Name: Beyond CRO: The New Rules of Conversion
Uploaded: 2026-05-13T17:16:22.141Z
Duration: 1 h 56 s
Description: Beyond CRO: The New Rules of Conversion

Transcript for "Beyond CRO: The New Rules of Conversion": Hello, everyone. Hi, Talia. How's it going? Good. How is everyone? We have lots of friends from everywhere. We have Lynn from Athens, Melody from Rome. Lovely. I can't see in my chat. Okay. Robert from Houston. Tony's here. Tony's in Tony, it's it's three in the morning. What? Moni, go to sleep. We'll send you the recording. Absolutely. Jeff, Jay, Rich, Jonathan, Naomi, Piper, Christopher. I feel like now that I started naming names, I have to name everyone or else it's not say. everyone's name. Andrea, Jonathan, Christy. Oh, hey, Christy. Christy is Rand's chief of staff. I know, Christy. Hi, Christy. Christy, you're gonna have to roast me later and say how this webinar went. Christy's the best. Portia, Beth. See, this is so nice. Of course, Naomi. You've got a shout out. Why wouldn't you? Okay, friends. Welcome to office hours. We have not done this in a minute. And today, we have a special guest. We have our good friend, Talia Wolf, with us. Talia is I don't like to say expert because what if someone says that about me, I feel weird, but that's what I'm gonna call you because you are. Talia is a conversion rate optimization expert. But what I really, really appreciate about her work is that she does the the research. She gets the data qualitative and quantitative, and then she shows you what to do with it, like, how to do the marketing from it. So not even just like, hey. The data shows your audience is here. It's, hey. The data shows this is how your audience feels about this thing. Here's what you should do next. And I think her work is just truly some of the best work in how to do the marketing, so much so that I have her book, Emotional Targeting, and I bought this copy. I think you offered to send me one, and I was like, no. I don't want you to send me one. I'm gonna buy one. So I did, and I read it, think I love it. a new one. I think I I think I maybe maybe you have two, and? you don't even know it. might have too, or maybe I bought the ebook because I bought something. Anyway, it's not important. The point is to get the book. Well and the question is, who here has pre ordered Rand and Amanda's book? Because that is a big thing. You guys have a book coming out. It's incredible. do. I'm so happy. Andrea's pre ordered it. You guys have to pre order it. Yay. There are some really cool bonuses in there. Do not miss them. Are they going away? Have they gone away already? No. There's. a few more days, right, for the Yeah. okay. Yeah. So, yeah, so friends, if you haven't ordered zero click yes, William. We have a book. So Talia's book, I'll say this first, is Emotional Targeting, When Hearts Boost Sales Own the Market. It's a it's it's a really good book. And it's also I mean, for clubs like me, it's also not very long, which I love. I love it, but there are just good stories, anecdotes, like and good personal stories that really ground the book. So I love it. And then our book, Rand Fishkins, and my book, Zero Click Marketing. Thanks, Christy. It is it's the book on zero click marketing, literally. This is now available for preorder with our publisher, Damn Gravity, and we will eventually sell on, Amazon and other third party retailers. So if you're outside of North America, yes, I acknowledge the shipping fees are a lot. But if you want to get the preorder bonuses, which includes SparkToro and Alert Mouse discounts, as well as, bundled offers and consulting with me, and invites to Zero Click Summer School, which will be a couple of summer webinars. If you want all of that and you live internationally, you could consider buying the audiobook and ebook bundle. That way there's no shipping cost. And then if you want, That's can get did. the oh, good friend. It's what good friends do. I did the ebook and the audiobook, and then I'm also buying a bunch of books, but I'm sending them to my team in The US so that we can ship them out to clients because it's gonna be a game changer, and all our clients need to read them. Read it. Talia, you're such a good friend. Thank you. Our friends Erica Erica Posner is here. Hi, Erica. Joseph, Jessica. Okay, friends. I feel like that was too self promotional, and I don't like me right now. Let's talk about conversion rate optimization. I I wanna kick be fair, with an one that pushed the book. I was the one that mentioned it. And everyone everyone in chat wants to hear about your book. So it was me. It wasn't Amanda. Sorry. and then I just kept talking. about conversion optimization, guys. We will. Okay. First, a little bit of housekeeping, and then we'll get into Talia's wonderful presentation. Thanks, Erica. I like you. Okay, Fred. So the chat, which you lovely people are already using intuitively, the chat is one of my favorite pieces of this webinar series because the SparkToro community is really, really special. Like, this is truly one of the most, supportive, constructive groups of people. Awesome people. People have really good questions. You can put questions in the chat, but ideally, friends, you will put your questions in the q and a box. It's at top right tab. That way we can better keep track and so that if you see that another friend already asked a question, you can just upvote it. That helps us prioritize. So that is gonna happen. We will also have time for q and a. And, you know, just throughout the presentation, I might sprinkle in some questions for Talia. Keep her on her toes. No. In case there are clarifying questions. And what else? The recording. Friends, believe it or not, this recording comes free with webinar sign up. So, yes, the recording will be available very shortly after we end it, right on this very window you'll see. You'll also get an email, I think, with the slides. Talia, can we share slides? It's okay if no. Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. We will share. slides. Of course. Alright. And with that, friends, I I will hand it over to Talia. Like I said, Talia is gonna take us through conversion rate optimization and really what that full journey or that full funnel looks like now and how it is not just about optimizing your website. So with that, go for it, Talia. Thank you. I'm gonna share my screen, and just let me know that, like, you can still see my screen. It's. full width. Everything's fine. Cool. Beautiful. It's not just me really looking at my two slides. Okay. Cool. So I've been doing conversion optimization for over a decade, and I'm super excited to be talking about this, because there's been such a huge shift in marketing. And I also think that Sparctoro and like, Amanda and Rhonda are probably the only people I know who were the first to talk about this. So I'm excited to kind of dive deeper and talk about how what you can do in a post funnel world. So to get started, I will tell you that when I was a teenager, I was obsessed with Sims, like, properly obsessed. Every day, I would run home from, school, and