2024 Platform MASTERMIND: Isaac Morehouse: Why "Nearbound" Is The Future Of Marketing

Isaac Morehouse: The average American sees as many as 10,000 ad impressions in a day if you count branding and all the other things. The number of companies that are trying to vie for their attention and attract them is insane. You want to surround your buyer, and you want to surround them not with you but with who they already trust. You want to reach them with and through the voices they already trust, the people they're already gonna send that text message to.

Tim Chermak: This is The Platform Marketing Show, where we interview the most creative and ambitious real estate agents in the country, dissect their local marketing strategy, and get the behind-the-scenes scoop on how they're generating listing leads and warm referrals. We'll dive into the specifics of what marketing campaigns are working for them, how much they're spending on those campaigns, and figure out how they have perfected what we call the Platform Marketing strategy. This is your host, Tim Chermak. I'm the founder and CEO of Platform. I love marketing and I talk too much, so let's dive in. 

Tim Chermak: Alright, our next speaker, we're gonna skip the break because we have to get to lunch-- apparently, we can't move lunch back-- is Isaac Morehouse. Isaac is probably my favorite person on the literal earth. I have flown out of state before, hopped on a plane to have lunch with him and then flown back home. That's how deep of a thinker and brilliant of a business person Isaac is. He's raised millions of dollars from Silicon Valley, investors, built, scaled, sold multiple companies, but more importantly, he's a deep intellectual. He understands economics and philosophy and what's going on with business at that 40,000 foot level. 

Tim Chermak: The new company he just got involved in is gonna disrupt the education space and they're already doing $50 million a year. I think he's the CEO of that company. And I have learned so much from Isaac about how to think about marketing philosophically. Like, what are you really doing when you run an ad? Or what are you really doing when you reach out to past clients? What's actually happening? Like just thinking about marketing differently. 

Tim Chermak: He spoke at a Mastermind we had a couple years ago and so many people said that was like-- "Well, that was my favorite talk from that Mastermind, was that guy, Isaac's." And this year, I don't know if it happened, if your company's so large now, but like, dear God, you're wearing a button up shirt. I think you have actual shoes. The last time he spoke at a Mastermind, he had board shorts. He was literally barefoot. He walked on stage barefoot, t-shirt, and a button down shirt, like long sleeves. That's very impressive. So everyone, welcome Isaac Morehouse to the Platform Mastermind.

Isaac Morehouse: Hello. All right, there we go. Tim, when you upgraded to the Backstreet Boys microphones, I decided to upgrade to a collared shirt, so this is next level. So Tim, I'm waiting for them to get my slides up here, so I'll give you a fun little anecdote. Tim said I was the first ever customer of the John Galt Mortgage company, by the way, so shout out to John Galt. Mitchell Broderick back there. And Tim called me yesterday and he said, "Hey. Can you wear your John Galt t-shirt?" And I said I wanted to, but it's dirty. And he's like, "That's okay." And I'm like, well, I don't know what kind of standards Tim has, but I said, no, it's really dirty. In fact, I wore it destroying my opponent in pickleball and that opponent so happened to be my wife. Sorry, honey. You gotta work on your game. So I'm not gonna wear it even though Tim wanted me to smell like a pickleball sweat, but instead, I'm just gonna hang it up here. And this is gonna end up being more memorable anyway 'cause you're gonna be like, "Oh yeah, that dirty John Galt mortgage shirt. I think there's a stain on there, some mustard or something."

Isaac Morehouse: So anyway, I'm super honored to be here. I'm not kidding when I say-- Oh, okay, by the way, one more thing because I thought of this when Tim was talking. Tim's like, "Isaac is such a great guy. I flew all the way across the country to meet him for lunch." And I was thinking, actually, that makes me sound like kind of an asshole, right? Like, "Yeah, I'll get lunch with you. You fly to me. I give you two hours. We'll eat lunch. That's it. You're buying a ticket. I'm staying where I am." That's the kind of guy I am. 

