Empower Your Brand: Community-Driven Growth Strategies (Practical Guide)

In 2022, Bessemer Venture Partners, a leading venture capital and private equity firm, declared that within the next five years, 1 in 2 startups and tech companies will have teams dedicated to community building by the time they pass the $5 million revenue mark.

We are in the forecast period, and the reality on the ground matches the prediction.

In recent years, we have seen more and more companies leverage the power of community as a growth mechanism, especially in the face of competition. Competition not only for market share but also for a slice of the dwindling capital available to startups.

Data shows that since Q2 2022, global venture deal volume has declined, with early-stage funding down 40% year over year.

Why is this important? Startups must adopt creative, nontraditional, and inexpensive growth strategies like community-driven growth (CDG) to reduce customer acquisition costs and take advantage of the growing influence of online communities.

This article thoroughly examines CDG, including the top community-led growth strategies to adopt and a step-by-step guide to implementing CDG.

Overview of community-driven growth

Community-driven growth refers to a strategic approach where a company deliberately cultivates and leverages its community of users, customers, and stakeholders as part of its growth strategies.

The CDG approach has gained popularity due to several factors. For starters, consumers spend more time online now. Providing extra attention and personalized, authentic experiences can be a competitive advantage in capturing their attention.

Secondly, it can significantly reduce marketing costs, as satisfied community members often spread the word organically.

CDG emphasizes active engagement, open communication, and collaboration with the community to achieve mutual benefits.

It involves initiatives such as creating value-adding, educational content, building online forums, organizing events (virtual and physical), implementing feedback mechanisms, encouraging user-generated content, and more.

Through these initiatives, community-led growth leads to:

Acquisition

Communities aid customer acquisition through word-of-mouth referrals. Members actively share their experiences and your community-driven initiatives, thus bringing more people through the door.

Adoption

Once the user is through the door, communities also play a vital role in educating them about the company's value and product.

Through your community, they get to see firsthand how you handle customer complaints, how other users interact with your products and services, and any additional value they can get.

Retention

Communities also help promote a special connection among members and with your brand. This can breed loyalty, making such users more likely to stay.

Advocacy

Community members who become customers and find tremendous value in your products, services, and overall experience will become champions who point others to your brand and community.

This process creates a continuous cycle of organic growth, provided the community continues to excel, and the product remains exceptional.

What type of companies should adopt community-driven growth strategies?

While community-driven growth can apply to various types of companies, its effectiveness may vary depending on factors such as industry, target audience, and company culture.

It works best for businesses with a strong online presence, digital products/services, or those targeting niche markets where community engagement is crucial to success.

However, any company can benefit from nurturing a community, even if you may need to tailor your approach and adopt initiatives to suit your specific context and goals.

Essential components of a community-driven growth

Community growth strategies rely on several essential components, including:

1. The community philosophy

Every community needs a guiding philosophy. Your guiding philosophy includes your mission, vision, values, and purpose statements. Clearly defining the community’s guiding principles helps attract like-minded individuals and aligns everyone towards common goals.

One of the trickiest parts of developing an overarching philosophy is that it’s almost a chicken-and-egg problem.

Ideally, you want the citizens of your community to have significant input into what the group is about, but you don’t have a community without citizens.

We recommend creating these statements but leaving room for them to evolve as the community grows and gravitates toward an identity.

One key way to ensure this is to remove hierarchies or obvious powers in the group, ensuring everyone feels like their voice matters.

value creation

2. Value creation

Without value, it’s practically impossible for community members to transition through the four stages of community growth we shared earlier (acquisition, adoption, retention, and advocacy).

Members must feel like being a part of the community has tremendous benefits. Value, in this sense, is multifaceted and can mean one or more of these things to individual community members:

A sense of belonging the members would hardly find elsewhere as far as the community’s purpose and philosophy is concerned.
Freedom to share their experiences with or without incentives or being forced.
A place to share their expertise and also learn from other experts, including from the content you provide.

3. User engagement

Encouraging active participation from community members is crucial. An active and engaged community is at the heart of all Community-Led Growth (CLG) strategies.