I would essentially just, like, throw my JanSport bag on the floor. And I would play for hours and hours and hours. I was obsessed. I really wanted to build, like, this beautiful home. And the thing is that when you start out with Sims, you have no similins, like, no money. And your player has so many requests, like your Sim wants to eat, they wanna sleep, they wanna bed, they wanna couch, like, really annoying kind of requests. But you want a house. Like, you wanna build this incredible thing. So every day, your sim has to wake up and go to work, and it comes back, and then they go to sleep, and then you go to work, and then you come back, and then you go to sleep, and maybe they eat in between if you give them some time. And you do this on repeat for twenty four seven. And at some point, it gets super frustrating because you've done all the things that Sims says that you should do, And yet the bills, the expenses, all sorts of weird emergent emergencies that make no sense happen at Sims. You guys, I can't see the chat right now, but please let me know. I'm not the only one, right, like, that used. to play have. we have some friends playing the Sims. I was thinking I I I played it too for a minute with my husband, and there was I don't know what happened, but, like, I think someone in the Sims world was mean to me. One of the, like, computer things, not an actual person. And then my husband, Oh, like, I think trapped him somewhere and, like, built a house around him. I mean, That's so silly. a Sims thing. Like, I I mean okay. Like, if people are gonna be honest, like, most people here probably trapped their sim in, like, a pool and taken out the ladder. There's all sorts of stuff. Okay? Like, let's be honest. But true. I'm not the only one. I'm really happy because there's all sorts of weird emergencies that happen, and they make no sense. And you're six down like, six months down in your in your Sims life, and you're still nowhere close to that amazing house that you wanted. And, honestly, it looks more like this. But, like, this is what Sims really looks like. And I'm gonna tie this back to marketing because you have to. So this is just like marketing. Like, you do everything that you're told by all the experts and the gurus and the guides of the world, but you're just not getting the results that you want. Even if you follow follow all the best practices and everything everyone tells you, you're still not gonna get that. But the thing about the sims is that you have cheat codes. Everyone loves cheat codes. Right? Like, a quick hack, you put in Muggleode or Rosebud depending on when you're putting dude's like, I guys, I played this for a long time. And you get that mansion, and it's amazing because suddenly you're a billionaire, and you can do all that thing. But that and that's great in in Sims, but unfortunately, in marketing, there are no cheat codes. But I feel like marketers are kind of acting like there are cheat codes right now. And when pressure hits, we really do try to reach for shortcuts, and I get that. Our new shortcut in 2026 is AI. We do things like say, write me a high converting landing page, give me 50 headline variants, Give me five AB testing ideas for a product page or generate urgency copy. And the result is that everyone is basically shipping the same stuff faster. So velocity goes up, differentiation goes down. No one actually can tell the difference because everyone looks and sounds the same. And conversions, they also go down. Like, you're not getting leads and you're not getting sales. And then when you want to start running AB tests because that's what we do. Right? Like, if something's not working, we want to optimize. There's a problem you wanna fix, but you have no idea what to test. So you end up doing this thing where, like, you take a page, you duplicate it, you change one element on the page, and you're like, surprise. Yay. This is the best AB test ever. And, like, nothing actually happens, and you're just kind of it's all on fire. Everything's it's terrible. It's really bad. Is is that is that you? That is you. Here's me. My nine year old took a video of me doing this, and then I turned it into a GIF. I was really proud of it. But but, honestly, like, this is what it feels like. Everything's on fire. Like, the this is fine meme, but, like, Sims version because I had to do a sim version. And the thing is that while everyone is really shipping stuff because you can, there's a huge, huge issue that everyone's ignoring. Well, everyone except Rand and Amanda. Right? Which is that the linear funnel we've all been optimizing for years no longer exists. This this isn't what our our funnel looks like anymore. And, unfortunately, buying decisions have moved off of your website. People start with your website and then they leave. And we've seen this from running countless of AB tests. And sometimes they don't actually start on your website. But if they do, then they leave and they go to Reddit, to Facebook groups, to LinkedIn, comments. They go to YouTube friends. They go to podcasts. They Discord communities, black community, WhatsApp. They get on a phone with someone. They're on blogs. These spaces actually feel a lot more human and connected and unfiltered and messy and emotional, and they feel authentic. And the truth is that right now, trust no longer lives on the website, and we actually trust strangers more than we trust, brands And this is especially true sorry to interject. I just was, inspired here. go ahead. This is especially true in b two b SaaS. So our friend, Yeah. Ross Simmons, over at Foundation Inc, they did some research on, on the how Reddit is winning a lot of traffic on organic keywords, which basically. describe pain points, questions, things around certain b two b software companies. So, you know, when people and it's not even just the stuff of, like, you know, best pro productivity tool. It's just generic pain points where Reddit is winning of all up to a 100% of that traffic. So more and more people. are doing the research on Reddit and other places like that before their webs them back website. to you. Mhmm. Sorry. And they're not sending it back. No. It's good. It's great. Keep this going. Yeah. And they're not sending it back to you. And and this is the point, right, is that trust is determined in public. Right. So this is the these are the spaces that people negotiate trust, and they ask the questions they actually care about. Like, has anyone actually tried this? Did this work for you? What's the catch? Am I about to make a mistake? And the reason you should care about this is, a, what you just said, Amanda, which is like all this traffic, it's not coming to your website anymore. All of your prospects are there. But when someone googles your brand or your industry or your competitor or a pain point, when a prospect even prompts chattyPT, AI mode, gym whatever, they're actually pulling all this information from everywhere. Meaning, everything online, every sentiment, every frustration, every moment of trust, every warning, every praise, it's all summarized