Isaac Morehouse: No, I'm super honored. I'm not kidding when I say Tim is– and I've worked with tons of marketers over the last 20 years. Tim is by far the best marketer I've ever met. He is naturally incredible at marketing, but he also studies and is relentless at getting better. So you should recognize, one agent per market? You want to be that agent. You are here because you figured it out too. 

Isaac Morehouse: So I wanna talk about a little bit of the evolution of marketing, inbound, outbound, and now nearbound, and the rise of what I call the "Who" economy. So a brief history of modern marketing, and modern, I mean like in the digital age. In the outbound era, the 2000s, the internet is now here. We have some new tools at our disposal as business people. We have emails, we have massive lists, we have online directories, a much easier ability to buy phone numbers, email addresses, and to blast people at scale. And in the early days of this outbound era, you got pretty good returns for just spamming people 'cause it was new, right? But it started to wear out and then something amazing happened, the golden age for people like me who love marketing, and I love writing. 

Isaac Morehouse: The inbound era was amazing. This was when marketers figured out, okay, people don't want to just be interrupted with a cold email or a cold call from someone they've never met. They wanted to attract buyers, so they started creating content that answered the types of questions buyers were asking so the buyers would come to them. So, search engine optimization, the really dominant question. The winners in the inbound era were the people who came up first in Google results. Those were the primary winners. 

Isaac Morehouse: When someone searched, "How do I connect a contact to an automated blah, blah, blah?" whatever came up, it'd be some helpful blog post from HubSpot. And HubSpot's giving you helpful content for free and then often gating it and saying, "Hey, if you give us your email address, we'll give you a whole PDF about this." And it was exchanging your information for some education. They were attracting you based on what they were building. And this worked really well, so you'd have email funnels. People would come and get your lead magnet. They'd give you their email address, download it, and then you'd email them a drip campaign, trying to keep them along, educate them, a lot of content creation. It worked really well until it didn't. Something shifted, the scale of digital meta ceiling. 

Isaac Morehouse: This sea of content just became too massive. Games got gamed. Do you remember back when Googling or going to look for an Amazon review or a Google review or a Yelp review, that was good enough? "Which product should I buy? This one or this one? Lemme go see what the review site says," right? Before we got overwhelmed, that worked, but once we started having thousands of emails in our inbox and once we ran into 4.7 star syndrome, do you guys know what I'm talking about? Literally every review is 4.7 stars now. Everything, because five looks fake. You don't want them to know that you're using a bunch of bots and stuff. Four is too low. You want it to be 4.7. It looks believable, but still really good. That's literally what everything is now. Go test this out for yourself. I laugh every time I see 4.7 stars. It became-- we couldn't trust it anymore. There was just too much information. 

Isaac Morehouse: And it's not even that it was bad information. It's actually some really, really good information. There's just too much. If you Google, and I come most recently from the software space, and when people search for something like, you know, how to make sure that my contacts in Salesforce are properly syncing with my email marketing tool, they're gonna get infinite results and they're all gonna be blog posts and podcast episodes and downloadables. And they're all gonna be pretty good, but nobody knows which one to go with. It's overwhelming. I call it the infocalypse. There's just too much information. We are drowning. We have reached the infocalypse. So what have people done in response to this? What have you done in response to this? I bet you'll immediately click when I say this.

Isaac Morehouse: Oh, first I have a little setup. Uh oh. There we go. So you guys have heard this before, data is the new oil. This was like a big thing in the early 2000s. We're in the internet age, data is the new oil. It's the most precious resource. Get all the data and then you can automate emails to people. You got all the contacts, you just, like, mass quantities of data. Again, the infocalypse came and something changed. Now, trust is the new data. Trust is the new data. The trust you have in your market, that's what matters, not the list of contacts you have. Not the leads, not the email addresses, the trust. But how do you measure and quantify that? You don't. 

Isaac Morehouse: Tim is right about fuzzy ROI. We have moved from the "How" economy to the "Who" economy. You used to ask questions when you got online. Like, "How do I figure out which computer to buy? How do I know what software tool? How do I solve this problem?" And you would see what the internet would tell you is usually content made by a good content marketer. Because of the infocalypse, because there's just too much and we don't know who to trust and every rating is 4.7 stars, have you found yourself shifting to asking who? 

