Be Calm and CRO on with Talia Wolf

The key to standing out in a world overrun with AI tools and generic marketing is getting back to the fundamentals of emotional targeting and understanding your customers at a deeper level.

• Technology changes, but people don't. Emotional triggers still drive all purchasing decisions
• Most marketers focus too much on features rather than addressing customer emotions
• Using AI to outsource thinking leads to generic content that fails to convert
• Website traffic has decreased by 50-60% across platforms, making conversion optimization critical
• Two key emotional clusters impact buying decisions: self-image and social image
• Customer research is frequently skipped, but remains the foundation of effective marketing
• Generic messaging leads to commoditization, where businesses all sound the same
• AI-powered search is more conversational and emotional than traditional keyword search
• The best starting point is collecting the voice of the customer data through surveys, interviews, and review mining

Guest Information: 

linkedin.com/in/taliagw

taliawolf.com

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Emotional Marketing
• 7:13 AI's Impact on Marketing Strategy
• 15:43 Understanding Emotional Triggers in Buying
• 22:29 The Changing Nature of Customer Research
• 31:08 CRO Fundamentals in the AI Era
• 42:45 Final Advice and Resources

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

Speaker 2: 0:17

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, matt Bertram. I am recording from up in the mountains because Houston is just horrible for anybody that's listening in that area it is like 72 and breezy. So I wanted to bring on somebody that I was super impressed with at SEO Week. I had not heard from her before and she just blew my mind on so many levels, and I am lucky enough to have her on the podcast to talk about psychological triggers, how to communicate with real humans in the age of AI. I think everything that is hot right now we're seeing it even in the downloads of the podcast.

Speaker 2: 1:08

If we're not talking about AI, people are not super interested, and that was why I published an article that somebody else shared, but I re-shared it on multiple social media channels because I thought I was guilty of this.

Speaker 2: 1:23

It was an MIT study that said we've outsourced our brain to AI. We're not doing thinking anymore, and I am so guilty of like not even sometimes taking that prompt and even reading it and like utilizing it and um, this is a year or so ago, but I, I that that, that that article just hit me in the face and, and you know our numbers and some of the things that I was working on on pet projects were really, um, not performing the way that I thought they should. And when I turned back on my brain and I started going back to the fundamentals and I started to use the, the, the copywriting that I learned and the emotional triggers, things started working again. So I had to, like, go back to the fundamentals and so I wanted to bring on Talia Wolf, uh, who is the expert in this. She's speaking all over the world about this stuff and I am so glad that she's here with us today. Welcome to the show, tyler.

Speaker 3: 2:26

Thank you for having me. I love everything you just said. I think we can finish. We're done.

Speaker 2: 2:35

Well, I would love to get your perspective. I know I heard you at SEO Week. You used a Coca-Cola example. You talked about how people got to remember that there's somebody on the other side of whatever ad you're doing, whatever website you have, whatever social media posts that you make and I've found personally, when I have that ICP ideal target persona in mind, it lands better. People engage with it more.

Speaker 2: 3:11

And when I'm posting into a void, it doesn't always work that well, even when we're looking at CRO on websites. And so I would love to just kind of get your perspective on you know where the state of the market is and what you're seeing maybe agencies, freelancers doing the questions you're getting from conferences, like where's everybody at right now? And you know we talked about this a little prior, but you know LLMs are not like here yet, like everybody's kind of going where the puck's going to be, but right now, like people are still engaging on Google, people are all across the internet. Certainly AI overviews have taken over, but you know what? Just tell me kind of the state of the market as as you see it today.

Speaker 3: 3:58

I guess one of the things you know that we're all saying is the race for the next best tool. I would wager that most people feel less than inadequate and like they're not. You know, they don't know, they're not using 22 different AI tools and they're not creating landing pages with AI. You know, in a one minute, whatever prompt, and we're all. You know, there's a lot of people out there telling you to comment prompt if you want to get something. There is a frenzy, for sure, and I think it's happening because the world is changing, as we know, and people are afraid for their jobs and they're just trying to stay on top of things. But unfortunately, in the race to stay, I don't know, in the know, we are forgetting everything. And, as you mentioned, at SEO Week, I got on stage and I talked about emotional targeting and my biggest, I would say saying that was technology changes but people don't.

