talia Wolf
Yes. And I would say this conversion optimization isn't about changing elements on the page. It's not the headline or the pop up. It's about solving people's problems. If you can identify the problems that people are coming with to your website, then you can create experiences that solve them. And that's the whole point. It's not that the headline doesn't matter, it's that it's part of a bigger strategy. Everything on the page should make people feel seen. When someone lands on your website for the AI society, they should be able to say, oh my gosh, this is exactly how I feel. This is exactly the gap that I'm missing. This is what I need in my life. And I'm reading through the stuff and like, yes, okay, oh, there's someone like me who's done this, who's felt this way. Oh, they have all this stuff. This is incredible. Yes, please sign me up. Take my money. Not because you're manipulating people or you're making them feel emotions that don't exist, but you're just resonating with them and saying, hey, I know how you feel. I know what you've tried before. Here's a better way and let me show it to you. And that's what it is. It's all together. It's a strategy.
- [12:23]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. I'm sold. I want to learn how. So where do we start with your process. And folks, we're going to unravel this today. By the time we're done with this podcast interview, you will be able to put this to the test. So where do we begin?
- [12:37]
Talia Wolf
We begin at the beginning.
- [12:39]
Michael Stelzner
So, okay.
- [12:43]
Talia Wolf
So here is the good news and the bad news. The bad news is it's really hard. And what I mean by that is it's not a band aid. This is not a beautiful easy fix. It's not a tactic. It's not a hack. This work takes time, but if you do it, you'll unravel something that you'll be able to use forever. So the first step is research. And I say this because when people hear research, they're like, oh, not again. But research. Meaningful research. Not why did you buy from us? Not, hey, what feature do you like the most? Or why did you choose this plan? I'm talking about meaningful research, where you uncover the top three pains that led people to your website. The top three desired outcomes, emotional outcomes that they're looking for, understanding how. How they feel right now, understanding how they want to feel in the future once they found a solution. When you uncover that, and we can talk about different ways, that's when you start seeing the light. That's when you can start taking the next step, which we'll talk about in a moment. But that's the first step. It's research.
- [13:53]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, well, I love this. So let's talk about these clusters of emotions, because when we were prepping for this, you mentioned that we need to understand these, and then maybe we can talk about where to find some of the research data we're talking about.
- [14:06]
Talia Wolf
Yeah. So here's what I would say. When we're doing our research, there's all sorts of types of research that you can do. You can do customer surveys, visitor surveys. You can do social listening, which is different kind of ways of listening to the conversations, being a fly on the wall. You can do review mining, which is literally pouring through hundreds of reviews that products and services like your own that are competing with you are getting. When you start sifting through that information, you will start seeing all sorts of repeating themes. Because I've been doing this for so long, we've been able to identify over 223 different emotional triggers. So there's a ton. There's a lot. But I would say this is usually when people say, okay, Talia, but you've been doing this for so long, so just tell us, you know, what are the most common ones? So that's where these clusters come in. The clusters of emotions are clusters because it's never just one emotion. There's multiple emotions at play. The first cluster of emotions is self image. Self image is all to do with how I want to feel about myself after finding a solution. I want to feel pride, I want to feel smart. I want to feel that I am a better mom, I'm a better marketer. I want to feel a better version of myself. And that's all to do with self image. The Second cluster of emotions is social image. And usually this will come hand in hand, especially if you are a service provider. If you're in B2B, social image and self image are usually kind of tangled together. Social image is all about how I want other people to feel, think or see me after I have a solution. So, for example, I want other people to think of me as the go to person in the office. I want other people to think I deserve that promotion. I want people to think that I'm smart. I want them to think that I'm a leader. I want them to think that I'm a great mom. So there's the social aspect and there's the self aspect and they're both super important. So once you start doing that research, you will start noticing when people are talking about how they want to feel about themselves or when they're mentioning other people, they're mentioning people in the office, they're mentioning their neighbor, suddenly their significant others in the conversation. And when you start seeing those patterns is when you get okay, my hypothesis is that my prospects really care about their self image or they really care about social image. And there are many other classes, but these are really the most common and repetitive ones.