into one answer off of your website, which is you can or you cannot trust this brand. So you no longer control your story. Prospects aren't getting that beautiful polished message that you carefully crafted on your website anymore. They're getting the messy Internet signal about you. And I'm really here to tell you that without trust, there are no conversions. And if you want to start increasing conversions, you we actually need to start addressing the new customer journey. And I I wanna show you what that looks like. So, the new customer journey has four steps. The first one is discovery, and this is when buyers discover you, through ads, through peer recommendations, organic content, LLMs, Reddit, and they are discovering you all over. And then they start their research. So they go through multiple touch points, multiple channels, reviews, community, social proof, competitor comparisons on and off your website. So sometimes they'll they will come to your website. They'll read a bunch of things. They'll make sure, for example, that the pricing is in the right bracket, that your features are the right features, that you have the right integrations if you're in b two b, and then they'll leave to go and build trust somewhere else. And once they do the research, then they do validation. And this is a part that we all kind of aren't aware of yet, but what happens is after someone, for example, went on Reddit and read through a bunch of subreddits and threads, they then go to your website to confirm that what they learn about you off of your website is true. They're coming with beliefs and emotions to your website, and now they're coming to your website to actually see if those are true and if you're gonna contradict it. And finally, you get that conversion if you're lucky and it worked well and there's no contradicting information or story or emotions or anything there. So this is the new customer journey that we're seeing. And as someone who's been doing conversion optimization for almost fifteen years now, I have determined that trust is the new conversion rate. Without trust, no conversions. Right? So what is trust? Trust is the perceived probability that choosing you won't end in regret. Meaning that when people are contemplating you, they're asking themselves stuff like, are other people like me choosing this? Are teams like ours using this? Is this a safe choice? Will I get the results that I'm hoping for? Will I lose my job? If you're, like, in b two b, that's a scary thought. So this element of trust really matters. And the only way to actually make sure that you have that trust element is you have to have three things, everywhere, not on a not only on your website. You have to have emotional safety. You have to have viable and meaningful social proof, which we can talk about soon, and a consistent narrative, and this is super important. This is the key. On your website, but also across all the platforms where your customers are, where your prospects are. And this is a big problem because there's a trust gap. So most companies are over here saying, like, these beautiful things about themselves, but what the web is actually saying is completely different. And I use some examples in here like, oh, on the left, it's a b two b company saying, like, effortless collaboration, seamless results. And then, this is actually from Reddit. I just put it into Gamma. Gamma is, like, my favorite tool right now. And I also did take the Reddit threads and just kind of make it look like threads so I'm not actually showing real people. But, honestly, a bit overpriced for what it does, confusing, not as not as seamless as promised, features are good but buggy. You can tell that this was done with AI because it says seamless instead So, wait, of instead of seamless. say go back just a bit? What's gamma? Oh, gamma feel dumb. AI. Okay. Gamma AI is my favorite tool right now. So the way I use AI, I don't wanna outsource my thinking to it. So I do a lot of my planning and my thinking on my whiteboard or on this huge piece of paper, it's brown paper, and loads of colors. And then when I have a big idea and I know what I'm what I wanna go for, my biggest issue is I actually don't know I'm not good at design. I'm not good at explaining things in design and wireframing and, like, creating beautiful things. Gamma is a tool where you can literally just throw in a LinkedIn post that you're writing, maybe even, like, your entire outline for your new slide deck and presentation, or, like, anything you you're really working on, and it will visualize all that stuff for you. What? I did not know about this. super feel. dumb. No. Okay. No. No. No. You're not dumb. cool. Come on. This is we're all learning here. I also the other tool that does this is Napkin AI. Oh, Super cool. Those are the two tools that I use the most. not kidding. I learned about Gamma AI from Will Reynolds. So, like, I didn't know, any of this. I just is cool. Will religiously on LinkedIn. This is cool. And he has a Oh, go ahead. Sorry. no. Go ahead. No. No. I was gonna say, like, this webinar is not sponsored by gamma dot ai. But, Or, by Will wanna. give, gamma, if you wanna give us free accounts, we'll take it. It is it is a very cool tool. Also, I love how they've learned You can tell that they're learning from their users. I'm gonna go over time. But but, like, you can tell they're learning from their users because they used to only have the option to create a presentation or a social post. So you throw in text, and then it creates, like, either a social post for you with, like, multiple slides or an entire slide deck. But last month, they also introduced graphics. Like, you just wanna create an image, and they noticed that everyone that's what people are doing, so they created an option to just create images. So this is it, basically. But as you can see, AI still makes, like, spelling mistakes and stuff like that. But it's just a cool way to, like, okay. On the left is this, and on the right is this, and it it's cool. So, yeah, Gamma AI, cool, and Napkin AI too. Super cool. Back to our regular programming session. So okay. What do you do when there's a trust gap? Right? What do you do when your website, you've spent a ton of time optimizing it and creating something beautiful, and you know, it's correct, but then the web is saying a bunch of things you have no control over? I'll tell you what you don't do. And I'm gonna start there. Doing more is making it worse. We are right now at autopilot. So we do what feels like work. We're producing more content, more channels. We are working on more data, more attribution, more AB tests, more tools and software, more proven LinkedIn props. Like, I hate those comments. Like, comment prompt. More just build it with AI. Like, we are just because we can, we're just building more and more and more. We're throwing so much on everything. And that more is killing our conversions. It's killing our productivity. It's killing our conversions because it's all baseless with no strategy. It's useless. And it just feels good because we it's