How Aaron Martinez Uses Organic Content and Paid Ads to Grow a Business

Host 00:00

He spent like $140,000 just trying to get a funnel to work.

Host1 00:04

Grant Weiss does not get to decide what works and what doesn't work. The market gets to decide what works and what doesn't work. They boost a post for 10 bucks and they're like, oh, I didn't generate a client. This doesn't work.

Host 00:13

What do you think is one of the most valuable things to be doing today? They need to be sold on you, they need to be sold on the method, and it needs to be sold on your product. I think a lot of people are upset about the rising cost of acquisition. It's not like a this versus this. It's what is the goal? What is going to be the best vehicle to put in place to make the end result or the end goal in everything?

Host1 00:30

What up, everybody? Grantwise here. Welcome back to the Partner and Profit Podcast. Excited for my conversation today. I've got Aaron Martinez on. We're going to dive into teaching you how to turn your relationships into revenue. What up, Aaron? Thanks for being here.

Host 00:42

Dude, thanks for uh for having me. When you reached out, uh look or I guess I wanted to find a time earlier, but uh just ended up with our uh you know our client event and stuff that we had to do it now. But I'm I'm happy to jump on and have a conversation.

Host1 00:53

Yeah, man. How are you like in Arkansas? I meant to ask you this for a while.

Host 00:56

Yeah, it was kind of a long story of how we ended up here, but um, long story short, my wife got an opportunity to help uh build out like a children's ministry here. And um, you know, everything that I do is is local, or I'm not local, is a remote. So I was like, hey, you've been supporting me, you know, through through all we've we've been together on all my crazy ideas and businesses. You know, it's kind of my turn to to return the favor. So yeah, it's good. We have um real estate's cheap. So we got you know a nice piece of land for, you know, we have four kids. So they we just installed like a zip line, a rock climbing wall, we got a trampoline, we're just gonna get a play play set for them. We have a bunch of chickens and ducks and stuff. So it's uh it's it's fun, man.

Host1 01:31

Yeah, that's awesome. I uh I don't remember where you moved. Uh I just remembered that you moved to Arkansas. Obviously, I was born and raised here, but I live uh in the northwest corner of the state, so it's a little bit of a different culture compared to the rest of the state. Oh, yeah, is what I've consistently noticed.

Host 01:46

Uh yeah, I was in Virginia.

Host1 01:47

If you meet some people from Arkansas, they'll say, like, we always say, like, I'm from northwest Arkansas, and it's it's like we're trying to distinct ourselves from the rest of the state. Exactly. Because when I tell people from Arkansas, they're like, Oh yeah? It's like, yeah.

Host 02:01

Where where at? Which part?

Host1 02:03

Exactly. So, anyways, and for the people that are listening to this that don't know much about you, just give them a little bit of the backstory. How do you get to where you are today?

Host 02:10

Yeah, yeah. So uh again, another another quite long story. I've been making videos online. So I'm 30, I'm about to be 31, and I've been making videos like on YouTube since I was nine years old. So obviously the content has changed since then, but you know, I was into gaming and magic trick videos and all that type of stuff. And, you know, when I was when I was 15, I had gotten my my first check from from YouTube. And, you know, at the time, like I, you know, I didn't have anything, I didn't have the whole like this is what I want to be when I grow up. And it just so happened because I'd gotten like that early taste of like internet money, we'll say, is I kind of just kept on that path and you know, tried a bunch of different things. It was a point back in like 2021 when I was working with a ton of real estate agents, you know, brokers, team leads, things like that around, you know, advertising, marketing, YouTube was a big, like YouTube organic, like posting on YouTube was a big thing. It's like a pretty massive market now, which is it's funny to see, is like just how how far it's come. And then um, you know, did that for a little bit, transitioned out of working, you know, having my own agency and actually partnered, fixing the name, partnered with uh a guy that I'd known for a while in the agency space. His name's Cole, and you know, just started out with him. I don't know how deep I'll go into it, but you know, started out working with him and and kind of gotten to the point where now I'm uh a partner within within the company. So it's been in a nutshell, that's that's kind of what's uh what we've done.