Isaac Morehouse: When I'm trying to solve a problem for my business or for my life, I think, “Who do I know that's already done this? I'm gonna buy a car. Should I use Carvana? Should I use some-- oh, you know what? My buddy bought a car recently. Let me shoot him a text.” All of a sudden, the questions are going offline. If I Google, “Should I use Carvana or whatever the competitor is?” I'm gonna spend hours sorting through a bunch of really well-produced content that all contradicts itself and I'm gonna be lost. I'm gonna be flummoxed. I'm gonna be stuttering like I am right now on stage. I got like two chuckles outta that. I'm trying to get you guys warmed up and laughing a little bit here. The self deprecation usually works. 

Isaac Morehouse: So now, people are asking, who? Who do I know that has recently solved this problem? Who that I trust can I ask on a personal basis 'cause I don't have the time to sort through all the information? So this is the "Who" economy and it's kind of a really cool combination of the new world and the old world. Pre-internet, what did you do when you needed to get something done? You had a guy. I got a guy. I got a guy for that. Something's wrong with my car. It's making a funny sound. I got a guy, right? And then it was like, I don't need a guy, I got the internet. Then the internet was overwhelming, you gotta have a guy again. But the cool thing in the digital age, that guy doesn't have to happen to live in the neighborhood that you live in. You can have a guy that you only have ever texted with or been on Zoom calls with that lives all the way across the country. Or you're in a little Facebook community around a specific niche interest and you formed a relationship and you trust them. That's your guy, but they're part of your global village. So you get the best of both worlds, you get trust and scale. So the scale of digital with the trust of pre-digital. So this is what I call nearbound.

Isaac Morehouse: You probably can't see the labels on that's really small, but nearbound has moved from a company standpoint– your buyers have moved from "You" to "Who," and this has become a huge trend in the software industry where I most recently came from. It's not confined there, but this is a survey of software buyers, asking them which has the biggest impact on buyer's purchase decisions, asking the sales team. So asking salespeople, what are buyers the most influenced by? And you've got blogs and articles, content and events by your company, industry analysts, review sites, social media posts, the opinions of those in their professional networks and trusted agencies, and tech vendors and consultants. When you add them up, over 80% say the biggest influence is something outside of your company. 

Isaac Morehouse: So blog posts, content, your salespeople, your marketing efforts, review sites, social media, those are all "You" things from the company standpoint and those are things you create. What other people say about you, those are "Who" things. Those are people that don't work for your company. What are they saying about you? That is 80% of what drives purchasing decisions. And what are marketers mostly focused on? They're all focused on the thing that's driving 20% of sales. They're putting 100% of their marketing efforts on the thing that drives 20% of sales, my content, my social posts, my reviews, and ignoring what the people who surround the buyer are talking about. 

Isaac Morehouse: So, actually, helped write, ghost wrote some chapters of a book just a couple years ago that took off, was a really big bestseller in the tech world on this whole concept. So I'm only using this to say people started to figure this out, that we're in the nearbound era, especially in the software world. The venture-backed tech software world tends to be a year or two ahead of other areas of the market 'cause it moves very, very fast, but it's not confined there. It's not just in tech. This is true everywhere, the shift to "Who." People are looking to their networks. 

Isaac Morehouse: So what does it mean for your business? Outbound. If you could define it in a word, it's interrupt. You don't want to interrupt people. They don't want to be interrupted. You don't wanna be interrupted. Inbound is attract. Yes, you can try to attract people, but if you think of a little paperclip as your customer and you think of a magnet as your inbound strategy, you're in a world where there's 10,000 magnets surrounding them. 

Isaac Morehouse: The average American sees as many as 10,000 ad impressions in a day if you count branding and all the other things. The number of companies that are trying to vie for their attention and attract them is insane. You want to surround your buyer, and you want to surround them not with you but with who they already trust. You want to reach them with and through the voices they already trust. The people they're already gonna send that text message to.