- [16:55]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so what I heard you say is that there's really two main emotional categories that generally speaking a lot of marketers, prospects and customers fall into. Self image is how do I feel or think about myself after using this solution? Will I feel smarter? Will I feel happier? Will I feel like I've upgraded myself? These kinds of things, right? And then the social image is more how will others view me and think about me and feel about me? Like will they look to me as the go to marketing expert on AI or will they say she's worth a promotion or I want to hire her, right, because she is an expert? These are the kind of things we're talking about.
- [17:37]
Talia Wolf
Exactly. Exactly.
- [17:38]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, yes. So we've talked about these clusters of emotions and we've talked about briefly how to find this information. And you said surveys, which can be surveys you send out to your customers. Visitor surveys can be little tools that pop up little surveys when people hit your website and then review mining. Maybe just talk about that a little bit if you don't mind, because I don't think anybody really knows what that means.
- [18:02]
Talia Wolf
So review mining and social listening are probably my two favorite research methods and maybe also an emotional competitor research, but generally those two are my favorite. So review mining. Review mining is something that I learned from Joanna Weeb, who is the OG Conversion Copywriter. And this is a great hack. So if you don't have a lot of customers that you can interview right now, or survey review, mining means going on to your competitors products and seeing their reviews. So what kind of reviews are they getting? But it's not just your competitors, it's also lots of you selling courses for, for training your own dog at home. And you could actually go onto Amazon and look for books about training dogs because your prospects are probably, if they want to do their own dog training, they're probably also learning it from books. Now this could be anything. It could also be if you have an accounting software, you could go and look at the book called Accounting for Dummies, right? So there are books on Amazon that are usually out there trying to solve the same problem that you are. But with a book, what you want to do is to mine through hundreds and hundreds of reviews that these, these books are getting or your competitors are getting in order to see what people are complaining about, what people love, what people are missing. What are the things that they said, oh, I wish this book would cover X or this book didn't really get into this piece, which I'm really missing, or this book nailed this piece. Now when you do that, you start seeing the different ways that you can outsmart your competitors, different ways that you can talk about. You'll suddenly see, oh, they really care about this. I have a feature that does that. I should be talking about this because people care about it. So it's a great way to see what people really care about. Because usually when we think about surveys, we kind of ask like, what part of my business do you like most? And they're kind of very specific to features, technology, pricing. But when you're looking at the conversations, it's just different. It's different words and people are using their own words to describe things that they care about. So it's just a great way to really start filtering through the noise.
- [20:18]
Michael Stelzner
Amazon, you've got TripAdvisor, right? If you're like a travel service, G2 Crowd, G2 is for the more bigger software products. There's probably review sites for almost everything you could possibly imagine. But it's really fascinating is we know people only write reviews when they're either really excited or they're really mad. Right. Other than those that are paid to write reviews. So what does that kind of tell us? Can we just like download a bunch of these into AI and have it do some analysis? Do you have any tips on this?
- [20:46]
Talia Wolf
Oh yeah, for sure. So that's one of the things that we do. So one of the things that we'll do is we'll download all of our research and then we'll upload it into either Perplexity or to Claude or ChatGPT, depending on the project. And we ask it to look for specific things. For example, put this information into two buckets, self image and social image. So I have already pre fed. This is what social images, this is what self image is. Here's what I would like you to look for. Look for these negative things or put it into negative and positive. Please shine a light on all the reviews that mention other people. Please shine a light on all the conversations and all the reviews that mention X. So you can use this now. Why is this great? Because I think, Mike, you and I have chatted about this in the past. But like with AI, it's garbage in, garbage out, right? So if you go in with the information you have about your customers right now, which is I know their age, their geographical location, I know their gender, their browser, I know maybe what role they do, and I put that into ChatGPT and I say, give me some great copy, it's going to look exactly like that. It's just going to be generic and boring. But if you pour, I don't know, 200 reviews from a book you and to your project and to AI and you say, hey, here's what I need you to do. Dissect this, tell me, then you can get incredible copy because you're really feeding it with incredible and golden insights. And that's the difference with AI, you're either just dumping stuff into it and hoping it will work, or you're feeding it with just incredible, smart, important insights that you can actually use.