Host1 03:21

That's awesome, man. That's really awesome. So relationships, partnerships have been a big part of the growth, it sounds like. What would you say? Video marketing is one of my favorite things in the world, right? Got really big into video marketing several years ago and started studying, learning about parasocial relationships, learning about just all kinds of stuff. Taught a lot of that stuff too. But when it comes to building relationships, from your perspective, when it comes to like video content and stuff like that, like where's the convergence? How are people in your mind using video to build relationships and create connections?

Host 03:51

Yeah. So for us, you know, a big, a big piece of it, even like because I'm in more like the online marketing space. So I find like that market is is a couple years ahead of, let's say, like, you know, real estate agents, brokers, things like that, which like obviously you can just learn a ton from, you know, the success leaves clues. So, you know, the biggest piece that I found is specifically, because again, I've been doing YouTube stuff for so long, is like YouTube, I found is the best at building those relationships. Really, the main reason is because it's so much more two things. Number one, it's longer form. So for someone, let's say you put like an Instagram reel or, you know, a 60-second ad out there is someone needs to consume a ton of those things back to back in order to build, like, if we're looking at a relationship meter as you know, zero to 10, is like they're they're kind of building like micro improvements within that meter versus if they watch one YouTube video that's 10 to 15 minutes long, at that point, it's like they've kind of filled that trust meter, if you will, by just consuming one piece of content. And then on top of that, the second thing is people that are on YouTube are a lot more in that like that consumption mode of like having higher intent versus someone that's on Instagram again, it's like more disruption based. They're, you know, and at the grocery store, they're at their house at the, you know, at night in bed. And it's just like they're not really looking for anything, they're just wanting to get some dopamine rushes. So I think to kind of be bringing back to your question is, you know, I've I found it to work in that way where you create the longer form content, you still want to do the shorter form stuff, but the shorter form is more of like a vehicle to bring to the longer form and they consume more of your content to build more trust.

Host1 05:14

Do you you find that like people should make long form and just mostly do a lot of shorts from that long form to push people back or create specific pieces of content that drive people to longer forms?

Host 05:25

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it depends on what what your goal is on these platforms. So, for example, and this might be a little bit of like a trick kind of like way to go about it, but you know, everyone is obviously like, okay, I want to create content, but not because I love content, it's because it's going to get me to the end outcome of like selling another house or, you know, building some sort of relationship. So I think you have to just ask yourself the question of like, am I posting just for like to stay relevant on my feed because I already have ads running so that when someone comes back to my page and they're seeing that consistent feed of content, if that's the case, then I think, yeah, by all means, make a long form piece of content, record a podcast, cut out different clips from it. The issue with that though is a lot of times, unless the clips like from a podcast or from a YouTube video inherently have a very strong baked-in hook, is that's the most important of a short form piece of content. So if that doesn't exist, is you just aren't really gonna see the success in terms of growth, engagement, all those things on a short form, as you would if you would just like sit down and record it straight to camera, have a very strong hook in mind, and then and and you know, it's called like paying off the hook by like giving them the value that validates, okay, here's what was the hook, and now I'm going to like I feel good after watching this video. Right. So I think I don't know if that answers your question specifically, but I think it's just like, what do they want from it? And then if you're in like a really big like growth mode, is I would say 100% keep them separately, record your YouTube videos, record your short form content, but a little easy hack that you can do. I mean, we have so many AI tools these days, is just take the transcript from your YouTube video, throw that into whatever AI you use, and just be like, you know, what what are some heavy-hitting clips from this podcast that you feel like would be relevant? And then I would take the context and I would just reshoot it for short form specifically with a good hook. That way you already have some what of the content of something that you would talk about, but now you're like making your life easier by giving yourself kind of a starting point with the short form.

Host1 07:10

That makes sense. I think trust is one of the single most important things in today's day and age. And it's only become more and more important over the next three to five years with AI and everything that's going on. When it comes to creating content and creating video content, how can somebody or what types of content should people create to build trust in the audience that they're trying to build?

