What if everything you know about conversion rate optimization is wrong? Talia Wolf reveals how emotion, not best practices, is the secret weapon for websites that actually convert.
In this episode of the Page 2 Podcast, we sit down with Talia Wolf — founder of Getuplift, best-selling author of Emotional Targeting, and one of the world’s top CRO experts. Talia breaks down why most websites fail to convert, and it has nothing to do with button colors or headline formulas.
She introduces her Emotional Targeting Framework™, a research-driven approach that uncovers the emotional drivers behind why customers actually buy. From eCommerce to B2B and service businesses, Talia shows how emotion—not best practices—should guide your CRO strategy.
You’ll learn how to transform your homepage, pricing page, and product pages into high-converting assets by tapping into customer pain points, desires, and decision-making behaviors. We dive into AI’s limitations in copywriting, the psychology of trust and social image, and why optimizing your presence on Reddit, LinkedIn, and even LLMs is now mission-critical.
Whether you’re a marketer, founder, or agency pro, this episode will completely reframe how you think about user experience, storytelling, and the future of conversion optimization.
🧠 In This Episode
• Why traditional CRO misses the mark by ignoring customer emotions
• Talia’s Emotional Targeting Framework™ and how it works
• The 223 emotional triggers that drive conversions (and how to use them)
• B2B vs B2C emotional differences — what really drives each persona
• Why AI still fails at emotional copywriting (and what it can help with)
• How to write homepages, pricing pages, and category pages that convert
• Using social listening & review mining to shape messaging
• The rising role of LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini) in brand perception
• Why your brand must optimize Reddit, LinkedIn & beyond
• Color psychology myths — why “red means urgency” is outdated
• Why “Powered by AI” and “#1 Solution” should die from your copy
• Talia’s personal CRO audit method using emotional resonance grading
• How conversion strategies vary between eComm, SaaS, and services
• Reddit authenticity tips: Should your team post as themselves?
This episode is packed with powerful insights that will help you build emotionally resonant marketing that actually converts.
👍 Don’t forget to Subscribe for more game-changing marketing conversations!
💬 Comment below: What emotion do YOU think your brand should be triggering more effectively?
📚 Resources Mentioned
• Talia Wolf on Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/taliagw/
• Talia Wolf on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@TaliaWolf
• GetUplift → https://getuplift.co/
• GetUplift Case Studies → https://getuplift.co/conversion-optimization-case-studies/
• Talia's Free Emotional Targeting Course → https://getuplift.co/conversion-optimization-resources/
• Talia Wolf's personal website → https://taliawolf.com/
• Emotional Targeting (Book) → https://amzn.to/4aC3JOG
• Heart Before Carts (Podcast) → https://taliawolf.com/podcast
Jon Clark (00:00)
What if everything you know about conversion rate optimization, from best practices to button colors, may be completely wrong? Talia Wolf is the founder of Getuplift and the author of Emotional Targeting. Her agency helps companies like Amplitude, Bitly, and Mercedes rethink how they speak to customers, not by tweaking CTAs or cramming in keywords, but by tapping into the emotions that actually drive decisions. This episode is about the hidden layer beneath every high-performing webpage,
the emotional needs your users bring with them. Talia breaks down why traditional CRO overlooks this entirely and how her emotional targeting framework turns user psychology into strategic insights. We talk about why most B2B landing pages fail, why AI still can't write persuasive copy, and what really makes a homepage convert in 2026. There's also a fascinating bit about how social proof works differently depending on whether you're selling a product or a service,
and how brands can optimize not just their sites, but their presence across Reddit, LinkedIn, and even LLMs. The tension in Talia's work is this. She's built an entire framework rooted in qualitative nuance, but now faces a world obsessed with automation. Can human emotion scale? And what happens when AI starts defining your brand narrative before a customer even lands on your site? I found myself rethinking how I approach website audits after this conversation, especially around where emotion shows up in the user journey.
If you learned something new today, take a second to subscribe to the Page 2 Podcast. Leave us a rating or review and let us know it resonated. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Okay, let's get into it.
Jon Clark (01:37)
Welcome to episode 105 of the Page 2 Podcast. I'm Jon Clark joined by my co-founder at Moving Traffic Media, Joe DeVita. Our guest today is Talia Wolf, founder and CEO of Getuplift and author of Emotional Targeting. Talia, welcome to the show and congrats on both the book launch and your new podcast, Heart Before Cart.
Joe (01:45)
Hi.
Talia Wolf (01:52)
Hi,
thank you so much for having me and thank you. I'm not sure what's harder, the writing of the publishing of the book or the podcast yet to be determined.
Joe (02:09)
I spent where I don't know where you are in the world right now, but we just suffered through the blizzard of 2026. I spent all my time shoveling, listening to all the episodes of your It's great.
Talia Wolf (02:21)
⁓ Oh, Thank you. I'm excited to hear that. That's good.
Jon Clark (02:25)
It's a lot of work. So we'll check in when you get toward, you know, episode 20 or 50 maybe and see how we're doing.
Talia Wolf (02:31)
I know, I was like a hundred, I'm like, I'm at six!
Jon Clark (02:35)
Yeah, it's a journey for sure. last week we had Garrett Sussman on talking about the psychological aspects of search. so this feels almost like perfect timing to dig into the emotional side of conversion. But I wanted to start with something that sort of jumped out at me about your business model in general. So Getuplift does both the
Talia Wolf (02:41)
him.
Jon Clark (02:54)
you know, CRO sort of done for you services and the training. You know, lot of our agencies sort of keep that knowledge close to the vest, right? Cause that's sort of job security. You know, how did you decide to both do the teaching and sort of the services? Are you ever worried know, it will work your way out of a job or is that the point?
