In this episode, I unpack the lessons from “Emotional Targeting” by Talia Wolf.
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Full Transcript:
Decision making, especially at the highest levels, isn’t as data driven or simple as it might appear. It’s a little bit from Talia Wolf’s book, Emotional Targeting. It’s a fantastic book just about approaching things the right way, about how consumers are driven more in emotion than logic, which I hate because I like to think we’re all logically driven, we’ll do all the math and do the right decisions to make the right choices, and that’s just not how humans work, myself included. I’ve heard it said a lot of times that people tend to…
make decisions emotionally and then try to justify them logically. And I’ve seen myself do that over the years, despite me thinking I make everything logically. I know emotion has a lot to do with it. So let’s unpack this fantastic book. She starts by talking about the deadly hamster wheel of optimization. She said, quote, the more experiments we ran, the more it became clear that almost every business tries to tackle their conversion problem the same way. She lists four things that they try to always do. They lean heavily on best practices. They speak to too broad an audience. I see that one quite often. Our audience is everyone. That’s clearly not true.
They overcomplicate their funnels and they over rely on software to fast track their results. So she listed a few mistakes here. So again, unpacking those a little bit. You rely on best practices or copy your competitors too much. She says, quote, I love this example because I almost always see, quote, reduced form fields come up when people talk about B2B best practices or surprising tips and tricks. And jumping ahead in her quote a little bit, if you reduce form fields,
Anyone and everyone was signing up and while you might have increased conversions, your entire sales team was frustrated because they were overwhelmed with unqualified leads. Someone else’s best practice wound up screwing with your sales pipeline. This actually happened to a colleague, she said. So if you reduce form fields, because that’s like the best practice and it does work, it gets you more form submissions, you’re gonna generally get worse leads coming in. So what are you really accomplishing here? You’re probably gonna have the same number of actual sales at the end. We’re have to filter through a lot more leads along the way. So it’s generally not a great idea. And then again, she talks about, yeah, you speak to everyone.
You overcomplicate things and you use tools and software to fast track things too much. So she gets next into how your customers actually decide what to buy. She talks about a man actually in here in the book, a man named Elliot who had a brain damage that prevented emotion. And because he didn’t have emotion, he couldn’t decide what sandwich he wanted to have for lunch. Like consistently, just literally his body wouldn’t let him decide what sandwich to have just because he didn’t have emotion. The emotional part of his brain was messed up. The logical part was there, but without that emotional part.
know, emotion is just central to all decisions, even ones that don’t feel necessarily emotional. So she has the emotional targeting framework is kind of the core to her book here, walking through what that really means. She shares a funny example with Coca-Cola. She makes a fake advertisement for Coke, ⁓ selling it with facts instead of emotion. Because as we know, Coca-Cola is probably the master in the world of selling on emotion. And so she has here, you know, the number one soft drink in the world since 1886. And how many calories it has, and how much carbonation, and kind of lists all these facts, which is
It is funny to see in the book because it would be a ridiculous ad for Coke to make because they’re known for their emotion and I like to teach the world to sing and all the stuff they do. That’s what sells the Coke, not the statistics about what makes it work. But yet so many businesses lean on the statistics and that’s just not the way to go. So the goals really, she sets two goals in this chapter is to solve your customers problems and to make informed decisions. So we’ll kind of dig into that. So the emotional targeting research, that’s the next piece she talks about, emotional targeting.
She said there’s really four methods to researching. Talking to your customers, kind of figure out what’s going on, what drives customers to stop what they’re doing and start searching for a new solution. you can do customer-focused surveys, send out surveys to customers, which is not a bad thing. Better, could have meaningful customer interviews, actually sit down and talk with your customers. Use social listening to fill in the gaps. Certainly you can hop on social media, see what people are talking about, what decisions they’re making on social, and then do other emotional competitor analysis to see more things there.
Then you synthesize your research, kind of put it together. I’m not getting into that too much because really I want to get to the heart of this book, which is running the emotional targeting audit. And so she digs a lot into this. So we’re going to unpack a lot of this and how to actually run this emotional targeting audit to see if your stuff is tackling things the right way or if you’re relying on logic too much. So she gives nine questions for your emotional targeting audit. So let’s dig into those. She said, first, can your prospects see their pains reflected in every step of the journey?
And this is something I’ve talked about a lot on the blog and with Green Melon and lots of places, just how you can, if you can show people their problem upfront, they’ll say, wow, these guys get me. And so can your prospects see their pain reflected in every step of the journey? And that every step piece kind of maybe gets us a little bit. Cause I know we’re great about it upfront, but do they see their pain reflected all the way through? And that’s a good question. Number two, can customers immediately and clearly see what’s in it for them on the page? Question three.
Am I using the actual words my customers and prospects use to describe their pains or challenges? I see this kind of with search engine optimization too. There are words you may want that rank better, but there’s words that your customers actually use. And using the words your customers actually use and recognize will help in both. That’s the words they’re gonna search for and it will resonate most on the page. Use those actual words. Question four, does your design, UX, colors and images all support and prove your main message? So.