Speaker 3: 5:13

And, as marketers, as agencies, as digital marketers, whatever we're doing, at the end of the day, if you're trying to get more sales, more leads, if you're trying to get more results, more leads, if you're trying to get more results, the number one thing you need to be thinking about is who you're selling to and why they buy from you. When I ask students for my course, so if I ask at conferences or my clients, why do people buy from you? I get a long list of features and technology, ai and all sorts of made up stuff that's to do about the product. But, honestly, the reason people buy is emotion. Every single decision that we make in life is based on emotion and as we race to catch up and we try to reverse, engineer whatever prompt someone created to create I don't know something an image of a cat reading a book we're forgetting those people. Image of a cat reading a book we're forgetting those people. We're forgetting that.

Speaker 3: 6:09

As long as you're marketing to people and not robots behind the screens, you need to know who your audience is, beyond gender, age, geographical location, their role and what they're doing at work. You need to really understand what's motivating them to buy from you, why they buy from you, and that's crucial for any marketer. And if I think about where we are today, you opened by saying we're outsourcing our brains. Right after SEO week, I spoke at Mailchimp's conference Forward London and there was a huge conversation about the two different ways you can be using AI. Right now, you can be using AI to outsource your thinking right To just basically dump everything that you have on it and hope that it will give you great results. Give you great results.

Speaker 3: 7:09

The problem with doing that, of using AI that way, is that our knowledge of our customers is very generic. We only know very basic things. So when you're going into chat, gpt or Claude or Perplexity, and saying I don't know, make recommendations for a landing page for a dog leash or for a watch or for an accounting software, it's going to give you generic stuff because you're supplying generic stuff at it. That's what you're throwing at it. But if you use it the second way, which is using AI to hone your skills, to get better at what you're doing and feeding AI with meaningful research about your customers, who they are, what they care about, you can create beautiful, incredible things and become the person that doesn't get replaced by AI. So that's kind of where I am right now in my thinking.

Speaker 2: 7:59

You know, one of the things that I heard that resonated with me and I got to dig into it a little bit more, because I do think that there's a way through, like prompt engineering, to get more output out of you know LLMs, but they said to me that the reason that information is generic is because there's a level of like there's guardrails that the LLMs don't want to go outside of, right, like so, um, I guess it's like the temperature gauge of what you're using to make sure it falls inside, like the trusted parameter, but it typically gives you the medium result, like the average of whatever the output is Right, like the average of whatever the output is right. So it's not going to give you something over the top fantastic, because it doesn't want to be wrong in the output that gives you. So it's giving you basically the best mediocre, like middle of the road data, and so then everybody's proliferating this data, so it's raising the general bar. So if you're doing horrible like, okay, you're going to get left behind, but but the game hasn't changed that much because you know the bar's just been raised of what that basic medium level data is. You still got to write that, that content that defines who you are with your insights and I really do like what you said about how you, if you take those insights, that that.

Speaker 2: 9:28

So I'm going through this like AI course right now from Harvard and the the biggest thing that it's saying is all of our data right, like, if you think about it as a marketer, I got my, you know, sem rush, ahrefs. Like you know, demand sphere. Like I'm using all these different tools, I got, you know, search Console, ga4, like I got all this different data in these different silos and I'm, you know we're starting to pull them together manually and that's where kind of NPC servers come in to pull them together to get unified insights. But but to what you said, I have found with customers, more than anything else, that they don't really know their target persona, the level in which we think they should, and we don't know our target persona and way we we could and utilizing these tools to get those insights. That then take the skill sets we have to craft a meaningful message to them is what people I don't see on average, are doing data into chat GPT and they're just using the generic stuff.

