Emotional Targeting: A Proven Path to More Leads and Sales

Ever feel like you’re spinning your wheels with conversion optimization—testing headlines, buttons, and pop-ups but still seeing underwhelming results? Do you know something’s not working on your site, but have no clear direction on what to fix or why?

Emotional targeting is a science-backed approach that transforms your marketing by tapping into how real people make decisions.

This article walks you through a step-by-step framework, from uncovering emotional triggers through research, through auditing your site with a human lens, to testing hypotheses rooted in real customer pain and desire. You’ll also find examples of how emotional targeting works across copy, design, and AI-assisted research.

If you’re a marketer tired of guesswork and ready for a smarter, more human-centered way to optimize, this guide will help you turn emotional insights into tangible business results—more leads, more conversions, and customers who feel truly understood.

Why Emotional Targeting Improves Your Marketing Efforts

Conversion optimization can make many marketers feel trapped in what Talia Wolf, conversion rate optimization strategist and founder of Get Uplift, calls “the deadly hamster wheel of optimization.”

This hamster wheel begins when you identify a leak in your funnel through Google Analytics. You know there's a problem with your home page, landing page, or product page, but knowing what changes to make becomes the biggest black box in optimization. No one tells you what to do next.

So what happens? You start Googling for best practices or asking ChatGPT how to optimize your product page. You copy your competitors because it's easy to assume they know better than they do. You throw tools at the problem, thinking maybe a new automation tool, landing page builder, or AB testing platform will solve everything. You test buttons, pop-ups, and reduce form fields. When that doesn't work, you start guessing again and again.

The fundamental problem is that marketers aren't optimizing for the right things. They're looking for where the problem is and guesstimating their way to optimization instead of understanding the deeper mechanics of decision-making.

Wolf experienced this exact challenge early in her career. She tried all the best practices, guessing her way through optimization and button testing blue versus red, but nothing got her the results she wanted. But she understood that if she could reverse engineer how people make buying decisions, then she could influence the buying decision. After all, what is a conversion? A conversion is a decision. It's someone coming to your website, looking at what you have to offer, and saying that they need that in their life.

When Wolf and her team went back to research the science behind decision-making, they discovered that emotion dictates everything we do. Every single decision that we make in life is based on emotion. This isn't a fluffy, nice-to-have concept—this is science. Research shows that without emotion, most of us lack the ability to make any kind of decision.

Once Wolf started using the process of identifying emotions, pains, hesitations, concerns, how people are feeling, and how they want to feel, it became much easier to look at a page and immediately see what was wrong. She could identify when copy was off, stories weren't resonating, social proof made no sense, and no one cared about what was being presented.

Conversion optimization isn't about changing elements on a page—it's not about the headline or the pop-up. It's about solving people's problems. If you can identify the problems that people are coming with to your website, then you can create experiences that solve them. That's the whole point.

When someone lands on your website, they should be able to say, “Oh my gosh, this is exactly how I feel. This is exactly the gap that I'm missing. This is what I need in my life.” As they read through the content, they should think, “Yes, okay, there's someone like me who's done this, who's felt this way. They have all this stuff. This is incredible. Yes, please sign me up, take my money.”

This isn't about manipulating people or making them feel emotions that don't exist. You're resonating with them and saying, “Hey, I know how you feel. I know what you've tried before. Here's a better way, and let me show it to you.”

#1: Begin with Research: The Foundation of Emotional Targeting

The first step in emotional targeting is research, and Wolf emphasizes that this work takes time. It's not a bandage, an easy fix, a tactic, or a hack. This work requires meaningful investment, but if you do it properly, you'll unravel something you can use forever.

When people hear “research,” they often think of basic questions like “Why did you buy from us?” or “What feature do you like most?” or “Why did you choose this plan?” Wolf is talking about meaningful research where you uncover the top three pains that led people to your website, the top three desired outcomes and emotional outcomes they're looking for, understanding how they feel right now, and understanding how they want to feel in the future once they've found a solution.

Understanding Emotional Clusters

Through years of experience, Wolf and her team have identified over 223 different emotional triggers. However, these emotions typically fall into clusters because there are always multiple emotions at play.

Self-Image: The first cluster is all about how someone wants to feel about themselves after finding a solution. They want to feel pride. They want to feel smart. They want to feel that they are a better mom, a better marketer, a better version of themselves. This is all related to self-image.

Social Image: This second cluster usually comes hand in hand with self-image, especially if you're a service provider or in B2B. Social image is all about how someone wants others to think about or see them after they have a solution. For example, they want other people to think of them as the go-to person in the office. They want other people to think they deserve that promotion. They want people to think that they're smart, that they're a leader, that they're a great mom.

