A Referral Marketing Strategy That Actually Works

Jennifer Poulson: So here's one thing I found interesting that happened a few months ago. I’d had somebody that reached out to me directly from Facebook and asked me to come over and talk about listing their house. It was the first time that it really sank into me, because typically when you go to a listing presentation, you're one of several people that they're meeting with. That's what I'm going there thinking, “I'm one of several. They just happen to be my retargeting audience and so that's how they know me.” And as I'm sitting there at the kitchen table with them, I realize they already trust me, which was an interesting paradigm shift for me. 

Jennifer Poulson: Usually we're working on building that trust with somebody that we just met, but especially because of the diversity of things that they see, yeah, they see me do realtor things, but they see me do all these other things too, they do have a pretty good idea of who I am as a person, what I like, what I don't like, what it might be like to be around me. And it really– I think that the superpower now with me with sellers is that they do feel like they know me. I don't have to build that at that meeting. I've been building it already. 

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. Welcome back to another episode of The Platform Marketing Show. I'm joined today by Jennifer Poulson in St. George, Utah, really southern Utah. Jen, welcome to the show. 

Jennifer Poulson: Hey Tim, thanks. 

Tim Chermak: So Jen's been working with Platform for about two years now. Is that right? 

Jennifer Poulson: Yep, I joined you in ‘22. 

Tim Chermak: Okay, yep. So I just want to lay this all out right away, you were already a successful agent before you joined Platform, so this is not one of those rags to riches podcast episodes where it was like, “Hey, I was scraping by and barely had money to pay the bills and then I hired Platform and–” you know. You were already very successful, but you were looking at something that could strengthen your brand in your area and give you an edge on competitive listing appointments over the other agents in your market because I know that in the last couple of years, the greater St. George area has become expensive, very competitive in terms of real estate agents, obviously because it's becoming more of a premium luxury area. And for those who don't know, St. George, I mean, I don't know if I'd describe the whole town as a luxury community, but it's not cheap housing in Southern Utah. It's a very luxurious place to live. 

Jennifer Poulson: Our average price point is in the $700,000s. 

Tim Chermak: Okay, yeah, that frames it up where if you're not familiar with Utah, you're not familiar with the area, you might think, “Okay, middle of nowhere in Southern Utah. What is that? Like a $200,000 house?” It's like, no. It's a very beautiful area. What's the National Park you're really close to there? 

Jennifer Poulson: We're right next to Zion National Park, is you can see it's part of Zion from here and then we've got some ski resorts. We're really like the playground of Utah when it's snowing. It snows, people come down here. People from Vegas come up here. After COVID, the world discovered us and we exploded. 

Tim Chermak: Yeah, so it's gotten a lot more expensive in the last couple of years. Obviously, it's a popular place to want to be a real estate agent because there's still this myth out there that it's easy being a real estate agent. It's easy money. That's because I think people usually look at successful agents when they say, oh, this agent's making so much money, but they don't see the other 99 agents that are struggling and not making any money at all. That's a great example of survivorship bias. If I were to ever teach that in a college classroom, I would just use real estate as an example. 

Jennifer Poulson: It's true.

Tim Chermak: If there's this myth out in the public that agents are making so much money and we need reform and they should be making less commissions, it's like, well, maybe if you look only at the really successful ones and not the vast majority of agents that are barely making enough money to pay their bills, or they're not paying their bills. 

Tim Chermak: I say all that to say you're in a competitive market where there's lots of good agents and you were already a successful realtor, but you were looking for a little bit of edge of, hey, what type of marketing can I offer that'll put my brand over the top where if people in my community or in my sphere, like the friends of friends and the friends of friends of friends, like people who don't necessarily know you super well, but they probably know five other agents. It's like, how can I get those people to choose me when they're thinking about listing their house and not the other half dozen agents that they know? That's why you inquired about Platform. 

Tim Chermak: So when you signed up, it wasn't like, “I want a bunch of leads. I wanna buy a bunch of leads.” It was, “How can I build my brand in a deeper way in my community than maybe what you had been doing?” So my first question, Jen, is what marketing were you doing or had you done ever before you signed up for the Platform Marketing program? 

