While traditional GTM motions rely on sales or product-led tactics, a community-led approach turns engaged users into loyal advocates who drive organic adoption, retention, and brand amplification.
When businesses prioritize community, they gain a built-in audience that fuels long-term success.
This article will explore how a community-led GTM strategy can be the key to unlocking sustainable, long-term business success.
Specifically:
- What community-led go-to-market is
- The key benefits of a community-led GTM strategy
- How to leverage your community during the pre-launch and post-launch stages
- How to measure and track community success using OKRs and KPIs
- Essential engagement metrics such as retention, customer acquisition, and advocacy
- Proving the impact of community-led growth to leadership
What is a community-led go-to-market strategy?
What do you want out of a go-to-market strategy? Loyal customers that are engaged with your brand? Value-led products? Sustained business growth? If any of the above are your goals, you might want to consider a community-led motion for your GTM strategy.
Unlike traditional sales-led or product-led GTM motions, a community-led GTM strategy means that growth, revenue, and customer acquisition are driven by your community. It starts and ends with your customers.
The core benefits of a community-led GTM strategy
- Built-in audience for product launches: With each launch, you’re not going out looking for an audience; you already have one that is engaged and eagerly awaiting your next product.
- Organic growth and advocacy: Loyal, engaged customers naturally become brand advocates, generating word-of-mouth growth.
- Customer feedback as a competitive advantage: Rather than guessing what customers want, a community-led company can ask them directly, allowing for continuous product-market fit.
- Long-term trust and value: When community is central to the business model, customers feel like they are part of something bigger, rather than just passive buyers.
Community-led in the pre-launch stage
If you’re wondering how to harness your community’s power before launching a product, you'll want to factor in three integral tactics. "Why bother?" you ask.
The major reason to factor your online community in the pre-launch phase of your GTM strategy is that engaging your community early on helps build anticipation, gather valuable feedback, and create organic excitement around your launch.
Here’s how to make the most of your community in the pre-launch phase:
1. Feature updates
Companies with a strong community-led approach will lean on their members before launch by posting about upcoming releases and feature updates in the community. This builds anticipation, ensures the community feels involved, and increases early adoption.
2. Gamification
Community members can then be directed to the release with a gamified request. This means that when they comment about the release, share the news, or provide feedback they receive a reward. It’s an innovative way to generate excitement and engagement.
3. Webinars
But the community spirit doesn’t stop there. You can access the power of your community by scheduling a webinar and answering members’ questions about the new feature in real-time.
Community-led in the post-launch stage
The biggest advantage to a community-led approach in the post-launch stage is that you have access to immediate feedback on your latest product or release from your members.
For example:
- If your marketing team wants to find out what percentage of your community actually uses a new feature, you can run a survey.
- For qualitative insights, you can organize a Zoom call with engaged community members and ask for their opinions.
- This research should then feed back into your user personas, making them richer and more nuanced over time.
Jason Johl, Product Marketing Manager at MuleSoft, talked to us about how he works closely with product managers to put together the right set of questions for their community:
“For the inbound collaboration, I work with a ton of product managers and they're a great group of product leaders. Oftentimes, they ask me to test a question or a hypothesis, and so together, we'll work on building hypotheses or questions and use the community as input to answer those.
“Depending on the question, we'll either do a survey to community members where we'll set up a feedback focus group of anywhere from five to 12 people. Or sometimes, if it's something I want to do quickly, I'll use some of the personal relationships I built.”
Jade Warne
How Mulesoft organizes its community members for product launches
Sabrina Marechal, Senior Manager of Developer Community at Mulesoft, explained to us how she sees the relationship between developer product evangelists and product launches:
“I see product launches as opportunities to make more evangelists. Launches are the opportunity for our champions to meet to learn more about the product, engage with us, and go out there and spread the word for us, which ultimately leads to a deeper relationship with them.”
Multiple community tiers
The software platform MuleSoft structures its community across multiple tiers, with a particular focus on the three highest levels during product launches, as these members tend to be the most engaged and knowledgeable.
Foundation:
At the foundation of these top tiers are the meetup leaders – approximately 350 volunteers who regularly organize MuleSoft events both regionally and online.
Middle tier:
The middle tier consists of mentors, who demonstrate their expertise and commitment by engaging across multiple channels: organizing meetups, creating content, and providing assistance on community forums.
Top tier:
At the apex are the MuleSoft ambassadors, who represent the community's MVPs. These highly recognized members serve as influential voices within the MuleSoft ecosystem.
Here we can see a fairly straightforward breakdown of how Mulesoft leverages its thriving developer community in the go-to-market phase.
Engaging your community in the pre-launch, GTM phase in this way encourages adoption, and peer-to-peer support and makes for a healthy, growing community.
Hannah Wesson
How to measure community-led growth
As with any aspect of business, you have to know what your goals are and how to measure them in order to be sure your strategy is working. And community-led growth is no different.
Here’s an example of a community management OKR in action:
Objective 1: Build a thriving and self-sustaining community ecosystem
Key result 1: Increase monthly active community members from the current baseline to 10,000 members
Key result 2: Achieve 80% member retention rate quarter over quarter
Key result 3: Develop 50 community champions who contribute content or moderate discussions weekly
Setting metrics for community success
When you’ve landed your key results, your first port of call should be to shout about your success from the rooftops! Sharing any wins with your internal stakeholders to help demonstrate the value of a community-led approach, showing leadership they’re getting a return on their investment.
When it comes to crafting community strategy, you need certain metrics in place that will guide your efforts. What you see from your metrics will help you refine and rework your strategy so you can be confident your community is thriving and driving business growth as you want it to.