- [22:28]
Michael Stelzner
Well, and for some of you, some of you might have what we have for social media marketing world, where you have over a thousand testimonials from people who have given us testimonials over the years. And we could technically feed all that stuff into AI and we could ask it to pull out these emotional clusters based on the stuff that Talia and I were just talking about. And we could. I hope my team is actually listening to this.
- [22:51]
Talia Wolf
Well, actually, you know what I remember from when we did our first project together, One of the things that we identified is that so many people were saying that the best thing about the conference was the community. Yeah. Not feeling alone anymore. Like actually meeting people like me who are in the trenches, who are doing incredible things. But I'm so lonely because usually there would only be like one social media marketer in the company. So imagine if we now took, because we didn't have that then, but imagine if we took all of our research now and put that into AI and said, hey, can you just highlight all the testimonials that mention community? And over here, can you mention all the different testimonials that mention this? And you can put it into buckets and you could put that on the homepage or you could put that onto your sales page or anything because you know what people care about. Now you're just using AI to look for that information and surface it.
- [23:46]
Michael Stelzner
What if I told you while your marketing peers are still fumbling with basic AI prompts, you could become the AI expert your entire company depends on. That's exactly what's happening inside the AI business society. Our members aren't just using AI, they're mastering it. They're automating repetitive tasks, creating professional videos in mere minutes and making data driven decisions that leave everyone on their team completely amazed. Most marketers are barely scratching the surface of what AI can do for them. While they're stuck creating mediocre content. You could be leaping so far ahead that people look at you as if you're from the future. Here's how we make that happen. First, you get monthly live training from leading AI experts who actually use these tools in real marketing situations. Secondly, there is a incredible community of innovative marketers who are pushing the AI boundaries every day that you have access to. Third, we have multiple meetups per month where you get a chance to interact with your peers and ask questions from our experts. As member Lisa Kanda said, quote, the quality of training offered is the best I've experienced and from an organization that I can trust. Here's the truth. The marketing landscape is changing very quickly. Don't get left behind while others race ahead. Visit social mediaexaminer.com AI and become the AI Enhanced Marketer your company or your clients need. Future you will. Thank you. Visit socialmediaexaminer.com AI to learn more. Hard part research. Not necessarily hard, given these little tips that Talia just gave us. All right, let's assume we've done some research. Yeah. Now what do we do?
- [25:24]
Talia Wolf
Okay, so the next part is called an emotional targeting audit.
- [25:31]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [25:31]
Talia Wolf
Okay. When we think about a conversion optimization audit, most of us think about the basics, right? Heuristic analysis. Look at some heat maps, look at some recordings, make sure you only have one call to action button and you don't have a carousel and all sorts of things that are more UX and design specific. But again, when you're doing a CRO audit, the generic CRO audit, which to everyone here who's listening, CRO is just an acronym of Conversion Rate Optimization. It's very surface, level and basic. What we don't do is ask ourselves why these things are happening. So an emotional targeting audit is a set of questions, strategic questions that you ask yourself while you're actually looking at your pages. So you now know that your customers care about different things. You know their pains, you know their hesitations, you know their concerns, you know what desires they have. Now what you can do is you can actually go onto your website, let's say a landing page or a pricing page, and you can look at it and ask yourself a set of strategic questions that, that will tell you if something is resonating or not. For example, are you making it about yourself or about your customer? Number one question to ask yourself. Cool. That is an important question to ask. Or can prospects see their pains reflected on every step of the journey, the real pains that they feel? Or am I pairing every single feature or every single offer with the emotional outcome? So there's many different questions that you can ask yourself, but you can see that it's very different than the do I have one button or two? Are all my call to action buttons the same color? This is you looking at things in a different lens now that you have all this information about your customers and literally looking at the page and saying, okay, am I doing this right or not? And as I mentioned at the beginning, this is where you thrive, because this is where you'll start noticing that you're using a lot of generic stuff, that you're talking a lot about yourself, but the customer is nowhere to be found. And there's a lot of different ways to just kind of suddenly surface. Oh, am I using social proof that actually dismantles hesitations and concerns? Or am I just using the customary logo bar? Oh, no, I need to change this. So it's just a great way to start getting hypotheses. Oh, hypothesis. The reason my landing page isn't converting is because people can't clearly see that this product was designed for them or people can't clearly see that we solve the number one pain that they feel. So the audit is the best way, once you have all those insights, to finally figure out why people aren't converting and what's stopping them from doing that.