Jennifer Poulson: I definitely fall into that category of realtor where every report card I ever got had the comment that I talk too much. So my whole big marketing thing when I very first started was open houses on busy roads. That was literally what I did. I will talk to anyone. I enjoy people, so I would just throw out my little signs, I would find a vacant listing, and I would bring other works that I was doing and just turn it into my office. I didn't care how many people I got. I wanted to practice talking to people and getting comfortable in the sales phase with real estate. I would just do open houses because they were free and I could. I don't cold call. I've never cold called. I don't buy leads. If I did buy them, I would probably never call them. I just go and meet and talk to people. That’s kind of my superpower. 

Tim Chermak: How long have you been an agent? 

Jennifer Poulson: I got licensed at the end of 2019. In fact, I was pulling up my numbers and it was funny. In 2019, I sold one house. I was also working another job. My husband, he was cute. I actually didn't tell him I was getting licensed, I just did it. I was getting ready to take my test and I said, “Okay, so by the way, I'm gonna take my real estate test because I need to do something different. I'm ready for something different.” The words that I still tease him about were, “But you have health insurance,” because he's self-employed. I was like, “Promise, I'll make enough that we can pay for our own health insurance. It's fine. We don't need the health insurance.” 

Jennifer Poulson: That first year, sold one house. The least expensive house of my career actually. It was like $90,000 or something like that. I was super excited to make my $6,000. That was really exciting. That first client, he turned into– that first year– three transactions, but even more than that, he adopted me, sort of. One of those things where my clients become my family. They become my friends. 

Tim Chermak: Yeah, just lots of referrals. Lots of future business.

Jennifer Poulson: And then after that, I quit the job with the insurance and made it full time. In 2020, which was my first full year, now mind you, that was COVID, so when I was starting out, we were like, “Okay, you can't touch anything. Okay, you can't–” like all that you can't’s. I did about $150,000 that year, and then the following year–

Tim Chermak: And you were not spending money on marketing. 

Jennifer Poulson: Nothing. 

Tim Chermak: So essentially in your first full year as an agent, you still did $150,000 in GCI. This is basically just by sitting open houses and trying to insert yourself into as many possible situations where you're just talking to people and getting face time with people. 

Jennifer Poulson: Yep. And then from there, I did just over $350,000. Now we were also heating up, but some of that was investors. 

Tim Chermak: But there's many agents though, just to give some context to that, that yeah, the market was really hot in 2021 for sure, but there's many agents who have still never in their life made 300,000 in GCI and you did that in your second full year in the business. Okay, so how many people live in St. George, Utah, the greater area? 

Jennifer Poulson: Right around 100,000. I should probably Google that. It's a small town. We have one Target. We have two Walmarts. We have one Costco, so it's little-ish. 

Tim Chermak: I mean, it's not a small town if you have 100,000, but it's definitely not a big city. 

Jennifer Poulson: No, and it's kind of the town where everybody's from here and everybody that grew up here, it's sort of like a tight knit. If you didn't grow up here, it's kind of hard to break in here. And I came from Vegas, so I moved here in 2017. 

Tim Chermak: And how far away from St. George is Vegas? 

Jennifer Poulson: Vegas is about a little over an hour south of here. 

Tim Chermak: So you were familiar with the area, but you weren't embedded into the deep historical social circles.

Jennifer Poulson: I was the new girl from Vegas. 

Tim Chermak: I mean, frankly, even now we're recording this in the year 2024, you're still a relatively new realtor. You've been licensed for less than five years at this point. Your business rapidly grew from $150,000 then to $350,000, and then I know the next year you did actually over $400,000 in GCI and you weren't spending money on marketing this entire time. I know people listening to this are going to be like, “Bullshit. There's no way that she wasn't spending money on marketing.” Where were the deals, where were the leads coming from? Was it just referrals from people who knew you, who knew you? Were you active on social media? What was the main source of business of how people were calling you throughout this time? 