Host 07:30

Yeah. So I think the the trust meter, it's definitely changed over the years, right? Like like you said, like the introduction of AI, like I can literally go into like an RCADS or a Hagen or something and like make a copy of myself and put it out there, right? And and and more often than not, depending on the market that you're going in front of, if you know, understanding your audience audience being mostly, you know, real estate agents, brokers, team leads, is their audience being, let's say, the consumer, someone that wants to buy or sell a house, is that market is much less like they're they're starting to become more more aware of AI, but I think there's still, you know, a good amount of time to be able to take advantage of those things. So, so back to the question of trust. If we're looking in 2026, I think two two things that really heavily need to be emphasized in in the types of content. The first thing, and I I just I'll steal this from um a guy that I got some mentorship from a couple of years ago. His name's Todd Brown. He's like a big, big like copywriter in in like kind of like the online space. You know, he works in multiple industries, but mostly online marketing. And one of his philosophies is called it's when he writes his copy, it's always done, it's called a CPB chunk. So that stands for uh claim proof benefit. And what you need to do is anytime you make some sort of marketing argument or hook or VSL or whatever, is you always want to include anytime you make a claim, you need to follow up with some sort of proof and then the benefit as to why it's important for them to listen to. And the reason is because there's like especially like someone literally can pull up their phone and make some sort of crazy claim, and people just aren't going to believe it anymore unless there's something that's like next to it. That's like a statistic or a screenshot or some sort of proof that really make like kind of just like has a check mark in the person's head that's watching is like, okay, so this is like actual credible information backed by some sort of data. That's the first thing. Uh the second thing, I think the majority of our audience know who Alex Schmozzi is. I think we all do at this point, is you know, if you again back to the success leaves clues, is you're starting to see uh, you know, Alex Schamozzi is a good example, Cody Sanchez is another good example, Daniel Priestley is a lot of these guys, you're starting to see that they're popping up with live streams, right? And that's not because like they come with live streams, they've seen that over the last couple of years, it's not like live streaming is a new concept, but there's been a lot of these like IRL streamers on like Twitch or Kick or any of these platforms, is they're getting hundreds of thousands of people watching them live. So, what it allows you to do is when you are a you know real estate agent broker team leader, is if you can go live, whether it's like a market update or a walkthrough or whatever, just by the sheer nature of going live, it takes out any of your ability to be able to edit content. So you are then perceived to build more trust because you're just like talking off the cuff, right? And that I've seen builds an immense amount of trust because there is no longer, I mean, I've seen so many people come up where like and more in my space is like I'll see a ton of their content and like I'll book a call with them just to see, like, oh, like let me see like if I can like work with them, whatever. And I jump with that on Zoom and I'm like, What where was the person that was on the screen? Like, you you actually don't really, you know, respectfully, you don't actually know this stuff. It's like it's all scripted and teleprompted and highly edited. So I think just the the sheer nature of just going live and your ability to talk without having to have that preparation will build an immense amount of trust.

Host1 10:28

How do you think like things like vulnerability play into content creation, if at all? Because everybody says be authentic, but then everybody goes and pulls their scripts from Chat GPT, you know. So it's like it's kind of the opposite of being authentic. When you I think a more clear way to tell somebody to be authentic is to be vulnerable, to like share sides of your life that maybe you wouldn't typically think of sharing that help you create and form like a real connection. But I I didn't I don't know if you see anything like that. I know that's kind of like anti-internet marketing culture because internet marketing culture is like let's go rent the Lambos and you know, yeah, yeah.

Host 11:06

Well, I think a big piece of like the whole it's not even that like the you know, the whole vulnerability piece is just coming up. I think it's just the the market, and you've been doing this long enough to know that like the market is very cyclical. So, you know, when there was this whole time of like, you know, the the rented Lambos and the big houses and things like that, it's just like that started to become much less of like a want. Like, don't get me wrong, like people still want some of those things. But I think when when people can like it's really hard for someone to see that type of content and feel motivated because like the motivation towards like that type of thing is usually like either not really within their reach or it's gonna be a lot of hard work to get there, which like hard work is fine. But I think when when instead of me as a person comparing myself to this this person that's up here, is if I can compare myself to the person that's here or even like a story that's down here, it gives me like that motivation of like, oh, like if this guy did it, then like so can I. And you you have the context of, you know, they they were broke or they were struggling in this way, or they, you know, had relationship problems or whatever, like the before was, it gives you a really clear contrast to be able to to equate to your own personal situation and people, it makes it a lot easier for them to connect with you when you can when you can bring into like the everyday scenario.

