Marketing That Connects and Converts  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast]] - Full Title: Marketing That Connects and Converts - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/dbc67884-ef18-4cad-a8a0-1c2651b133ec ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Example of Poor Emotional Targeting** - Many websites focus too much on technology and pricing, sounding the same and lacking emotional connection. - Research shows buyers decide emotionally after ensuring features and pricing fit their needs. Transcript: Talia Wolf Yeah, so we've done this with hundreds of brands, but the go-to is really how we essentially see that most websites are very very focused on pricing features technology we're powered By ai you know that stuff um and kind of forgetting gluten free right right whatever the only one platform for x or powered by ai or we're the number one platform for something else. So everyone sounds the same and looks the same and done this with multiple companies from Strata, Identity Orchestration to Teamwork, which is a project management solution to also E-commerce sites and really a lot of different types of companies. Normally what happens is we'll notice that there is a very big kind of focus on highlighting the technology and the pricing. And what we've forgotten is that there's people behind the screens that are making decisions that aren't just about integrations and the technology behind it. So what we do is we run emotional targeting research to identify why people really buy from them. So once they've checked, you know, the pricing and it's like in their category and the integrations all work and that the feature, they have all the features that they made in their little Shopping list. How do they make a decision? What matters to them? How do they feel right now? What are they struggling with? What pains do they have? And how do they want to feel after finding a solution? ([Time 0:02:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ea37c9a0-62a8-4a41-a5eb-93bd0f571ec9)) - **Emotions Transcend Personas** - Traditional personas segment people by demographics but miss emotional commonalities. - Different customers often share the same emotional pains and desires, regardless of background. Transcript: John Jantsch But, you know, I think increasingly people are discovering that their best clients don't all like fit into a persona. I mean, they have a need or a problem or a pain. They may look completely different, right? So how do you kind of zero in then on what the emotional triggers, can I use that word, triggers, are? Talia Wolf So I love that differentiation because, you know, we've been told for decades that we need to be data-driven. And data-driven means knowing personas, like their segmentation, their agenda, location, the browsers that they're using, the devices, their age. So we kind of quantify people into segments and then it's really, really hard to actually write copy or choose images or know what to even say to people to convert. But when you start zeroing in on the pains, we actually notice that most people, no matter if they're a 70, you know, 70-year man in Nebraska or a 15-year kid from the UK, they're all kind Of experiencing the same emotional issues and they have the same pains and hesitations and concerns and they want to feel certain ways. So the way that we go about it is that we conduct research and the research is qualitative research, which means we conduct interviews on customers. We do surveys, both on customers and on visitors. And we also do something called review mining and social listening. ([Time 0:04:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d8ff9203-4ac1-462b-b5c6-2dc3e3b32589)) - **Ethical Emotional Targeting Advice** - Emotional targeting means appealing to emotions people already feel, not creating fear or manipulation. - Ethical marketing helps solve genuine customer problems instead of exploiting fears. Transcript: John Jantsch How do you balance the fact that, you know, some emotional targeting is actually manipulative? It's like, I understand that you're like really afraid of this thing. So I'm going to make you more afraid and that's going to get you to buy or I'm going to I'm going to create scarcity so that, you know, you're worried that you won't get it. So how much of that is manipulative? How much of that is authentic? Talia Wolf Thank you so much for that question. You're not trying to make anyone feel anything. The whole framework is based around the idea and the fact that every decision that we make in life is based on emotion and people are coming to our websites already feeling things. Our role and our job as marketers is to relate to them, to appeal to the emotions that they're already feeling and help solve those problems. Anyone who is trying to manipulate people, trying to scare or fear mongering or anything is not emotional targeting. ([Time 0:06:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b3bacf20-f0d1-476d-9287-6e4cd1730598)) - **Teamwork's Customer-Centric Messaging** - Teamwork tailored its messaging to agencies by emphasizing client-facing profitability pain points. - This focus made prospects feel understood and differentiated Teamwork from generic competitors. Transcript: Talia Wolf And we've seen this a lot. So even with a teamwork, for example, which is a project management solution, can everyone in the world use their project management solution? Absolutely. They have an incredible product. But if you are a person, a company that serves clients, so if you face clients, if you are an agency, a consultant, if you are creative team that serves clients and you have retainers and Projects that are client facing, teamwork is the best product for you. And they've done everything in their product and in their marketing to make sure that when you are an agency owner and you land on their website, you know that teamwork was designed for Your kind of work. And you know that because they're talking about their specific problems that agency owners and project managers and agencies and client facing teams face every single day, which Is profitability, knowing if you're profitable or not, knowing if Pam on accounting is actually doing her work or not. So you could just