Presented live on Tuesday, May 15, 2018
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Emotion sells… but what emotions should you be triggering in your prospects? Check out this tutorial to see.
TRANSCRIPT:
Joanna Wiebe: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Tutorial Tuesdays. Joanna here from Copy Hackers and Airstory, joined by Sarah of course, who is going to be taking chats and everything today. And we have a special guest. Talia Wolf. Hello, Talia,
Talia Wolf: Hi.
Joanna Wiebe: How are you?
Talia Wolf: Excited to be here.
Joanna Wiebe: Good, well we’re excited to have you here. So I am, I mentioned to everybody I was calling from my co-founder’s kitchen and I’m thinking I might like, every Tuesday until I move into my new office, I might find a new location, like every Tuesday. That’s going to be the new thing. So look forward to that. Great.
Joanna Wiebe: Okay, today we’re talking about the seven sweeps. We’re actually talking about the sixth sweep, which is the heightened emotion sweep. We’re going to get into that right away. That’s why Talia is here, because if anybody’s going to talk about emotion, Talia is the one to do it.
Joanna Wiebe: So, awesome. We’ll get into that, but first, some house keeping. We are recording this. Yes. If you would like to chat anything over, please do use chat that will let us just get your quick feed back or quick thoughts. People are already chatting “Hellos” and all sorts of things. If you do chat, please choose between all panelists, or everyone and just us. So if you just want the three of us to see what you’re chatting, then just send it to us. If you want to share with everybody and say, “Hey from Panama”, or wherever, sunny San Diego, all sorts of places, then go ahead and put that for everyone. Cool?
Joanna Wiebe: When we’re ready to take questions, or when you’re starting to have questions where you’re like, “I need Talia to tell me X, Y, or Z,” put those in the Q & A area please.
Joanna Wiebe: Okay. That covers that. “So what is this kitchen in the background?” people are asking. This is my temporary location. I’m doing a tour of …
Talia Wolf: You should have just said, “This is my new office.”
Joanna Wiebe: Isn’t it normal to have a kitchen in your office? What? No, this is a temporary location. So, cool, cool, cool. Now Talia is talking to us about emotion. As the sixth of the seven sweeps. The other sweeps, Sarah is going to chat out the links to the first five, basically. The whole idea with the seven sweeps, if you go back and watch the first one, the clarity sweep, that tutorial, if you go through that you’ll see exactly how to use this again and again and again.
Joanna Wiebe: The idea here is, once you finish a draft of something, then you want to go through, once you feel good about it, then you go through and apply these seven sweeps really swiftly. Not like, you don’t take all day about it. Take like 30 minutes to go through and move through each one and go back up and make sure you always finish with clarity.
Joanna Wiebe: Now people are dying to hear from Talia, they’re already like, “I love your necklace, Talia.”
Talia Wolf: It’s the Harry Potter. I’m a little obsessed with Harry Potter.
Joanna Wiebe: Which you’re allowed to be.
Talia Wolf: But that’s a totally different topic. I could talk about Harry Potter for like half an hour, so let’s not.
Joanna Wiebe: That sounds about right for Tutorial Tuesday. Like, what do we feel like talking about, actually now that we’re here? But no, you are going to talk about the whole idea of, well I’m going to let you take over, but when we’re talking about the heightened emotions sweep, we’re really looking through out copy to see like, are we making people feel like what we want them to feel and what hopefully they will want to feel at least by the end of the page?
Talia Wolf: Yes.
Joanna Wiebe: Talia, what would you like to say about emotion? You’ve made a whole career out of it but you’ve got …
Talia Wolf: I know. Take your career and turn it into a 20 minute tutorial. Perfect.
Talia Wolf: I’m joking. I actually love the whole idea of the sweeps, because it’s just a really, super easy way to just kind of take a step back, look at everything that you’ve done, and quickly fix some stuff. I’m not going to get into too much about why [inaudible 00:04:18] emotion today. I’m going to give a bit of the basics and then I’m going to jump in to exact questions you need to be asking yourself as you’re reading through your copy, and a few tactics that you can use.
Talia Wolf: I’m going to share my screen with you guys, and I’m also going to cancel my video, otherwise it won’t work. That’s how my Mac works. So please hold, as I share my screen with you guys.
Talia Wolf: Okay, you can still hear me though, which is what matters. I’m sharing my desk top with you, so you should be able to see my screen now. Go away zoom, I can’t see what I’m doing. Ah, there we are. Okay, yes?
Joanna Wiebe: Yes.
