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Conversion problems? It’s not your button color—it’s your messaging. Talia Wolf, GetUplift founder, joins us to break down how emotions, not just data, drive buying decisions – and how to build high-converting funnels by tapping into what your customers actually care about.
Beyond Button Colors: How Emotional Targeting Drives Real Conversion Growth
Let’s be honest—most of us approach conversion optimization all wrong. We tweak button colors, swap hero images, and fiddle with form fields hoping for that magical uplift in conversions. I’ve been guilty of it myself. But what if I told you that real, sustainable conversion growth has nothing to do with these surface-level tactics?
That’s exactly what I learned in my recent conversation with conversion optimization expert Talia Wolf on the Agents of Change Podcast. Talia has helped companies around the globe generate more leads, sales, and ROI through her emotional targeting framework—an approach that digs deeper than traditional CRO tactics to uncover why people actually buy.
The Problem with Traditional CRO
“Conversion optimization is usually viewed as a tactic,” Talia explained. “When people think about it, you think about changing a call-to-action button, changing the hero image, reducing a form field.”
But this approach rarely produces meaningful results. Why? Because it doesn’t address the core issue: understanding why your customers buy from you in the first place.
In today’s noisy digital landscape, where competitors are just a click away, looking and sounding like everyone else is the fast track to being ignored. And with AI tools generating similar-sounding copy for everyone, this problem is only getting worse.
“Everyone just looks and sounds the same,” Talia points out. “When you use emotional targeting, you are able to own the market. You stand out and you’re able to clearly show your prospects that you built a product for them.”
What is Emotional Targeting?
At its core, emotional targeting acknowledges something that neuroscientists, psychologists, and major brands have known for centuries: every decision we make is emotionally driven. Yes, even those “logical” B2B software purchases.
Talia’s emotional targeting framework consists of three key steps:
- Research: Understanding customers beyond demographic data
- Emotional Targeting Audit: Strategically analyzing your funnel
- Meaningful Testing: Running experiments based on emotional drivers
Let’s break these down.
Step 1: Research That Reveals Real Motivations
Traditional marketing focuses on demographic data—age, location, job title. But emotional targeting digs deeper to understand:
- What are your customers’ biggest pains?
- What are their desired outcomes?
- How do they want to feel after finding a solution?
Even if you’re a small business without tons of customer data, you can still gather these insights through social listening and review mining.
“Social listening and review mining doesn’t require you to have a lot of clients,” Talia explains. “All it does is require you to go into the places where your should-be customers are already on and having these conversations.”
Here’s where to look:
- Reddit: “Almost all of our clients get chosen at some point through Reddit,” Talia notes. Look for conversations about your brand, competitors, or industry.
- Facebook Groups & LinkedIn: Monitor discussions where your target audience hangs out.
- Amazon Book Reviews: Look for books related to the problem your product solves. What are readers praising or complaining about?
This approach is particularly valuable for small businesses that don’t have the traffic or customer base for extensive surveys or user testing.
Step 2: The Emotional Targeting Audit
Once you understand your customers’ motivations, it’s time to audit your website and marketing materials. But not in the way you might think.
Traditional CRO audits check if you have a CTA above the fold or if your site loads quickly. An emotional targeting audit looks at whether your messaging, design, and UX actually resonate with your customers’ emotional drivers.
Talia shared a compelling example from a project management software client. Through research, they discovered their ideal customers were agencies and client-facing teams. While their competitors all looked similar, they revamped their entire site to focus on client work:
- Their homepage highlighted how features specifically help deliver great client work
- Their comparison page grew from 500 to 3,500 words, directly addressing how they solve agency problems better than competitors
- Even their navigation was personalized to client-facing teams
The result? A 54% uplift in organic conversions from their ideal customer profile.
Step 3: Meaningful Testing
The final step is testing—but not the kind you’re used to. Instead of testing button colors or image placement, emotional targeting tests strategic approaches:
- Does highlighting customer pain points convert better than showcasing desired outcomes?
- Do users respond better to product-focused or customer-focused messaging?