Speaker 3: 10:44

The output is generic for various reasons. When a prospect is trying to solve a problem, they're going to. Let's say, only 1% of people are using LLMs right now. Okay, for search. So let's say they go to Google and they are searching for some sort of software or some sort of of of solution for their problem. Okay, if everyone looks and sounds the same and is saying the same generic stuff, how do people make a decision? So they're coming to your website and they're checking. Okay, do they have the right integrations? Yes, do they have the same features? Yes, everyone has the same features. Pricing it's in my pricing bracket Great.

Speaker 3: 11:28

Now there's an emotional component. There's a piece left that I need an answer to. For example, do they solve my particular problem? Do they help people like me? And you know, have people like me had the same issues? Have they been solved? What if I don't know this? What if I need help with that? If you're not closing that emotional gap, you are losing that sale, and so are your competitors, right? So the good news is, if you take that step forward and you get to know your customers better, you can then feed ChatGPT, your NELM, with meaningful insights about your customers and get really good recommendations and you can start testing stuff and you can have hypotheses. So there's a lot of opportunity in there if you go the extra mile beyond the generic. But I think unfortunately right now that's what everyone's using.

Speaker 2: 12:24

I'm seeing that in ads. I actually had a pretty long conversation with two of my ad managers and they're kind of going like everybody's seeing all that stuff. Like we got to stand out, we got to do something different and like I've talked about this on previous podcasts, about how the personal brand or or the brand of the company, or the origin story of like what makes them different, as well as the case studies and the testimonials, do tap on those emotional heartstrings. But like, what makes you different Like that's what I'm seeing is our industry of digital marketing, seo, whatever you want to call it and, however, your position in that is becoming commoditized. Your, your position in that is becoming commoditized. And, um, like that's just what I'm seeing is like, well, you're just as good as this person because you do the same thing. And when people build a website, they're like it's oh, it's SEO optimized. Like they said, it's SEO optimized. You're saying it's SEO optimized. It's SEO optimized.

Speaker 3: 13:28

And.

Speaker 2: 13:29

I'm like optimized, it's SEO optimized, and I'm like it's being put in a bucket of a commodity. Like I'm curious from you, like are you seeing that? And like maybe maybe give everybody a quick like masterclass and you know, a few minutes on, setting the foundation of how they should see the world from an ICP standpoint. And like, what are those big emotional triggers? Because I think people have forgotten, with all the shiny new objects, that we need to get back to humans, or humans, and you need to be communicating to them. And yeah, everybody rationalizes their decisions with logic, but they make their decisions based on emotions. And so, like I feel like, with 50% less traffic to the website, you better hit on these emotional cords, like very well, because you might only get one chance 100%.

Speaker 3: 14:24

Traffic is going down. Reddit, google, linkedin everyone's keeping the traffic to themselves right, and Rand Fishkin talks a lot about this, about the alligator reports, where you're seeing traffic going down. At the end of the day, the funnel's different and people aren't coming into the funnel the same way they used to and it's not a linear funnel. It's not enough to just know your customer's age or their persona I actually really do not like that word persona. It's not based on what really matters. So if we're thinking about how do I cater, how do I get more people to convert, so let's talk about it. Traffic's going down, which means that when people do come to your website, you have to convert them. You're not going to convert them by just talking about yourself. You're not going to convert them by saying you're the all-in-one platform for, or we're powered by AI, or the number one solution for X. You're going to convert them by solving their problems, which means you have to understand the top three pains that led them to your website. You have to know what's keeping them up at night. You have to know how they want to feel after finding a solution. So it's not enough to just know the features. Everyone has those features, and if your competitor doesn't have them today, they're going to have them tomorrow.

Speaker 3: 15:57

What you need to be focusing on are those emotions, and over the past decade actually much longer we've identified over 223 different emotional triggers that impact buying decisions. But there are two clusters of emotions that are the most impactful, and what that means is it's never just one emotion, it's always a few at play, and there's two clusters of emotions that impact buying decisions the most. One is self-image. Self-image is how I want to feel after finding a solution, how I want to feel about myself. I want to feel proud. I want to feel more successful. I want to feel smarter. I want to feel like a better mom. I want to feel like I'm successful. So there are a lot of self-image emotions involved when someone's buying a product, whether it's B2C or B2B. The second cluster of emotions is social image, and that is huge and, I would argue, probably the most common in B2B and SaaS, but definitely everywhere, right? But social image is how do prospects want other people to feel about them after finding a solution? I want them to feel that I am the go-to person in the office. I want them to think I deserve a promotion. I want them to think that I'm smart, I want them to think that I'm a great mom.