Talia Wolf: Okay. Zoom has a ton of things. I’m using hand gestures, and you can’t see them, never mind. Anyway, so during this sweet, the idea is that you will be able to go over your copy and make sure that your message resonates for your prospect on the emotional level rather than the transactional level.
Talia Wolf: What I mean by that is, instead of talking about pricing features and product we’re going to be making sure that people get that you get them, that you understand them. They get the value that they receive from you. So instead of basically feeling a risk at every step of the funnel, I want them to commit to you on an emotional level and feel secure with you and start converting.
Talia Wolf: Now if you get emotion right, you know that you’re actually helping people commit to your solution really easily. You’re removing any sense of risk and you’re not only securing a one time conversion, but you’re going to be creating a long time customer or client.
Talia Wolf: Now, I love to answer this question. Some people say, “Why emotion?” Well, because … wait, this needs to work. Reality sucks.
Joanna Wiebe: This is my favorite.
Talia Wolf: This is my favorite slide. Okay. So reality sucks, seriously. Right? I mean this is what would happen if I were trying to do the Titanic thing. Now, why emotion? Because everything we buy in live has an emotional reason to it. When we buy something we’re not buying a product, we’re essentially buying a better version of ourselves.
Talia Wolf: Now here’s the really, really cool think about emotion. It converts, thankfully, otherwise I won’t have a job. No matter what you’re selling, what people really care about isn’t the what, it’s the why. What is in it for me? People want to see the value and what’s in it for them.
Talia Wolf: Now the really cool thing is, that most companies don’t use it. So if you use it, you would actually be ten timing the conversions for your clients, your managers, your own business. I’ll tell you why. Most companies think that people shop for products or features or pricing, right? But I had this idea other day. I was thinking about how people shop today. So say you were looking for a virtual assistant service, and you were trying to figure out who is the best person you should hire?
Talia Wolf: What’s the first thing you do? You go into Google and you search for virtual assistants, and you’re like, “Okay, cool.” What’s the first think you do? You actually start clicking on all the options, right, in Google. You don’t open one and kind of say, “Let’s look at this one.” No, you open like six, seven different tabs. Then you might spend five seconds on each.
Talia Wolf: You go casually between does this interest me or not, and you start closing tabs. At some point, one of them grabs your attention. This isn’t because you spend time going over the whole page, something grabbed your attention. Something made you think, “This means something. These people get me.” We get you, and this was built for you.
Talia Wolf: This is what we want to create. We want people to basically stop and say, “Oh, I should give this two more minutes to just kind of read through and see if this thing is for me.”
Talia Wolf: Now I guess at the end of the day, what we want to understand is, dig deeper, in order to understand what are those emotional drivers. Understanding why they’re really buying from you. What are the emotions that drive their decisions? Are they trying to feel successful? Do they want their managers to appreciate them? Are they longing to feel a part of a community? What really influences their decision making process?
Talia Wolf: Once you identify those emotions, it’s easier to write copy, choose the right colors for color psychology, choose the right visuals, testimonials and more. In today’s tutorial, I’m not going to get into finding those emotions. I’m going to assume that you know what emotions you want to create within your copy. Basically I’m going to help you identify and make sure that all these appear in your copy, that these emotions work.
Talia Wolf: So, you found the emotions you want to test. How do you make sure that they’re on the page? For me there are two questions that I ask myself.
Talia Wolf: One of them is, Question Number One: Are you making it about the customer? So this is basically the Holy Bible of the emotional targeting methodology that I created, which is all about understanding why people buy.
Talia Wolf: The whole pillar of this is that you want to make it about the customer. You’re not the hero, your customer is. You are essentially the mentor who is there to help them become that better version of themselves. So you want to go over your copy and ask yourselves a few questions.
Talia Wolf: The first one is going to be, am I focused on my customer’s value or the benefits and features of the solution? You basically read the copy, you go over it line by line, you don’t stop. It’s really important to read through the whole thing and ask yourselves, am I focused on my customer’s value, or the benefits and features. I’m going to show you an example in a minute by what I mean by this. I’m going to critique a few landing pages, but it’s so easy to fall into that pace where you talk about yourself, how amazing you are, the awards that you’ve won, how your product is the best, you’ve got the best pricing. Instead of focusing on the value. Most importantly, you want to have that at the top of the farm, where you want to know that is the first thing that is featured.
Talia Wolf: The second thing you want to ask yourself is, can I focus my message focus on what my customer is currently feeling, or what she wants to feel? What I mean by that is, there are a few different ways you can use emotion. Joanna actually mentioned it at the beginning. The one way that I like to use emotion on the page is where I start with what people are currently feeling, so the pain that they are feeling and showing that on the page.