- [28:31]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, I love this and I want to unravel this a little bit just for sake of clarity. When we're doing this emotional targeting audit. We're looking at the content, the sales page or multiple pages, and we're asking ourself a couple questions. Number one, are we making it about us or are we making it about the customer? If we're making it about us, make a note. That's going to have to be tested, changed. Can our prospects see their pains reflected in each step of the journey? Well, that's important. I want you to talk about, like, what you mean by each step of the journey.
- [29:00]
Talia Wolf
I think when people hear me talk about emotional targeting, a lot of the times they mistake it for fluffy headlines and cute flowery, the big promise. But I would argue that the biggest impact emotional targeting has is not in those big, huge value propositions that we have at the top of the page. It's how you weave emotion throughout the page. It's how you talk about what your customers go through every day. How they, for example, as a social media marketer, are feeling the burn. Because tools are changing all the time, because strategies are changing all the time. Every day there's a new, whatever tool out there, AI is changing all the time. You have to keep on top of things. Everything's scary if you just have a great headline that says, okay, become a social media expert, or that's not going to take you all the way home. Reflecting people's pains throughout the journey means that while people are reading through a page, while they're going to the next page, while they open an email from you, if they see an ad from you, everything should be reflecting how they feeling right now, what struggles they have, what challenges they have, and then of course, how you're going to solve that. And one of the best ways, by the way, to reflect the pain is say, here's what you've probably tried. You've tried 1, 2, 3 and 4, and they haven't worked. Here's why it hasn't worked. Because abc, and when you do that, you're not just saying, be the best social media marketer in the world. You're saying, imagine if you were always on top of things. You never felt behind. You never felt like the world was 20 miles ahead of you and you could stay on top of things. And this is me, I'm just spitballing here.
- [30:50]
Michael Stelzner
Or imagine your boss is so happy with your work, right? Using one of those other emotions that he or she gives you a promotion. Right? I mean, that's the kind of stuff we're talking about. So doing that throughout the entire journey. Okay, I'm glad I asked this. So that means all of your messaging leading to that sales page, not just that sales page, and even that sales page as it goes to the checkout page, I'm assuming. Right. Right up until they purchase. Correct.
- [31:13]
Talia Wolf
100%. And I also just want to say this is not just about copy. This is also design. It's about the colors that you're using.
- [31:21]
Michael Stelzner
Okay.
- [31:21]
Talia Wolf
It's about your website's navigation. Okay. We've run multiple tests for our clients on the navigation of their website to make it more conversational, to immediately show case studies. For one of our clients, for example, when we did our research, we immediately saw that, look, there's no way around this. When they're trialing this company's product, they're also trialing two others. They just are. They're trying three products at the same time. So what we actually did is in the main navigation of the website, it said, compare us, and literally sent them to five different comparison pages in the menu, which no website does that you don't want to send people to. Like, oh, by the way, we have competitors. Like, most people would say, no, no, no, no, no. Don't tell them about our competitors. They know. They know you have competitors. Especially in AI, they're asking for recommendations. So understanding how people make decisions and in this customer journey, the way people were making decisions was they were actually trialing multiple products and actually saying that. So it's not just in the copy, it's in everything. It's in the visuals that you use. Like, one of the questions that we ask is, do your images, your ux, your colors, do they all amplify your message? Because you could say, we have the best posture trainer in the world that will make sure that when you slouch, will remind you, sit up straight. So that's one of our clients. Upright, incredible product. But if you don't show someone who's sitting in front of the computer working all day, like you and I and probably most of the people listening to this podcast today who start off the day sitting up straight with all the intention to fix their posture, but as the day goes on, we just kind of slumped because we forget, if you don't show that, then you're missing the whole point. It's not just the words. Yes, copy will always come first. But are you just using fluffy screenshots of your product? Are you just using those cute little animations because everyone else is? Or are you actually leveraging the images and the colors and the visuals on your whole customer journey to amplify your message and to drive it home. So there's all sorts of different.