- Which emotional driver resonates most with your audience?
The beauty of this approach is that you learn something valuable whether your test “wins” or not. If an emotion-based test fails, you’ve gained insight into what doesn’t motivate your audience. If it succeeds, you can apply that learning across all your marketing channels—from email campaigns to sales calls.
How to Get Started Today
If you’re inspired to try emotional targeting but don’t know where to begin, Talia recommends starting with social listening:
- Spend time on Reddit, Facebook groups, and other platforms where your audience discusses their challenges
- Look for recurring themes in these conversations
- Check your website to see if you’re addressing these themes at all
“What was the one repeating theme that you’ve seen in conversations?” Talia asks. “Have you even mentioned it? Is it anywhere on your website? That could be something that you could optimize for.”
Beyond the Website
While we focused primarily on website optimization in our conversation, this framework extends far beyond your site. The insights you gather can inform your:
- Email marketing messaging
- Ad copy and targeting
- Sales conversations
- Content marketing strategy
- Product development
The Bottom Line
In a digital landscape where everyone is starting to look and sound the same, emotional targeting gives you a way to stand out, connect authentically with your audience, and drive sustainable conversion growth.
It’s not a quick fix—it requires real research and strategic thinking. But unlike changing button colors, it leads to results that actually last.
Emotional Targeting: The Key to Higher Conversions Episode Transcript
Rich: Alright, my next guest is the founder of GetUplift, the CRO agency high-growth brands like Bitly, Sprout Social, Teamwork, Thinkific, and Cato Networks turn to when they want to optimize their funnels and create experiences customers want to convert to.
Using customer centric methods and emotional targeting, she and her team generate more leads, sales, and ROI for clients. She’s been invited to keynote on hundreds of stages, such as Google, MozCon, Growth Marketing Summit, Product Hackers Conference, SMX, and many more. It was recently listed as one of the most influential experts in conversion optimization.
In fact, I discovered her when ChatGPT recommended I reach out to her and get a quote for an upcoming article. So she’s the real deal.
Today we’re going to be answering your most pressing conversion questions with none other Talia Wolf. Talia, welcome to the program. She’s giving serious jazz hands if you just listen to the audio on this.
It’s great to have you here. And just want to start with how you got into all this. What was your journey like that you became this conversion rate optimization expert, because I don’t remember seeing that on any of my college syllabi?
Talia: Yeah. That’s such a great question. And I think the honest to God truth is, I stumbled into it. So there’s no hero’s journey. I am an optimizer with everything in life. And I was working at a social media agency back in the day when we all were reporting on likes and comments, and that was big thing. And one of the biggest things that I was focused on was conversions.
Now, I didn’t know that’s what I was focused on. But my role was driving traffic, and I started asking questions like, “Hey, client of mine, are you seeing any sales from this traffic that I’m sending to you from Facebook, from YouTube, Twitter, from LinkedIn ads? What are you seeing?” And they’d say, most of them would say, “I don’t know, we don’t have Google Analytics. What’s Google Analytics?” This is so long ago.
But the ones that were tracking it would have responses, or I would go in and jimmy rig the thing and try and figure it out. And then I just started changing things. And at first it was just like, okay, let me change this headline. Let me change this image. Let me see what happens if I do this to the landing page. And someone on my team said, you know what you’re doing is called “conversion rate optimization”. And I said, huh, what’s that? That sounds fancy. Sounds cool. So that really is where my journey began.
And from that, I got really into it and then started working in an agency and kind of led that agency for conversion optimization. And then started Get Uplift, which is now nine years. My own conversion optimization agency, so that’s kind of how I stumbled upon it. Discovered it was a thing.
Back in the day, there were only two companies doing this. Now, every other person says they do it. And in the past you’d ask, and I’d have to explain to people why they need to do it. Now I have to say why they’re doing it wrong and how they should be doing it.
Rich: CROs, conversion rate optimization, for a lot of people who are just getting into this, feels like such a technical, cold, analytic type term. And yet your approach to this is you’ve got a framework called the Emotional Targeting Framework, which feels much more touchy-feely. And not in a bad way! Can you talk to us a little bit about, walk us through what that emotional targeting framework is all about?