Jennifer Poulson: The main source of my business was referrals, either from people that I knew, because I am very social, and then I just did tons of open houses. I did participate in a website with a couple of other agents where I think I spent $250 a month or something like that. We would get round robin leads, and I did sell two things from that. 

Tim Chermak: So, mostly open houses. And when you say that you sat at a bunch of open houses, do you mean every weekend? 

Jennifer Poulson: If I didn't have anything to do, I would look online and find a vacant house on a busy street and get the listing agent to let me hold it open. I would throw my signs everywhere because I figured I need to practice talking to people. I just needed one person that wanted me to help them somehow. I needed the practice and it was pretty easy practice. It's surprising how easily that parlayed into quite a few– 

Tim Chermak: How many– and again, this is gonna be a complete guess, I understand. I'm not asking you to have this memorized off the top of your head, but in that year, 2020, 2021 so your first couple full years as an agent, you said you focused on open houses as a lead generation strategy. How many open houses would you say you did in the year 2021? Was it every weekend, so you did 50 open houses? 

Jennifer Poulson: No. I honestly feel like I just used the open houses to get some momentum. Once I got the momentum, I would work those clients. So, I bet you less than 20. 

Tim Chermak: That's still in the spring, summer time of year in St. George. It's probably one a weekend ‘cause obviously you guys have a winter there that you're not doing as many open houses. 

Jennifer Poulson: My superpower is once I start to work with people, so like my first listing. My first listing was actually a park model. Do you know what a park model is? It's like a trailer. 

Tim Chermak: It's basically a fancy, a euphemism for a trailer. Yep

Jennifer Poulson: It was like 600 square feet. They're usually not new, so it was probably 20 years old. I knew that my clients needed to get every dollar out of it. I'd sold them a house and now they needed to sell their park model. I talked them into just letting me do whatever I wanted. I went to Home Depot and I bought some paint and I painted the walls myself and I switched out their curtains. I just freshened it up and made it look like a totally different something, but to me, I wasn't doing anything else. I knew I could make it look better and if it looked better, it would sell for more money, which it did. 

Jennifer Poulson: And then I sold another house for them doing the same thing. I went in and took their house that had been vacant and made it staged. I actually rented a trailer, brought furniture three hours north, to stage the house to sell it. That became my thing where you bring me into a property and I'll do anything that you'll allow me to do to make it better because I know that buyers have no attention span. If I can make it look better and make it show better, then they'll make more money. I think my all in this, it's easy to get referrals when they see you painting the walls yourself. 

Tim Chermak: Sure, on a trailer. That's the context that I think a lot of people don't get about real estate agents is, yeah, they might see that, hey, Jennifer Poulson sold a million-dollar house or a $700,000 house or a $1.3 million house and they think, wow, she must be making all this commission. It must be so great having that job where you make a $20,000 or $40,000 commission check when it closes. What they don't see is that you started out selling 20-year-old trailers as your first listings to get your foot in the door and start to build that clientele and build that brand to get to where you are today. 

Jennifer Poulson: And if I have clients like that today, I have people ask me, “Will you sell my house? I know it's not very expensive,” and yes. I'll give that the same amount of attention as I will give a $2 million house because to them, it's their home and every dollar matters. 

Tim Chermak: I mean, purely selfishly too. Let's say someone has a $400,000 house, which isn't a cheap inexpensive house. It's just that if you're in a market where there's $700,000 houses and that's the norm, $400,000 can seem cheap by comparison. Let's say someone has a $400,000 house. Well, selfishly, what you always are going to have in the back of your mind as an agent, or frankly, as a marketing company, is you never know what people know that person. It's very possible that you help someone sell a $300,000 or $400,000 house and they might be really good friends with a couple that has a $2 million house or a $1.3 million house or whatever. If you really impress them, they'd be like, “Hey, this agent did a phenomenal job for me. I want to connect you with my friend who has this million-and-a-half-dollar house they want to sell.” You never know who you're going to get connected to. 

Tim Chermak: It just doesn't make sense to ever do a mediocre job because the long tail effects of just being known for excellence, I mean, the ROI is almost incalculable if you just constantly focus on that. So, you discovered Platform in the year 2022. Again, you were already successful. What was it that interested you about Platform? I mean, how did you find us actually? Was it a Facebook ad? How did you find us originally? 