something that you can show in a report. It's something that you can show, like, oh, I didn't I built five landing pages this week, but that is actually this is why teams are failing when they're doing all of this. They're on this hamster wheel of just creating more and more and more content. And, you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So I'm here to remind you that you can't actually cheat code your way out of a trust problem. And the only way to actually understand trust and to optimize for it on your website and off is to go back to the foundations, and this is what we're talking about today. I want us to go back to the real foundations of marketing, and talk about how people make buying decisions because we forget. We put our buyers in these little buckets of, like, gender, geographical location, browsers, devices. We try and put them into these segments, but we forget that it's actual people. So as a reminder, this is not how people make buying decisions. We don't go through an elaborate process of thinking about the pros and the cons and what makes sense until we finally reach a rational decision and, like, yes. I will buy. That is not how decisions happen. Countless psychologists, neuroscientists, and the biggest brands in the world have proven beyond beyond the shadow of a doubt that the way people make decisions is with emotion. Every single decision that we make in life is based on emotion. Yes. Even in b two b, if you're in b two b, emotion is the foundation of everything. It's why people buy in any industry. It's why they don't buy. It's why people choose one brand over another. And, again, once you have shown them your pricing, your integrations, and everything that's cool about your product, they're left with a decision, and that decision is built on emotion. And in basically this world where buying decisions are being made off of your website, site, you have to prioritize emotion. And the brands that are prioritizing emotions are the ones that are getting the best results. And I'll show you what I mean by that. So this is kind of my thoughts and feelings. Again okay. I'm not gonna say how I made this. So strategy before tactics. Okay? Most companies, most marketers wanna start here. Okay? Everyone wants to start with social, paid, new tools, new tactics, new channels, the fun stuff, the visible stuff, the stuff that helps us feel like we're doing things, and it feels like progress. But this is also where teams get lost because without a meaningful strategy behind it, you're just kind of creating more and more and more and more work, but you're not getting the results that you want. Then you have metrics, and optimization. So, like, metrics, KPIs, analytics, attribution, we're upset with we're we're obsessed with it, but metrics, we think that metrics create clarity, but they're actually just measuring what we've decided before that matters. And we're not even, you know, tracking trust, for example. Low a a later down, we have really core pieces of marketing, SEO, CRO, content, and email marketing. Super important. But as a reminder, those are execution layers. Without a good foundation, they just give you a sense of more work, but they keep keep you on that hamster wheel. Then you have audits and road maps. Like, audits tell you where things are broken, but they don't tell you why because we're doing very specific audits, and I'll talk about that in a minute. The basis of everything is emotional targeting. You have to start at the bottom of the pyramid, just like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the emotional targeting foundation, and then you build on that. Sorry. Then you can optimize everything else. Without this foundation, you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall, and it's just keeping you on that hamster wheel. And, really, the thing is that right now, I was looking at the stat and it blew my mind that 82% of marketers have no confidence in their ability to analyze or use their data. We're collecting data like pokemons, and we don't know what to do with it. And the data that we're collecting, it really sucks. It's stuff like Josie's a woman, age 30 to 35 to 50 living in The US, blah blah blah. We know all this stuff about our customers. And this data this data keeps telling you that the reason people buy from you is because of your features, your pricing, your technology, your AI, and it's incorrect. And then you take this information and you're like, okay, AI. Help me do this thing. And I did it. I was like, please outline a landing page for a well known soda drink. My target audience is adults and children. It's only $14, a 140 calories. So all the stuff that we feed AI with all the knowledge that we know about our customers, because we're not focused on emotions, psychology. We know we know behavioral stuff, and we're throwing that at AI. And, of course, ChatGPD is like, well done, Talia. You're amazing. This is great. Here's how to build the landing page. And then my team and I built the page, and it's the number one soft drink in the world since 1886. Now no one will ever see a landing page like this than Coca Cola, but we're all putting this we're all doing this shit. We're all putting this out there, and we don't know why we're not getting the results that we want. So meaningless data equals distractions. And I'll show you an example from a case study, a quick case study. So, we work with one of the largest moving companies in The US. And what their competitors are all saying is we're the cheapest, we have the best price, act now to get this amount off. These are all actual headlines from their landing pages. Guaranteed pricing match, call today for the best offer, no hidden fees. This was our client's landing page, the original one. Pay what you see, no hidden fees. Basically aligned with what everyone else is saying. And I get that because moving is hard and it's expensive. And a lot of our clients are worried about pricing, and especially in the past few years, it's getting even harder. So I understand why the whole industry kind of moved into a pricing conversation, but what happened is everyone kind of forgot that there's much more to moving than pricing. And when you do this, you're not actually catering to what your customers care about. You are really just repeating what everyone else is saying. So we did our research, and we tried to figure out what do people actually care about when they're moving. And all our, almost all our clients' reviews were about white glove service. So feeling safe, knowing that their items are protected, knowing that someone's coming to help them, that everything arrived well and unbroken, and that the people that came to move their stuff were really trustworthy and helpful and nice. All the feedback, all the reviews weren't about pricing at all. They were really about their the fact that people were moving their lively possessions, and they were super worried that they were gonna give all that stuff and it would catch on fire or go or, I don't know, disappear. So we decided to go against what