Isaac Morehouse: So I'm gonna pause for a second and talk about language. I'm really, really big on language and metaphors 'cause they shape our ability to think. If we don't have a word for something, we don't know how to think of that thing. There's some really, really crazy and interesting studies on that. Some people even think– I don't know, this is not proven or provable, but some people hypothesize that the natives in the new world literally couldn't see the ships from Columbus and others because they didn't have a word for it. I don't know if that's true. It's an interesting hypothesis. But there's a lot of research on the language that we have limits our capacity to think about things. 

Isaac Morehouse: There's an amazing book all about this called "Metaphors We Live By." How many of you have heard the phrase go-to-market? Anybody? Okay, so maybe it's not super big here. In the tech world, go-to-market is basically a shinier way of saying, "your marketing strategy." How are you gonna reach your buyers? But the language, go-to-market, when you think about it, it's like your company is up here on a hill in your fortified position and you're like lobbying marketing missiles down at your buyers as if they are hostiles, right? Like, “I gotta go to them and I gotta like, you know, target them.” All the language we use is kind of hostile. Like, they're over there. I'm targeting them. I'm like shooting stuff at them. I suggest you gotta flip the metaphor to live-in-market. You should be living in the market with your buyers, with the people that surround your buyers. That's really what this is about. And it places trust above transactions in the value chain. You need a transfer of trust more than a transfer of money. 

Isaac Morehouse: "Isaac, I'm gonna go outta business if I don't have a transfer of money." Yes, of course. That will come, but it will come in a compounding way if you learn how to transfer trust first. What do I mean transfer trust? Your buyers already trust people. They don't know you yet, most of them, but there's other people they trust. If those people that they trust trust you, that trust transfers. So how do you find who they trust? Find who surrounds them and look for that transfer of trust. 

Isaac Morehouse: Too often, especially in your business, in real estate, everyone's competing at the point of sale. You do nothing to live in-market and cultivate trust with buyers and those who surround buyers until they raise their hand and say, "I'm about to sell or buy a house." And then every single realtor descends on them at the same time saying, "Hi, we've never met. You should use me," right? 

Isaac Morehouse: If you build trust with them all the time, if you're living in-market with those they already trust, you won't even have to be there when they say, "I'm about to sell or buy my house," 'cause they will already have the question answered. They already know who they're gonna go with, right? “I know who I'm gonna go with the next time I get a mortgage. I don't need to have anybody advertise to me. Once I fill out those get-my-interest-rate forms, I don't care how many people text me from that. I know I'm calling Mitchell Broderick from John Galt Mortgage,” 'cause there's trust, okay? You wanna become the choice before they're ready to choose. 

Isaac Morehouse:  Okay, so let's get to some examples from your industry. These happen to be Platform examples 'cause I love Tim's company so much. So here's a great ad, Tamara Sharp highlighting her favorite barbecue place near Waco and she's just talking about how great it is with an awesome picture. And you see the barbecue place right there is like, “Thank you so much. This is amazing. This gave me goosebumps, especially what you said about culture.” And you can see it's not just like, “I love this barbecue place. Now you should trust me.” This is real. This is genuine. She's living in-market and talking about a local business in the market that she's serving in a very genuine way, and now that business, you think they're gonna trust Tamara? Is it Tamara or Tamara? Tamara. I knew people here would know. You think they're gonna trust Tamara when they think realtor? Pretty good chance. 

Isaac Morehouse: Here's another one, Katelyn Bashford, Highway Cafe in Wichita Falls, Texas. I was gonna try to make another joke about me stumbling and slurring over my speech, but the last time I did it, nobody laughed so there’s no point. Just look at this dirty shirt instead. So another one, great one, real content, genuinely sharing about something in the market, in the community that she loves. 

Isaac Morehouse: This one, highlighting a local dog rescue, over 30,000 views on Facebook. And here's one where the ROI, at least in one case, isn't so fuzzy. At least one major buyer contacted her directly because of this ad. You don't always know that. You can't always tie it back, but that's a great example where you do know and that's happening way more than you're able to measure.

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