She says further, quote, is every single element in your funnel designed to drive the message home and help prospects feel seen? Question five, am I using stories that resonate? Question six, am I highlighting the outcomes customers care about or am I just speaking about the features and how the solution works? That kind of goes back to the Coca-Cola thing. Like you’re actually talking about outcomes and really what matters to them or just the features and how things work. And again, the features and stuff matter, but that’s kind of the second step. The emotion is going to drive it and then they’ll come back to the logical side. So, okay, I need to justify this decision I’m about to make. What’s going on?
I want to see the features and that makes sense. Question seven, can a prospect immediately see what action they need to take on the page to get the promised emotional outcome? always, of course, have clear calls to action. Don’t just kind of leave with a, hey, you know, if you want whatever, you can reach out on our contact page. I give them a clear call to action. Click here to start now. Click here to call. Make it very clear what’s going on. Question eight, am I using relevant social proof that directly dismantles my ideal customer profile’s top three concerns or is my social proof generic?
So you want very specific social proof. And I like this one. She had kind of a long quote to back this up, which I’ll read you here because I thought it was great. She said, you should use social proof to solve the objections and emotional concerns your prospects have. If your testimonials only focus on how great your solution is and aren’t strategically placed to help customers overcome specific hurdles, you’re missing a key optimization opportunity. Effective social proof should directly address the specific objections stopping prospects from converting. For example, if customers share that they’re concerned about the transition from their current software,
Share a testimonial from someone raving about how seamless the changeover was. Remember, prospects will believe customers like them more than they’ll believe claims that you make. And so think a lot of people are bad about testimonials. Their testimonials are full of, is a great company, they’re wonderful, and they say all these great things, but they say, hey, they’re a great company, they helped me do X and turn it into Y, and they took me from A to B, and they did these specific things. People say, wow, that’s the thing I need, and they did it for you, and you loved them. That’s so much better than just saying, they’re great, which, again, not a bad thing, but not particularly helpful.
And then the last one in this list, question nine, she says, does the page use easy to follow cues and is the color of call to actions and highlighted elements consistent through there? Now going further, she said there are three other indicators. I said this was kind of a longer chapter, but three other indicators that typically signal your copy can be optimized to better connect with your customers. And this first one is huge. So things, ways you can see that your content can be optimized better. The very first one, she says, your copy came after design. We see this a lot where people want to pick out a design or pick a template or do whatever it, and then kind of figure out, okay,
Here’s the template. guess I need to three boxes of content and a paragraph here. I’ll try to write the stuff to fit. It absolutely should be the opposite. You should write the content that’s going to resonate and matter and then build the design around that. And so she says in the book, she says, quote, I’m always amazed by how often I see designers create wire frames with lorem ipsum text and then send it to a copywriter or the CRO manager to fill in the blanks. Designing first is a clear sign the customer wasn’t the focus on creating the page. The designer created it based on what looks best, what’s cool right now, or what competitors are doing. So.
Always write first and design second. Things are gonna work out so much better. The second indicator that your copy could be optimized better is you’re keeping it short for the sake of it. And keeping it short is good, but don’t keep it short just to keep it short. You use the right number of words. And then the third one is you’re not making about the customer. If you talk a lot on your page about we do this and we do that and we’ve been around this long and know, we, we, we, that’s not good. You should be talking to your customer how it can help them. And then lastly, there are three indicators you can look for.
to help you identify key areas for optimization. So other things to look at beyond just the content. The first one is your images don’t support your messaging. The second one is emotions aren’t consistently used throughout the customer journey. And three, it’s unclear what action people need to take to get what they want. And so these we’ve kind of talked about already a little bit, but images should support the messaging you have. Emotions should be used consistently throughout the entire customer journey. Again, I talked about how we’re great about showing that problem upfront, but not as great about showing it through the journey. So you’re always gonna show that emotion through the journey.
And then again, make it super clear what action people need to take to get what they want. You need to click here to start now or sign up for your free trial and make it very clear so people are excited they can just click and get going. Next she talked about running meaningful tests. A lot of tests you can do to improve your conversion rates. She has three kinds of tests I’m not going to dig into too much here, but she can talk about pains versus desired outcomes and how you can kind of balance the two of those. The second test is product versus customer focused.
Is your content and images focused on the product itself or on the customer and how you can solve their problems? And then is it test three is social versus self image. Again, are you trying to make yourself look good, make them look good? What are you trying to do with all that? And then she kind of wraps it up from there. The last little bit she says is, once you understand what drives your customers, you’ll never guess what to optimize again. So if you can do the work that she lays out in this book, and again, I talked about some of the techniques she has. She of course has a lot more detail about some of these items as you dig in.
But if you understand what drives your customers, you’ll never guess what to optimize, because you’ll know what to optimize. You’re know what drives your customers. You’re know what emotion resonates with them. And you can make the optimizations necessary to bring it home for them every single time.
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