Talia Wolf: On the other hand, you can start with the promise, what they want to feel. So if someone is feeling lonely right now, you could show that on a page and say, “Hey, we know that you feel lonely, and this is how you’re feeling.” Or you could say, “There’s hope for you. We will find someone for you and this is going to happen.” So it’s all about identifying what emotions you actually want to show. Do you want to focus on the before, or the after? The cool thing is that, with copy, you can start with the before and make your way to the after, or even the opposite. You can start with, “Hey, this is what you want to achieve. This is what you want to feel. Let’s take a step back and see what you’re feeling right now and how we can get you there.
Talia Wolf: The third question we’re going to ask is, am I using the right words to bring out the emotions that I want to create on my page? Now this is a case where we start talking about ourselves. The quick tips that I can give you is, when you basically want to swap out the us and our words, or when you’re talking about your brand. One thing you can do is see how many times is your brand name mentioned on the page. If you have it more than one or twice on the page, you’re talking about yourself and not about your customer.
Talia Wolf: You want to switch that with you, I or maybe me. So that’s a really cool way to look at it. The other thing, as I said is, starting to count nots. So swapping out us and ours, to you, I or me.
Talia Wolf: The final question, and then I’m going to show you a few examples is, am I using testimonials to address specific road blocks, concerns, and hesitations of customers? So with emotional targeting, when you want to use emotion on the page, it is very important to look at everything. When I say copy, and I know I don’t have to tell you this, but it’s not just the headline and the paragraph that you’re using. It’s everything, the whole concept on your page.
Talia Wolf: Testimonials are a huge way to actually address those emotions and fears of your customers. So most companies use testimonials as self praise. “We are the number one company. We’ve been chosen X amount of times, or I don’t know what I’d do without this company.” But it doesn’t actually address specific road blocks or concerns that your customers or your prospects are experiencing.
Talia Wolf: So the one thing that you want to review when you’re looking at your copy is looking at those testimonials, looking at that social proof in figuring out if you’re actually answering people’s problems. So if you know that many people are worried about the durability of your products and maybe it won’t last for long, then you want to get a testimonial that addresses that specific road block. It’s all about identifying those emotions, identifying those concerns, and then showing them on the page with the right social proof.
Talia Wolf: Now when I say, “Making it about the customer,” I wanted to show you this really cool example that I, Zoom, so Zoom has managed to kind of annoy be because if you look at their, this is their home page. It says, “Zoom Video Communications blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Choice for Meeting Solutions.” So someone named them the best, then you have this amazing, so selling an emotional image over here, right, of, I don’t know, some sort of report, by Gartner. And the call to action is, read the report.
Talia Wolf: Why would I ever read this report? This drives me nuts. There’s nothing in here about the customer. And you know what, some one is trying to evaluate, “Hey, what communication platform should I use now? Should I use Skype? Should I use Zoom? Should I use, I don’t know, Webex”?, because those are examples that I’m using today. Would you stop and say, “Oh, Zoom was named the 2018 Gartner peer insights customer’s choice? Sign me up.” I don’t think so.
Talia Wolf: Then when you look at the page, you’re like, “One consistent enterprise experience, and here’s what we do. We do meetings, video webinars, Zoom Rooms, this and this and whatever.” So a list of all sorts of, what is that? What does that even mean? So it kind of frustrates me, as you can hear in my voice. Again, when we talk about social proof, testimonials. Zoom is ranked number one in customer reviews. Okay, fine, whatever. Why Zoom? Because we have one consistent experience. You mentioned that already.
Talia Wolf: What else? Engineered and optimized to work reliably. Up to 500 video participants. What if I need less? What if I need more? Why are you mentioning this right now? So, then the funniest thing, and I just have to show you this. Here’s a testimonial. “Zoom limits the time that kids have to stay under anesthesia and prevents multiple surgeries.” I’m just going to give that a second to sink in. Oh, so that’s what Zoom does. Okay.
Talia Wolf: What? So if I were a copywriter, which I’m not, but if I was trying to audit this page and kind of review it and try and figure out, am I making this about the customer? This would be a big no. Nothing here is about the customer.
Talia Wolf: So what would be about the customer? I will show you a different example. Cisco says, “Teams and teamwork together at last.” Okay, we’re getting that, right? They’re talking about you, so it’s not, “Hey we’re the number one platform in the world.” It’s teams and teamwork together at last.
Talia Wolf: Is the clarity there? I think Joanna might say no, I don’t know, probably, but at least we’re getting somewhere. We’re making it about the customer. There are so many things you could change here, but if I land on this page, and it says Teams and teamwork, if I’m actually a team and I actually need to get teamwork done, then I’ll say, “Okay, yes, tell me more.”