Talia Wolf (03:13)
That's That's a great question. Honestly, the reason I do it is because I love it. I probably should worry about, you know,
there are people who've taken our courses and have started using our methodology and framework obviously. But there's a big difference between the clients that hire us and the people that take our courses so the people that take our courses are usually entrepreneurs, founders, and people who are Kind of like a you know, they're wearing multiple hats in their own company and that could be the lawyer, the yoga instructor, the doctor,
Jon Clark (03:33)
Mm.
Talia Wolf (03:48)
and it can also be freelancers who are just trying to get to learn more. I rarely see actual CROs like conversion optimizers take the course. It's mostly people who are trying to optimize their funnels and their own conversions, and I love it because I just, I just enjoy teaching so much. So maybe I should worry about it, but I don't.
Jon Clark (04:10)
That's good. That's great. Yeah, so it sounds like almost two distinct audiences, which kind of makes sense.
Talia Wolf (04:15)
It does,
yeah, it works for us.
Jon Clark (04:19)
talked about the framework. I want to definitely dig into that a little bit. You know, client comes on board. Take us through the steps of how you start to set up that. I believe you sort of named it the emotional targeting framework.
Talia Wolf (04:31)
Yes. So the emotional targeting framework is a framework that I developed almost a decade ago, maybe a bit longer. And it's all to do with generating more leads and sales for our clients. But
the entire framework is based on emotion and psychology. Our goal is to really understand why people buy from our clients, what the real intent and emotional need is behind their decision-making process, and then use that in order to increase conversions. So when we onboard a new client, and that can be B2B, B2C,
We have a lot of e-comm, we have cybersecurity, we work with publishers, we work with service providers like moving companies. So really across the board. But whenever we onboard a new client, the first thing we do is research and we do a lot of research to uncover the decision leavers. So mostly our clients know the behavioral aspects of their customers. They know that the behavioral data, age, geographical location, gender.
browser's devices, what we aim to uncover is they buy. What are their pains? What are their hesitations? What are things that they're considering? What other things have they tried that haven't worked for them? using that information, once we've uncovered it, we then audit
the website with a customer first lens. So, instead of looking at it just from a best practices lens of
Jon Clark (05:54)
you you
Talia Wolf (05:59)
wow, you need one call to action button. We look at it from the customer's perspective. Now that I know more about them, does this website serve me? Does this website actually speak the language and tell the stories that our prospects care about? And using that audit, we can
then start A-B testing and coming up with hypotheses of, the reason this page isn't converting is because strategically,
Jon Clark (06:16)
So
Talia Wolf (06:23)
it doesn't do this or because we're missing this information or there's too much information and so on. So our entire methodology is built on research for first, auditing and then
Jon Clark (06:34)
So when you
get all that data back and you sort of act as that potential customer, is that through sort of like focus groups? In other words, like you have actual potential customers or is it that you just have such a strong understanding of who that person is? You can sort of act as that person as you're sort of going through the website. Does that make sense?
Talia Wolf (06:54)
Yeah. So the research itself is based on multiple types of research that can be surveys for customers and surveys for visitors. We do interviews. We also do something called social listening and review mining, and we do an emotional competitor analysis. So we do multiple things to gain as many insights as possible. And then using that lens, we'll audit the website. I will say that
Jon Clark (07:03)
Mm-hmm.
Talia Wolf (07:18)
yes, I mean, having those insights definitely help because we have a checklist. We have questions that we're asking ourselves over and over again, for each website to understand based on everything that we've learned. You know, what's the answer here? Yes or no? Are we doing this? Are we not? But in addition to that, we also have our experience, obviously. So it's a lot easier for us to kind of point out what really isn't working or isn't resonating. And it's not really best practices. It's just because we've run thousands of A-B tests
at this point, so, and we have so much research that we can usually identify the strategic issues, if that makes sense.
Jon Clark (07:53)
Yeah, totally. I think one of those, I guess, big pieces of research was all of research you've done around emotional triggers specifically. I might get this number wrong, but I think it was 223 triggers that you actually identified. Take us through, how do you apply that knowledge?
Talia Wolf (08:07)
Yeah.
Jon Clark (08:11)
Is it industry specific or are you seeing these emotions tied to sort of all industries and it's just a matter of which one has a heavier weight?
Talia Wolf (08:20)
I love this question. I think that we tend to think data in segments. So if targeting people in Chicago who are between 25 and 34, who have a certain, their certain age, certain role, certain income bracket, it's easy for us to think in that way. And then that's the people that we're targeting.
In the emotional targeting methodology, 25-year-old from Chicago and a 55-year-old woman in Russia could have the same emotional trigger. It's less about where they're from in terms of the behavioral data, and it's more about their emotional needs. And what we find is that, yes, we have identified over 223 different emotional triggers, but
It's not that we are targeting specific ones all the time. It's not that I'm doing research and then saying it's trust and just trust, or it's just, you know, jealousy or something. It's what we find is that more often than not, it's multiple emotions happening at the same time. We feel negative emotions. We feel positive emotions
Jon Clark (09:16)
Thank
Talia Wolf (09:30)
on our culture, based on our history, based on our personal experiences. And there's just so much involved in there. So it's less about like, I'm trying to trigger an emotion and more about resonating with the existing emotions that are already there. So I don't know that answers your question, but it really is, it's a little hard because I'm always asked like, you know, what is the most popular emotion? it's, there isn't one.
Jon Clark (09:54)
I think I had that question.
Joe (09:56)
⁓
Talia Wolf (09:56)
There just isn't one.
Jon Clark (09:58)
I'm not going to ask it.
Talia Wolf (09:59)
Okay, cool.
Joe (10:00)
I have a silly question
Marketing can be very creative. For my career, I haven't spent a lot of time in creative roles, but one very smart creative director told me one time, the three big emotions that you try to tap into when you're building good marketing, fear, envy, and sex.
Talia Wolf (10:15)
Go.
Joe (10:18)
And I know that's like, there's only three, like does everything fall under a set of categories? You have 223, it's hard to wrap your head around. Are there like five or 10 big ones you think they fall into?