- [33:38]
Michael Stelzner
I love it. Okay, so the emotional outcome side of this, like, I think everybody understands the pains, the emotional struggle. But you also said something along the lines of making sure that you pair each step or something decision. I don't remember exactly what you said with the emotional outcome. Yes, talk about the emotional outcome a little bit and how it's separate from the emotional pain, you know what I mean? And how they might work separately or together.
- [34:05]
Talia Wolf
So what I mentioned before was when you are talking about a feature that you're selling, a lot of the times you'll see we're powered by AI or an all in one platform for X, whatever. If you're not pairing each of your features with an emotional outcome, then you're missing the point. Meaning if you're just saying we're powered by AI and not we're powered by AI and this is going to help you achieve this. This is why you should care that we're powered by AI or for example, we're an all in one platform. That's cool. Everyone's saying that why should I care? You should care because right now you're using six different tools to try and do marketing. But actually apparently I think it's 22 tools, an average that marketers use. So if you're like, okay, cool, this is an all in one platform. But every single feature that you promote, when you want to talk about your technology, if you want to talk about your features or something that's cool about you, it has to have. And here's why you should care, here's the result you're going to get.
- [35:16]
Michael Stelzner
And have that paired with some sort of emotional desire they have. Is that correct?
- [35:20]
Talia Wolf
Yes. The emotional desire that they have, the emotional outcome that they're going to get. I can give you an example from upright.
- [35:26]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, go for it.
- [35:27]
Talia Wolf
So upright in the past used to say, get upright to improve your posture. Powered by biofeedback. So this is incredible science that they use to literally know when you're slouching and remind you to sit up straight. Honestly, yeah, everyone wants the right posture. Like, okay, yeah, I do want to improve my posture. But what we actually did for upright is one of the things that we uncovered during our research, which was incredible, was that everyone has the full intention to fix their posture. No one's happy with the fact that their back hurts, their shoulders hurt, their knees hurt, and everyone starts the day, as I said, with all the intention to fix it. But as the day Progresses, we forget. The one thing that we identified is that everyone had this guilt that they should be doing it. And I can't believe it. I keep forgetting and it's terrible. And there was this guilt inside of people for not actually doing it. And when we combed through Reddit, so Reddit is one of the best places to comb through conversations. So many people mentioned forgetting. Just, I forget, I forget. When I remember, it's great. But when I forget, I forget and it's terrible. We actually added some content on almost every single page that said, look, your poor posture isn't your fault. You slouch because you forget. Not to. Everyone does. But there is something you can do about it. And the whole idea was outsourcing this so you never have to think about it again. Upright will do it for you. You never have to worry about it again, and you will never forget again because upright will remind you. And that was the whole emotional angle. So anytime we mentioned biofeedback science, it was paired with. It will remind you to sit up straight. You no longer have to have that guilt. You no longer have to worry about this thing. You're outsourcing it to us. That's an example of not just saying biofeedback science, but like literally pairing it with. And here's why this matters to you.
- [37:30]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Talk to me about the importance of using actual words from customers and prospects instead of your own words. You know what I mean by that, right? Like using words that are maybe like common trigger words that you might have some internal ways you describe things, but the way your customers is different. Right. So talk to me a little bit about that.
- [37:47]
Talia Wolf
So it's called voice of customer, really. And the way it works is oftentimes marketers and businesses just call things in a certain way and we use all these terms. But when you start combing through Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn Conversations, or Facebook groups, you'll suddenly notice that they're actually calling you something completely different. They're using different terms, they're using adjectives, they're using verbs that don't like. You've never used them to describe yourself. And it's very, very cool. For two reasons. Number one is that for many startups, this is a good indicator that you're doing something wrong. You're building some product and people don't get what it's about and they're not sure and they're calling you different things and they think you solved them the wrong problems that you don't actually. The other thing is, is that you suddenly get sticky copy. Suddenly instead of using your own words, you're using theirs and you're starting to use the terms that other people use that your prospects use. And that is a gold mine. That is incredible because instead of just saying, you know, this is what we are, you're using their words. So it's a technique that's used a lot in conversion copywriting. And this is what's won. I'm sure I'm not the only one that sometimes sits in front of a empty Google Doc hoping words will come from somewhere or, I don't know, you're feeding stuff into ChatGPT and you're hoping it will look good, but then you're reading through it and it's just bleh. So when you are fed with voice of customer, it's so much easier. It's so much easier. All you need is a template. There's so many copywriting frameworks and templates out there for free. Hundreds. And we have a tonic at uplift too that we use, that my team uses. Once we have the most desired outcome, biggest pain, biggest concern, you can just add that in and their voice of customer. So yeah, that's, it's just huge.