When you start researching, you'll begin noticing when people talk about how they want to feel about themselves versus when they mention other people. They're mentioning people in the office, their neighbor, and significant others in the conversation. When you start seeing those patterns, you can develop hypotheses about whether your prospects care about their self-image or their social image.

Research Methods That Work

You can conduct several types of research to uncover these emotional drivers.

Customer surveys allow you to directly ask your existing customers about their experiences, but these should focus on emotional drivers rather than feature preferences.

Visitor surveys are tools on your website to capture insights from people who are currently in your funnel but haven't converted.

Social listening involves being a fly on the wall in conversations where your prospects naturally discuss their challenges and desires.

Review mining is one of Wolf's favorite research methods. If you don't have a lot of customers to interview or survey right now, review mining means going to your competitors' products and seeing their reviews. But it's not just your competitors—you can also look at related products on Amazon.

For example, if you're selling courses for training your dog at home, you could go to Amazon and look for books about training dogs because your prospects are probably also learning from books if they want to do their own dog training. If you have accounting software, you could look at reviews for “Accounting for Dummies.”

The key is to mine through hundreds of reviews that these books or your competitors are getting to see what people are complaining about, what people love, and what people are missing. You want to see comments like “I wish this book would cover X,” ” This book didn't really get into this piece, which I'm really missing,” or “This book nailed this piece.”

When you do this research, you start seeing different ways you can outsmart your competitors and different ways you can talk about your solution. You'll suddenly see that people care about specific things, and you might have a feature that addresses those concerns. You should be talking about this because people care about it.

Review sites exist for almost everything you could imagine. Amazon works for books and physical products. TripAdvisor works for travel services. G2 and works for bigger software products. The key is finding where your prospects are already having conversations about solutions like yours.

Use AI for Research Analysis

One of the most powerful applications of AI in this process is analyzing the research you've collected. Depending on the project, Wolf and her team download all of their research and upload it into Perplexity, Claude, or ChatGPT.

They ask the AI to look for specific things. For example, they might say, “Put this information into two buckets: self-image and social image.” They pre-feed the AI with definitions of social image and self-image and ask it to categorize the research accordingly.

Other useful prompts include asking AI to “put it into negative and positive,” “shine a light on all the conversations and reviews that mention other people,” or “highlight all the conversations and reviews that mention X.”

If you go in with basic demographic information like age, geographical location, gender, browser, and job title and ask ChatGPT to write great copy, it will be generic and boring.

But if you pour 200 reviews from a book into your AI project and say, “Here's what I need you to do. Dissect this. Tell me about [specific emotional drivers],” then you can get incredible copy because you're feeding it with incredible and golden insights.

#2: Audit Your Site and Funnel Through an Emotional Lens

The second step is conducting an emotional targeting audit. When most people think about a conversion optimization audit, they focus on basics like heuristic analysis, heat maps, recordings, making sure you have only one call-to-action button, and avoiding carousels—all UX and design-specific elements.

However, the generic CRO audit is very surface-level and basic. What these audits don't do is ask why these things are happening. An emotional targeting audit is a set of strategic questions you ask yourself while looking at your pages.

Key Audit Questions

Now that you know your customers' pains, hesitations, concerns, and desires, you can go to your website—whether it's a landing page or pricing page—and ask yourself strategic questions that will tell you if something is resonating or not.

Are you making it about yourself or about your customer? This is the number one question to ask yourself.

Can prospects see their pains reflected on every step of the journey? This means their real pains should be visible throughout their entire experience with your brand.

Am I pairing every feature or offer with an emotional outcome? You shouldn't just say, “We're powered by AI,” without explaining why someone should care and what emotional outcome they'll achieve.

You'll start noticing that you're using a lot of generic content and talking a lot about yourself, but the customer is nowhere to be found. You might discover that you're using social proof that doesn't actually dismantle hesitations and concerns, or you're just using the customary logo bar instead of meaningful testimonials.

Reflecting Pain Throughout the Customer Journey

One of the biggest misconceptions about emotional targeting is that it's just about fluffy headlines and cute, flowery value propositions. Wolf argues that the biggest impact emotional targeting has is not in those big, huge value propositions at the top of the page—it's how you weave emotion throughout the page.

It's how you talk about what your customers go through every day. For example, as a social media marketer, you might feel the burn because tools and strategies are changing constantly. Every day, there's a new tool, and AI is changing everything, and you have to keep on top of things. Everything feels scary.

If you have a great headline that says, “Become a social media expert,” that won't take you all the way home. Reflecting people's pains throughout the journey means that while people are reading your page, going to the next page, opening an email from you, or seeing an ad from you, everything should reflect how they're feeling right now, what struggles they have, what challenges they face, and then how you're going to solve that.

