ConversionXL Live: Build an Emotional Strategy for Your Landing Pages in 4 Steps

Day one of ConversionXL Live was jam-packed with insightful and knowledgeable speakers. As each speaker stepped off the stage I was taken back with all the actionable advice I had received from the day’s presentations.

One speaker I found incredibly helpful was Talia Wolf and her session on creating landing pages for customer needs.

The concept is simple -- the root of conversion is human behavior.

As effective marketers we have to understand how our visitors behave. For example, take  mobile browsing versus desktop. Talia told us that there is a 270% gap between mobile and desktop conversions. That’s most likely because we optimize for the desktop experience and make it responsive for smartphones and tablets, not for the user’s mindset when browsing and shopping on mobile.

How we spend time on our phones is very different from how we spend time on desktop. This may seem like common sense, but putting the same thought process into action when optimizing your website and landing pages is a different story.

How to Build an Emotional Strategy for Your Landing Pages in 4 Steps

Optimizing a page for conversion requires insight into what your buyer is thinking when they arrive on the page and an emotional strategy that reflects that. You need to strike the right emotional chords to elicit the desired action.

Talia Wolf’s step-by-step process for emotional strategy creation is simple for any marketer to follow and will allow you test for better results.

1. Performing an Emotional Competitor Analysis

Start by choosing 10-15 competitors. They do NOT have to be direct competitors, simply include all companies who are targeting your audience. Then, examine the following:

• Message - what are they saying and how are they saying it

• Color - what colors are they using throughout the page

• Image - what images are they using on the page

• Emotional Triggers  - what are they making the customers feel

^ This is an actual example from Talia Wolf's presentation at ConversionXL Live.  

Once you are finished gathering this data, summarize the emotional triggers you found for competitors during your analysis.

2. Creating an Emotional SWOT Analysis

Next, put together a SWOT analysis for your general competition and for your own company. In other words an outline of each of your:  

• Strengths

• Weaknesses

• Opportunities

• Threats

Your SWOT analysis is an important part of the development of an emotional strategy because it will help you differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Use your threats and weaknesses in the next step of the process as you develop your emotional content strategy.

3. Developing an Emotional Strategy

How can you solve for the weaknesses you found during your SWOT analysis?

A great example of this from Talia’s presentation was an industry where a big weakness is that the audience perceives all solutions as the same and that it is difficult to use and takes a long time to set up.

To overcome this weakness, your strategy should summarize how you want to make customers feel, what differentiates you from the competitors and how you can solve for challenges.

4.Testing

Talia explained, “The goal of testing is to gain knowledge and learn as much as possible about your customer.”

In order to do this, you must come up with testing hypotheses, create 2-3 landing pages that utilize these variables, and analyze your results.

Utilize a basic framework like the example below to compare your competitor’s emotional triggers to your own company’s desired emotional triggers.

You will find yourself listing two, three, even four or five in the list for each column. This list will be how you define your variables for testing.

A common mistake marketers and companies make is copying their competitors.

Copying is not the answer. This only leads you down a rocky path that doesn’t end with more conversions. Utilizing research from how your competitors are doing things and testing your copy and design against those hypotheses is the best way to truly know what will get results and what your users will enjoy.