Talia Wolf: With you every step of the way. Okay. Then again, we’re talking about ourselves. Features, features, features. It goes on and on, but, and we’ll get into this soon with the second question that you want to ask yourself. They do a few things that are really good in here. If you look at Zoom for a moment you’ll see that they just mention, “Here are the different features, the things that we have.” When you look at Webex, they say, “Continuous teamwork in one place.” So say only people that land on this page are teams, this would make sense.
Talia Wolf: This doesn’t. It’s a way of just looking at it and saying, “Okay, am I talking about myself, or am I talking about the customer? What kind of feeling am I trying to get in here?” So this is obviously about the after. There are many different things that we could do, but they’re in the right direction.
Talia Wolf: Now, if we look at Skype, “Join the millions talking on Skype.” So this is an interesting aspect and a different angle. The reason they are doing this is because everyone basically opted out of Skype and moved to a different chat platform because, no one uses Skype anymore.
Talia Wolf: So it starts with the band wagon effect. “Hey, everyone is using Skype, come along.” So this is the type of emotion they’re trying to create. You want to be part of a community. You want to use what everyone is using. Fantastic. But when you look at that text, “As we continue improving the accessibility of Skype, we currently recommend VoiceOver users … ” Anyway, I can go on forever. But as you can see, “Discover the world of Skype.” Nope, I don’t care about that. Skype x Trivia with Fangs, I don’t even know what that means. Skype for Android update, what if I, what, okay. And that’s it. That’s the page. And by the way, no emergency calls on Skype, so if you have a problem, F you. Sorry. As you can see I have beef with these companies.
Talia Wolf: But this is the point. They’re not making it about their customer. There’s nothing in here about the customer that makes you feel, “I know this company gets me. They understand what emotions I want to feel, where I want to go, or what I’m feeling right now.”
Talia Wolf: An interesting example is Gusto. “It’s time to tame the chaos of payroll, benefits, and HR.” Looking at it, it’s interesting because it is a bit of a chaos and it’s a problem managing all these things in one place. But I actually have this thing where, I went to way back time machine thingy, and “For HR people who do everything, one intuitive place to manage payroll, benefits, and HR for your business.”
Talia Wolf: Now obviously we could argue what would be the best, if we should switch between them, but this company actually gets me. This is for HR people who do everything. If they’re trying to get HR people, then this is what human resources feels. They feel that they are overwhelmed. They are doing everything for the company, and they want to be acknowledged for it.
Talia Wolf: So this is actually the old variation, it’s from 2016, but I remember it so well because of the use of many other things on this page, but it talks to me. If I was looking for an HR solution, “Okay, wait. This is actually built for HR people? Interesting.” More than, “Okay, you do payroll, benefits and HR.” Again, it’s a way of looking at it and understanding what all the emotions that we’re trying to get through. Are we trying to make sense? Are we trying to talk about the before? Are we trying to hit a chord? What are we trying to do? Quickly looking at the pages and trying to figure out what they are saying. Are they creating that emotion on the page?
Talia Wolf: Now if we go back to the slide deck … We answered all these questions. What I want to do is answer the second question. Now this is an interesting one. Can people consistently feel the emotion throughout the page?
Talia Wolf: What I mean by this is, I know that most of the people in here are copywriters or their job is to write copy. Unfortunately, if you want to create copy that people read, and you want to actually convert people from your copy, you can’t only focus on the copy. Copy doesn’t work on it’s own. It’s part of the bigger picture, and it can not go without the colors, the visuals, the different elements on the page. Every element on the page should actually support your copy.
Talia Wolf: I know that many companies say or many experts say, “People don’t read, so just write as little copy as possible and put on some amazing photos or images or whatever.” But that’s not how it works. The copy is the basic of everything. That is the foundation of the emotions that you’re using. It’s the foundation of the strategy that you’re using, and it’s your job, your job only, to make sure that when that page goes live, your copy doesn’t get drowned with terrible pictures, horrible color, or whatever it is.
Talia Wolf: So it’s all nice and well to send a brief to the designer, but you have to make sure that they get your messaging, your strategy, and that everything on the page supports it. So I gave you an example before about Skype, and it’s an interesting thing, because they say, “Hey, Join the millions talking on Skype.” So for me, to support that message I would have maybe an image of the world, or showing the amount of people that use them. Instead, Skype uses the number one strategy that every singe company in the world uses. “This is what my product looks like.” Who cares?
Talia Wolf: No one cares. It doesn’t help. So, you see, as we said, Skype tried to go for the band wagon effect, while not really achieving that. Many, many companies are doing this everywhere. They’re all talking about themselves, and if they are mentioning the customer, in their visuals, they are not showing them.