- [39:54]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so we've talked about, we start with research, then we got into auditing, and now let's talk about how to actually put this stuff to the test. Because obviously that's kind of the key to the whole thing, right? Because you don't just make the changes, you have to run to tests. So talk to me a little bit about that.
- [40:10]
Talia Wolf
So the third step is running meaningful experiments. I kind of hinted at this before, that if you are struggling with testing and you're just kind of changing call to action button colors, or just trying pop ups or just changing headlines, you're on a hamster wheel. In order to actually get meaningful results, you need to start running meaningful tests. You can only run meaningful tests when you have meaningful hypotheses. So just let's go back. If you have no idea who your customers are, if you have no idea why people aren't converting on your landing page, then yes, probably what you'll do is you'll Google for best practices or search on AI. If you're powered with all of these insights that we've collected through our research and our audits, you start having hypotheses. I mentioned some before as an example. Like my hypothesis is that the reason people aren't converting on my landing page is because they can't see that other people like them who do the same work as they do or struggle the same way as they do, have also used our solution and have succeeded. So that's an incredible hypothesis. It's a big test. Okay, so what that means is now I need to go onto my page, sure that I have enough social proof that shows that people like them, people like my prospects, have used my product, struggled in the same way, tried different things, it didn't work, tried our product, tried our service, and it worked. That's an hypothesis, that's a meaningful test. And I can give some examples of emotion based tests before we go there.
- [41:54]
Michael Stelzner
I think one of the questions people have in their mind is let's just assume our landing page is a mess, okay? It's totally. We've learned through this pro what we're doing it all wrong, right? Like, do we test little bits at a time? Do we do the whole thing and compare it against the old one? Like, because there's so much to this, right? Like, do we just start with the opening sections? You know, where do we start? Because obviously I know many people listening are going to be like, wow, I've discovered a whole bunch of things that I could test. Do we do it all in one swoop? Do you understand what I'm asking?
- [42:23]
Talia Wolf
I completely understand and I'm going to answer in the most annoying way and say it depends, it depends on multiple levels and I'm going to start at the most basic one, and that is buy in. When it comes to testing, if you are a solopreneur, if you are the CEO or the CMO and you don't have to answer to anyone, more or less, okay, you can run whatever you want, you can test whatever you want, that's fine. But if there are people around you and you have to convince them to write copy the way you want, to design things the way you want, or you have to get buy in from the executive team on, like, I think we're doing this wrong and we should change everything. That's going to be really, really hard. So in that case, I would say, hey, do not test big things. Do not go all in. Take an email. Write one email about the biggest pain that you've identified.
- [43:20]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, I like that. See if you get a lot more.
- [43:22]
Talia Wolf
Opens and clicks, it's so much easier, right? Let's say that you've identified that there are three main pains that drive people to your website and you want to see, but what is the one that really converts? You can write three separate emails, one about each pane and see what Gets the most opens, what gets the most click through rate and what gets the most conversions. Now a conversion can be anything. It's a download of Lead Magnet, it's a sign up, it's a sale. But you can literally see what motivates people to actually buy something. So it's not you saying you're experiencing this, it's talking about the pain, talking about how they try to solve it. And here's a new solution that you can use and seeing how that works. And you can do the same thing with desired outcomes. You can say, through my research, I've uncovered three desired outcomes that I think people want. I don't want to go immediately to my homepage and change it. I will test it in an ad, I'm going to test it on my, in my emails. And you can send three different emails and see what gets people to click through, what gets people to convert. So on that aspect, if you are working in an organization or with a team and you're worried about buying, this is a great way to go about it because a, first of all, you're armed with research right now, you have all this stuff that you've done. So then you can go to your team and say, look, here's what I've uncovered. Our prospects are saying all of this over here on our website. We're saying this now. I know this might scare you, so I'm not going to test our homepage. I'm over here testing some emails. Not going to bother anyone. I'll let you know how it goes. So that's one way to go about it. And you know, when I get on stage and I speak, I'm always showing like these huge redesigns because companies have hired us to do this for them. But oftentimes if you're internal, it's a little harder. If you have the buy in, if it's easier for you to run tests, which by the way, not everyone can run significant tests. So we can also talk about that. But if you can, I would advise to go all in. Now. All in doesn't mean trying to solve everything at once, because that's a mess. You won't know what caused the impact and why. But if your hypothesis is people coming to your website cannot see that this solution was specifically built for them, let's say, I don't know, you have a product that's for agency owners, that's what it's for. And when agency owners, your hypothesis is when agency owners land on my website, they can't see that this is for them, they think it's for everyone. Because I'm speaking to everyone and I need to be more specific. So now you can run a series of tests that are just around that if you know what you're trying to learn. How do I show people that this was built for agency owners, it's designed for them. Then slowly you can optimize the landing page in terms of the copy, in terms of the visuals that you're using. But that is your hypothesis and you're sticking to it. You're not also going. And the social proof and the visuals, you know, they're not resonating too well. So you've got a hypothesis and you're trying the different things at once.
