How to Combine Community Engagement with Content Marketing with Behdad Jamshidi

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Community engagement and content marketing go hand in hand if you have the right strategies. I discuss how to combine the two in this episode with my guest, Behdad Jamshidi.

In the past 6 years, Behdad (or Bee) has met with and assessed 992+ marketing agencies and vetted them down to a lean 100+ preferred partners across all marketing niches. After pairing hundreds of businesses with the right partners, he’s found his skillset lies in the matchmaking process.

Getting Started with Community Engagement and Content Marketing

Bee specializes in connecting businesses with the right marketing partners. He got into that space by engaging with a variety of communities. During COVID everything hit a wall, and everyone rushed into online communities for engagement. In one of the communities that he was in he built up his brand and landed a lot of customers by sharing knowledge and sharing information. In those communities people got to know him over the course of three years. That’s how he got into the community engagement and content marketing space.

Bee’s purpose was to always share value first; he loves learning about new ideas and sharing content. Bee wasn’t trying to sell, and he was adding value and as a result potential clients reached out to him.

Sharing the Right Kind of Content for Marketing

Bee shared his experiences growing as an entrepreneur, including trials and tribulations. He was always learning more and more from mentors and other business owners. Bee realized that not everyone gets access to those people at the level that he did. He learned about new concepts and ideas through those conversations he would then take it in and journal about it. From there Bee would create content around his journal entries in various communities.

Bee learned about some common mistakes that businesses make when they’re trying to pick the right marketing partner and then shared how to avoid them. Some questions included, “I’m about to hire a business coach, what should I think about?” Then afterwards he would share “I hired this business coach, here’s what I learned.” You create a continuity of business advice within those communities.

Making Deeper Community Engagement Connections

Bee spent a lot of time learning on calls. He’s a super connector in the marketing world, so he was always on calls. The byproduct of those calls turned into meaningful content. He also went to a lot of in-person networking events. At those networking events he would create deeper connections with the people that he interacted with online.

That’s where a lot of the content would come from. Bee used to be an engineer. He would do sales engineering for businesses that were in the 50 to 1,000 employee range. So, he got a lot of content and a lot of knowledge from his past work experience that he could share. Bee was unique because most entrepreneurs that are running purely entrepreneurial businesses haven’t worked in or with large organizations.

When you come in with insights that others don’t have you have unique content to share.

How to Stand Out and be Remembered Through Content Marketing

You must discover what your core theme is. What do you like to talk about? You can even start out easily, with “This is who I am, this is a little bit of my background, here’s what I love talking about, here’s how I can support you”. Just be an open book.

The next piece after that is to continue sharing what you know that most people don’t know. For Bee it was seeing businesses constantly failing with marketing partners. He provided feedback in his communities about how to avoid those mistakes. That’s where a lot of his content started out, it was just what he was naturally doing.

That content helped Bee focus on the topic that would become the core of his business.

We also dive into topics such as:

How to keep the attention of the people in the community after you get it so you’re more than just a blip on their radar.
How to find and engage with the communities that will be most valuable to you and vice versa.
The importance and value of showing up and commenting on other people’s content.
How to create and build your personal brand in communities.
The number of communities you should get involved with when you’re just starting out.
Why finding new communities gets easier on your journey.
What a system to successfully engage with communities looks like.
How to pick an ideal target market and how to find communities of them.
How to keep humming along after you find communities of your ideal target markets.
How to know what your communities want you to post about once you’ve established your brand.
How to convert conversations and connections into clients.
How to maintain a high level of meaningful, valuable content over time.
How to find and foster relationships with marketing and referral partners.
What successful sales conversations look like and how to have them.
How to turn happy clients into referral partners.
The one thing, above all else, that you need to do to develop a community engagement and content marketing strategy.

…and other golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

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About My Guest

Behdad Jamshidi (or “Bee”) started CJAM Marketing after realizing that most companies don’t know how to evaluate the value of a marketing agency or assess their own needs. Since every business is different not only in their needs but where they are at in the growth process, it isn’t a one size fits all.

In the past 6 years, Bee has met with and assessed 992+ marketing agencies and vetted them down to a lean 100+ preferred partners across all marketing niches. After pairing hundreds of businesses with the right partners, he’s found his skillset lies in the matchmaking process.

Featured in MarketWatch, Bloomberg, National Post and the Financial Post, Bee’s unique background in marketing, engineering, consulting, leadership, sales and strategy, has allowed him to serve as the conduit between business owners and the marketing teams they need.

Click here to learn more about CJam!

Click here to connect with Bee on LinkedIn!

Click here to get Bee’s Pricing Benchmark Guide!