Talia Wolf: There are a few things that I want you to make sure of after you get the design. So this means you have sat in the brief. You have reviewed it. You made sure that the copy is about the customer. You have made sure that you are triggering the right emotions, that you are using the right words. You’re not talking about yourself too much. And you have the above the fold section, which really grabs people’s attention and makes them feel that you get them.
Talia Wolf: You send that brief, with the copy, to the designer. Then you get the design. You ask for that design and you need to check the following things.
Talia Wolf: Do the images feel real, relatable, and authentic? People want to see people like them. So obviously using images and photos of people is the best way to go, because people want to see relatable images. And I know that many companies don’t have a professional photographer, and you can’t really hire one right now, whatever. But you can use very cool websites like Unsplash, to find really good images that don’t look like a stock image that everyone else is using.
Talia Wolf: Then we have, do they support the emotional strategy? So if you’re trying to make people feel inspired, or if you’re trying to make people feel a part of the community, or trust, whatever emotion you’re trying to create, the images and the visuals on the page have to support that. So you want to make sure that it does that. We’ll review Gusto again and a few others just to kind of hit the nail on the head.
Talia Wolf: Then we have, we want to make sure that there’s no visual noise. This happens a lot when designers go all out and they’re like, “Wow, this is a perfect image.” Then you can’t even read the text. So you definitely want to make sure that the image on the page is in a good transparency, that it doesn’t annoy anyone, that you can actually read the copy, and that they remove anything that is unnecessary.
Talia Wolf: Then we have a very important thing. What does your copy look like on mobile? Here’s the thing – here are some problems that could come up with mobile. Your image could look stretched. What I mean by that is, you might have this great copied ad, but then the image is distracting or the image is, basically you can’t read anything. Or more importantly, your copy might actually be too long for mobile, so people have to start scrolling to get the whole depth of the strategy that you’re trying to create.
Talia Wolf: The thing to understand, I guess, with mobile, is that our intent and needs are very, very different, including our emotions when we’re on mobile. So you may actually need to create a different version for mobile. I’m not saying scrap everything that you’ve written and create something new, but one thing that you can do, and don’t be afraid, is going to Google Analytics, and see what people are doing on mobile.
Talia Wolf: You’ll notice that when we’re on desktop, people have more time to research, to read. They’re more relaxed. On mobile, we’re usually mobile. We are sitting and watching TV or maybe we’re commuting on the train, or maybe we are trying to do something on our phone, but then the pizza arrives, or someone calls us, or whatever. So we get distracted very quickly.
Talia Wolf: So it’s your job as a copywriter to make sure that you get those emotions really quickly on mobile and you persuade people easily. Sometimes it does mean changing or shortening some of the stuff that you’ve written.
Talia Wolf: Then we have colors on the page and buttons. So color psychology is a huge thing. I’m not going to get completely into that, because that will take me a long time, but not every color has a specific emotion. Blue doesn’t mean trust, purple doesn’t mean wealth and green doesn’t mean health every single time. You have to know who your customers are and what experiences they have been through, what colors symbolizes for them, and the emotions they feel towards specific colors. Sometimes a specific color can actually work against your strategy. So you definitely want to look into that.
Talia Wolf: Then you want to think about removing all the text and only showing … That’s terrible.
Talia Wolf: Does it pass the five second test. So I don’t use this a lot, but five second tests are actually a really cool way of just making sure A, for clarity, which I know Jo talks about a lot, which is really important, and B, asking people, what emotion do they feel? What did they feel after reading the text? It’s really cool that you can read through your text and kind of say, “Oh, I feel this way or that way.” But it’s also really cool to ask other people to read through the copy and see what do they feel. Are they feeling a certain way? Did they feel good before, do they feel good after? Do they even feel the same emotions that you wanted to create?
Talia Wolf: Remember, it’s never one emotion. You never want to make people feel just one specific emotion, it’s usually quite a few. So getting other people to look at it and seeing that it resonates in those five seconds, especially because of the new behavior from us jumping from tab to tab. You want to make sure that within those five seconds that you get, people understand that you get them, they see the value in those five seconds and they commit.
Talia Wolf: Let me just give you a few examples. So for example, and just because Gusto is a really good example, for me, this works much more than the current design. This one is, “Hey, this is a real person sitting in front of a desk and she’s smiling and she looks authentic.” Maybe it’s a stock image, I don’t think it is. Maybe, but it feels authentic. For some reason, this company, and many more, I’ve seen MailChimp go this way, and a few other companies have suddenly gone into illustrations.