Talia: Yeah, 100%. So you are right. Conversion optimization is usually viewed as a tactic. And kind of like an additional thing that you have to, you have SEO, you have PPC, and you also have conversion rate optimization.
And when people think about it. You think about, okay changing a call-to-action button, changing the hero image, reducing a form field. And we think about it as changing elements on the page. And honestly, that’s how I started out, too. I changed elements on the page.
But what I quickly found out is that this would not produce the results that I needed. Not for myself, not for my clients. And if I wanted to create, to generate real growth for my clients, I had to understand why people buy from them. Because if I could understand why people buy, then I can tap into that.
So I went back to my bat cave, and I started doing some research. And I understood something that neuroscientists, psychologists, and let’s face it, the biggest brands in the world know and have known for hundreds of years, is that every single decision in life is based on emotion. Every decision, whether it’s B2B, B2C, you’re buying insurance, you’re buying software, whatever it is you’re buying, emotion leads that decision.
And what that led me to do is essentially create a framework that helps me uncover why people buy from my client and translate that into high converting funnels. And really what it’s based on is if I can understand why people buy, the real ‘why’ beyond features, pricing, and the generic stuff, then I can really look at a page and say, what’s not working? Is my story not resonating? Are the words that I’m using or are they not connecting? Are the testimonials incorrect? What are we doing here that isn’t resonating on an emotional level for our customers?
And then you can optimize it. Because really, I would say that the hardest part about conversion optimization isn’t finding the leak, and it isn’t launching the test. It’s knowing what changes to make. So the Emotional Targeting Framework is really built around identifying what the problem really is, not where it is, but understanding why people aren’t converting. And then being able to make the right changes.
Rich: So as the son of a psychologist, and as somebody who thought he was going to become a psychologist when he went to college for the first time, I totally agree and gel with everything that you’re saying. And I’m sure that a lot of people listening are feeling the same way. But then it becomes the question, when it was just tactics I could just switch out my hero image, headline, whatever. I knew how to do that. Now I need to understand why people buy from me. And that’s a lot messier, because people’s emotions and brains are a lot messier.
Can you walk us through a little bit of your process when you’re working with a client, to really under understand and uncover that why people buy from your clients?
07:29 Talia: Yeah, and I think I’ll take a step back and I’ll explain why. I think because I’m going to, I’m going to get into it and it’s going to be a lot harder than what anyone’s doing right now. And I just want to explain why this is so important.
Because the world right now is very noisy. We have hundreds of competitors, whether they’re direct or indirect. And right now what’s happening is everyone looks and sounds the same, and I think AI is making it even worse because everyone just looks the same and is using GPT or whatever tool they’re using to create copy, to create content, and everyone just sounds and looks the same.
When you use emotional targeting, you are able to own the market. You stand out and you’re able to clearly show your prospect that you built a product for them, that you understand them, and that you are the best solution for them. So while this process is a lot harder, it just really is not a hack, it’s not a tactic. When you do it right, it’s something that you’ll be able to use for years to come and you’ll be able to really stand out.
So now that I’ve said that, I’ll say the process is really three steps. Step number one is research, which I’ll get into in a minute. Step number two is an emotional targeting audit. And step number three is testing, running meaningful tests.
The research part is where we need to take a step back and get to know our customers beyond behavioral data. If I ask you today, who’s your client, who’s your customers? Most of us can say their age, geographical location, their job title, their gender, their browsers that they’re using, the devices. We’re very focused on data-driven marketing and data points, we’re not seeing the human behind the screen. So with this research, your goal is to understand what are their biggest pains? What are their desired outcomes? How do they want to feel after finding a solution? And really get to know them better through surveys, interviews from user testing, from review mining, social listening, which we can get into specifically in a minute.
Step number two, once you have all these insights and you’ve uncovered the real motivators, then it’s so much easier to go to your best funnel and audit it strategically.