One of the best ways to reflect pain is to say, “Here's what you've probably tried: one, two, three, and four, and they haven't worked. Here's why it hasn't worked: you don't know A, B, C.” When you do that, you're not just saying “be the best social media marketer in the world.” You're saying, “Imagine if you were always on top of things. You never felt behind. You never felt like the world was twenty miles ahead of you, and you could stay on top of things.”

Or using social image: “Imagine your boss is so happy with your work that he or she gives you a promotion.” That's the kind of messaging we're talking about—doing that throughout the entire journey, not just the sales page, but all messaging leading to that sales page and even the checkout page, right up until they purchase.

Beyond Copy: Design and Visual Elements

Emotional targeting isn't just about copy—it's also about design, the colors you're using, and your website's navigation. Wolf's team has run multiple tests for clients on website navigation to make it more conversational and immediately showcase case studies.

For one client, when they did research, they immediately saw that when people were trialing this company's product, they were also trialing two other companies. They were trying three products at the same time. So, they added “Compare Us” to the website's main navigation, which literally sent visitors to five different comparison pages in the menu.

Most websites don't do this because they don't want to send people to competitors. But prospects already know you have competitors, especially in AI. They're asking for recommendations. Understanding how people make decisions and acknowledging that reality in the customer journey led to better conversions.

Other audit questions include: Do your images, UX, and colors amplify your message? You could say, “We have the best posture trainer in the world that will remind you to sit up straight.” Still, if you don't show someone sitting in front of the computer working all day, who starts the day sitting up straight with all the intention to fix their posture, but just kind of slumps as they forget, then you're missing the whole point.

It's not just the words. Yes, copy will always come first, but are you just using fluffy screenshots of your product? Are you just using cute little animations because everyone else is? Or are you leveraging images, colors, and visuals throughout your whole customer journey to amplify your message and drive it home?

Pairing Features with Emotional Outcomes

When you're talking about a feature you're selling, you'll often see language like “we're powered by AI” or “we're the only one platform for X.” If you're not pairing each of your features with an emotional outcome, then you're missing the point.

Instead of just saying, “We're powered by AI,” you need to explain, “We're powered by AI, and this is going to help you achieve this. This is why you should care that we're powered by AI.”

For example, instead of “we're an all-in-one platform” (which everyone says), explain why someone should care: “You should care because right now you're using six different tools to try and do marketing. Actually, it's twenty-two tools on average that marketers use. With our all-in-one platform, you can consolidate everything.”

Every single feature that you promote, when you want to talk about your technology, your features, or something that's cool about you, it has to have “and here's why you should care, here's the result you're going to get,” paired with some sort of emotional desire they have.

Wolf provides an example from Upright, a posture-improvement device. In the past, Upright used to say “get upright to improve your posture, powered by biofeedback”—incredible science that literally knows when you're slouching and reminds you to sit up straight.

Through research, they discovered that everyone has the full intention to fix their posture. No one's happy with the fact that their back hurts, their shoulders hurt, their knees hurt. Everyone starts the day with all the intention to fix it, but as the day progresses, they forget.

The key insight was that everyone had guilt that they should be doing it: “I can't believe that I keep forgetting, and it's terrible.” There was guilt inside people for not following through. When they combed through Reddit conversations, many people mentioned forgetting: “I forget. When I remember it's great, but when I forget, I forget, and it's terrible.”

They added content on almost every single page that said, “Look, your poor posture isn't your fault. You slouch because you forget not to. Everyone does. But there is something you can do about it.” The whole idea was to outsource this responsibility so you never have to think about it again. Upright will do it for you. You never have to worry about it again; you will never forget because Upright will remind you.

Anytime they mentioned biofeedback science, it was paired with “it will remind you to sit up straight. You no longer have to have that guilt. You no longer have to worry about this thing. You're outsourcing it to us.”

#3: Run Meaningful Tests Based on Emotional Insights

The third step is running meaningful experiments. If you're struggling with testing and simply changing call-to-action button colors, trying pop-ups, or changing headlines, you're on the hamster wheel. To get meaningful results, you need to start running meaningful tests. You can only run meaningful tests when you have meaningful hypotheses.

If you have no idea who your customers are and why people aren't converting on your landing page, you'll probably Google for best practices or search AI for that information. But if you're powered with all the insights you've collected through research and audits, you'll start having hypotheses.

Developing Strong Hypotheses

A strong hypothesis might be: “People aren't converting on my landing page because they can't see that other people like them who do the same work as they do or struggle the same way as they do have also used our solution and succeeded.”