Talia Wolf (10:19)
you
Those three don't fall into the top 10, I would say. They do sound very like 90s. Like when I started doing conversion optimization, not in the 90s, I'm not that old, but when I was doing conversion optimization, when I first got started at like my first agency, the people I was working with, they were like, it's all about selling sex. And I'm like, you're clearly two men.
Joe (10:33)
Okay.
Jon Clark (10:38)
Okay.
Talia Wolf (10:53)
Yes, does sex sell does, you know, making people feel, that they're going to lose something. Absolutely. Like loss aversion is a huge psychological trigger that really affects people's decision-making. Envy is also a big one, but it's not because you're envy of something, of someone. It actually speaks to a bigger cluster of emotions, which is self image and social image. So we categorize emotions
Jon Clark (11:05)
hmm.
Talia Wolf (11:19)
into two buckets. There are more, but those are the two most important ones, I would say. Self-image are all those emotions that are to do with how I want to feel about myself after I buy a product or
Jon Clark (11:32)
you
Talia Wolf (11:33)
hire someone. And it's all about like, I want to feel better about myself, I want to feel more confident, I want to feel like a better parent, I want to feel like I am of value.
Social image is all those emotions that are to do with other people, how I want other people to feel about me and think about me. I want other people to be jealous of me. I want other people to think that I'm the go-to person in the office. I want other people to think that I'm, I don't know, good looking, all sorts of different emotions. So when you think about it, like sex, envy, all that stuff, it fits into those categories, but they're not specific to like make this person feel
envious. It's more about how do they want other people to think about them or how do they want to feel about themselves? And I think that is that's the distinction between like one singular emotion and then understanding how people feel right now. They're feeling lost or they're feeling jealous or they're feeling sad and how they want to feel And those are kind of the distinctions.
Jon Clark (12:34)
mentioned and I want to come back to that in a second, but I was just curious about the cohort of 223. Is there one that you've found recently or the emotions that you've identified sort of been consistent over time?
Talia Wolf (12:47)
They're mostly consistent and I would say that what's more like what's newer for us is the categorization of the social and self image. In the past, we just looked at like the rainbow of the different emotions and now
we kind of put them into those clusters. So that's more of a new thing for us in the past few years. But there's so many studies out there about like the different emotions and there's just, you know, it's nothing, the specific emotions aren't new and they didn't come from us. We just studied them and found them, but other people and psychologists have found them in the past, just use them for other things.
Jon Clark (13:21)
Got I was curious about the triggers just because the emergence of AI and being able to say 'Hey AI tool, I want to evoke this emotion. Tell me where I need to insert it into the page'. Are you seeing any sort of, I don't know, trigger fatigue? Almost like when banner ads came out, right? Like it was, they worked great. And then everyone sort of
Talia Wolf (13:28)
you
Jon Clark (13:43)
had a blind eye to them. Are you seeing any impacts from AI around, I
should or what I might before respond to versus what I'm getting sort of hammered with today?
Talia Wolf (13:53)
The AI situation is really interesting, right? Because I think there was like this huge bubble where everyone was like, AI is coming for your job. It's going to replace everything that you do. And everyone I speak to now is like, AI is just taking up so much of my time,
Jon Clark (14:01)
Mm-hmm.
Talia Wolf (14:08)
I end up just rewriting everything, nothing is working. Like it's just making up nonsense. It really is. It's baffling to me, like how much we wanted it in some way to replace a lot of the work that we do and actually can't. I think when it comes to emotion, it's the same. We want to think that we can just tell Gemini or ChatGPT to
make, you know, add some trust into this copy or make people feel a little more happy or excitement, but it rarely works because it's not about this one trigger. It's not about this one emotion. It's about the whole story and it's about showing people that you understand them. So it's not that like, if I just,
Jon Clark (14:40)
You
Talia Wolf (14:56)
plaster a bunch of social proof on a page, or if I just keep saying, you know, this is 100 % like this and you know, we've increased conversions, but that's not the whole story. So AI can only do as as it can, but at the end of the day, if you're not connecting all the dots between the entire story, this is how you're feeling right now, this is what you've tried before,
this is how you want to feel, this is why the things you tried before didn't work. And all that needs to weave in the trust, the happiness, the excitement, the we've got you kind of feeling. And I'm not seeing AI do that. What we have been able to do at Getuplift along with a great friend of mine, Sani is to actually create an emotional greater. So we, we are able
Jon Clark (15:44)
Hmm.
Talia Wolf (15:46)
to, so what we do is we allow people, our clients to put in the copy that they've written and it will tell them if they're invoking enough trust or what's missing to add some more trust. Like you're missing some numbers or you're meeting, you're missing some stats or you're missing this. So that is where I think AI can be great in like helping you assess where things are with a grain of salt, but not actually
writing your copy or doing the stuff for you.
Jon Clark (16:14)
Got it, got In the trust example, are criteria sort of driven from like E-E-A-T principles or is it really the research that you're and surveys that you're doing of the real customers and trying to sort of close that
that gap.
Talia Wolf (16:30)
Yeah, so for our clients, we're uploading all of the research that we've done for them. And we're constantly updating that because it's important to continuously run research and then we're using
the GPT in order to give it to other people on the team and our clients team to kind of review what they've written and give them ideas of like, this is some social perth that you can use. This is a story that you can lean on. This is something people really care about that you should highlight. This is maybe a roadblock or something that people are worried or concerned about. So don't forget to mention this when you're writing the email, when you're writing an ad.
⁓ So it leans heavily on the research that we're running.
Jon Clark (17:09)
Got it. Joe and I worked at the same agency together, which is how we met Razorfish. And we had lots of really smart, creative people around us, as you mentioned, and they always talked about what you're saying, right? Like you have to tell the story from top to bottom throughout the page. and so I was really curious around, you hear above the fold, below the fold, make sure you have a CTA above the fold is common.
Talia Wolf (17:32)
Mm-hmm.