Host1 12:15

Yeah. Seems like um kind of taps into the heroes two journey frameworks that Russell always talks about with the journey of achievement, which is like what we set out to accomplish, but then the journey of transformation. And really it's the journey of transformation that people fall in love with, the characters and you know, movies. A lot of people in real estate, they're they're like very perceptive, like you know, they can they're so strategic about everything. And it's like, man, people want to see the real version of you when you're creating content, especially because like what you talked about a second ago, you know, getting on a zoom call with somebody, if if the zoom call does not align with the advertisement, then trust is immediately broken. Yeah, and it's very, very difficult to rebuild it in in you know 30 minutes or an hour, you know, in a in a conversation. Yeah. So I get how you're using video content or we can use video content to build relationships. And I'm curious, how do we turn those relationships into revenue using video content?

Host 13:10

Yeah. So you're saying like basically if if someone's watching my content and then they're like, oh, I trust this guy enough, let me like buy it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we can get like super, super technical on it, but I think if we if it boil it down to, you know, what are the the mistakes that people usually make is I think that especially if someone has, let's say, like cold advertising experience, like through ads or whatever, is that type of audience needs to be nurtured, right? It's like they they see you one time on an ad, they come through the funnel, you need to have a crazy email sequence, you have to have applications in place, you have to have logic to disqualify certain people, you have to have a crazy follow-up sequence to make they make sure they even show up for your call in the first place. Like that, that type of audience is just setting the expectation that it's a lot harder for them to show up, right? And then by the time they get on the call, is or you know, consultation, you know, you show in the house or whatever, it's like there really isn't a ton of trust built there because you're like forcing them to watch you, right? Now, all like our whole business is basically based based off of paid ads. It's just the predictability that comes with ads. But then if we're looking at the content side, is you just have to try way less, like way, way less is hard to actually get the convert to the point where we literally just have like a calendar link, almost like no applications, just like, hey, just booking the calendar because we understand that that person is just much more sold. Like, I I forgot where I learned this, but for someone to like buy your product, they need to be sold on you, they need to be sold on the method, and it needs to be sold on uh your product. So you as a person, the method is what are you specifically teaching them or what are you, what are you helping them do to get past their where where they're stuck and to where they need to be. And the product is the actual like how much is it? What are the deliverables, things like that. Through content is those first two pieces are already sold, right? They're already sold on you and the method. You're just on there to sell them the product. Through ads, is they're not really sold on any of those things. So you have to rely on the sales call to then for sell those things. And the and what happens is people, that's when people start to feel salesy or the or the person comes off salesy, and what is when they're trying to sell them on all these things on a call, but then the person also has the expectation that, oh, this person's just saying these things to sell me. So to bring that kind of full for full circle is the mistake that I see people make is they try to do this like really long process of nurture, follow-up, whatever on someone from YouTube or Instagram. And you don't really need that. You just need a very clear CTA, right? Actionable things, right? If you're on YouTube, one link in your description, if you're on Instagram, one link in the bio, right? You don't want a link tree with 10 billion, you know, links because then they're not going to make any decision and you're not gonna get any traffic through it. So that's what I would say is kind of a mistake. But um, but yeah, just just understanding that people that are from social are are ready to buy a lot of times. You just have to make it really simple for them in order to talk to you.

Host1 15:47

Organic content and then paid are really two different things. And I think you kind of unpacked a second ago. It's like, yeah, you can grow this way with ads and you can grow this way with organic. What do you think is one of the most valuable things to be doing today? I think a lot of people are upset about the rising cost of acquisition, all the things that are going on with paid traffic. Doesn't mean it doesn't work, but they're they're definitely two kind of different verticals, and it seems like people are picking a path lately. What do you think is is gonna come out on top here?

