The Real Reason Zillow Leads Stopped Working

Tim Chermak: Have you tried other marketing programs or services before, Aaron? Like, did you have anything to compare it to? Have you ever even bought like Zillow leads or realtor.com or anything like that?

Aaron Nelson: Oh, sure. Like on the lead gen side. Even recently I've tried that, and I found that you can spend what, $5,000, $6,000 at least in our area on realtor.com. 

And I don't know if it's just the way the market is right now or what, but the leads usually aren't any good. It's either people wanting to rent a house, or they're not ready to buy, or they can't buy. And you hardly ever get any seller leads. With Platform, with the fuzzy ROI, you get plenty of listing leads, and I'm finding very quickly that spending those thousands of dollars on lead gen is not worth it.

Even if they say that those leads are ready to go, and supposedly, Zillow and realtor.com, those leads are a little bit lower-hanging fruit on the vine, I don't find that quite to be the case. I think that the brand awareness that we are building with you guys is what's allowed us to be successful.

And it does take time. I think it took probably close to a year for me to start getting that, I don't wanna say local celebrity, but just to be known around town from people that I've never met before. So I think that's a better way to spend your money, take it out of that lead gen where if it's not making you at least three or four times what you're spending, put it into your brand awareness.

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 this. 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: Hey guys, it's Tim Chermak, and welcome back to another episode of the Platform Marketing Show. I'm joined this morning by Aaron Nelson in San Angelo, Texas. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Nelson: Thanks for having me, Tim. 

Tim Chermak: So, Aaron's business has doubled over the last year. I think you said you went from about 16 to over 30 transactions here in the last year, but what's really cool about that, as if that wasn't already impressive, is I know you're running multiple other businesses. You have a property management. And how many doors did you say you had with the property management? 

Aaron Nelson: Yeah, about 700 doors in our property management side.

Tim Chermak: So you're keeping busy. You're doing real estate investing. I know you mentioned you have like a home services company, plumbing, and everything. I mean, I'm assuming you do like HVAC, kind of that whole round of things.

Aaron Nelson: Yeah, exactly. It services all of our other companies. We do a lot of flips and things like that. So it services our property management, our flips. We also help investors do the same thing. 

Tim Chermak: Yeah, so when you get a client on the real estate side, you're able to monetize that relationship much deeper than maybe a normal real estate agent is, because now, hopefully, that client becomes a customer for life with their plumbing needs, their electric needs in addition, obviously to working with you when they buy and sell real estate.

So that's really impressive. I have to ask you, and by the way, for those who aren't familiar, with the Platform Marketing Show. I don't send questions ahead of time. So these conversations are purely live, and I don't know what Aaron's gonna say or how he's gonna answer these questions. So this is fun for me, having these conversations, as well. 

My guess is that when you say your business has doubled, is a lot of that is coming from fuzzy ROI and kind of just the branding in the community? Or how much of that is like, “Hey, I just converted all these leads, and I called a bunch of people.” I mean, what does that mix look like for you?

Aaron Nelson: Yeah, so the big thing that Platform has done for me, basically, is that fuzzy ROI side. So, you know, everybody hears about the local celebrity, and everybody talks about that, but until you actually experience it, when you're sitting down at a restaurant, and some random person walks up to you and says, “Hey, I think I know you. Aren't you that Realtor on Facebook?” that's when it really starts blowing up.

Tim Chermak: Yeah. Yeah. I assumed it's probably a lot of what we call fuzzy ROI, and again, for those who aren't familiar with that term, ROI meaning, what's the return on investment. We call it fuzzy, “fuzzy ROI”, because it's kind of hard to track. Like if someone comes up to you at a restaurant, or they're just like, “Hey, I recognize you. You're that Realtor,” or you're at church, or you're grocery shopping, or whatever, and you just find people are recognizing you more and then within the course of a year, your business doubles, but you're looking back at it, and you're like, “I don't really know how many of these were 'Platform leads' or how many of these clicks or leads were literally from my Facebook lead gen ads? As much as I just noticed in the last year, I'm getting twice as many inbound phone calls or twice as many referrals.” And the cumulative results of that at the end of the year is that your business doubled.