Speaker 3: 17:32

There are all sorts of different emotional, social, emotional triggers that are so dominant when we make decisions. In fact, think with Google recently found that B2B purchases are eight times more likely to buy a more expensive product if they see personal value. So think about that. They will literally go out and they will be now comparing I don't know two project management solutions or two accounting software programs and if they see a personal value, even if it's more expensive, they will buy it, which I think is phenomenal, and we're all ignoring that. So, yeah, especially now that you know, google's trained us to kind of searching keywords. But LLMs is conversational. We're going in and we're like literally saying this is my problem and this is who I manage and this person's annoying and how do I do this? And I need a tool that can also do this and can also do that And're emotional like I'm.

Speaker 3: 18:35

I'm doing this research now to identify how emotional LLM searches, but it's a lot more emotional, which means that there's a lot more uh digging right.

Speaker 3: 18:47

So, um, a recent study I think it was by SEMrush found that the most common information that's showing up in LLMs right now is what shows up on page four, five and six in Google, because the people on page one on Google are SEO optimized, but the people on pages four, five and six are actually solving someone's problem. And because people are in LLMs writing their problems, that's what's showing up in LLMs. So if you want to get more traffic, so that your traffic does go up and actually convert people, you have to be solving the problem. So it's just a call for like hey guys, wake up. You need to actually go back to the foundations. Why are people buying from you? What are their pains, what are they trying to feel? And then create content, landing pages, ads, emails everything has to be about that, so that LLMs will recommend you, so that you show up in search and so that you can get that conversion.

Speaker 2: 19:43

So, Talia, I want to, I want to make this real for everybody, because I think this is so great. I will let's just use, because we know most of the listeners are agencies and freelancers and some in-house companies. Right, what are you seeing? Or like you could even, like we could just create, like some company that's a marketing company, right, Because this is the crazy thing. I've had two other agency owners reach out to us to say I haven't had a call with them yet, but they've reached out to us to say like hey, like maybe we should pool resources, Like like I don't know what that means, Um, but I'm certainly interested. I think that everybody's hurting, right? Like I think everybody's hurting, and so I would love to kind of maybe use, just like you know, XYZ company, that's a digital marketing company. What do you see?

Speaker 2: 20:39

The common issues that they're doing? Or like maybe we do a before and after and and let them know what they should be doing. Because, to your point, I there's a couple of blogs that I follow and some of them have gotten bought up by some of the bigger guys and then they just hide all the data. But it's super conversational blogs of someone just talking and they're talking through the issues and I can really connect with what's happening and I can see how LLMs could decipher a lot of that and kind of give you that data and it solves the problem.

Speaker 2: 21:14

But you're right, Like I think most of these websites are all commoditized and are generic and are offering the same things. And so when someone's trying to get more visibility for SEO or they have a CRM issue or whatever it is, how do you decide between all these agencies if all these agencies are also checking the box? And I would even say one of the things you said earlier that had my mind going was like the deep Harbor issue on the B2B side, Like so you know, whatever that commercial was, you never got fired from hiring IBM.

Speaker 3: 21:52

I don't know exactly how it goes, but yeah, uh, it's um, it's an, it's a saying from the 70s.

Speaker 2: 21:59

Nobody ever got fired by buying IBM yeah, like that, like I feel like that's still true today, and even I saw Mike just went, went over across the river to like I don't know. Like I just feel like there's like companies that are a little outside the box but focused on results, but but no one wants to get fired and they want companies that are safe, and you were talking about how companies need to be viewed, and so I'm just curious how should agencies be positioning themselves today if they're dealing with these type of issues traffic loss? They've checked the SEO list and optimized everything. They're ranking at the top of Google or somewhere in that range. I guess they're running ads.