Jon Clark (17:33)
You know, quote
unquote best practice. Have you found in weaving these emotions into the structure of a page, certain areas where it resonates best? So for example, get something above the fold, or maybe write in the hero and then sort of reinforce that, right? When someone makes one scroll or arrow down. Any insights there from your research?
Talia Wolf (17:54)
Yeah, I mean, the annoying answer is that it depends, right? It depends on your prospects. There are really great
Jon Clark (17:57)
Of course. ⁓
Talia Wolf (18:03)
conversion copywriting formulas out like PAS, which is pain, agitation, solution. So you start with the pain, then you agitate and remind them why this pain really affects them, and then you offer a solution. The reason that works is because someone tested that when you mention someone's pain, what they're actually experiencing right now, that converts or that keeps people on the page and they will read more.
⁓ We run tests for our clients sometimes where we start with the pain and we mention, hey, you've been feeling this or you're experiencing that. And we've run tests where we're actually showing the desired outcome first, like, you will be able to feel this, you will achieve that. So starting with the actual emotional desire, like how do you want to feel? This is how you're going to feel, and that converts more. So for us, it's not like there's a rule of thumb, like always start with the pain or always start with the promise,
but it is usually one of the two. And we definitely see for us that weaving social proof throughout the entire page is a huge, has huge value. Rather than just like if we think about the homepage, cause that's the easiest page to kind of give us an example, most brands just have the logos kind of stripped,
you know, in the hero section and then at the bottom they have maybe a few testimonials. For us, what we've tested and we've seen this over and over and over again is that if we pair every claim that we make on the website, on the, on the page with some social proof, whether if that's data numbers, if it's a quote, some proof that helps people trust you and convert.
Jon Clark (19:42)
Hmm.
Talia Wolf (19:44)
So there's pieces that we see repeat themselves over and over again, but it really does depend on the audience.
Jon Clark (19:51)
So amazing. Like these things make total sense, but they take effort, right? And like it's the hard things that typically
perform. so if you take the lazy approach, in fact, one thing I noticed on your case studies on your website is like, wasn't just a testimonial, it was like, okay, here's a paragraph about the challenge. And then there was a testimonial speaking about the challenge. And then it was like, okay, here's how, here's how we position the solution. And then was a testimonial about the solution. It was incredible. I never seen that done before.
So you mentioned the home page as your example. Maybe outside of page structure, are there specific pages where you found this implementation to be most impactful? Because an ideal website state, you're not sending everyone to the home page, maybe for brand. But then, of course, ideally, they probably already know something about you.
Talia Wolf (20:37)
Yeah.
Jon Clark (20:38)
So is it the service page?
Is it the contact page? Like how do you think about, you know, page breakdown in terms of aligning these emotions?
Talia Wolf (20:44)
Definitely depends on the industry. In B2B, we've done a lot of user testing on that and it will vary. But the main pages that we look at are pricing page, homepage, demo page or free trial page, depending what they're trying to achieve, case studies, and then of course, product
Jon Clark (20:58)
sure.
Talia Wolf (21:05)
page where like the product walkthrough, sometimes that's one page, sometimes that's a few. What we've noticed is a pattern in B2B and I can talk to about e-commerce too, if you'd like, but specifically in B2B what's interesting is most brands would most prospects and visitors that come to a homepage will use the homepage as a jumping board. So yes, obviously you're trying to direct people to other pages, but a lot of time in B2B people just come to the homepage.
And so the homepage acts more of a springboard to first I'm going to pricing, then I'm going to integrations, then I'm doing a product walkthrough. Once I've received that information and I've made sure that it's in my pricing range and you have all the integrations that I need, people leave and they go to other places, which we can talk about where the actual decisions are made. And then they come back to the website and then they'll go to a specific, you know, free trial page or a signup page or a demo page. So.
it really changes within the industry. In e-commerce, we see something completely different when we recently ran a few tests. And it's interesting to see how for some e-commerce stores, it works really well to send people directly to a product page. And for some, you have to send them to the category page because they have to first understand what is this? What are the products? Who is this company?
So it does depend on your industry. It depends on the amount of products that you have. It depends on how well a prospect knows you when they come to your website and so on.
Joe (22:37)
Can I ask a question on the service side? You've got a lot of great examples on the product side. I love the writing you've done on B2B case studies, but for a B2B company that is offering a service, it's the people that they're selling. How deeply should a company go to credentialize its people?
Talia Wolf (22:40)
Yeah.
It's a great question. I think now it matters more than ever. Right now, more than ever,
people are looking for authenticity. AI and a lot of other things in the world are creating a lot of stress and people want real life connections with people. In the past, I think, just thinking even five years ago, an agency like ours or yours really stood and fell on like how big you were, how many people you have, the logos that you have.
We've worked with quite a few service providers by now. We also, we've worked with PR agencies to help them optimize, SEO agencies really honestly, like all over. And it's so interesting to see that every time it comes back to the people, not just specific, like I want to know who the CEO is, or I need to know who runs, who's going to be my account manager, but the feeling of this team that I'm going to connect with,
the feeling of who am I hiring? And at the end of the day, there are emotional triggers for your clients too. Sure, they want to increase traffic or they want to increase conversions or they want to get mentioned in LLMs, whatever the KPI is, but there's an emotional reason behind that. They need to look good in front of their managers. Someone from up top is saying, use AI, use AI. And they have to like do something about that.
They also maybe feel like they're behind and, like everyone is writing on LinkedIn and how cool like they're doing an AI when no one's actually doing anything with AI, but there's like serious FOMO and you feel like you're not good enough. So there's a lot of different emotions there. And I think it is really important to address all of that for service providers like ourselves, we need to understand why people are coming to us. And that's why Jon, you mentioned the case studies
and how we position them, but we do that on purpose because like a lot of our, our leads and our clients that are coming in face similar challenges. And when they read that they feel seen. It's not another agency just saying we increase conversions by 300%. Sure. We've done that, but we understand your particular problem and we know where it stems from. So it's about the people and it's about your approach to what you do, because at the end of the day, there's
hundreds of SEO agencies, there's hundreds of CRO agencies. So what makes you stand out is who you specifically are and how you do your work.