everything what everyone else was doing in, the industry, And we made it about what people really care about. So we combed through hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations on Reddit after looking at our reviews, and we saw the same pattern. Will all my stuff arrive safely? Will my life arrive in one piece one piece? Are these people trustworthy? Will someone help me from start to finish? Are these friendly, kind people? Is there someone to call if something goes wrong? So we created a landing page that says trusted since 1928, a premium moving experience from start to finish. Now the word premium already tells you that it's gonna be more expensive. It's not more expensive, but it sounds more expensive. Transparent upfront pricing with no hidden cost. So now it's a bullet point, not the headline. Full value protection for all your items, covers all 50 states, customer support, full service. This actually increased their conversions by 14%. So actual leads that then converted. And that is incredible because you go against everything everyone else in your industry is saying, and you make it about your customers, and you actually increase conversions. And I wanna show you how to do this. So I'm gonna show you a five step process, which is actually six, and I didn't update it. As I told Amanda, I added another step today. So the sixth step about the moving company. Can I can I add a piece. of advice that you guys can ignore? When I I've moved a bunch of times, the thing that worried me most was not so much hidden fees, but more of, like, the unexpected fee of if the move. takes a little bit longer than. expected and I I've asked every movie comp every moving company this, is if if the move takes a little bit. longer than expected, can you agree to a not to exceed rate? So, like, is there a maximum you can guarantee? Like, I understand I'll have to pay you extra, of course, for an extra hour or two of time, but can you promise me you're not gonna have some surprise fee of, like, well, when you go over the time allotted, it becomes a thousand dollars an hour. And. in my. experience, most of the moving companies agreed to that. They're like, yeah. Sure. We can. And we didn't even come close to that amount, but it helped me feel better that, like, I wouldn't suddenly get a bill for, like, $8,000. Yeah. Absolutely. And by the way, this is one of the first variations. that we tested. The current one that's winning actually says, no surprise fees on moving day. Oh, Because that's we. realized with a lot of people were saying that, like, I got a great quote. And then on the day, someone arrived and it was like, well, we didn't account for all of this. So it's, like, $5,000. more. Yeah. And no surprise fees on moving day. It was a big thing, and it's one of our bullet. points right now. So that's I love that. cool. Okay. I'm sorry. Go on. No. That's great. Okay. So the six steps to optimizing your customer journey in a post funnel world. Okay. So number one, I want you guys to audit the discovery path. What would someone learn about you if they never visited your website? If I had a few more minutes, I would literally make you do this right now. But here's what you wanna do. You wanna ask ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity, one of these questions. Like, what are the pros and cons of your brand or your or your competitor or the industry? What, who should not use this brand? Is brand worth it? Do a Google search with your brand name, write it, honest review, problems, go to YouTube and ask for a review or an experience. Take into consideration the fact that a lot of people are arriving to your website for the first time after they've done a ton of research about you. You have to know what they're learning about you off of the website before ever visiting your website. That is crucial. This takes fifteen minutes max. You could do this this Friday. Take fifteen minutes out of your time. Book it right now on your calendar and just Google it. Just check what would someone find out if they never visited your website? What would they learn about you? And if you're not appearing anywhere, that's also a problem. Right? Okay. So that's step number one. Step number two, locate your trust ecosystem. So you wanna identify the social platforms that your prospects use, the post the podcasts are on, the communities where they're hanging out, where the influencers that they trust. And I, of course, put in SparkToro because, guys, this is everything is in here. This is actually from our movers. So I took this information from our client. We use, SparkToro, at GetUplift at my agency. And look at all this incredible information. It's telling me that people who move listen to these podcasts and that they're using these social networks. And now I can tell my client where to invest in paid, and I can also know where they're hanging out, and I can do research. So I can do research on YouTube, on Facebook groups, and on Reddit to find out more about my customers. And, by the way, one of the cool things that we do is we upload the email list to SparkToro. And by the way, Amanda Rad did not tell me to do this. I'm just telling you how we do it. So we upload the email list to SparkToro, and it's like, well, here's all this information about your customer. It's incredible. Right? It it really is cool. So this is a really great path because one of the first questions I get when I talk about the optimizing everywhere strategy is, like, this feels like a lot. Like, conversion optimization is already a ton of work, and now you're telling me to be everywhere all the time, everywhere at once. I'm not. I'm telling you to prioritize the top three channels and places that your customers are at, and you can you need to find out where that is. You don't have to use SparkToro, but it's just a great way to do that. You can also just go into Reddit and start checking that out. Okay. So step number one was finding out what people learn about you without visiting your website. Step number two, locating the trust ecosystem for your prospects. Next, step number three is doing emotional targeting research. This is beyond a doubt. This is the number one most important step. You have to do the extra research. You have to actually stop what you're doing and uncover why people really buy from you. Not features and pricing, the actual emotions. And what you wanna find out is how do people feel before finding a solution like yours? What are the top three pains that are that people are trying to solve? What mistakes are they terrified of making if they choose you? What concerns do they have about their self image? The self image is how they're going to feel about themselves after finding a solution. What social image are they trying to achieve? This is actually quite big in b two b. Like, I want when I buy a product, I want my teammates, my colleagues, my managers to think about me in a certain way. Maybe I want a promotion. Maybe I wanna make sure I don't lose my job. Social image really matters. And what does success feel like for them? You