“Everything in business to business is blue. Go and look. Open a new tab. Look at the five competitors in your sector and tell me you could pick yours out with the logos taken off.”
That is Talia Wolf about ninety seconds into our conversation, and she is annoyingly right. Talia founded GetUplift, a conversion optimisation agency, and she wrote Emotional Targeting: Win Hearts. Boost Sales. Own the Market. She has keynoted at Google and spoken to rooms of five thousand people. She has also, as you will hear, made the exact mistake she spends her working life warning other people about.
Your conversion problem is a sameness problem
Talia’s case is blunt. Most of what marketers file under low conversion rates is really a failure to look or sound like anybody in particular. “Ultimately most products are the same,” she said. “They have the same features, the same integrations, the same pricing, but when you try to differentiate them, it’s really really hard because everyone’s saying the same stuff, everyone’s got the same messaging, everyone looks the same, especially now with AI.”
I put our own business to her, because I wanted to test it on something I understand. Clients hire a PR agency and ask for coverage, and coverage is almost never the thing they actually want. Talia has run this exact audit on a PR agency before. Her answer was that the stated request is always tactical and the real driver sits underneath it. Clients want to stop feeling like they are guessing. They want the team pointing one way. They want to stop lying awake wondering why the numbers moved.
She groups those drivers into two clusters. Self-image covers how you want to feel about yourself, and social image covers how you want other people to see you. “I want them to see me as the go-to,” she said. “I want them to give me that promotion that I’ve been gunning for.” Nobody writes that on a brief, obviously, which is precisely why it goes unmarketed.
Listen to the full episode with Talia Wolf
You can watch the full episode with Talia on YouTube, find every previous guest at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk, and read the framework itself in Talia’s book, Emotional Targeting.
What is emotional targeting, really?
Emotional targeting is a research-led method for working out the real reason people buy from you, then rebuilding your messaging and customer journey around that reason rather than around guesswork.
The misunderstanding Talia hears most is that this means soft-focus advertising. “They think it’s like this fluffy cool thing, oh, I need a beautiful headline or an image of some family happily staring into the distance,” she said. “But that’s not what emotional targeting is about at all. You’re not supposed to trigger emotions.” The emotions are already sitting there. The job is connecting to them so a prospect thinks this lot understand what I am dealing with.
I assumed she was building towards fear of missing out, because in marketing it usually is. She was not going there at all. FOMO works late, once somebody has already decided they want the thing and simply has not moved yet. Two days left will not rescue you if the prospect never believed you in the first place.
The work starts with research, which Talia cheerfully calls a dirty word. Interviews, surveys, review mining, and thousands of conversations scraped off Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube comments and Facebook groups. Only after that does the team audit the site. “We don’t audit the website first,” she said. “First, we get to know the customers.”
The blue book cover she printed and then binned
Talia is a comic book obsessive. Her marketing is full of superhero references, her posts are full of them, and she watched the latest Spider-Man film three times in its opening week, which is nothing short of hilarious for a woman who lectures brands about being recognisable. So when she sat down to write a business book, she made it professional, serious and extremely blue.
She printed the thing anyway. A few dozen copies of a blue cover that looked like every other marketing book on the shelf, roughly a fortnight before launch.
Then the beta readers came back. “49 people out of the 50 wrote back, great book, but where’s Talia?” she said. “Where’s the pop culture references? Where’s the comic book? Where’s the banter?” Among them were Wil Reynolds and Rand Fishkin, both of whom had read the whole thing and told her the same. Her COO Jess pushed her to scrap it and go all in on the comic book idea.
That decision is what sold the book. People posted photographs of it because they had never seen a business book designed like a comic. It hit number one in several Amazon categories. The author of the emotional targeting framework had very nearly published the most emotionally anonymous object in her own category, and was saved by fifty people telling her so.
Optimisation has escaped your website
The part of the conversation that stuck with me was Talia’s view that conversion work no longer stops at the assets you control. “Your customers aren’t on your website,” she said. “They’re on Reddit asking if they can trust you. They’re in an LLM, whether if it’s ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, asking it if they could trust you. Then they’re going and reading an article. Then they’re on LinkedIn.” By the time somebody lands on your homepage they have already formed a view, and the page is being marked against it.
That is earned media wearing a different job title, and it is why this dovetails so neatly with what we do at Prohibition. You cannot control the Reddit thread or the model output. You can be present in those places, saying something a human recognises.
Her advice for anyone with a budget and a beige B2B brand was not to spend it on more output. Stop creating for the sake of creating, do the customer research, audit yourself honestly against it, and accept that the reason nobody else bothers is that it is genuinely hard work.
About Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where senior marketers talk honestly about the campaigns and decisions that went wrong and what they took from them. New episodes land every week on YouTube and all the usual podcast apps.
So go on then, open that new tab and count the blues.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