say, we have great reporting, which is what everyone does. But teamwork and the work that we've done with them over the years has really helped solidify the fact that when someone comes in, they can clearly see that this product was built for Them, for the work that they do that solves their particular issues and problems. And I think a lot of companies are scared to do that because you're afraid to eliminate potential buyers. But we don't understand that by speaking to everyone, we're actually alienating the people that actually would buy from us, would stay with us and would continue to buy from us. ([Time 0:08:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ea529422-c9b3-479b-b264-7d92c576ec51)) - **Honest Pain Point Admission Wins** - An email CRM's honest message about migration difficulty won our trust despite tough process. - Acknowledging customer fears and promising support turned a hard experience into a selling point. Transcript: John Jantsch We recently went shopping for an email service provider CRM and category that is like you said, I mean, line them all up and they all say the same thing. However, the company we went with was the company that spent the greatest amount of time telling us how hard it is to migrate, but that they were going to be with us every step of the way. And they were not even going to charge you until we've migrated. And that was the deal, you know, for us, because when you look at them on the surface, they all seem to do the same thing. But our pain was it's a pain in the butt to switch. And that was their focus. Talia Wolf I love that. And I think the fact that they recognize that, because I talk a lot in my book about the unconscious and the subconscious stuff. So there's things that we say that we think like, Oh, it's the pricing, it's the feature or, but actually underlying that is so many fears. Like what if I migrate all our emails and something happens and a freak accident happens and everything gets deleted and everything gets lost like that's a real fear what if I onboard A product and everyone hates it and thinks you know I failed there's so many emotions involved in a process like that so actually knowing and saying hey look this is hard this sucks we Know you've tried all of these other things, but we're going to help you. We're going to be there every step of the way. That's knowing your audience and understanding their pains. ([Time 0:10:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4a8d6866-bd9b-422f-8cc3-a18570360b4c)) - **Four-Step Emotional Targeting Framework** - Follow the four steps: research, synthesize, emotional audit, and meaningful tests. - This method uncovers real problems and hypotheses, leading to effective conversion improvements. Transcript: John Jantsch Okay. Talia Wolf So there's four steps. The first step is running meaningful research, customer research, which I kind of spoke about before, but in the book, I really explain how to run this research and how to actually ask The right questions, how to know how much information to actually collect. The second step is synthesizing the research. And this is actually really important because a lot of the times we're collecting a ton of data, but we don't know how to turn it into actual insights that we can use. So I talk about the different emotional triggers, the most common emotional triggers that people have, how to put it into different buckets, how to identify when something's a pain, When something's a trigger, when something's more of a desired outcome. In step number three, we take all of our research and we audit our website. And this is super important because when we think about a zero audit, we think, OK, I'll do a heuristic analysis. I'll check that I have one CTA or not two. But when I talk about an audit, I'm actually talking about an emotional targeting audit, which is a set of questions that you ask yourself to. It's a strategic it's strategic questions. Am I appealing on an emotional level? Can people clearly see their specific pains reflected? Can people see what's in it for them? So there's a set of questions that you ask yourself and you kind of make a check for every time you've done that. And I think what's incredible here before I get to the full step is that the hardest part in conversion optimization isn't running tests and isn't identifying where the problem is. It's knowing what the heck is wrong and what changes should I make on a page. When you've done this research and you start doing the audit, it's incredible how quickly you can see the problems. Oh, we're using stories that don't resonate. We're highlighting features people don't care about. We're talking about outcomes people don't care about. So it's so much easier to understand why people aren't converting and come up with a hypothesis, which leads us to step number four, which is running meaningful tests. That's when we say, OK, my hypothesis is, let's say, people can't clearly and easily see that this product was built for them. So now I'm going to try and show this on the page, on my comparison page, on my homepage, in my navigation. And I'm going to see if by weaving in stories and testimonials and the features that people care about, will that increase conversion? So we do research, synthesizing, emotional audit, and running meaningful experiments that aren't button tests, but are actually strategic so that you can learn from them, even if You don't increase conversion. You ([Time 0:12:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/49bbe7d4-43ea-48fc-bd0d-da7184e0a340)) - **Use AI for Deep Customer Insights** - Use AI thoughtfully by inputting valuable customer data and asking focused questions. - Proper AI use can reveal top customer pains and improve messaging by analyzing large data sets. Transcript: John Jantsch You know, we have found over the years that, you know, the best messaging usually comes up right out of the mouth of a customer. And it's in their voice, their words. It's probably not stuff that we think is that sexy, but it's like what they're really, you know, feeling. And it's amazing. And what are we, 14 minutes in, I'm first mentioned of AI. But one of the things that AI has really done, I think, is, you know, a lot of people are using it for