- [46:32]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, let's give an example of either one, a client or yourself that you've done this with, just so people can like understand how to take the emotional message essentially and effectively, like put it to work. Do you have any stories or any examples that you've done yourself that you could share?
- [46:48]
Talia Wolf
Yeah, sure. I mean, I mentioned Upright, which is a great example. Another cool example is with teamwork.com teamwork is a project management solution software and it's for agency owners. So anyone who's client facing. If you work with clients and you're facing clients, so you could be an agency, agency, a service provider, a consultant, a creative team, a law firm, and you work with clients, you would want to use teamwork.com now, can everyone in the world who needs a project management solution use Teamwork? Absolutely. It's a phenomenal tool and they have all the different, I would say different features that the biggest competitors that you can think of, think Asana, think Monday.com, think ClickUp, have. But Teamwork has done a lot of work. We worked with them for almost three years on changing and optimizing everything on the website to speak to client facing teams, from the comparison pages that we've written for them to a homepage, landing pages, product pages, emails, and even their menu. As I mentioned at the beginning, creating content around specific pains and saying, look, you know, everyone has a reporting feature in their project management solution, but Teamwork actually created a reporting feature that helps agency owners see profitability. This is a huge pain for an agency owner. I know, I run an agency, it's hard. You don't always know if you're profitable or not and you sometimes actually want to know if. And I'm in accounting is doing a work or I don't know if I have enough resources. Everything that we wrote and created and tested on Teamwork's website was around showing agency owners and project managers that all these questions that they have about whether their colleague is doing their work, if they have enough resources that they can move things around, if they should hire more people, we put that all in there and that is how you weave the emotion through every step of the journey.
- [48:59]
Michael Stelzner
Talia we could continue talking all day long because there's so much more to that well of yours. It runs very, very deep. First of all, thank you for sharing your ridiculously valuable insights with us. If people want to connect with you on the socials, what's your preferred platform? And if maybe they want to check out your services, where do you want to send them?
- [49:19]
Talia Wolf
So if you want to connect with me, LinkedIn and Instagram are probably my favorite spots right now. Also, unlike all the other stuff, but those are my two go tos slash Talia GW and if you want to learn more a the book is probably the best place to start.
- [49:36]
Michael Stelzner
Say the name of the book again.
- [49:37]
Talia Wolf
Emotional Targeting, Win Hot Boost Sales, Own the Market. Or you could just go to Taliawolf.com book and you can get that there. And blogs and all sorts of free templates and worksheets and all on Get Uplift, which is the name of my agency. So there's a lot out there.
- [49:55]
Michael Stelzner
Talia, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.
- [49:59]
Talia Wolf
Thank you so much for having me.
- [50:00]
Michael Stelzner
Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@social mediaexaminer.com 679 if you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a while, give us a review. If you don't mind, on whatever platform you're listening on and share this with your friends, you can tag me on the socials and do check out our other shows, the AI Explored Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Just a quick reminder before you go. If you're ready to become indispensable in the age of AI, the AI Business Society is your solution. Join now and secure your discounted membership by visiting social mediaexaminer.com AI I can't wait to see you inside the AI Business Society.