Why I Stayed With Platform For 7 Years (And Counting)

Jill Lightfoot:  Just like everyone else, I have a rollercoaster of a ride with real estate. There's up times, there's down times. Actually, I just went through three months of it being kind of down, but what always comes to my mind is I've never thought about, “Oh, I should stop doing this. I should stop doing Platform. I don't have the money. I should not do this.” I think how much worse this would be if I shut off all my marketing. The thought never crosses my mind to stop doing it. 

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: Hey guys, it's Tim Chermak, and welcome back to another episode of the Platform Marketing Show. I'm joined today by Jill Lightfoot in Columbus, Ohio. Jill, welcome back to the show!

Jill Lightfoot: Thanks, Tim. This is so fun. 

Tim Chermak: So Jill was on the show several years ago. When I say several, it actually may have been like three or four years ago.

Jill Lightfoot: Yeah.

Tim Chermak: Because Jill has actually been working with Platform Marketing for seven years now. We were just talking before we hit record here and we went back and figured out, like okay, you signed up in spring of 2018. 

Jill Lightfoot: Yeah. 

Tim Chermak: And we were trying to like triangulate which specific year it was. You're like, “Well, I think the first mastermind I attended was in San Antonio. No, it was actually the one in Disney in 2018.” And then I realized, wow, you've been a client a long time. 

Jill Lightfoot: Yep. Yep. 

Tim Chermak: And your business when you first signed up was you were doing like a couple million a year in sales volume. 

Jill Lightfoot: Correct. 

Tim Chermak: I think maybe you had hit $3,000,000 one time. It was some 2 point something I think was kind of where your business is at. So you were making enough as a real estate agent at that point to pay your bills and that's about it, you know? 

Jill Lightfoot: Yep, and doing no marketing. 

Tim Chermak: Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you're selling $2 million a year, you're not doing a lot of marketing at that point. And you have enough, like I said, to pay the bills and not much else. 

Jill Lightfoot: Right. 

Tim Chermak: The good news is this last year, you actually sold, $15 million. So I'm not even sure if you go from what, 2 to 15, that's not quadrupling, that's not sixtupling. I'm not even sure what the verb is there. But you've grown a lot, right?

Jill Lightfoot: Yes. Yeah. 

Tim Chermak: And at some point in your journey with Platform, I should say, at no point in your journey with Platform, have you ever really plateaued. It wasn't like, “Oh, I grew from $2 million to $10 (million), but then my business got stuck at 10.” ‘Cause most people hit some sort of plateau where, “Hey, this is the amount of homes I can sell in a year. I feel like I'm running outta time,” or whatever. But you've been kind of just consistently growing every year since you signed up for Platform, which is really cool. 

Jill Lightfoot: So cool. 

Tim Chermak: I wanted to have you back on the show to give the really big picture perspective of, now that I've been around this for seven years, which is frankly longer than most employees that are on the Platform team, and we have obviously some of our management leadership employees that have been working with Platform longer than seven years, but not many of them. I think probably 90% of our employees have not been here for seven years. So you've actually been involved in Platform longer than most of the team at this point. What has made you stick around for seven years and counting?

Jill Lightfoot: I guess I would say the number one reason is exactly what you just said was my growth for sure. Gosh, so many reasons. I've worked with Emily the entire time.

Tim Chermak: As your account manager? 

Jill Lightfoot: As my account manager, yes. Sorry about that. And what's been amazing about that is she and I know each other so well now that she can spit out these ads for me now, almost like on autopilot. So that's super amazing. 

Tim Chermak: She just kind of knows what you're thinking, you mean. Or if you send her… I'm just trying to put this in as practical of language as possible for those listening who maybe aren't working with Platform. So what you're saying is that, hey, if you send Emily a random video clip or a photo of something you were up to, or a photo of a restaurant you went to, that you feel a pretty good trust level with Emily, that hey, she can come up with some good ad copy for this or find a way to write this as an ad when I just send her random content.

Jill Lightfoot: Yes, exactly. So that's exactly what I do. I'll send her a picture and I'll say, maybe it's a picture from my phone with my family, it could be real estate related. And I'll start it with, “Here's the gist of what I'm thinking, but I can't write it all together and put it all in there.” 

Tim Chermak: And you trust that she can find the ad that's hidden in that story somewhere and also write it in such a way that it feels like your voice, so that if someone sees that ad pop up in their newsfeed, they would just assume that Jill herself wrote it.

Jill Lightfoot: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. She writes it better than I would even say, that I could even write it. She definitely finds the ad, like you said. So that's kind of amazing that she and I are on autopilot. We speak twice a month, but we really don't need to just for that. So I would say, that's maybe the second reason why. Platform is just my marketing on autopilot in general. So I like that it takes the guesswork out of it so I can concentrate on, I wouldn't say more important things because I think the marketing is very important. Just gives me leverage with my time. 