So when people think about a CRO audit, we think about checking if you know you have a CTA above the fold, you are not using too many colors, you don’t have a carousel. When I talk about a CRO audit, I’m thinking about it strategically. You are asking a set of predefined questions to see if the words, the messaging, the design, the UX, are all resonating and helping people clearly see that this product was built for them, that it is better than others, and that they should buy into it and really clearly see why they should care about it. And once you’ve done that, then you start running meaningful experiments.
So instead of changing elements on the page, you’ll run an experiment that maybe looks into, people coming to our website do not clearly see this is for them. So I’m going to dedicate an A/B test now to clarify throughout the whole page that this was built for the kind of work my prospect does. And it’s a different kind of test than saying, “our conversions are down on the homepage. What changes can I make?” And guesstimating your way through it versus coming at it from a problem statement where I know this is the problem, now what are the different elements I can change to fix that problem? Does that make sense?
Rich: It does. But do you have a recent example that you’ve gone through, just so we can anchor it down? That’s how I learn better.
Talia: Of course. Yeah. So let’s take a look at a project management solution. We’ve run dozens of tests for them. We’ve done A/B testing on their pricing page, on their homepage, landing page, comparison pages, and even their menu and navigation.
One of the things that we clearly saw is that their ideal customers are agencies and any type of team that does client work. So if you work in a law firm, if you’re a creative team, if you do marketing, any type of agency or anyone who’s client facing should be using this product.
Can other people use it? 100%. But when you look at product management solutions, they’re all pretty much the same. They have the same features, they have the same technology, and you could switch out their logos and not know which one is ClickUp, which one is Monday, which one is Asana. Let’s be honest.
So one of the things that we did with our client is we went all in on the messaging and design and experience of client work, of delivering great client work. For example, on the homepage, we started talking about the type of things that they are trying to achieve. And we showed them, we paired the features that they have that a lot of other companies might have, with how it helps them as agency owners or project managers or product managers. And we did the same on their comparison page.
One of the most interesting things that we did with the comparison page is that when you look, you know everyone’s comparing, no one’s just looking at you in isolation. When prospects come to your website and they start a free trial, they are also trialing two or three other products at the same time.
And we did a lot of research into their competitors. And usually when you look at a comparison page, it says something very generic like, “Why choose this company over this company? Here’s a table with a lot of features and pricing and sign up now”. Now what we did is we pointed out, we took a page that was about 500 words and turned it into a 3,500-word page. And went deep into look, this company says it does this, but it actually costs a lot more. You are saying that you need this and this, they say they do it, but actually they do a lot of upsells. And we started pointing out a lot of things.
We also started highlighting testimonials from people that made the switch. So everything that we did on this page was adding more context into why people that do client work should choose this company versus its competitor. And what was really interesting to see is that we got a 54% uplift in organic conversions. So conversions from the organic channel, from ICPs, from their ideal customer profiles, by adding more copy, by making it about them, by adding visuals and testimonials, and just making the whole experience about client work.
And just to add one more example, one of the most interesting tests that we ran for them was on the menu and navigation of the website. When you go to a B2B company, you’re used to seeing the same thing, right? Like it’s pricing, features, product tour, sign up, or get a demo. We decided to go all in on the client work idea and their customers, and we basically personalized the whole thing to client facing teams.
So when you went into features, you’d see features that help you get client work done. The types of client work the client facing teams that use this company. Here are the testimonials that you should be reading, the use cases that you should be using. Compare us to what we actively said, look, here are the comparison pages, we know you’re comparing.
So everything we did within the menu was about them. And that got us a huge increase, too, in conversions and also ideal customer profile signups. So just a quite a long story, but very interesting in terms of pinpointing that.
Rich: No. Great examples. And that definitely helps me understand. Of course, in my own brain, I’m thinking about our own website and all the things that we can be doing as a client facing company.
Now that sounds like the research, is that also the emotional targeting audit that you often do? What does that look like?