writing, but it does amazing analysis. So now you can take tons and tons of data. You take all your sales call transcripts and just dump them all in there and it's going to be able to synthesize, you know, here's the themes. Talia Wolf A hundred percent, you know, garbage in, garbage out. So if you can only feed AI with segmentation and raw data, that's what you're going to get back. And when you're trying to write copy with it and that's the information you fed it, you're going to get really bad copy. But other than that, you're going to get really bad insights. When you feed it valuable insights and you ask the right questions in AI and you're asking it to, hey, tell me what are the top three pains people mention from this thousands, like 1000 Answers in my customer survey. What are the top three pains people mention? When you ask the right questions and you have really valuable data, that's when you get the magic. That's when you get incredible things from AI that you can actually use. ([Time 0:15:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/456a274a-9f5b-4ceb-947f-9c3cd16113a3)) - **Effective A/B Testing With Research** - A/B testing is hard but essential; avoid guesswork by developing hypotheses from research. - Emotion-driven tests deliver strategic learning, gaining internal buy-in and breaking company silos. Transcript: John Jantsch I agree. Because they'll even read everybody else's and theirs and go, oh, I don't know. So talk a little bit about A-B testing, because I think that's a category that is so valuable, but so underutilized, because a lot of people go, this is our best shot, put it out there. Why isn't it working? You know, as opposed to, you know, and again, you know, one of the promises of AI is all of a sudden now we've got potential for dynamic and personalization to where, you know, people can Actually come and hear the message that we believe will be relevant to them. So why aren't people doing more testing? A and B, I guess, would be part of that question would be how to do it effectively. Talia Wolf Well, testing is hard, right? It's really, really hard. Like it's not actually easy if we go back to like being honest and telling our customers. Forget it. I want the magic pill. John Jantsch Give me the magic pill. Talia Wolf A-B testing is hard, but I think it's also hard for most people because we're on a hamster wheel. And I talk about this in my book that when we start A-B testing, we're kind of just guessworking our way around it. And we're Googling or searching on ai for best practices and we're copying our competitors and then we throw stuff on this like whatever tool that we're using and we're like oh it doesn't Even work it doesn't even increase conversion so why am i even wasting my time and that's because we're running meaningless tests with no strategy behind it not to mention obviously The fact that you have to get everyone on board when it comes to A-B testing. You have to sell your ideas. There's a lot of pushback. There's always a lot of like politics inside the organization and it's just hard. But actually, this is why emotional targeting is so great because when you are doing the hard research and you finally have a good hypothesis, you can A, get internal buy-in really quickly Because you could say, look, guys, I've done the research. Here's what our customers and our prospects are saying. And here's what we're saying on our website. Like we're completely missing the mark. I have an idea. I'm not going to do a homepage redesign. Don't worry, but I'm going to send out a few emails and I'm just going to check this or I'm going to test this on a landing page. And let's just see the first you get buy-in. Second, when you run emotion-based tests that are based on a real hypothesis, a meaningful hypothesis, whether you increase conversions or not, you're going to learn something. Now, if you're just testing a blue versus a red button and it decreases conversions or increases conversions, there's nothing you can do with this test. Like you can't actually say, oh, I'm going to change all my buttons to red now. Like there's nothing to actually do with it. But when you learn that, let's say, oh, my prospects are deeply impacted by their social image. They really care about what other people think about them. And buying this product makes other people think a different way about them. And this matters. You can weave that into your ads, your emails, your landing pages, your comparison page, like everything. So I think the reason it's so hard is, again, like we're just running meaningless tests. It's technically hard. You need a lot of people, you need a lot of buy-in, but if you do it the right way, it's super rewarding and you can break all those silos in the company and say, look, tested this, we learned This. Hey, sales team, you should be using this content. Hey, product team, we're learning that people really care about it. You should be talking about this product this way and this feature this way. ([Time 0:17:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fd12152c-a5b5-497a-9ec8-5da0ef1701d5)) - **Be an Emotional Detective** - Become an emotional detective by researching the real reasons why customers buy. - Understanding customer emotions enables creating websites and experiences people want to engage with. Transcript: John Jantsch How does that play out in kind of your work? Talia Wolf Well, most of all work when we become emotional detectives is doing the research and really identifying those emotions and why people buy. Because I truly believe that if we, whatever you're selling, if you can identify the real why behind the purchase, there's no stopping you. There's nothing you won't be able to do in terms of optimizing every single page and asset that you create. So the book and my website and my courses and the consulting, the agency, everything is about helping teams become emotional detectives, getting to understand more about their customers Than just their behavioral data, but really understanding the people behind the screens so that they can create user experiences and websites that people want to convert to and actually Like. ([Time 0:21:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/58ab3cbb-f09b-4d7c-a2e3-3b72ff2784e4))