So we call that fuzzy ROI because it's kind of fuzzy how you calculate the attribution there of like where is all this business or leads coming from. You can kind of only see it in hindsight at the end of the year, like, “Oh my gosh, my business doubled.”

Aaron Nelson: You know, something funny, Tim? When I first started real estate, I started trying to do billboards, and in our area, they cost about $800 a piece, and they were about the same back then. But I've lived in my area my whole life, so I tried to reach everybody. I didn't have contact information or acquaintances and that kind of thing. But if you look at what we're doing with Platform, it's like billboards on steroids because on my listing tours, I'm getting about 60,000 to 70,000 views, the listing videos. You don't get that many people. You get people driving down the road, you might get 70,000 impressions or whatever they call it in billboards, but you don't get that good exposure where people recognize you. 

It was literally Sunday. I was shopping. We meal prep every Sunday, and a lady just walked up. She says, “You're that Realtor, aren't you?” I'm like, “Yes, I am. Thanks for noticing.” So it's pretty cool seeing the difference between billboards and what you guys are doing with Platform.

Tim Chermak: Yeah, you know, this is something that you can kind of compare and contrast with any other form of marketing media, whether it's billboards or anything else. But back when I was doing sales calls for Platform before we had Diana on the team, who's amazing, one very common thing I would explain on a sales call is what makes this different from sending direct mail or doing billboards or any of the kind of non-digital advertising, is retargeting.

Because, let's say that 60,000 people do see one of your billboards in real life, right? There's no way of knowing who actually saw the billboard and who spent more than a couple of seconds looking at it, who actually read your name, Aaron Nelson. ‘Cause there's no way of just driving by a billboard to distinguish between people who drove by, never saw it, and people who actually drove by and looked at it for a couple of seconds.

Tim Chermak: The cool thing about what we're doing with social media ads with the Platform strategy is so much of our emphasis is obviously on the retargeting ads because it would be the equivalent of, hey, someone drove by your billboard and let's say there's a super duper CIA secret sensor on the billboard that somehow tracks who actually looked up and saw the billboard, and then it somehow plants another billboard a quarter mile down the road with another message, only to show it to those people who looked at the first one. Obviously, you just can't do that with physical advertising the way that you can with digital. 

So even if you could claim that, “Hey, my Facebook video got 70,000 views and my billboard got 70,000 impressions,” it's a total apples-to-oranges comparison because we actually have a mechanism on the backend with retargeting ads to keep showing ads to those people, and we actually know how many specific people saw the first video. 

Facebook kind of is sketchy in how they count views because they'll count a view as three seconds. Now, if you want to set it this way, they can even track a view at two seconds, which kind of inflates the numbers, obviously, it's just inflation. But what we do manually in the ad account settings for clients is we will change the retargeting criteria to be if someone watched 10 seconds of this video, 'cause that way we hundred percent know without any ambiguity, if someone watched 10 seconds of your video, they were definitely watching, right? And it wasn't just a scroll; they were definitely watching. So that's how we set the retargeting ads so that, “Hey, if someone watched any of Aaron's videos for more than 10 seconds, let's keep showing ads to them.” That's what makes this so powerful, and there's no equivalent of that with a billboard or with a newspaper ad, or with direct mail or with radio advertising. There's no way of knowing who's actually engaging with your content.

Aaron Nelson: To go full circle on that, something we started doing here in the last, what, three or four months? We started running a few billboards again, but instead of doing a generic ad, we started putting, “Have you seen what I posted on Facebook on there?”

Tim Chermak: Yeah. Yep.

Aaron Nelson: So just generating all that, going back to our Facebook page.

Tim Chermak: Yeah, and people are like, “Oh, that's right. That's where I've seen that guy.” Or, “I recognize that.” We're kind of like shit-talking billboards here, but I love when clients do billboards but find a way to link offline and online.

Aaron Nelson: Right.

Tim Chermak: Because if you do that, it does kind of create a one plus one equals three effect, where the billboards make your social media ads more effective. And your social media ads make the billboards more effective because people kind of have that light bulb moment of like, “Oh, that's right. That's the guy I follow on Facebook.” Like, “Oh, I've seen him before.” So it absolutely can work. 