Talia: So the emotional targeting audit is based on the research that we’ve done. The research that we’ll do is look at social listening. So just listening to the conversations on Reddit, on LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook groups. We’re in there reading through conversations that people are having. We’re doing review mining to see what people are saying about our client and their competitors. We are doing surveys on the website for visitors and to existing customers, to really identify the real reason they buy. And we’re also doing interviews.
Once we’ve done all that research, we have a lot of insights. And most of the insights are down to the top three pains that lead people to our website, the top three desired outcomes, the emotional outcomes. So how do people want to feel after finding a solution? And the obstacles and concerns that people have before signing up, the things that are stopping them from converting.
Once we’re armed with those insights, we then audit the website. So yes, we look at UX and we look at heuristics, and we look at fonts and design, but we’re also looking at messaging. And it’s a lot easier with this audit to see what makes no sense. Oh, I’m using completely wrong stories. I’m highlighting features they don’t care about. Or, I haven’t paired the emotional result people are going to get from this feature. Or, I’m speaking to the CMO when I should actually be speaking to the general manager. Or, I am using quotes that are too general and they’re not actually solving people’s problems.
So the emotional targeting audit helps you identify where the problems are. And the next step in emotional testing and meaningful testing is trying to solve those problems.
Rich: Okay. Makes a lot of sense. And then ultimately, you mentioned testing. So testing does feel more of the clinical side of things. Is it just literally testing like normally would be? Is there anything specific from the emotional targeting framework that you look at differently when it comes to the testing?
Talia: Yeah, so we are talking about A/B testing, but I do want to say that when it comes to conversion optimization, conversion optimization isn’t just A/B testing. There’s a lot of things you can do if you don’t have a lot of traffic. If you don’t have enough conversions per month, you can still optimize your website.
But when we’re talking about experimentation and A/B testing, we are huge advocates for running meaningful tests. So again, not button color testing, but more, we believe the people are highly motivated by how they want their manager to think about them. So we know that people that buy this product will help get a sense of confidence and they’ll be able to promote themselves, and maybe they’ll get that promotion that they want. So the test that we will run will be based on that.
We will change multiple things on the website from within that angle to see if that has an impact on conversion. So it’s an emotion-based test. More examples are the before and after, what works more when you talk about their pains or when you talk about their desired outcomes? Or what works more, when you talk about the product itself or when you talk about the customers and who they are?
So we try different approaches that have a strategic standpoint from them. And the reason we do that is because when you run A/B tests that are based on elements, if it doesn’t increase conversions, you’re stuck. And to be honest, even if it does increase conversions, you’re also stuck. Because what are you going to do with the fact that a brighter shade of orange increased conversions. But if you run an emotion-based test, if you run a strategic test and it doesn’t increase conversions, you’ve learned something. Okay, this type of wording doesn’t work, but we still know that this matters to people. So what are other ways we can do it? You are always learning from your tests, and you can also, if it does increase conversions, speak to everyone on marketing and say, look, here’s what we found, here’s the research.
Start implementing this in everything that you do, in your emails, in your ads, in your landing pages. You can talk to sales and tell them, look, we know this is what they care about. So when you get on a demo call, make sure you mention this. So strategic testing in the emotional targeting approach just gives you a lot more to work with than just, oh, it lost, okay, onto the next thing.
Rich: That’s a great answer and I’m also glad you brought up. Sometimes you just don’t have that traffic. Because I was wondering, you work with a lot of bigger companies. Whenever I hear words like ‘social listening’, I always flinch a little bit, because for many small businesses there isn’t enough data out there, nobody’s talking about them in any kind of scale. So are there different approaches that small to medium sized businesses might take versus large enterprise businesses that are obviously generating a lot of buzz online?
Talia: Of course, I would say that social listening and review mining are for them. So if you don’t have a lot of clients and customers, social listening and review mining doesn’t require you to have any of that.
Yes, surveys, interviews you need a pool of great customers or visitors coming to your website. But review mining or social listening, all it does is require you to go into the places where your customers – or should be customers – are already on and having these conversations.