Host 16:17

Yeah, in terms of like organic versus paid. Yeah, I think like it's funny. We were just talking about this on our marketing meeting earlier today, is uh Alex Ramosi put out this video uh a couple days ago, and I think it's titled like ads have changed forever or something like that. And basically the whole premise is because there is an influx of people that are running ads, is trust is down, right? They see a billion different ads. When someone opts into your ad, they see 10 others from someone that's similar, uh, just by the by the sheer nature of it. So he's just talked about how just organic content is becoming more, more uh important, right? But uh, you know, the way that I look at it is kind of like you mentioned, is I don't really compare the two as I look at the the pros and cons. So the pros of paid ads is just more predictable, right? It's like I can put X amount of dollars in and I can, you know, based on the numbers, I can generate X out as long as like those systems are in place, right? Your follow-ups in place, your uh, you know, your sales team is good or you're doing sales correctly. You have a pretty predictable way of putting in a dollar and getting it out based on your systems, right? We're we're spending $30,000 a day at a three to four X ROAS, uh front end ROAS. So, but that's only because we've been refining that over the last four or five years to predictably be able to do that. What people usually do is they spend a hundred bucks, maybe even that. They spent they boost a post for 10 bucks and they're like, Oh, I didn't generate a client, this doesn't work, right? This is just not the case. So I I just look at ads as a more predictable way. Organic is you it's it's less predictable, but you have the higher quality clients. It kind of sucks to say, but you if you really want to scale, you have to do both because you want the predictability from ads, but you also want the conversion mechanism that is organic. And I think the the where I'll end that thought is I think it's just really important to uh be able to reverse engineer. Is like I didn't used to be good at tracking. That's basically all I do now is understanding what leads are coming from YouTube, from Instagram, from TikTok, from Facebook organic, from Facebook ads, which funnel is it? Is if you just reverse engineer your numbers and just be like, okay, I'm a real estate agent, broker, team, whatever, and I want to make terms of GCI, I don't know how it works specifically for team leaders, but it's like GCI, I want to make $200,000 this year. Well, then you have to figure out, okay, $200,000 divided by 12 is X. And then you figure out your monthly, and then your monthly divided by your weekly. So then now you know, and then your weekly to your daily. So then you figure out, okay, what type of front-end metrics do I need to hit in order to make my end result inevitable? And that could be amount of times that you post. That could be, you know, the amount spent, whatever it is. And then it becomes really simple. I mean, it's not a perfect science, but it just at least gives you more predictability, but it gives you more of like an action plan of like instead of like where most people are, is that they're like, oh, I'm gonna spend some money here, but that doesn't work for, you know, within a week. So I'm gonna post some content, I'm gonna post content for a week and that didn't work. So now I'm just back to door knocking, right? It's just like they just don't give enough time to actually work. So uh hopefully that answers your question. I think it's it's not like a this versus this. It's what is the goal? What is gonna be the best vehicle to put in place to make the end result or the end goal inevitable?

Host1 19:07

What do you think people should know when it comes to running ads? Because you hinted at something like, you know, we've spent years refining all of the stuff and now we have all these positive things happening. Marketing is testing. Like if I could get a tattoo on my forehead, people ask, like, hey, Grant, will this work? Like I have no idea. We have to test it. Like I don't get to decide. Grant wise does not get to decide what works and what doesn't work. The market gets to decide what works and what doesn't work. So if you unpack a lot of that, it's like, okay, your messaging has to be good, your offer has to be good, the process that the offer is presented has to be good. And so all of these little bitty things really have to be dialed in. How do you typically coach people to get in the right mindset to even start advertising their business if it's something that they want to do?