So if I hit rewind here, the reason I asked you earlier, Aaron, about of your business doubling, you said you went from about 16 to over 30 transactions this year on the real estate side. The reason I was curious about asking how much of that is fuzzy ROI is because I assumed it was if you're running all these other businesses. If you're running a home service business, you've got a property management company that has over 700 doors, so it's a large company, right? It's not like you're a property manager with 14 doors. That's a pretty large, legitimate property management firm. Almost by definition, if your marketing is gonna be effective to grow the real estate side, it has to be kind of branding and inbound marketing because what you probably don't have is time. Like you don't have hours every day to be following up with leads and calling people. If the marketing is gonna be worth it, it needs to be convincing people to call you, not the other way around where you're calling them and chasing them. And I think that's honestly one of the coolest parts of the Platform strategy is that when it works really well, that’s how it works. It's getting people to call you or message you or email you, versus you having to chase a bunch of people. Have you experienced that?

Aaron Nelson: Absolutely. So after joining Platform and learning about what brand awareness is versus lead gen, that's a thousand percent what it is, because my phone's ringing, I'm not having to chase these people down for business, which is the worst thing about having to do any kind of sales or salesy job is trying to chase people down that don't wanna hear you, right? So having people listen to you, kind of learn about you on Facebook, figure out who you are, I mean, that's worth its weight in gold because those calls coming in, they're ready to transact with you to do business. You hardly ever get any people arguing with you about commission because they already know you. They see your videos, they see how you advertise, so they see what you're bringing to the table.

Tim Chermak: Yeah, that's a topic there that probably doesn't get enough attention on this show is how much if you follow the Platform strategy, whether you hire Platform Marketing or you're doing it on your own, you’re trying to do this on your own, if you follow the Platform strategy, it changes the commission conversation and the margins you're able to have in your business because the closer you can get people kind of like emotionally to feeling like you're their friend and they know you, the more awkward it is for them, to be honest, to try to weasel you down on commission and be like, “Hey, can you work for this percent instead of that percent?” Or “Can you do it for a little bit cheaper? Because my buddy over here, I know this other discount brokerage, is willing to do it way cheaper.” 

If they feel like they know you, it's almost awkward for them to ask in the same way it'd be awkward to ask your friend for a discount because, usually, I've always been of the belief that friends don't ask friends for discounts.

Aaron Nelson: Right.

Tim Chermak: If you offer one, that's cool, but if I'm gonna go get my hair cut and my buddy is a barber, let's say, it's kinda weird to ask him for a discount because I'm his friend. If anything, I should be more willing to pay full price because it's my friend. Right?

Aaron Nelson: Yeah. 

Tim Chermak: And that same dynamic, you can harness that in your real estate business. The more content you're putting out, the more people feel like they know you personally, the less likely they're gonna be like, “Hey, can you do this for cheaper? I found this other company that'll list for 1% or 2% or whatever. Can you match them?” And you'll just be like, “Uh, no, that's not what I do 'cause look at all the marketing I do for you.” And then oftentimes they'll just say, “Oh, okay. I just thought it was worth asking,” and then they happily pay whatever your normal full standard commission is.

Aaron Nelson: Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, that happens infrequently now, but every once in a while you'll still get that question on commission, seeing if you'll drop, but…

Tim Chermak: Yeah,

Aaron Nelson: I hardly have anybody ever balk at the percentage that we charge.

Tim Chermak: You know, I think historically when agents were thinking about, “Oh, how do I handle myself?” or “What are my true principles that I cling to when I have the commission conversation?”, so often it's like a sales conversation, or it's like a script. It's like, “Hey, what script do you use when clients try to negotiate down your commission? Are you thinking it's like this sales problem?” 

I've always viewed it as a marketing thing. If they're even asking that in the first place, it means your marketing probably didn't educate them enough, or didn't position you in such a way where it's just not obvious. It's like, “Hey, no. I'm not a discount agent.”

Aaron Nelson: Yeah. And you know, in the last few years, I've come from the stance of I'm more of a marketer than anything else and I think that's kind of helped too. And I've tried to even tell the agents at our brokerage the same thing. You know, your job isn't to be in sales, your job's to be in marketing. Once you have clients coming to you, your job is to get the house sold. How can you do that the most creatively, to get them the best money?