Jennifer Poulson: I actually found you because my daughter-in-law found your podcast. 

Tim Chermak: Oh, that's right. And now you're on the podcast. 

Jennifer Poulson: I listened to it and after the first episode that I'd heard, I was like, “If it's exclusive, I'm already interested.” Just from listening to your different theory, the thing that was the most impactful for me was, I think that most companies, for sure realtors, we all do the same thing. This slightly different variation of the same reels all day long. You go on Etsy and you buy your pre-packaged whatever, so we all just look the same. We all sound the same. And frankly, we all kind of think that everybody else is obsessed with houses just because we are, and they're not. 

Jennifer Poulson: I really loved the fact that Platform strategy was you're a part of the community. Yes, I'm a realtor, but my job as a part of the community is I shine a light on the businesses that I frequent. Coming from Vegas, I love the small town-ness of St. George. My mechanic, he owns his shop. I love small business. My husband and I are small business owners. I love that I don't advertise me. For the most part, the ads that we run, they're not about me. They're about somebody else. 

Jennifer Poulson: I'm actually wearing a necklace from this little shop that I found on the way to dinner one day and, just impromptu, I did a little ad on her. I know people have gone down to see her because they would text me, “Where'd you get that necklace? Where's that store?” I love that. It's scary and hard when you start a new business and you're putting out all that time, money, and effort. If the community can wrap their arms around you, that's phenomenal. The fact that you were giving me a way that I could help my business, frankly, by helping other people, that is exactly how I think life should be. You won me from day one. 

Tim Chermak: That's the heart of the Platform strategy is that the most effective ads don't look like ads and therefore, one of the most tactical ways of doing that is run ads that are actually just promoting other small businesses in your community. You're not even talking about yourself, you're actually giving an authentic shout out to a local boutique or local coffee shop or your favorite bakery or pizza slice shop or whatever. You talk about them and you just happen to be the one hosting or running the ad, but it's not about you. It's about the pizza shop or the coffee shop, whatever. 

Tim Chermak: People don't even realize they're subliminally being advertised to because they're still seeing the name, Jennifer Poulson, pop up in the Facebook ad because these ads are coming from your Facebook page or Instagram, but it's all about someone else. It doesn't look like you're bragging about yourself or constantly promoting yourself because you're not. You're shining a light on the community. 

Tim Chermak: If you do it once or twice, that's not going to build a brand, but if every month, you're doing this month after month and eventually year after year, people start to just associate, hey, Jennifer Poulson is a champion of the community and she loves promoting the community. She's essentially doing what the chamber of commerce and the local economic development commission should be doing, but so often isn't, actually promoting the businesses here. She's a champion of the community and she just happens to be a realtor. 

Tim Chermak: If first and foremost, people think of you as, hey, she's just really an advocate of the community and she just happens to be a realtor, well, guess what agent you're gonna call when you're thinking about selling your house? Or you're thinking about moving to the area and buying a house, you'd probably just, at a gut level, want to work with an agent who loves the community, is constantly promoting the community. 

Tim Chermak: I think Platform works really well for, I mean, frankly, for anyone, but specifically for agents like you that are really good at what you do, but you're maybe not super keen on the idea of, “I don't want to just talk about myself in all the ads. I don't want all the ads to be bragging about how awesome I am or how many homes I sold or what awards I've won,” just those cringe ads a lot of agents do where it's them holding their trophies or here's how many homes I sold or how many volume I sold last year and it's all about you, you, you. People don't care about that. 

Tim Chermak: It would be like if I ran ads for Platform and all the ads are just talking about Tim Chermak. It's like, well, no one cares about Tim Chermak. You're probably less likely to sign up for Platform the more you know about me. What we do is we highlight our clients and the results that they're getting. That's most of our ads we run for Platform. If people see a post about this client or that client and the success they've had or the referrals they're now getting or whatever, it's like, well, then you wanna sign up because we've made the marketing about other people, not us. So, that's how you found us. You got referred to us, you said, by your daughter-in-law? 

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