Speaker 2: 22:54

I see a lot of them I love, where SEO companies run a ton of SEO ads but they're not ranking on SEO, and I'm kind of like, should an SEO be your calling card? That's just me, I don't know, but what should agencies be doing? Or what do you see agencies doing wrong? I'd love to bring it down to a level that people could tangibly execute on, because I think that there is a lot of change going on and people are struggling and everybody's talking about right on LinkedIn that 50% of agencies are going to be gone in three years, you know, and it's scaring everybody.

Speaker 3: 23:27

Yeah, I run an agency. That's scary, definitely scary. That's scary, definitely scary, um I mean, how do you unpack that?

Speaker 2: 23:39

I think there's a lot in there, right? Whatever you want, whatever you want, I think, go in any direction you want with it.

Speaker 3: 23:42

What I mean what I mean by that? Is our agency's about to change? Yeah, because things are different. And again, like this takes me back to our the conversation. We where we started, which is how are you using AI? Are you outsourcing your brain and you're just leveraging it to think for you, or are you using AI to you know, hone your skills, become better at what you're already doing? I think the agency world is definitely changing. It's going to change.

Speaker 3: 24:19

The way you hire people inside your agency has to change. You have to be hiring people that are prompt engineers that know how to use AI, are prompt engineers that know how to use AI, not because you need to be an AI first company, but because, a as an agency, you have to reduce cost and, b the way that your output for your clients has to be a little different. So if you're serving like huge enterprises, chances are they're always going to need you. They're always going to need most of your work because they're going to need people to come in and do the actual work. But if you're a smaller agency, you need to think about the ways that you are serving your clients, and I think a lot of that is to do with rethinking not just your services, because that's a given, but just how you operate internally. But not because we're headless chicken running around worried about all work, but because things are changing. So what is like why should I invest with you as a company? Like, why should I invest with you as a company? Like, why should I pay you now? Right now, most like AI can't do most of the stuff that agencies do for us. Okay, like, can they? Yes, if you find a really good, prompt engineer and you're like this is an incredible person that can just do all this stuff for me, yes, but generally speaking, right now you can't really like fire your agency and get one person to do everything with AI. It's just it's going to take some time. But, yes, you should be thinking about your services, how you do things internally, the tools that you're providing your clients, but what you shouldn't be doing is switching everything into AI and running around and like firing everyone. And, yes, like, I'm getting these emails too, and I think there's a lot of different agencies that are thinking about, okay, how do I become a bit bigger? How do I get you know, add more services into our bucket? But I do think, at the end of the day, ai is going to do all the jobs that were not, that don't require a lot of thinking. Right, like all the things that you can automate and do faster.

Speaker 3: 26:53

But if you want to stay in advance, it's not about using AI better. It's about honing your own knowledge and becoming that person that steers strategy, because strategy comes from within and understanding humans is important. And, again, as long as you're selling to humans and not robots, you need to understand emotions. You need to understand how people buy. You can use tons of tools, but you shouldn't be using them as a crutch. So if you want to stay in the game I guess is the right way to put it then you have to become better, smarter, you have to be thinking differently. And, again, it's not a race for tools. It's a race for having a proven process, being able to replicate it, being able to speak about it in a very distinct way and also really help companies execute it in a good way, and just being that person that's smart in the room.

Speaker 3: 28:04

And I think, when it comes to SEO agencies I mean, mike King talks about this all the time right, like the way we measure, seo should change the way we measure the things that we do should change For me. I'm a CRO agency. We help brands increase conversions. Like we run experiments. We measure our success literally by did this sell or did it not?

Speaker 3: 28:32

With SEO, it's different, and I think that for a very long time, seo was measured by traffic. Here's a pretty graph of traffic going up. You can no longer do that and you need to understand that and you need to be able to explain why that's happening and why conversion matters. Back in 2015, I think I was pregnant with my first kid and I got on stage in London for Search Love and I gave a talk about emotional targeting and conversion optimization and and it was a search conference and I literally most of the feedback was this has nothing to do with SEO. Why was this? Why was this person on stage? Conversion has nothing to do with SEO. And I think I got up at an SEO week and I was like guys, if you don't know this, there's no SEO anymore. This is the foundation of everything. It's not about traffic.