So let’s think about Reddit. We found through dozens and dozens of hours of research that almost all of our clients get chosen at some point through Reddit. If you Google anything at this point, a Reddit thread will come up and you’ll scan it and you’ll look at the different things in Google, and you’ll click through to Reddit. Because Reddit has been able to brand itself in a very good way where everything on Reddit is true, because it’s real people having real conversations, and you can’t really do marketing on Reddit.
Rich: They’re true opinions, I would say. I want to make sure that we don’t say that.
Talia: Yes, of course.
Rich: Because I love Reddit opinions. I see a lot of crazy stuff that goes on.
Talia: Oh, a hundred percent. What I mean is it’s being branded. And you are absolutely right. Positioned as this, these comments and these threads are things that I can trust because it’s real users. If I go to a company’s website, they’re just going to tell me what I want to hear. But if I go to Reddit, I’m going to find out the real truth.
So your customers, your prospects are on Reddit, and you should be Googling that stuff. You should be in Reddit looking for your brand name, for your competitor’s names for your industry. You should be combing through those conversations, and you can also do that on Amazon if you think about Amazon books.
One of the best things I learned from Joanna Wiebe, who is the OG conversion copywriter, is think about the books that try to solve what you do. You have an accounting software. Accounting For Dummies is a book. If you go and look for those types of books and just download all the reviews that they got. Now today, you can use ChatGPT to segment all the answers and see what’s positive. What are they complaining about? What don’t they like? What were they missing in the book? What are the things that they absolutely loved? These are your prospects that could be using your product that are in there telling you exactly what they think, and you could be using all of that to optimize your funnel.
So review mining and social listening, to me, is absolute key for anyone that doesn’t have a lot of clients, a lot of customers, a lot of time, or buy-in to do user interviews, for example.
Rich: That is a brilliant use case, and I definitely am going to figure out how to take advantage of that.
This is fresh in my mind just because right before our call, I got off a call with a client during the kickoff, and they have a sales process, a sales cycle that can take years in some cases to get started. I’m wondering if a long sales cycle versus a short sales cycle, those impulse buys, if that changes your approach at all?
Talia: It changes the approach of what we’re trying to achieve with our experimentation. So most of our clients are B2B companies, software that take anywhere between six months and a few years to get to a real conversion. And sometimes that’s hard to track. They see one thing and then they come back six months later, and then someone sends them an email a year later.
The way we approach it is the same way. First, we want to figure out what they care about. And if we know that this is a long cycle, then we want to make sure that when they do show up on our website, in our emails, in our webinars, downloading a white paper, every single piece of content that we create is for them. It solves a specific pain for them. It makes it about them. It really shows them the value that they can get.
And in this case, we just wouldn’t push for a conversion. We’d push for something else, or we just say, okay, they have the content, that’s good enough for us. So it doesn’t really change the approach, it just changes how we measure conversions and success.
Rich: Makes a lot of sense. Obviously, you’ve been doing this for years. But if somebody’s listening right now and they’re feeling inspired by everything you shared, what’s one thing that you would recommend that a listener could do today to get them started on improving their CRO, using the emotional targeting framework?
Talia: I would say social listening. That would be the number one thing I would do. I think it is eye-opening. I would comb through Reddit, I would comb through Facebook groups. And then what I would do is I would go to my website and say, okay, is any of this stuff on my website?
What was the one thing that was a repeating theme that you’ve seen in conversations in Facebook groups, on LinkedIn, on Reddit? Have you even mentioned it? Is it anywhere on your website? That could be something that you could optimize for. So social listening is key, for sure.
Rich: Awesome. Talia, this has been brilliant. If people want to learn more about you, more about your company, where can we send them online?
Talia: So the company is GetUplift. So you can go to our website and get a ton of free content. Also, follow me on LinkedIn. And I have a book coming out very soon, my first book. Really excited. So you can also grab that, hopefully soon.
Rich: Awesome. This has been brilliant. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Show Notes:
Talia Wolf is the founder of GetUplift and a go-to expert in conversion rate optimization for brands that want their websites to actually convert. She’s all about emotional targeting, smart testing, and helping businesses ditch the guesswork and start seeing real results. Follow her on LinkedIn, and pre-order her book!
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.