That's an incredible hypothesis and a big test. What that means is you need to go to your page and make sure you have enough social proof that shows people like your prospect have used your product, struggled with it in the same way, tried different things that didn't work, tried your product or service, and it worked.

That's a meaningful test because it's based on research-driven insights about what motivates your prospects.

Testing Strategy: Small Steps vs. Big Changes

The approach you take depends largely on buy-in within your organization. If you're a solopreneur, CEO, or CMO who doesn't have to answer to anyone, you can test whatever you want. But if you have to convince the people around you to write copy the way you want, design things differently, or get buy-in from the executive team on changing everything, that will be difficult.

For organizations with limited buy-in, Wolf recommends starting small. Don't test big things. Don't go all in. Take an email. Write one email about the biggest thing you've identified, and you'll get more opens and clicks.

For example, if you've identified three main pains that drive people to your website and want to see which one converts best, you can write three separate emails about each pain and see which gets the most opens, click-through rate, and conversions. A conversion can be anything—a download of a lead magnet, a signup, a sale—but you can literally see what motivates people to actually buy something.

You can do the same thing with desired outcomes. Through research, you might uncover three desired outcomes that you think people want. Instead of immediately changing your home page, test it in an ad or send three different emails and see what gets people to click-through and convert.

This approach works well because you're armed with research. You can go to your team and say, “Look, here's what I've uncovered. Our prospects are saying all of this. Over here on our website, we're saying this. Now, I know this might scare you, so I won't test our home page. I'm over here testing some emails. Not going to bother anyone. I'll let you know how it goes.”

For organizations with buy-in, Wolf advises going all in. But “all in” doesn't mean trying to solve everything at once; that's a mess, and you won't know what caused the impact and why.

If you hypothesize that people coming to your website cannot see that this solution was specifically built for them—let's say you have a product for agency owners and when agency owners land on your website, they can't see that this is for them because you're speaking to everyone—then you can run a series of tests around that specific hypothesis.

If you know what you're trying to learn (how do I show people that this was built for agency owners?), then slowly you can optimize the landing page in terms of copy and visuals. But that is your hypothesis, and you're sticking to it. You're not also trying to fix social proof and other elements simultaneously.

Real-World Testing Example

Wolf provides an example from her work with Teamwork, a project management solution software for agency owners and anyone who's client-facing. While everyone in the world who needs a project management solution could use Teamwork, they focused specifically on client-facing teams.

Wolf's team worked with Teamwork for almost three years, optimizing everything on the website to appeal to client-facing teams—from comparison pages to the homepage, landing pages, product pages, emails, and even the menu.

They created content around specific pains, acknowledging that everyone has a reporting feature in their project management solution, but Teamwork created a reporting feature that helps agency owners see profitability. This is a huge pain for agency owners—it's hard to know if you're profitable or not, and you sometimes want to see if you have enough resources.

Everything they wrote, created, and tested on Teamwork's website was about showing agency owners and project managers that all these questions they have about whether their colleague is doing their work, if they have enough resources, if they can move things around, or if they should hire more people were addressed throughout the customer journey.

This demonstrates how to weave emotion through every step of the journey rather than just focusing on surface-level optimizations.

Using Voice of Customer Language

An often-overlooked aspect of meaningful testing is using actual words from customers and prospects instead of your internal language. This is called the voice of the customer, and it works because marketers and businesses often call things in a certain way and use specific terms, but when you start combing through Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn conversations, or Facebook groups, you'll suddenly notice that prospects are calling you something completely different.

They use different terms, adjectives, and verbs you've never used to describe yourself. This is valuable for two reasons. For many startups, this is a good indicator that you're doing something wrong—you're building a product and people don't understand what it's about, so they're calling you different things and thinking you solve problems you don't actually solve.

But the other benefit is that you suddenly get sticky copy. Instead of using your own words, you're using theirs. You're starting to use the terms your prospects use, which is a goldmine. Instead of saying “this is what we are,” you use their words.

This technique is used extensively in conversion copywriting. When you're armed with voice of customer insights, creating compelling copy is much easier. Once you have the most desired outcome, biggest pain, and biggest concern, you can add that into any copywriting framework or template along with their voice of customer language.

Wolf emphasizes that meaningful testing isn't about incremental improvements to design elements—it's about solving real problems your prospects have identified through their own words and experiences. When you test solutions to these genuine problems using language that resonates with your audience, you move from the hamster wheel of optimization to meaningful improvements that drive real business results.

This comprehensive approach to emotional targeting—starting with research, auditing through an emotional lens, and testing meaningful hypotheses—provides a framework that goes far beyond surface-level optimization. It's about creating experiences that make prospects feel seen, understood, and confident in their decision to work with you.

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on X.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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