Speaker 2: 29:41

You know, I feel like when companies come to us, they're trying to solve a problem. They're you know they're trying to get. Maybe the large majority of, let's say, seo companies are trying to generate more leads or increase the bottom line, and a lot of the people working in the agency and we've had to talk to our team is it's not about rankings, it's not about being first position as Google. It's like is this selling? Like, are these leads that you're seeing actually the kind of leads that they want? How do we lead score? I feel like, maybe okay, if it's a year engagement, the first six months is getting it to rank and getting people coming to the site, and then the second half of it, or whatever timeframe you want to put, three months, three months, you know, is CRO Like it automatically switches to CRO. In my mind of like how we should be looking at the project. If we're like managing services, seo for a client, we start to focus on CRO and and now with the traffic drop, it's like all about CRO. It's like put out the information you want to put out. The LMs are going to find it, people are going to find it, the search, you know, the AI overviews are going to find it and now that they come to your website, you have to convert them. You have to run the split test. You have to, you know you have to lead score. You have to set up heat mapping.

Speaker 2: 31:07

I mean, what are the things that you see as like the biggest, um, you know, biggest opportunities? Like I always see with clients, like retargeting is like a big thing, like come in. I'm like you're spending all this money on ads or doing SEO, like let's set up some retargeting to bring them back. Like that's like one of the big things for me, that that I look at to say, hey, like let's get a little bit more out of this funnel. It might be like a leaky funnel, that terminology, but I feel like CRO is so important. I would love for you to kind of share some, some secrets or some best practices, or even just things that you see companies doing. Over and over again. You're like, hey, you just need to fix start here. You know, here's the foundational stuff.

Speaker 3: 31:53

I think. Well, the start here is always research. Like that is probably the number one thing everyone should be doing, which is running surveys, doing customer interviews, review mining on Reddit, uh, social listening, mining for conversations, and starting to gather voice of customer research, like really understanding what people are talking about, what they're complaining about, what they love, what they hate, what they're missing, what's not working for them. The second step is auditing your website from a different lens. That isn't just do I have one call to action? Is my call to action the same color on the page? Did I remove my carousel? Of course you need to have you know. You need to do a heuristic analysis. Of course you need to run heat maps and user recordings, but we're not asking ourselves the most basic questions, Like am I making this page about myself or about my customer? Can my customer clearly see their emotional outcome and the outcome that they care about on the page? Can my prospect clearly see their pains reflected back at them, like what they're going through, what they're struggling with, what they've tried, what they haven't, what's working, what's not? Actually, strategically asking yourself what's not working, because in conversion optimization, the biggest problem isn't identifying where the problem is. You've got GA4 for that. It's why, why aren't people converting? And people aren't converting for various reasons.

Speaker 3: 33:32

So you have to do that research. You have to figure out if everything in your messaging, your design, your colors, the visuals that you're choosing, your menu, your blog posts, are they all resonating on an emotional level. And that's where I would start asking myself am I even serving and solving problems? Because that's the place to start and that's where I would start asking myself, like, am I even serving and solving problems? Because that's the place to start and that's how we're helping people. All of our clients are companies that have various types of ICPs, and we're looking at the website and we're asking ourselves you know not just how are things doing in terms of features and pricing, but, okay, when someone comes here, can they clearly see that this product was built for them? Can they clearly see that we're solving the same problems as someone else? Um, that there's people like them who've who've experienced the same stuff? You have to be really looking into the value and those emotions and you have to start with the research.

Speaker 2: 34:38

I feel like the research piece gets skipped over a lot, like when companies and the smaller company you work with, the more they just want to skip over that right. They just want to like I just need more, I just need more ads, I just need higher rankings. I just like let me just shove more people through this funnel and see if it works, you know.

Speaker 3: 35:06

That's the hamster wheel of optimization, right? Because you're under a pressure cooker Cooker and pressure Pressure cooker, you're under like pressure. I'm going to use that.