have to uncover these things. If you don't know the answers to these questions, you can't optimize. And the the cool thing is that when you have the answers to these questions, you can optimize everything, like every page, every email that you send out, everything. It's super cool. How do you actually do that? You conduct interviews and surveys of customers. You analyze conversations on Reddit, Discord, Facebook groups. You analyze public reviews. You analyze YouTube comments. You go on blog mentions. You look at media citations. Again, once you have once you actually do this research, you're gonna have so many gold golden insights. It's gonna be super cool because you'll be able to immediately see what's not converting. This is a cool example from teamwork.com. They're a project management solution. Their original homepage said the best platform for client work, try team Teamwork for free, and you have this homepage redesign. It's a project management solution. They have dozens of competitors. Think ClickUp, Monday, Asana, Basecamp, Trello, all the good ones. And the data that they had before was we serve agency owners. They have 10 plus employees, and they need reporting dashboards and chat. We did our research, and here's what we looked, and we found that all of their competitors are talking about AI powered project management. All your teams, all their workflows connected in one space. The number one project management tool, supercharge your team with AI. The CAI theme is big. Seamless project management, project tracking made simple, discover powerful management, blah blah blah. The best platform for client work. So this is all their competitors. We continue doing our research. And what we uncovered and this is it's so cool. There's so many threads and information and content online and YouTube videos talking about how people literally choose project management solutions, what they did, what research they did, how they did it, and we use this to optimize our website and the homepage for them. What we uncovered was super cool is that their agency owner is tired of overpromising and underdelivering. They want to know what the f is going on. I say f because I don't know if we're allowed to curse on this, webinar. Wants to know if she's profitable or not and if Patty, the designer, is actually working. This is when you understand your real customer, their pains, their hesitations, their concerns. Amanda and I actually talked about this this week on your, on your show. So this was the original home page, the best platform for client work, and we changed it to run your client work in the only platform that's actually built for it. And we showed the project health report, which shows you exactly if Patty's working, if you're profitable or not, if you can take on a client or not. And it's super cool because it really does focus on what they do well and how they do it well. And I'll just show you another example of their comparison page. Why would you choose Teamwork over Wrike? So this was the original, comparison page, and it just says, you know, try us now for free. But we did so much research, and we were able to create a 5,000 word page really detailing the difference and helping people choose between Wrike and Teamwork, and actually say what they do and what they don't. Helping client, services service businesses manage project, see the full financial picture, actually telling them what they can, what they can't do. Instead of just listing the pricing, we explain why it actually looks more expensive, but it isn't and the hidden costs that Wrike has. When we got to actually comparing features, instead of just saying, okay. We have bored you. They don't. We have a portfolio. They don't. On the left here, we said, here's the result you're going to get from these features, the results that we know that they care about. And then we listed, okay. And here's all the features that support helping you do this, and Wrike doesn't have it. You create content that actually helps people make a decision and tells them, like, hey. If you don't need all of this, Wrike's a great competitor for you. Go choose them. So this research really, really matters, and I'm telling you, do not skip the step. Super, super important. Okay. Step number four out of six, create feedback loops. It's you don't have to constantly, interview people all the time. You can do some really cool things like surveys on thank you pages and automated emails, and you can also ask for very specific questions. So if you're reaching out to people, ask them, what made you feel safe choosing this product or solution? What one pain did we eliminate or lessen for you? These are questions that help you really understand why people buy from you, what the real value is. And once you start creating these feedback loops, they just happen all the time, and you've got information and insights coming in at all the time. It's super cool. And that is really important to set that up. Step number five, optimize everywhere. So you wanna show up where buying decisions are happening and you wanna participate in these discussions. Yes. You need to participate in Reddit, and, yes, you will probably get banned. So what? X, Twitter, whatever we're calling it, LinkedIn, Facebook, frads, blue sky. You need to be in all these spaces. You need to start conversing with people, commenting, replying to people, actually writing your own content, even if it has no links and no way to be tracked back to your website, participating in these spaces helps you build your brand and build your authority and build trust, which again, no trust, no conversions. So optimize everywhere. And of course, step number six is optimizing your customer journey. So you wanna keep, optimizing all the assets that you own based on all the insights that you just uncovered. And one of the things that I would love for you guys to do even before you do the research, the emotional targeting research, is ask yourself the following questions. Are you making your website about yourself or about the customer? Can prospects see their pains reflected in every step of the journey? Do your design, your UX, your colors, the images, do they support what you're saying and prove the message that you have, or are they just kind of working against it? Are you highlighting the outcomes that prospects actually care about, or are you just talking about saving time without actually elaborating what that means? Can a prospect immediately see the emotional outcome they're going to get by taking an action? So if you're telling them to sign up or enroll or start a free trial or contact you or get on a sales call or a demo request or get on a co on a coaching call? Can are you actually showing them the emotional value of doing that? Are you connecting those? And are you focused on how your solution works and what you do or the outcomes that people care about? This is a really quick audit that you can run. Even look at your home page or the emails that you're sending out and ask yourself if you're doing that. If you're doing if you're not doing all