Jon Clark (25:25)
There's so much in there.
I do want to quickly come back to the e-commerce comments you made earlier. So you've talked about the differences between the B2B consumer and the B2C consumer. Those emotions are very different, right? Like you said, for B2B, it's like I need to look good in front of my manager versus B2C, it's maybe like, I want to look good in front of my friends, which is two very different things. You're going to get different responses from those two groups of people.
Talia Wolf (25:46)
Yep.
Yeah.
Jon Clark (25:49)
You talked about the category page and I feel like in many cases, the category page is like the necessary evil of e-commerce where you have to group all your products somewhere. You know, people are going to visit it, but you don't spend a lot of time there. And then it's really the
product page where everything is spent. And on the SEO side, a lot of what we've had to do is figure out ways to get content onto that category page.
In some cases, clients are like, yes, like we should do that. Let's figure out a template. In other cases, it's like, well, we'll give you this text box down here at the bottom of the page and you can throw in your... yeah, you can throw in your quote SEO text down there, which is like we want to write for the user and justify why we're putting it there. a really long winded question of how do you use a category page to try to speak to some of those emotions? It seems like a very
Talia Wolf (26:18)
A closed div.
Jon Clark (26:37)
challenging thing.
Talia Wolf (26:39)
category page for us is very similar to a homepage. Because in
oftentimes like ads are directing directly to the category page and a lot of users coming there don't have any context. So we're not trying to sell one product often. Again, I'm kind of like giving you like this could be different for a different client, but generally, the way we approach it is, Hey, you've just arrived here for the first time. So let's give you some context. This is the ultimate result that we deliver.
Jon Clark (26:58)
For sure, for sure.
Talia Wolf (27:08)
And that is an emotion, that is a feeling, that is something that you get from this brand. And we have a wide range of products that deliver this promise to you. And we'll use a hero image, and we'll use copy as a headline, subhead, sometimes there's even bullet points, and sometimes we'll use the filter to as an actual
conversion metric, because we want people to filter. We want to see what they care about. We want to get people actually engaging with that page so that then we can prioritize stuff on the category page.
Jon Clark (27:40)
you
Talia Wolf (27:42)
But we treat it like a landing page or a homepage for people who don't know a lot about us. It's not like we're taking the whole hero section. We're not trying to create like an entire hero section of that, but we do spend a lot of time
building that brand up and talking about it.
Jon Clark (28:01)
I love that. That's really smart. is the CTA the same? Like, it like, do you on a category page? Are you thinking about
I don't know, other than like see more, view more, see product, like, you paying attention to CTAs on the category page?
Talia Wolf (28:16)
depending on their stage of awareness of prospects, where they are in the bio journey, are they just in discovery mode? There are a lot of e-commerce sites where people will land on a category page and they'll scroll through, they'll look at it, they're like, okay, noted and leave, but they will come back from a text message, from an email because
they saw another ad or someone mentioned the brand. Based on where people are, if they're, if it's easier to make a decision, if we're talking about products that are low cost, or if we're talking about products that are very expensive, depending on where people are in the bio journey, that's how we'll decide what the CTA is. Often it will be learn more, view more, see more quick view, stuff like that.
One of our clients has just two products. They have, you know, the basic and the pro. we have, okay, shop now because we've, we have a section about each product and we can just send them directly to the product page because we've given them enough information to feel confident to click on a $300 product. But if we don't have that space, then we won't do it.
Jon Clark (29:26)
You talked about, or guess you sort of teased it for us, which was, you know, people come into a website and then they leave and do research elsewhere. So I want to talk about the social side of this, because I feel like it's such a big part of what you do in your framework and sort of building out,
you know, who that customer is for a client. I guess just 10,000 foot view, like talk to us a little bit about like what that is, like what is the process? What are you trying to get out of it? Where do you go to pull that that sort of information?
Talia Wolf (29:54)
When I was writing the book last year, I didn't realize how big this was going to be because we've been using social listening and review mining for 10 years now as part of our process. And what that means is we literally comb through hundreds of conversations on Reddit, on LinkedIn, on Quora, on YouTube comments, Facebook groups, anywhere where we know our client's audience is spending time.
We'll like even go through Spotify comments now because that's become a popular thing. So we'll comb through conversations anywhere we can find them. Discord, Tumblr in the past. I don't know. With the, with the sole goal of understanding, real decision-making processes, because what really happens, as I mentioned before, is people come to your website,
Jon Clark (30:23)
Wow.
Talia Wolf (30:42)
with kind of a checklist of pricing features. Great. Now I'm going to go and figure out where the authentic conversations are happening, if this is real or not. Like we don't really trust the brands anymore. We trust the community. We trust what people are saying on Reddit, even though Reddit's owned by Google, but whatever. We trust Reddit. We trust LinkedIn. We trust a bunch of communities and
people for various reasons that make sense. So for us as a team, we comb through these hundreds of conversations to figure out, okay, what are the pains? What are the hesitations? What are people saying that they hate about this industry or their competitors? What are things they're missing? What are things that they love? And that helps optimize. Look at this incredible story or look at these, ⁓ oh, we've been saying this word, but actually people say this.
Jon Clark (31:33)
Hmm.
Talia Wolf (31:33)
So it really does help us get into people's minds of what they care about And also now it's even
easier because in the past we would copy all this stuff, put it into a spreadsheet and spend hours analyzing it. Now it's a lot easier because you have LLMs so you can give it very specific prompts to look for very specific things and it makes it a little quicker. Obviously you have to double check everything, but it's a bit easier.
So that's always been our process and it's been incredible because it usually shapes our messaging dramatically. We recently did this with a moving company. Just to test, we ended last week. It will be on my podcast in a few weeks.