Talia Wolf: First of all, I resent the fact that it’s just a woman, there are men in HR. But it doesn’t give me anything. There’s no emotion coming from this page. Then if you’re trying to say that, “This is for everyone in HR, or this is a way to tame the chaos”, where is the chaos in here? Or if you’re trying to make me feel that you contained it, then this isn’t the way, because you’re just showing me the back of a person and a few check marks. I’m not really feeling it. This may be just me, as Talia Wolf. As you scroll, “You’re on the go and on a mission.” You’re on the go. On the go means mobile, no? I don’t know. So this doesn’t make any sense to me.
Talia Wolf: I’m missing the emotional component in the images in the design generally. Here, a report, well that doesn’t even, I can’t even start to talk about that. Nothing in here resonates in any sort of emotion. Then when you do get real images, it’s impossible to actually read the copy. I had to highlight it in order to actually understand what it is. That’s part of the thing of reducing noise, when you’re trying to get people to read something, there’s just so many things going on here on the page. You’ve got seven different people on the page, looking at different directions. You’ve got a lot of this background that’s really noisy, so that’s also a problem.
Talia Wolf: You definitely want to be able to go through these things. You don’t have to be a designer to be able to say, “This actually works because I’m seeing faces of people. I wouldn’t place them in devices. I don’t know what that helps with, but it does give me a sense of understanding that a lot of people use it, that I will get a lot of work done.
Talia Wolf: And with Skype, as we said before, it doesn’t make any sense to say that millions of people use the product, but then showing the actual product.
Talia Wolf: The last thing I’m going to show you … Wait, that’s not what I wanted to do. The last thing I am going to show you is optimization mode. One thing I want to kind of focus on for a few seconds is, I’m all about results. I do conversion optimization. If you want to increase conversions on your page, start thinking about testing. My favorite go to tests are before and after. So you can actually create two different variations. Or us versus a competitor. This actually helps a lot when you’re trying to get buy in.
Talia Wolf: Many times people say, “Well my manager only wants to talk about features and the benefits and how amazing we are.” The best thing to do is A, create a test to show the the results, and B, you can actually show them what your competitors are doing and kind of run a test to show what works and what doesn’t. So you have a few emotions that you want to test. What emotions are your competitors trying to make people feel, and run tests against that.
Talia Wolf: That was it. So very quickly, because I only have a few minutes. Hopefully that was okay. All done. Let me stop sharing, right. And then, video, am I back? No, I’m not. Oh, I am. Hi.
Talia Wolf: Sorry, I spoke mega fast. I tried to get so much into that.
Joanna Wiebe: Well I asked you to talk about everything you have ever spoken or taught about. That was amazing. Thank you Talia.
Joanna Wiebe: People were saying lots of amazing things throughout. Then we got all distracted by the girl on the Gusto, the old Gusto website, because she is an actress. I was thinking the whole time, “It was probably pretty expensive to hire her, and then the got rid of her? What?”
Joanna Wiebe: And, I wanted to see her video, because she is funny. We were talking about heightened emotion and it would be amazing still, were they going for funny? Why did they think that would be right right emotion?
Talia Wolf: They did, actually. The previous variations, I just really liked it, so I kind of dug into it. They had videos, they had testimonials. This woman is everywhere on their website. I actually know that they did a few surveys and stuff, and it was going for a certain direction. It made people feel in a certain way, but then they went completely different.
Talia Wolf: I’m also baffled by MailChimp. MailChimp had a certain strategy, and then it went to like these weird palm trees and colors and this weird … I don’t know why companies do that. They go to illustrations. I’m not saying that illustrations are bad at all. Sometimes they can create this beautiful emotion and connect you to the right emotions you’re trying to create, but you need to know to do illustrations right.
Joanna Wiebe: Yes. I think they all hang out on Dribbble together, all the designers, and they’re like, “Oh, I like that illustration. I’m going to do illustrations.” I love designers, absolutely, totally. There’s a lot of Basecamp effect. As soon as Basecamp changed anything, for years, suddenly every other website made that exact same change.
Talia Wolf: Yes, and Basecamp is actually a really good example for using emotion, because they’re like, “Oh, we were expecting you.” You were? That’s their headline. So it does make you stop and like, “Oh, why were you expecting? Oh, because of all the chaos on the page.” There’s pros and cons.
Joanna Wiebe: Yes. So we have questions, and I know we’re at the end of your time, and I know we’re already had to say good bye to a few people. For those who can stick round, we have six questions. Are you ready for these Talia?
Talia Wolf: Yes. I think.