of this, if this isn't true, then you have an emotional connection and emotional resonance problem, and that needs to be fixed. That needs to be optimized. And you do that by, of course, running AB tests and optimizing your website, optimizing your ads, your emails, your landing pages, all the social basically everything that you own with all the insights that you gained, optimizing for trust, messaging consistency, and emotional resonance, and running meaningful experiments, not just button testing, but actually testing, messaging, real messaging around, people's emotions. So doing nothing is an optimization strategy, but, if you don't own your own narrative and your own story, someone else will or the Internet will. And I think, yeah, it's just not yours. So it really is important to start doing this stuff, more than ever. This is just a cool example of how I was, saying this the other day that our client didn't wanna show pricing on their website. So we showed them that ChatGPT is just telling everyone what the pricing is, and it's incorrect. So you can own that story. Instead of actually just sending them somewhere else, own that story. Start actually taking the narrative back from the Internet and owning it so more people come to you. So the only way to drive meaningful conversions in a post funnel world is to do extensive research to uncover the real why, run meaningful experiments using emotion, and optimize the entire customer journey on and off. I am here to remind you that technology changes, and it always changes just like AI. In the past, we used to listen to music this way and then through the radio and then through this and then the Discman or Walkman, whatever we're calling this. But the reason people do things doesn't change. So technology will change all the time. But we have an incredible opportunity to dominate our industries right now if you become customer first, if you obsess over your customers, if you optimize everywhere, if you understand their emotions. Because conversion optimization isn't about changing elements on the page. It's about solving people's problems, and that is crucial. Final note before we take question. Just a reminder that reality really does suck. And you as marketers and us as marketers and people who put out solutions into the world have to do better and create better experiences for people. So just remember that. Like, put more effort into less production, less building, less publishing stuff, and more quality, more helping people on the web. And that's how you get the results that you want. And that's it. I'm done. This is me. That was great. Thank you, Talia. I kinda ran through that because I was suddenly like, oh my god. We only have ten minutes left. Sorry with my. interrupting. That didn't help, but that was. fantastic. Thank you. Alright. We do have some questions here. I'm going to start with the most upvoted questions. So our friend Piper here asks, how did you research for the moving company? Any good recommendations for structuring said research or surveys? Yes. So we did, a lot of different types of research for them, and we're constantly doing it. First, we combed through hundreds of conversations on Reddit. Like, that is a big piece. Everyone's talking about moving on Reddit, So we scraped thousands of conversations. Like, really? And then basically analyzed those to see what the top pains are that people are complaining about, what how they choose a brand, what would deter them from choosing a brand, the biggest things that they're worried about, concerns, hesitations. In addition to that, we ran surveys with their existing customers, so people who have already moved with them and asked them a bunch of questions about how they felt, why they chose them, what would what they were concerned about before choosing them, and how that was how they were convinced to give them a try anyway. And we also did some customer interviews, and we interviewed, I think, 15 different people who used their services. We also did an emotional competitor analysis. So that was kind of what I was showing you with those, landing pages. We were looking at the different positions and what people are what these brands are mostly focused on. And with these companies, it was mostly pricing. So we focused on, really finding our angle of where we can shine and do something different. Those are, like, the key things that we Cool. Alright. Next question from Kristen. Do you use any tools for the emotional targeting research or any suggestions for research on Reddit? Oh, so kinda like double clicking on that question and the previous one. Yes. Yeah. So, scraping tools on Reddit are not really allowed, honestly. So there is Reddit ask that is very good that you can use. But we do a lot of manuals work because, also, when you give AI the opportunity to analyze data for you, it kind of misses a lot of nuance. So we will have AI actually, analyze a lot of conversations from Reddit, but then I also ask it to give me exact quotes for every single claim that it makes. So when it says, oh, the biggest pain is x, I want you to give me at least five to 10 quotes showing me exactly where that is, what was said, and how they used it. And then I also will go through into the spreadsheet and review it myself and analyze it. Where we use tools is in the analysis and less in, like, scraping stuff and things like that. It's just not allowed. And then we'll use for surveys, we use Type Form. We love Type Form, just because we get more data that way from people, and people like answering their surveys. Cool. Yeah. Typeform is really great for that. Okay. Yeah. And then our friend Eric, yeah, our friend Erica here asks, how do you build trust or, you know, reputation when you're starting from zero? that's a great question. So, obviously, like, you wanna have the most important things set up. Right? Like, you wanna have your website, really speaking to your customer and making sure that it is customer first and that you're resonating on an emotional level. And you wanna make sure that beyond your website, every social post that you're putting out there, any YouTube, video that you're putting out there, any email that you send, it all resonates. It's all connected. It all feels like part of a story. And then what you wanna do is when you're going to spaces where you don't show up, you wanna start participating in the conversation. And there's two parts of it. One is obviously responding to people and maybe getting your name out there, but also doing the hard work of helping people, giving content out for free, and really starting to build that reputation as someone or a brand that solves people's problems. It is a long game. It's not a short game. But as you slowly start producing more helpful content, as you show up in more conversations in the most important spaces, you build that trust and you start showing up. Yeah. I mean, it's absolutely true that it's a long game. It just is. So this is also why I often say to people that because it's a long game, you also have to figure out some short term not even