Jon Clark (32:16)
All right, all right.
Talia Wolf (32:18)
Joe is like, give it to me. But basically what we noticed is that everyone in the past year in the moving industry in America has started talking about
being cheap and getting like a good quote and pricing. But when we reviewed thousands of these reviews and what we found is most people were talking about the fact that they were so happy that their items were safe, that people were so careful with their stuff, that everything was boxed neatly, that the way things left their old house arrived in the exact same status when they arrived, you know? And we said, look,
Jon Clark (32:40)
Right. you
Talia Wolf (32:54)
We know that the whole industry is kind of shifting and there's a reason to why they're shifting to pricing talk, but we really believe in this kind of white glove premium service messaging. And we started testing it across multiple tests and it just constantly increases conversions. So the recent one increased calls by 17 % for this company. And that is all thanks to social listening and review mining.
So that's one thing. This is my Ted talk, by the way. And the other part,
Jon Clark (33:26)
Load.
Talia Wolf (33:26)
which I'm so excited about is that it's even more important now because our role as a conversion optimizer has completely changed. We used to only need to optimize the website or landing pages or emails or your assets, right? But now people are using LLMs.
People are searching for solutions to pains that they're feeling in ChatGPT, in Gemini, in Perplexity. And AI is spitting stuff out about your brand. But it's not just taking stuff from your website. It's taking the sentiment from all over the web. It's pulling stuff
Jon Clark (33:53)
you
Talia Wolf (34:02)
from YouTube, it's pulling things from Reddit. And that's what AI is telling people about your brand. So if you want to actually increase conversions,
and get good recommendations, it's not enough to just show up in LLMs. You actually have to influence what LLMs are saying about you, which is nuts. And that means that you have to optimize Reddit conversations and you have to optimize off the website. It is imperative
Jon Clark (34:15)
Okay.
Talia Wolf (34:30)
or you will lose the whole battle. if that makes sense.
Jon Clark (34:34)
It does. I mean, that was going to be my next question around, know, so you collect all this information, you see both positive and negative sentiment. Are you also suggesting like strategies to go into those platforms, Reddit, Quora, you know, respond to those comments? Create content on the website.
Talia Wolf (34:35)
Thank you
Absolutely.
Yes, absolutely. Of course, when you review so many
you also get ideas for content that you should be writing like articles because people care about that. But also, yes, as a brand, you should be on Reddit responding to people, and you should be on LinkedIn, and you should be on Facebook groups, and you should be on the podcasts that people are listening to, you should be on the blogs. You have to optimize the narrative all over the web if you want to be
to get good recommendations from, you know, inside LLMs. And it's even more important because in the not so distant future, the website will be the last point of conversion. Meaning people won't be coming to websites as much. They'll be using, you know, they'll go into ChatGPT and I'll ask it to look for, I don't know, blue sweaters or dog leashes or...
an accounting software and the LLM will spit out five recommendations based on everything and it will impact the decision. And when someone clicks through it will be because they're ready to convert. They're not going to your website anymore to make a decision. So you have to have, you have to influence everything everywhere, which is scary, but also great.
Jon Clark (35:49)
Hmm.
you
Joe (36:07)
But
The challenge a couple of our clients have had, like just going all in on Reddit is how to be authentic. we go in there as our company or do we find some stakeholders at the company and try to use their personalities? This seems like a tough question to try to influence on Reddit as a company. How have you approached it or given advice to approach it?
Talia Wolf (36:26)
Yeah.
We have to, We approach it in both ways, basically. One is we absolutely have a brand account on Reddit, including a sub Reddit with the name of the brand so that you can control that narrative and you can see what people are saying and you can discuss conversations. But we also always recommend that the executive team and the people in the marketing team are just identifying as individual people who
work at this company but are now commenting. So you need to do both. is the answer.
Jon Clark (37:01)
I've always thought of a company's cohort of employees is their sort of secret weapon, especially when they're of a larger size. Have you had any challenges or I don't know, maybe successes in getting that cohort sort of on board with something like this? Because, you know, and it kind of makes sense. Some people don't want on Reddit, for example, you know, your, your username is rarely your name
Talia Wolf (37:23)
Yes.
Jon Clark (37:23)
and some people like that privacy,
I don't know if I'm really asking a good question, but I guess how have the cohort of employees to help with amplification?
Talia Wolf (37:35)
So I think the key first is identifying those champions within your organization. And oftentimes the organizations are actually the ones who are more worried about asking their colleagues
to actually do something about it than the people themselves. When people are happy at where they work and they're happy to talk about it. And if they want to stay anonymous, then they can create a new account and talk about that. But I find it's a lot less hard to actually ask employees to share and talk and converse when they're very happy at where they work. The biggest pushback is usually from the executive team where they're like,
Jon Clark (38:12)
Mm.
Talia Wolf (38:16)
but what if they build their own brand and they leave? Like, well, that's part of the work. Like that's what happens. And honestly, like you should wish that on your employee, but generally, yes, I mean, that happens when you start, and it's not just in Reddit, right? It's with everything. You want your people on the team posting on LinkedIn. Like that's important. And sometimes that means that your employee will build a very big brand.
Jon Clark (38:22)
There we go.
Talia Wolf (38:42)
And if you're a good employer, they will stay or you will wish them success in their great endeavor, but there's still everything that they've, they've posted so far works for you and you're helping them and they're helping you. And so it does require a lot of conversations, but honestly, the biggest pushback is from the organizations themselves and not the individual people.
Jon Clark (39:03)
Yeah, I could definitely see that. You never know if you don't ask, right?
Talia Wolf (39:07)
Right.
Jon Clark (39:07)
I've heard you mentioned a couple of times that best practices aren't always the best approach. And one of the things that I heard you talk about was color. And, you know, not being a super creative person either, I've always sort of seen these infographics. It's like, OK, if you want to in bold, you know, trust, use blue. And you've said that that is not accurate. So talk to us a little bit about that. How do you think about color?
in the scope of like an A-B test?