Tim Chermak: Right. It allows you to frankly spend more time with clients, sell more homes ‘cause you're not feeling like you have to write every ad yourself. And you have that kind of trust with Emily that “Hey, I'll just send it to her and she'll figure out something, and she'll make it sound like me.”

Jill Lightfoot: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I guess I would say another reason that, and this is a huge reason, it was just sort of a byproduct that I didn't think of and that was just the PlatFam. I have so many great relationships with the other members. We collaborate. We send each other ideas, we encourage each other even on a personal level. And that has been sort of the bonus that of course, I didn't think about that when I first signed up. 

Tim Chermak: Yeah. 

Jill Lightfoot: Well, heck, I didn't even think I would ever be talking directly to you, you know? But I talk to you all the time. So it's the family that I can't imagine not having around.

Tim Chermak: Yeah. 

Jill Lightfoot: And I guess lastly I would say to maybe sum some of this up is just like everyone else, I have a roller coaster of a ride with real estate. There's up times, there's down times. And actually I just went through three months of it being kind of down. But what always comes to my mind is I've never thought about, “Oh, I should stop doing this. I should stop doing Platform. I don't have the money. I should not do this.” I think how much worse this would be if I shut off all my marketing. 

Tim Chermak: Sure, sure. 

Jill Lightfoot: So that's just sort of, the thought never crosses my mind to stop doing it. In fact, I do more. 

Tim Chermak: Yeah. It's always an interesting conversation when you're talking with a client and if the economy, if the housing market isn't a down year like it's been for frankly the last three years now. It's been really tough and transaction volume is down about like 40% right from where it was like before COVID, 'cause obviously from a realtor's perspective, it doesn't really matter what home prices do. I think that's the biggest misconception that the public has is that, “Oh, home prices are whatever at all time highs. Must be a great time to be a realtor.” It's like realtors don't really care about home prices as much as you care about the volume of transactions, how many people are out there buying and selling homes. 'cause frankly you would way rather have lower home prices, but way higher transaction volume than what we've had the last couple years, which is obviously high home prices, but very little transaction volume compared to an average year. It's a lot more difficult to be a realtor right now. 

So sometimes in this down market that we're in, we'll have a client be like, “Hey, I signed up and I'm nine months into Platform or even a year into Platform, and my business hasn't really grown that much more above and beyond what I would've sort of normally expected in a normal year.” And we always have to add that nuance like, “Well, it's not a normal year.” 

Jill Lightfoot: Yeah. 

Tim Chermak: And so if your ads were getting seen… if someone spends, I'm gonna do this quick math, a thousand dollars a month on ads, and their average CPM is 20 bucks, which means that every $20 they spend approximately a thousand people are seeing your ads that means that 50,000 people a month are seeing your ads. Again, average. That means that over the course of a year, over half a million people seeing your ads, and a lot of them, it's not half a million unique people. It's often a hundred or 200,000 people, or even 50,000 people are seeing your ads 10 times.

Jill Lightfoot: Yeah. 

Tim Chermak: That's more what it actually looks like because of the way that we structure the retargeting. And so I always have to kind of explain that to a client. I'm like, “So if your business even stayed the same, and yet there's probably 50,000 people that clicked on your ads, that saw your content 10 times throughout the year, what do you think your business would've looked like if you weren't doing Platform?”

Jill Lightfoot: Right. 

Tim Chermak: You know? 'Cause the answer is kind of self-evident and that a lot of real estate agents in the last couple years, their business has declined by 20% or 30%, or even 50% because they wanted to save money on marketing. Just kind of begs the question, well, if saving money on marketing means your business goes down 50%, you're not really saving money at all, right? 

But then there's agents like you on the complete other side of that spectrum that your business has grown in the last couple years. Jill, why do you think your business has grown in the last couple years when so many else are struggling? Because you weren't always selling $15 million. I mean, what were you at a couple years ago? Was it more like 10 or 11 or…?

Jill Lightfoot: Yeah, yeah, probably right in there. Yeah. 

Tim Chermak: And I think it's important to establish that baseline. Obviously selling $10 or 11 million is already really impressive in and of itself, right? But when we talk about, “Hey, I hired a marketing company,” or “I started this marketing program,” whether or not it's Platform, you could insert any company into that, you always want to make sure that if you're talking about, “Hey, this marketing helped me,” that like, well, did your business actually grow enough to where you know that the marketing you're doing helped you? Because frankly, if someone grows from $10 million to $11 million, or even from $2 million to $3 million, or from $3 million to $4 million, it's like that's kind of in the margin of error where maybe you just got a couple extra referrals that year and just blind dumb luck you sold an extra million dollars because again, just a couple extra referrals came in. Or maybe you got lucky and had a couple really high priced listings you sold but your business didn't really grow in any meaningful way. And then you have some marketing companies that are trying to take credit for like, “Hey, you hired us and we took you from $5 to $6 million,” or whatever. It's like, well, I don't know if you could give the marketing company credit for growing from $5 to $6 million or whatever. 