KPIs, right, but, like, short term, goals or, like, things that this crosses off your list. So, like, if you're producing the most useful, most helpful content, okay, in the short term, can producing a given asset help reduce Yeah. your inbox load? You know, like, if you're getting a question that's frequent from a from a bunch. of your customers, like, fine. Then maybe maybe the immediate KPI is, am I spending less time answering this question because I made this asset instead? Like, great. That's your. that's your, like, you know, one week or less KPI. Absolutely. Okay. And then some other questions here. Oh, Kristen asks, do you recommend participating in Reddit with a handle that is your brand, your brand name, or a person slash anonymous user? Both. Mhmm. So when it comes to Reddit, you wanna first create your own subreddit for your brand. That's really important. You wanna have a space where you can start posting there weekly and also, where people can come and talk to you and ask you questions. And it's like the official space for your brand, and you wanna own that before anyone else does. And you can also use that to create a profile for the brand and start responding as the brand. But it's not as good in all in all cases as using a personal, profile. So what I like to do when we when we work with our clients is we create a bunch of different profiles for more like the CEO, the founder, the, the people who are more who we see more, online, and then we'll do a mix of responding from, like, human accounts of just, like, people that, you know, have approved these messages and wanna engage, but then also a mix with the brand. And you have to play around with it and see how tolerant people are to brand versus people. Yeah. Sort of like a personal professional or a set of personal professional accounts that you make. Yeah. For makes sense. not anonymous, like, real accounts. for clients. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And, I mean, because it also just comes back. to people prefer to engage with people. Like, Yeah. I think that's just how it is. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. I am looking to see if there are any other questions here that my monitor is really small right now. It's hard for me to see. I need better glasses. We did not incentivize surveys. We try to avoid that. Just quickly Yeah. Because when you incentivize questions. people, then you risk muddying up the data because then you get people who are doing the survey. for the incentive. Yes. Yeah. Our experience too. Okay. Carly asks, do you have any best practices when interacting with subreddits that contain your brand without being too salesy? I think it's it's it's a hard one to recommend because it depends on your industry and the people who are engaging in it. Some brands can be cheeky and fun on Reddit, and then you can. go into, like, different subreddits and kinda comment things. I think, a good example is, like, on Fred's that a lot of brands are so engaged in conversation there, and, like, you can joke around and stuff. So you can do that in some subreddits. But in but often in in many, they're like they people just don't like the brand. Now if you are, if you're obviously not linking to yourself, you're not talking about yourself, and you're just responding as a brand to a question, it can work. But the true the truth is that you have to test it out, and sometimes they'll just ban you just because you're a brand. So you have to, based on your audience and the subreddits that you're in, just test some stuff out and see. Unfortunately, there's no, like, rule of thumb for any of this. Yeah. It's tough. I mean, that I mean, we are getting a lot of good questions here on Reddit, and it is making me think about, like, who can we also talk to on Reddit marketing? I mean, Ross Simmons at Foundation. Inc, he's great at Reddit marketing. He's had a lot of experience with that, especially in b two b, so he's a good person to learn from. Yes. Alright. We do have a minute left. You know, there was a question earlier that came up that I thought was interesting. It was from Will. He asked about, what was the question? Someone can retype it. It was about, like, what do you do? Oh, when you have a two sided marketplace, like, who do you focus on first? I just think that's a really interesting question. How do you think. about that? Yeah. It's a bit it's a big one. I actually get that quite a bit, funnily enough. It depends on your KPIs and what you're trying to achieve, so the business goals themselves. I would say that you wanna start with the customer, but both of them are customers. So the hard answer is that I can't answer in, like, seventeen seconds. I'm, like, so I'm, like, watching the countdown. Okay. So it you have to make it about the customer, and, unfortunately, it's gonna be depending on your specific audience and your business goals. I can answer a lot more about this, but it's just, like, it depends on what you're trying to achieve and what your KPIs are. I like to focus on one audience at. a time if I can, Mhmm. and. That makes sense. go also wanna add to that a story about The Knot, in wedding website. on I remember a while back, that. Amanda Getz, you know, author, marketer, podcast host now, but she, for a long time, was VP of marketing at The Knot. And she told me the story about the two sided marketplace that I have never forgotten, and it was at the knot, one of their most unexpected places of growth was in their wedding style quiz. So the wedding style quiz where if you were an engaged person, you would take this quiz. You know, it was kind of like a Tinder style, like swipe left or right based on, like, what you like. And then it would the result of the quiz would be it would give you a terminology or words to describe your style. Like, it would give you, like, a suggested I mean, I say would. Like, it still does. It still exists, but Yeah. it gives you, like, a suggested color palette, inspirational photos to consider for your, like, reception, all that stuff. And the reason this was so powerful for them was a lot of the wedding vendors who were on the knot marketplace ended up sending this quiz to their clients because it. gave them the shared terminology. Like, it made it easier for these vendors to work with clients. So a main so good. Right? This is basically an asset that served the end user, the b to b to c audience, but was ultimately shared empowered by the b to b audience. So I often think. about this as like a, how can I apply these principles to other things? So yeah. I love that. That's so cool. Alright. Thank you, friends, for joining us. Thank you so much, Talia, for sharing your knowledge. This is amazing. Yes. We're gonna send the recording and the slides. If you haven't already, please order Talia's book, Emotional Targeting. And if you don't slash don't want to slash can't do this conversion stuff yourself, hire her. Hire her and her team, and they will help you. And with that, we will see you next month or so. Bye, friends. Bye. Can you click on leave stage? I can do that.