Host 19:47

Yeah. So I kind of touch on this a little bit, but it's just really you have to fall as so cliche, but you have to fall in love with numbers and tracking and understanding like what's actually going on and making decisions based on numbers, not emotion or a feeling, or like anytime I'll have a consulting client and you know, we'll pull up their ad account or their tracking sheet, and I'll be like, okay, where do you feel as a bottleneck? And they're like, you know, I feel. And as soon as they say feel, it's like, no, we're not gonna feel anything. Or it's like, I think it, no, we're not gonna think any of this stuff. We're going to look at the sheet, we're going to look at the numbers, and then we're just going to look through them and see what is the bottleneck, right? Is it a bottleneck? But because and then it's, I think the piece is just understanding what each bottleneck means. So if we're looking at like a general marketing funnel, it's like, okay, first column is amount spent. Second would be like, let's say in the basic world would be like impressions. So okay, cool. So our impressions, amount amount of spent, now we get our CP, our CPMs. Then it's like, okay, I got this amount of leads. So then we look at, okay, how many impressions did we get and how many leads? In those, those two numbers is we then identify either a bottleneck or a lack thereof. So if you have 20,000 impressions and you have one lead, well, guess what? Either the lead form is bad, the landing page is bad, the messaging on either of those two things is bad, and we can make decisions and action plans based on that. And then I won't go through the whole funnel, but you know, just to give one more example is like let's say you have, you know, a decent, like, let's say that's good, that first part. If you have a good lead cost, but your like, let's say cost per book call is let's say you have 10 leads and one person booked the call. Well, it's like we want to see a 20 to 25% booking rate, right? Sometimes a little bit higher. But if that number is off, then we're like, okay, so maybe it's the VSL that's wrong. Maybe it's the the application is too long or too short. Maybe we add or subtract friction, right? So it's like having those understandings and making the decisions based on on data in order to, in order to do so. And then the the second thing where I, you know, I think a lot of people make mistakes, is they try the you want to treat ads like a science experiment experiment. And what I mean by that is you want to make sure that you're not changing too many variables at runs, right? There's the thing in science. It's like you only want to change to see like an actual science experiment come to fruition through testing, is you only want to change as as little variables as possible. So if someone like their ads don't work, they're like, oh, I need to change the ad and the VSL and I need to change the landing page and the booking page. It's like, no, it's like we need to look at the numbers, figure out what is our hypothesis as to what is going wrong, change that one thing, gather data for the number three to five days, and then make and make the change there. I tell this story all the time because I think it paints this picture, is uh my business partner Cole, and what I wasn't a part of the company at this time, but uh he spent like $140,000 just trying to get a funnel to work. And like so that it was like it was some some micro wins in there. And I think he like ended up breaking even on that spend, so not anything great, but through that $140,000 in spend was able to go from once he like clicked on the final, you know, 15th VSL, the 300th ad, is found a portion of all those things that worked, and then he scaled from 200 grand a month to a million a month in eight months. And it was from all the testing and putting that that that effort in to actually find that.

Host1 22:49

That's wild. Man, this has been an awesome conversation. I think one that everybody should listen to, especially when it comes to advertising and building relationships and and what all is required. I always like to ask this at the end of these shows is what's the number one way that the listeners of the podcast can partner with you? How can we walk alongside and support you?

Host 23:04

Yeah, biggest initiative for me is I think either Instagram or YouTube. Instagram, I haven't been as consistent on as I should be, just because we've been changing so many different things with our offer and stuff. But uh Instagram is a place I'll do a lot of the shorter form stuff. YouTube, I'm making a commitment to, you know, to be a lot more consistent there. And the goal is to hit, you know, 10,000 subs by the end of this year. I'm at like a thousand. So we'll we'll see if that stays, stays continuous and if I can hit that. But I go pretty deep into a lot of like the higher level ads tactics of like how to create ads, how to create variations, how to, you know, build out these funnels and things like that. So uh those are two places that I think people could get a ton of value out of.

Host1 23:37

Awesome. We'll make sure that we link up the ways people can connect with you in the show notes. Really appreciate you spending some time with me today, man.

Host 23:43

This is again was an awesome conversation. Sweet, man. Thanks for having me. Hope people get value out of it.

Host1 23:47

Of course, of course. And thank you all for continuing to listen to the Partner Profit Podcast. This has been another good one. I'll see you on the next episode.

Host 23:54

Peace.