Tim Chermak: But if over the years you've grown from $2 million to $3 million now to $15 million, and even just in the last couple years you've grown from 10, 11 million to $15 million, no one's business spontaneously grows by $5 million like, “Oh, whatever. I just had a good year. I grew by $5 million.” That doesn't happen, right? Clearly something that's happening with your marketing is resonating and it's working to have that type of growth, especially in a down market. Have you ever thought about what specifically about the marketing you're doing do you think is growing your business so much at a time when other agents are struggling?

Jill Lightfoot: Yeah, I think it's the consistency. 1. I do put out quite a few ads, videos, every month. And I think it's also just not salesy. That's just not my personality. A lot of it just matches who I am and a lot of the ads that we do, I should say.

Tim Chermak: All Cleveland sports related. 

Jill Lightfoot: Yeah, haha! Now that would be loser. I'm not a loser, I don't think. Well, I mean, I sort of am, I'm a Browns fan. But I think it is just that. We're not constantly talking about real estate. We're doing fun things, we're doing silly things, we're educating people. 

In the past, I would say in the last six months, I've met people in the industry, like at an event or whatever. And this literally happened to me twice where they walked up to me and introduced themselves to me and they said, “Oh, great to see you again, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I had never met them in person, never once. And literally the second person that this happened to, again, I literally argued back, I'm like, “No, I don't think we've ever met,” and he was insistent, “Yes! Yes, we have. We have met,” and we had not met. 

So that's what's very cool about that is how it just breaks down the barriers. The people just already trust me, which is really cool and we really haven't met. And the fact that these were industry people, both of them, who understand marketing. They weren't just consumers, not educated on what we're doing, that they legit thought we had met face to face when we had not. 

Tim Chermak: No, actually, they've just seen so many of your retargeting ads that they just assume or they think, “Oh yeah, I've met Jill before. I know Jill,” and actually they've just seen so many of your ads.

Jill Lightfoot: Yes, yes. And I think that's where I have had acquaintances, and this is the fuzzy ROI that we talk about a lot. I've had acquaintances that were Facebook friends. Did I really know them? No. Knew their first name. Who have felt comfortable enough to refer their family members, a friend or whatever. And that I think is gold.

Tim Chermak: That specifically is what is not happening if you're not investing in marketing. You'll probably have the inner rings of your sphere that are willing to refer to you 'cause they personally know you, they've personally sold a house with you. But what marketing accomplishes, to put this in the most granular terms possible, is that if you do marketing the right way via Platform way, and you do it consistently like you've been doing, Jill, you're not only gonna get the referrals from the true inner ring of your sphere, 'cause you were already getting those referrals anyways, but you're gonna start getting referrals from the outer rim of your sphere. 

Jill Lightfoot: Yeah. 

Tim Chermak: People that don't really know you at all, they've never attended an event, they've certainly never bought or sold a house with you. They barely know you themselves other than your Facebook friends as you said. But they actually start referring their friends and family. 'Cause if they keep seeing your retargeting ads pop up, they feel like they know you and they feel like, “Hey, I can risk some of my social capital actually recommending Jill, even though I've never worked with Jill myself.”

It would be the realtor equivalent of if a realtor has never worked with Platform themselves, but they've seen so many of our ads that they refer one of their other realtor buddies in a different town to sign up with Platform, again, even if they themselves have never actually worked with Platform, because our retargeting ads are convincing them so strongly that we're a trustworthy company, right? You have that same dynamic happening in your business where yeah, I mean, I was like, “I technically know this person, but not really.” And multiply what you just said there, that scenario where you get a warm referral from someone referring their friends and family, even though they don't really know, you multiply that by the probably dozens and dozens and dozens of times that's happened over the last couple years for you, and that's how you all of a sudden go from $2 million to $10 million and then from $10 million to $15 million. 

Jill Lightfoot: Yup. 

Tim Chermak: Because you also don't have a big team. I also want to make that clear that Jill isn't selling $15 million, but it's her and four agents doing $15 million. It's literally just Jill and you're handling that yourself. So that's also impressive.

You're in the Columbus, Ohio area. Is the Columbus area growing? Is the real estate market doing well, or is it kind of like the rest of the country, where it slowed down a lot? What can you share about your local market area? 

Jill Lightfoot: Yeah, our local, we are growing. There has been a ton of economic development with Amazon, Intel, car batteries, I guess is a huge thing. 

Tim Chermak: Obviously 

Jill Lightfoot: Several of those are coming to the area. So yeah, we have a ton of growth happening and a lot of people moving in, not a lot of people moving out so...

Tim Chermak: Move to Columbus, Ohio, the car battery capital of the world. 

Jill Lightfoot: Who knew? Who knew?

Tim Chermak:  So it's growing. 

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