Talia Wolf (39:34)
I love how you were like, that's not accurate. And I said, that's BS. That's my word. Yes. So the thing about color psychology is that it's a very sexy
Jon Clark (39:38)
All right.
Talia Wolf (39:44)
kind of marketing thing and everyone likes to write about it and there's beautiful infographics. And I think when I got started out in my first agency, I made an infographic about it because it was cool and infographics were all the rage. But they are very misleading because color psychology doesn't work like that. It's not that red equals anger and blue equals trust. At this point, there is also the bandwagon effect. So the bandwagon effect is a psychological trigger
that basically focuses on the fact that we tend to go with the masses. If a lot of people are doing one thing, it feels less risky to do it too. So if you are in finance and every bank you see online is using the color blue, then to de-riskify, to kind of de-risk, you know, and take less risks, you'll probably go with blue. So there's that bandwagon effect. But generally,
Jon Clark (40:29)
if Thank
Talia Wolf (40:37)
the way color psychology works is it is impacted by multiple things. So blue can mean one thing to me and can mean a whole other thing for you in terms of my culture, in terms of my experiences and my emotions. For some people, blue is a depressing color. For some, it reminds them of the sky. So there's all sorts of different things in there. I just, my biggest issue is I really don't like
Jon Clark (40:56)
Mm.
you you
Talia Wolf (41:05)
when people just say this is the only way to do something and there's no other way. Very similar, we have sayings like never use a carousel. It's the worst thing you can do. And for years, I agreed. And then a client made me run a test on a carousel on a webpage
and it increased conversions to my dismay. And now it's there.
Jon Clark (41:30)
Okay.
Talia Wolf (41:31)
There's just this
Jon Clark (41:31)
Okay.
Talia Wolf (41:33)
whole idea of like, this is the only thing. Green means freshness and this means healthy. It's just, it's not how it works. And our culture and our experiences really have a huge impact on how we see how we are affected by color. A good example by that is even McDonald's, where they, in Europe, for a very long time, they changed all McDonald's.
branches to green. And you won't see that in the States. In the States, it's red, right? Red and yellow. I don't go to McDonald's, I'm vegan. But generally, that's my... But in Europe, they're green because Europeans as a whole, not completely, not judging, care more about health
Jon Clark (42:00)
my gosh.
Talia Wolf (42:15)
and like what they eat and what they consume. In the past, this is all like in the 2000s, like early. So they rebranded to green.
And that actually had a huge impact in Europe, but it's because it's Europe. I think if Americans saw a green McDonald's, they'd be like, this is weird, goodbye. Right? I mean, it's just, it's what they did. This is weird. Green, the color of puke. mean, it's just, but it's just understanding where you are and who you're speaking to and why you're doing things.
Jon Clark (42:34)
This is too healthy for us. Right, yeah.
I know we only have you for a couple more minutes, so I want to jump to the, go ahead, Joe.
Joe (42:50)
I have the follow up for where you are. been trying to get this question in for the full hour. You're a conversion rate optimizer. You want to improve conversion rate. Do you start these conversations with here's the industry benchmark or do you start the conversation with here's where you're at, here's where I think you can go?
Talia Wolf (43:08)
latter.
Joe (43:09)
Yeah, so you say you're converting at 1%. We're gonna do this one test, we hope to get to 1.1 % and you just keep trying to build, you test to build and you go higher and higher. You don't worry as much about the competition or the industry. You gotta start where you're at.
Talia Wolf (43:25)
Yes, and also we grade emotional resonance. So we have a set of kind of a quiz that we fill in as a company when we're doing client work and when we're doing our research and we grade the website where they are
on an emotional resonance from one to 10. 10 meaning you're doing amazing, you're messaging, you're storytelling, you're design, you're UX. Like everything is customer first and really works towards meeting people where they are on an emotional level. One being you're doing nothing and everything's about you. It's all about your features and your pricing and your technology and the client, the customer cannot see themselves anywhere on the page.
So when we do our research, we will say, okay, your conversion rate is X and we want to get to this. This is where we're aiming for. But in addition to that, your emotional resonance grade is five, meaning you're hitting all this stuff. Like you've got a good foundation, but these are the pieces that are missing. Your messaging isn't doing too well. Your storytelling is missing something or
the way you've built the customer journey isn't working very well for your customers because they need something else first before you send them to the free trial page or whatever. So we start with those two points of where are you on the emotional resonance grade kind of school and also where are you just in respect for yourself and where you could be. It's not that we don't care about the competition, we absolutely do, but more in a way of
How are they positioned? What are they saying? Who are they selling themselves to? And how can you be different and stand out? Because at the end of the day, most brands are the same and they offer the same stuff and you just won't convince me differently. So you have to position yourself. You asked Joe about, okay, for agencies, is it about the people? And often it is. And for B2B, it's often about something else and for e-comm, it's different, but it's usually about
the specific problem that you're solving, and you're solving it in a way that no one else can solve it for you.
Jon Clark (45:30)
On that resonance scale, is it zero to 10? that how you think about it? Yeah.
Talia Wolf (45:35)
Kind of. It just, makes
it easier to think about it in that way. And it's mostly a spreadsheet where we're all filling in numbers based on hundreds of questions. Yes. Yeah.
Jon Clark (45:44)
And then you sort of get an average and that's sort of your score. Got it, got it,
All right, let's jump to ⁓ rapid fire before we close up and maybe a good first rapid fire question. What's, if you can name them, what's the company that had the best resonance score that you've worked with? Sort of out of the box.
Talia Wolf (46:00)
We're currently working with a really cool brand called Calistia. There's skincare products and they have a good emotional resonance score.
And I like that also in the acne, we've had a few clients that had really good emotional resonance. I would say, but though the highest we've seen is like around the seven and and most B2B especially in SaaS is lower than five.