Speaker 2: 35:17

You're under pressure.

Speaker 3: 35:19

Under pressure. You don't have time for research. You're just like testing stuff and you're changing button colors and you're adding pop-ups and you're reducing form fields and you're throwing spaghetti at the wall. And you're changing button colors and you're adding pop-ups and you're reducing form fields and you're throwing spaghetti at the wall and you're copying your competitors and you're sounding like everyone and you're throwing tools at the stuff and you're just kind of running and running and running, um, and it feels like you can't actually stop for a second and revisit the strategy. And that's where most of us are. The research feels like, oh, who has time for that? That's like four to six weeks of just asking questions.

Speaker 3: 35:58

And the other day I was talking to someone who's a researcher and she said I spent three months researching this and I was like, wow, that sounds fun. And she's like it was fun but no one wanted to hear about it Because everyone's like, oh, what is she doing? Like we need to make money. But the insights I was going over the insights with her and they're incredible. She's managed to shine a light on the specific things that their company can really do better and really helps other people with that their competitors don't. But nowhere on the website is that to be found? You can't see that unless you dig and you spend six months using that platform and you're like, oh, eureka, I can do this, but you could literally say that on the homepage and you would get so many more people converting on the homepage and you would get so many more people converting.

Speaker 2: 36:50

You know, I wish we had more time because I w I feel like we're just getting into the to the meat of this conversation, because I've found with a lot of the big B2B enterprises that I work with, um internet hasn't been a thing for them until recently. Like they just been eating off of their logo for so long. Right, they have salespeople. That logo gets them in the door. The trust that's already been built gets them in the door. The websites were just a thing that was there and I feel like that's changing in. The buyers and the people that are helping the decision makers out are doing this online research and they're they're starting from a such a you know, a basic level and and you know it depends on your industry, right, like if you're you know doing sas, like they're on top of everything and and cutting edge, but a lot of these enterprises are not um of everything and cutting edge. But a lot of these enterprises are not executing on all these levels, right, and they're not even looking for leads. They don't want leads. They got salespeople for that, right.

Speaker 2: 38:02

I have another podcast that I do. It's all about combining marketing and sales. That's the whole topic of the podcast, because salespeople don't look at marketing people in the best light historically. But the buyer's journey is happening now online. What is it like? I don't know what the data is. Today you have a better handle on that. Maybe 75% or more of the buyer's journey. Before someone buys, they've already made that decision, they've already come down to their selection and now they're just calling to get that verification and see if there's any red flags. They've already done all the selection online and it's not even happening on the website anymore. That's the scariest thing is it's all across the internet, it's on Reddit. It's like the scariest thing is like it's.

Speaker 3: 38:51

It's all across the internet.

Speaker 2: 38:53

Yeah, it's on LinkedIn. Yeah, it's like like people don't even get their news anymore, like I was actually having to verify some friends news. They've been following some of these crazy trials I'm not going to go into them of what's going on and they're like so-and-so died, and I was like I don't think they die, like there's misinformation, like I was like like I don't think that happened, like um, you know and so so I, I don't. Like all I can tell people is you got to control how people view you, what you're saying and and how you're being compared to others. And and then, yes, when people come to your website, you, you better know who you're talking to and what you're saying to them, and and and connect quickly, because the attention spans of people are what is it?

Speaker 2: 39:41

Uh, I remember there was a study by Microsoft quite a few years ago. My mom, my mom, worked for Microsoft, so but it was like human Americans have a less of a tension span than a goldfish. Okay, it was when the study came out. Okay, and that was before Tik TOK. Okay, that was before these shorts, and now like constant. So I mean, in this world, you know it's, it's it's really critical to get to the point and know who you're speaking to and have them raise their hand and and get them to take action.

Speaker 2: 40:13

I mean, if, if there was like one unknown secret, right, like one big takeaway that you had, what, what would you want to communicate to people that are, that are out there, that are struggling with this and they're they're pulling all the levers, they're pushing all the buttons, they're changing up the stuff to try to get the conversions, which I think a lot of times, if you don't measure it to your point of A B testing, uh, you can get in a detrimental place, like we we've actually had to set up on client websites where we're log tracking everything that happens, because they'll go in there and they'll start to change stuff and we won't know what they did and then we'll have to like reverse it because we're like, so I don't know, I've dealt with a lot of craziness with with you got a lot of different people, even like marketing it.