Community retention
Let’s explore retention first. To calculate your overall retention rate you need to first have three pieces of information to hand:
- The number of existing members at the start of the time period (S)
- The number of total members at the end of the time period (E)
- The number of new members added within the time period (N)
Once you know the figures listed above you can then calculate your overall retention rate using this formula:
Formula for retention rate: [(E-N)/S] x 100 = CRR
However, what we’re really interested in is how your community-building efforts are affecting this key business metric. To do this we need a cohort comparison that shows your retention rate within your community versus the overall customer base.
Imagine you have a customer base of 10,000 people. 3,000 of those customers are community members and 7,000 are not. You know that your average community member remains a customer for an average of six years.
And you know that your average non-community customer remains a customer for an average of four years. From this, you can see that community members remain with your company on average 50% longer than non-community members – a powerful indicator that your community work is making a difference to the company’s bottom line.
But the analysis doesn’t stop there – buckle in. You can get even more granular and compare how your most engaged community members compare to the average community members and non-community members as well.
Hannah Wesson
Acquisition
You can (and should) track how many leads you’re getting from your community just as you would track how many leads you get from other channels, like social or email.
As time goes on you’ll be able to gather more data and compare how your community-qualified leads compare with your other channels and whether it’s easier to retain community-qualified leads compared to other ones.
When it comes to acquisition metrics, you’ll want to find out how much it costs to acquire a new customer from a community-generated lead and how that compares to the average non-community member.
You can calculate customer acquisition cost (CAC) by using this formula:
CAC = Cost of sales and marketing / The number, of new customers acquired.
Monthly active users
You should also look at monthly active users within your community or MAU for short. This metric shows you how many of your community members took action within a certain time period.
Of course, what exactly constitutes “taking action” will depend on your business and your business goals but it can be anything from attending an event, posting a positive review, buying add-ons, or simply logging in.
Once you can see how active your community members are you’ll be able to see if you should put your time and resources into attracting new community members or retaining and engaging the ones you already have.
Don’t forget to get more granular and find out exactly how each type of community – if you have more than one - and each persona is behaving.
Monthly active users are considered an engagement metric. There are other engagement metrics that may not be as meaningful or relevant when it comes to sharing outside of your immediate team. These are the famous “vanity metrics” such as likes, comments, shares and posts that you see on your social media channels.
In general, these aren’t considered to be powerful metrics because they don’t really tell you what to do next about the numbers that you’re seeing and they can rarely be tied back to company revenue. However, there are certain situations where it’s useful to track these.
For instance when you’re first building your community and you want to see that your members are posting more than your admins. Or when you’re ascertaining how many moderators you’ll need within your community.
Likes and shares can also be a good indication of whether you understand what the community cares about. If you wanted to test new messaging within your community within a post and it garnered a huge amount of attention, likes and reshares then that’s a good indication you understand the language and concerns of your audience.
How to prove impact to leadership
It doesn’t matter whether you’re an entry-level community manager or Director-level, you’ll undoubtedly be spinning many plates. To be successful in this role you need to be creative, approachable and empathetic but also business-minded and analytical.
So while you might understand the power of a community-led approach, your C-suite sees this too.
One of the most common hurdles in new business fields like community management is proving the ROI of your department to senior leadership.
While your CEO may be more aware of the obvious benefits of sales and customer support teams, community management also deserves recognition for the tangible impact it provides organizations.
1. Visualize your impact and key metrics
Engaging with the OKR framework and metrics we mentioned in the previous chapters will stand you in good stead with leadership. We recommend carving out some time with them on either a weekly or bi-weekly basis to go through your key numbers and highlight your wins.
Consider creating a community dashboard to visualize how your community is supporting go-to-market, driving adoption and championing your product. You should also include a visualization of the cohort analysis we mentioned earlier, comparing retention with your community versus the general customer base.
2. Emphasize your competitive edge
“You’re simply the best / Better than all the rest.”
Yes, Tina Turner’s influence knows no bounds, even in community management. A brilliant way to show leadership how your community helps you win customers is how it decimates your competition. Creating a community is a clever way of adding value for your customers that your rivals may whilst also reducing the work necessary to conduct customer and competitive research.
Your community platform is a place where you can garner key insights into why your members chose you over another competitor and what they find most valuable about your product or service. The community itself will serve as a differentiator in the marketplace.
Spend some time gathering comments from members that reference why they chose you over a competitor and how the community itself played a part in this.
3. Highlight how the community saves time and money
Having a strong community isn’t just about making more money through adoption, upsells and cross-sells. Sometimes it’s important to consider the sheer time and money community management saves your organization in the long run.
Community managers can collaborate with marketing on a plan to reduce their workload and advertising costs by engaging community members. You can run content initiatives within your community that are incentivized.
For example, ask community members to tell you their favorite thing about a new product or service and use that as part of your next marketing campaign.
Marketing can take that time back and put it into work that directly impacts revenue like increasing MQLs in the pipeline. Or if you rely on freelancers or an agency for copy it could save a portion of your budget entirely.
3. Demonstrate how life is easier for everyone with a community
You need to be able to show your leadership team that life is easier for everyone in a community.
How much easier is it to beta test a new feature or product when you don’t have to trawl through your CRM system to find suitable candidates? And how much faster can you find out if a new feature or product is working as intended when you can just set up a Zoom call with your evangelists?
A community provides you with a ready-made database of customers who are engaged, vocal and accessible. This could save you and the product marketing team days of work so don’t forget to highlight this aspect of your work when speaking to leadership.