Joanna Wiebe: Cool. This was a question that came up when you were talking about replacing your brand name with you. So instead of we do this, you get this. Leann says, “When you say to swap out us and ours to you, I, or me, isn’t I or me also talking about yourself and not the customer?”
Talia Wolf: No. You don’t say, you, I or me. It’s you, as the customer. So you, the customer, I want to do this or show me how to do X. So it’s changing the sentences, basically taking it away from, “We will do this and this”, or “Zoom is the best communication platform”, to “We can help you, You can do this.” I think you showed us this in clarity, maybe.
Joanna Wiebe: I know that, it’s turning the language into the first person. So when we do on the button, show me my heat map. That’s my voice, not the speaker’s voice.
Talia Wolf: Yes, exactly.
Joanna Wiebe: Okay, that is good verification, love it. Leann asked another question. Leann is very engaged today. Leann has a lot of questions for you. This is an interesting question because, and I want to talk about it, “Do you think, maybe the Zoom home page is built for investors, rather than the end users?”
Talia Wolf: That’s a really good question. So many websites do have this when it comes to start ups. My question is going to be, is that what’s going to convince investors to invest? Even if the page was built for investors, as an investor, and I have worked for many different investors, that’s not what they look for. They want to see that you know you have your product market there. That you know you’re speaking to. That you have the voice of customer in mind. That you know how to sell. That you have conversions.
Talia Wolf: Obviously most people, you might have landing pages, you might have many different pages that people land on, but the home page is where people get what you do. When you’re saying, we won this award, that doesn’t give me any clarity, and the first call to action is at the bottom of the page, why would anyone want to read a report? Even, you know what, even if you did want me to read this report, because it was amazing and it would tell me exactly why I should use Zoom, you’re not giving me a reason to read the report. I can barely get through the headline.
Talia Wolf: I’d love your take Jo. Maybe you have a different take on it.
Joanna Wiebe: No, I totally agree. Whether it’s for investors, or enterprise, like they kept using the word enterprise, so we can image that that’s a big deal. But there’s this myth that enterprises are filled with, that the whole enterprise makes a decision when it’s actually a single person on the website, who is then going to go bring it to people. If it makes them feel certain ways, and ticks those boxes, like what the organization means. So there’s this almost laziness. Like, “Oh, we’re talking to enterprises, so let’s just keep it really dry and we’ll deal with answering questions in the sales calls.”
Joanna Wiebe: Then I’m like, what are you doing writing copy at all? Just have a call to action to call us now.
Talia Wolf: Zoom’s entire funnel is pretty bad channel. Sorry to be such a … I use Zoom just like you and I get their sales emails that try to upgrade me. Not a good work. Not a good job.
Joanna Wiebe: I do as well.
Talia Wolf: Not a good job.
Joanna Wiebe: I think they presume that you discovered Zoom because you’re invited to a Zoom call, so you might not go over to the Zoom website until you’re ready to look at pricing and stuff. So it’s worth talking to a product awareness level, but they are talking way past that. Anyway … It’s a good discussion though. I want to keep talking about it. I know what time it is.
Joanna Wiebe: Okay. This is a really tactical one. Isaac asks, “How do you go back in time on a website?” Like, what’s the website that you use to do that, Talia?
Talia Wolf: So it’s called Wayback Time Machine. Hold on … and essentially, it helps you see it’s archive.org/web and I will paste that in the chat.
Joanna Wiebe: Joey just actually pasted it.
Talia Wolf: Oh, thanks. So essentially you can go back and see every single variation a website ever went through, because Google scrolls it and they just show it. It’s amazing.
Joanna Wiebe: Love it. Okay. Leann asks another questions. “I don’t really understand the us versus competitors test. Any chance you can give an example of that?”
Talia Wolf: Sorry, I lost you. You said, “I don’t really understand” and then it cut.
Joanna Wiebe: I didn’t really understand the us versus competitors test. Can you give an example?
Talia Wolf: Sure. Us versus competitors, it can be used in two different ways. One way is, basically looking at the emotions that your competitors are creating and you can basically, when you do competitor research, you don’t need to look at, “Hey, what features do they have and how much they cost?” But more about the different emotions that they are trying to create.
Talia Wolf: So you look at the colors, the messaging, the images, and the whole strategy. You try and figure out what are they trying to create? What emotions are they trying to get through? When you do your own research to get to finding those emotional triggers that you’re trying to create, you essentially run surveys and you do customer interviews and there’s all sorts of things you can do.
Talia Wolf: You then can test the variations against each other. Most times managers and I’ve seen this, companies won’t want to copy their competitors. They just want to create the same thing. The competitor knows they’re bigger, they know what they’re doing, let’s just do the same. So I like to create a variation that’s very similar to the competitors and test it against one that I believe is going to work better.