Speaker 2: 41:04

You know sales all trying to get something out of like what they want from the website and a voice like you know how do you speak to them and then like what's like one big secret that people need to be doing?

Speaker 3: 41:19

I think I think the biggest advice I can give right now is that if you feel like you need to keep running after the ai frenzy and like figure out what tool to use next, stop. You do have time to do the research. You should be doing the research, um, and the only way to get results is by doing that. So yeah, I know it's unsexy, it's annoying, it takes time, it's not easy to do, um, I've been doing this for like 15 years now, but that's how we increase conversions for our clients and that's how we consistently do it, and and we're going to keep doing that, because we find hidden gems and we understand and we help these businesses transform everything that they do, starting from the smallest thing like an ad, all the way to, like, their entire customer journey. And it feels like you can't take the time to do it, but if you don't do it now, I don't think you're ever going to get to it.

Speaker 2: 42:23

I love that. So, Talia, tell us a little bit more about your company, how they find out more. I know you're very active on LinkedIn and you have some decks floating out there too. Uh, there's some great, great information. I would love for you to just kind of um uh, talk more about um uh, where people might be able to find you and and and your company and what it does. Uh, for those of you watching uh get uplift, uh, uh, and you can see how uh her name is spelled. Last name woof Uh, so it's really easy to remember. And uh, she's all over the internet, but why don't you just uh, share, share with everyone?

Speaker 3: 43:02

Yeah, so, um, I have, I run get uplift, which is a conversion optimization agency, and we help brands optimize their funnels and their customer journeys using emotion. Um, I developed the emotional targeting framework and I recently wrote a book called emotional targeting which is out now, and I also have the website, taliawolfcom. So on taliawolfcom you can find the book and courses and all sorts of like do it yourself kind of DIYing, and on getupliftco is the agency, so that's where you can get like all the consulting and all sorts of like do-it-yourself kind of DIYing. And on getupliftco is the agency, so that's where you can get like all the consulting and all the help we've like done for you services for conversion optimization. Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, on Instagram, just connect, ask questions. I love that and, yeah, that's me Awesome.

Speaker 2: 43:52

Well, definitely give me those links and we'll put them in the show notes. I need to check out the book myself. It was something that you had shared and it's on my reading list, for sure, and everyone that's out there. If you're listening and you are struggling with what's going on, I think the big takeaway here is don't change shiny objects which you know. You know we're in marketing, you know that.

Speaker 2: 44:20

Go back to the tried and true principles. Understand you're talking to humans and really conversion optimization and what Ms Wolf here is doing is so important that it should probably be your primary focus. And so, if you're not doing this, go check out her courses, read her book, understand what she's doing, reach out to her, because this is what businesses need. What you know ran fish skin. It was like the slide that just hit me was like 58.5% of traffic across the board has dropped. Okay, so we're like 50 to 60% of all traffic's dropped to your website. You better learn how to convert quickly, and so I would reach out to Talia and check out her stuff, and that's why I wanted to bring her on and, and hopefully you can see she is the expert you should be contacting. So, talia, thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 2: 45:17

Until the next time, everyone, my name is Matt Bertram. I would ask you to like, subscribe, follow, share. I'm really trying to move over to YouTube, so we're going to be working on that, but leave us a review on the podcast. I know that the sound quality is not always perfect, but hopefully today it's better. You know, talia, everybody leaves the bad reviews, right.

Speaker 2: 45:40

Yes, there's, something slime from bad reviews too, though Well, there's great feedback from that, so hopefully everybody can see I'm on a quality mic here, even remote, and I got a hard plugin, so I I do hear you, you know, if you'd like more guests, like Talia, you know, please subscribe and like. That just helps us get a better guess and do more of what we do until the next time. My name is Matt Bertram. This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Bye, bye for now.