Jon Clark (46:20)
Okay.
they try to keep everything so secret and they want you to request it and then they'll tell it to you, like. Whereas oftentimes it's just better to get it out. Anyway, if you could ban one word from every landing page, what would it be?
Talia Wolf (46:37)
'The Number One', ⁓ I have a few. The blah blah, or 'Powered by AI'. Those are my three. Ugh, enough.
Jon Clark (46:40)
haha
Wow, that's a good one. That's a good one.
So conversion optimization revenue, obviously important. Is there another sort of, I'll call it a vanity metric that you love?
Talia Wolf (46:59)
There's two. One is engagement. I love looking at engagement on a page. I learned how to track that from Dana DiTomasso. She's incredible and she has this entire process of how she tracks in GA4, which is impossible, how to actually track engagement on a page. And I love it.
Jon Clark (47:08)
Awesome.
Talia Wolf (47:19)
The other thing that I track, which isn't really a metric, it's mentions. I love looking at the sentiment of a brand and its different mentions, even if it's like a shout out somewhere, if an email that someone sends out, if it's a blog post, if it's a review or a comment on LinkedIn, I use a tool called Alert Ram Fishkin.
Jon Clark (47:41)
Yeah, brand brand fish.
Yeah.
Talia Wolf (47:44)
Yes, it is incredible. And we
put in our clients names in there and it just lets us know when the brands are being mentioned. And it works so much better than the Google Alerts things that never actually works or sends anything. I get daily mentions of like, here's all the people that mentioned to you and Google Alert comes in once a month and like, here's an article that has nothing to do with your name. That was three years old, exactly.
Jon Clark (48:03)
you
That was three years old.
Talia Wolf (48:10)
So
we use that and sentiment is something that we love to track.
Jon Clark (48:14)
Awesome. You mentioned a little bit about Getuplift using AI for certain components of the process. Is there that you would never consider automating? It's just that important.
Talia Wolf (48:23)
Copy. Just like, honestly, not automate copy, ever. Just never do it.
Jon Clark (48:25)
Mmm.
I think a lot of, a lot of us think about testing as we can do A/B tests for anything, right? Any client size, whatever. I saw something that you mentioned around a certain minimum number of monthly conversions that you believe makes sense to then do an A/B test. What's that threshold?
Talia Wolf (48:49)
I would say that you need a minimum of 300 conversions a month from the same conversion. Otherwise, I wouldn't waste time testing, A/B testing at all. I am.
Joe (48:58)
You're a mom? Is there a work-life balance rule you try never to break?
Talia Wolf (49:04)
I have a very family centered schedule. So I work in the early mornings and then I pick up my kids and I spend the afternoon with them. And then I go back to work in the afternoon, like when they're, when they're down, when they've gone to sleep. And that time for me, between like 1 PM and 4 PM is kids time and I love it. And that's something that I don't, I try to keep every day.
Jon Clark (49:29)
I try to approach things pretty similarly, actually. It works for me. ⁓
Talia Wolf (49:32)
Yeah, absolutely. And
again, like there's some days where their dad is with them. That's a thing. He's a part of it, but generally that's what I try and do.
Jon Clark (49:37)
Right, yeah, she had first.
right, last question. I personally have written off skydiving forever. You have jumped, think, 1,000 times, if I research that correctly. What was the emotion that you had to get over to actually jump out of that plane? Because that is just not happening for me.
Talia Wolf (49:49)
Yeah, pretty much.
That is kind of a,
that's an embarrassing story. I have told it on stage before, but the story really is that I am, I'm petrified of flying, which is like, I really don't like to fly, which is terrible because my whole job is flying around the world and speaking on But I went to a skydiving ⁓ drop zone with my friend who was skydiving. And there was just a cute guy there that I
wanted to impress so I jumped out of the plane for no apparent reason against every fiber of my being, I jumped out of the plane to impress him, social image, right? And yeah, I ended up loving skydiving. And yeah, that's the story. It's quite embarrassing.
Jon Clark (50:43)
Has your approach, this is maybe more of a personal curiosity question of mine, has your approach to that changed since you've had kids?
Talia Wolf (50:49)
In terms of skydiving? Yeah, I haven't skydived in a while. Mostly because, of all, I only found out that I was pregnant with my first, I have two kids, ⁓ he's eight and she's six. I only found out that I was pregnant quite late.
Jon Clark (50:51)
Yeah, because there are different risk tolerance, I guess.
Talia Wolf (51:07)
and I had been skydiving for months without knowing. But then when I found out, was like, okay, you can't skydive anymore. And I do indoor skydiving now, which is a lot safer and fun, but I haven't skydived in a few years. It's a thing. It needs to be discussed internally with myself. It's also very, it's like addictive. And I think...
Jon Clark (51:16)
Okay.
Yes, yes.
Talia Wolf (51:30)
like for me at least, an incredible sport and it makes me feel phenomenal, absolutely love it, but I don't know how it would fit in my daily life without just quitting everything and leaving.
Jon Clark (51:40)
Right. Right.
I've heard that from other people that the adrenaline and the addiction is, it's hard to replicate. Well, Talia, this has been incredibly educational. I really appreciate you feeding our curiosity with all of our questions. Let everybody know where they can find you online and also the book.
Talia Wolf (51:49)
Crazy. Yep.
The book is called Emotional Targeting and you can find it on Amazon. It came out just six months ago, which is insane. I can't believe it's been that long. Thank you.
Jon Clark (52:08)
again.
Talia Wolf (52:10)
You can find me on LinkedIn. Of course you can find me on our website getuplift.co and, you can also find me on Heart Before Carts, which is my new podcast. And I will remember to promote it. There you go.
Jon Clark (52:20)
Yeah.
Yes. We'll link to all of those in the show notes.
Thanks for joining us on the for the listeners, if you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, rate and review. We'll see you next week. Bye bye.