Talia Wolf: So it’s their emotional triggers versus the ones that we believe are going to work better, and basically running that kind of thing. So it helps where getting buy ins for optimization also helps. Figuring out, are you on to something that works, or do the competitors variations work better?
Joanna Wiebe: Thank you. Awesome. Jen asks, “If there’s only one image being used, would you pick the before, or the after?”
Talia Wolf: That depends on the copy. It depends on the strategy. Jo is loving this. It depends on the copy. It does though. It depends on what emotion I’m trying to create. If I am trying to, if I’m working with PAS example, Pain Agitation Solution, then I am going to use a headline that is going to talk about the pain, and then I might actually want to show an image that illustrates that pain.
Talia Wolf: I won’t go all cold, dark, and twisty they say at Grey’s Anatomy, but, you can use an image that portrays that emotion. If you’re going to go for, “Hey, we have hope for you, or you’re landed in the perfect place just for you,” then you will use the after image that shows that hope.
Talia Wolf: So always work together. That’s your job as the copy writer, to make sure that people are following the copy and the strategy goals and emotions that you’re trying to create. And you can use different images through out the whole page, too.
Joanna Wiebe: Okay, one more question. We’re probably not going to get to all of these, because they keep coming in, but I’ll ask this one because I think it could help to open people up to new ideas of the emotions they could be using. So Isaac says, “Do you think it helps to actually state the emotions you want to evoke before we write or design, and could you mention a couple examples of emotions other than pain or fear?”
Talia Wolf: Yes, one hundred percent. I am … I hear me … Sorry. Still?
Joanna Wiebe: I hear it that way. I’m going on mute again.
Talia Wolf: Okay. Yes. It’s you. Anyway, okay, so the question was, do I come up with the emotions before I choose the design? Of course. So in my methodology, I have a complete methodologic check. I’m not going to get into today.
Talia Wolf: In the emotional targeting methodology, the first thing you do is figure out those emotional drivers of your customers. Your goal is to figure out, who is your customer? What are they trying to feel? What do they feel right now? What do they want to feel after? And their hesitations, their concerns, what they’re worried about.
Talia Wolf: All that is what helps you build an experience that people love to convert to. If you now all of that you can write the copy that people will want to read. You can create the design that people want to actually look at and be convinced by. You can choose the right color psychology and everything that goes with it. Emotions are the key to understanding what to put on the page. So before you even go and open a new project, you want to make sure you know those emotions, you understand your customers, and you understand that they are more than just a browser, a device, or a geographical location. There’s so much more to it. Then you choose it.
Talia Wolf: You asked about different emotions. There are 222 different emotional triggers that you can use. At least that’s what I’ve mapped out. Getting into them is quite large but there are five branches of them. There’s love, there’s anger, there’s fear, there’s joy, and I’ve forgotten one. Four.
Talia Wolf: Each one has like dozens of different emotions within that spectrum. So you want to visit those four basic emotions and then try and figure out what are the different nuances. Many times for me, for clients, one of my current clients, we’re trying to get people to feel inspired, excited. We want to make people feel powerful. We want to make them feel empowered to do things and give them the control they need. So nothing here is about fear or pain. It’s just about giving them the confidence that they need. You can do that with inspiration and empowerment and love.
Talia Wolf: It’s just talking to your customers will help you find out.
Joanna Wiebe: Love it. Talia, that is amazing. I know we have a bunch of other questions that are unanswered. So for those who want to follow up with you there are a couple resources that you’ve shared with us that Sarah is going to chat out, or just did, and did again. That is amazing. Thanks.
Joanna Wiebe: Where can they find you online? On Facebook, on Twitter?
Talia Wolf: So on Twitter it’s @TaliaGw and on Facebook, I actually have a … Oh I send that to all panelists, that’s not going to help. On Facebook I have a new group actually called We Optimize and you can go in and ask all the questions on conversion optimization that you have, including copy, design, email, whatever you have. I’m happy to answer those.
Joanna Wiebe: That’s amazing. It’s so valuable. That is awesome. Talia, thank you so much for that and thanks to everybody. These replays are available. I’ve seen some other questions about other sweeps, about agitation, so do go over to the library. Check out this replay, it will be available later today with the transcript, so you can make notes. Print it out if you want to, if you’re old school and want to do that.
Joanna Wiebe: But otherwise, do click through, learn more about Talia and follow her on Twitter. I know I do. Thanks everybody. Have a good day.
Talia Wolf: Thank you guys.
Joanna Wiebe: See you next week.
Talia Wolf: Bye.