Tim Chermak: Yeah, I mean, it all comes back to marketing, right? That's kind of the broader point I'm trying to make there is whether you're talking about the commissions you charge or the amount of referrals you're getting, it really comes back to marketing. 'Cause without proper marketing and building that brand, well then yeah, if you get into a conversation, let's say you're on a listing appointment in person having this conversation, there's not a whole lot you can say. If someone's like, “Well, I found this other agent who sold a lot of homes and is willing to do it for 1% cheaper than you,” there's not really a great comeback for that. Unless you have elite marketing and you can say, “Well, that's actually an apples-to-oranges comparison, and here's why.”

Aaron Nelson: Right. 

Tim Chermak: And you talk about all the marketing that you're doing. So, Aaron, by the way, how did you actually hear about Platform? How'd you first find out about us?

Aaron Nelson: Yeah, it is interesting. So we actually started our brokerage in 2023. Shortly after that, it was I think, around July of ‘23, I was just scrolling on Facebook, just one of those mastermind real estate pages or whatever it might be, and I came across a post from Neil, who was with Platform. And it was actually a post from somebody else asking about marketing. And Neil replied to that post just talking about Platform and you could tell it wasn't an AI bot or anything like that. It was actually a human that was telling their story about how they were successful with this random company I'd never heard of.

And so I just had to make the call. So I called, or I set up online. I forget how I did it, but it was within a day, I made that call, spoke with you guys and it's a no-brainer. I mean, there's no contract length or anything like that. Speaking of the no-brainer side, you know, everybody says that it's an expensive thing, but I've always told even my account manager, Amanda, this is not expensive at all. Because if you're going to pay for boosting posts on social media, you just need to discount that anyway. You're gonna do that no matter what. So the service that we get through Platform is incredible because if I went and even tried to hire a VA or anything like that, I'd be paying a comparable amount. They would have less expertise.

Tim Chermak: Yeah, exactly. They would have no idea what they're doing.

Aaron Nelson: Yeah, you’d have to rehire every six months. Yeah. So it's a no-brainer.

Tim Chermak: You would have to be paying someone else separately to edit all of your videos. When I look at everything Platform does for an agent. I'm biased, obviously I'm the founder and CEO, whatever, but when I look at everything we do for an agent, I'm like, yeah, we could probably double the price, and it would still be valuable compared to if you went out and tried to hire separate contractors to do everything separately.

No, don't worry, for anyone who's listening to this, Platform's not gonna double our price. But if you actually were to make a line item list of, hey, in the absence of Platform, go try to hire local contractors to do everything we're doing, and then cross your fingers and hope that you find someone who's a world-class expert on social media marketing and Facebook, and they actually live in your town. It's like, good luck with that. 

Aaron Nelson: Right. 

Tim Chermak: Because almost by definition, if someone's actually that good at it, they're not gonna be taking on small local clients like that. They're probably working with much larger firms. So that's kind of the cool sweet spot we've found, is we are really good at this. We are world-class at this, but by having this one client per market philosophy, it allows us to simultaneously be a local marketing firm and a national marketing firm. Like we are national, but at the same time we're local because we're only working with one person per market. So it's a cool business model.

Have you tried other marketing programs or services before, Aaron? Did you have anything to compare it to? Have you ever even bought Zillow leads or realtor.com or anything like that?

Aaron Nelson: Oh, sure. Like on the lead gen side. Even recently I've tried that and I found that you can spend what, $5,000, $6,000 at least in our area on realtor.com. And I don't know if it's just the way the market is right now or what, but the leads usually aren't any good. It's either people wanting to rent a house or they're not ready to buy, or they can't buy. And you hardly ever get any seller leads. With Platform, with the fuzzy ROI, you get plenty of listing leads, and I'm finding very quickly that spending those thousands of dollars on lead gen is not worth it. Even if they say, that those leads are ready to go, and supposedly Zillow and realtor.com, those leads are a little bit lower-hanging fruit on the vine, I don't find that quite to be the case. You know, I think that the brand awareness that we are building with you guys is what's allowed us to be successful. 

And it does take time. I think it took probably close to a year for me to start getting that kind of I don't wanna say local celebrity, but just to be known around town from people that I've never met before. 

So I think that's a better way to spend your money. Take it out of that lead gen where if it's not making you at least three or four times what you're spending, put it into your brand awareness.

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