This includes regularly and consistently creating compelling content that addresses users’ needs, creatively using surveys and polls, organizing interactive virtual and offline events, facilitating networking opportunities, and running contests.

4. Feedback loops

Every community should be a two-way communication street. Effective communication helps build trust and stimulate engagement within the community.

You should actively listen to community feedback, promptly respond to inquiries and concerns, and communicate transparently about company updates and decisions.

More importantly, it is vital to pay attention to how community members use your products and services. Sometimes, you’ll learn unobvious use cases you may not have previously considered.

Additionally, communicate with empathy, patience, and understanding when attending to issues, questions, and assistance. Where necessary, provide personalized assistance tailored to each person’s specific needs.

Lastly, it’s essential to create mechanisms to capture important messages and ideas so they are not lost in the torrents of other interactions.

For example, you can create a dedicated sub-channel to listen to complaints instead of existing customers posting their issues in the general channel.

5. Community support and moderation

Community support is essential for building a positive and inclusive atmosphere within a community-driven growth model.

Community support involves offering assistance, guidance, and resources to help members overcome challenges, achieve their goals, and maximize their experience within the community.

Some of the ways to provide community support include:

Dedicated support channels, which we highlighted earlier.
Easily accessible knowledge base and FAQs.
Encouraging peer-to-peer support so experienced users can share their knowledge, offer advice, and provide solutions based on their own experiences.

Community management is also an essential aspect of the CDG model. It ensures that the community remains focused on its guiding philosophy, is respectful, and is free from spam or inappropriate content.

For starters, create clear and easily accessible community guidelines and appoint moderators. Moderators play a crucial role in maintaining the community's integrity, initiating engaging conversations, and fostering a positive atmosphere.

6. Recognition and rewards

Recognizing and rewarding members who go above and beyond to provide answers and solutions to other users’ queries and challenges can incentivize participation and encourage others to play a more prominent role.

Recognition and rewards can involve:

Highlighting top contributors on social media or newsletter.
Offering badges.
Rewards for achievements like exclusive access to new product updates and invitations to VIP events or webinars.

Your reward system should also give room for peer recognition and voting, allowing members to nominate others for awards, rewards, or commendations based on criteria such as helpfulness or creativity.

7. A strong CDG team

Another vital component of a community-led growth strategy is building a solid and vibrant CDG team. The team will execute your CDG initiatives and ensure the community continues to align with your goals. More on this later.

Top community-driven growth strategies

Here are some top strategies to leverage community-led growth:

Let the audience be the driving force of strategy

Earlier, we mentioned that one of the best ways to crystalize the community's guiding philosophy is to leave room for it to evolve and form its unique identity.

It’s essential not to shoehorn any strategy or direction into your community. To drive this message home, we’ll share two examples from Notion.

Notion noticed that its online community members regularly shared notion templates with their peers. Notion leveraged this information by building a “Template Gallery” on its Community Page to make this easier to find and the templates more accessible to more users. Tableau uses a similar strategy.

Also, Notion observed that users regularly organized events of their own volition. Notion funded some of these events but decided to start organizing events, too.

However, Notion soon abandoned this strategy because the events felt forced and less authentic than when engaged and loyal community members organized the events.

The lesson from this example is to ultimately be flexible and build features or initiatives that matter to your audience.

Focus on the 5%

When managing a thriving community, there will be both noise and signal. Experience tells us that only a tiny percentage will produce the signal.

As such, focus energy and resources on your most vocal and passionate supporters. In other words, keep them close. They will generate the most actionable criticism and quality feedback.

We’ve discussed rewards and recognition as essential parts of community-led strategy, and the 5% subset is the most deserving of this.

Empower them with resources, tools, and incentives to promote your brand, share their experiences, and joyously talk about your products or services within their networks.

Hire a community manager from the community

Multiple examples of startups have hired community members into community-related roles. Hiring from within has many advantages, including exceptional depth in product knowledge and empathy.

Notion hired Ben Lang, its Head of Community, after being impressed by the Notion Facebook group he started.

Similarly, ServiceTitan hired Thomas Howard, a customer for over ten years, as VP of Customer Success. The role covers community management.

That said, you can hire just about anyone from your community. As the examples above show, always opt for a superfan—someone who understands your product and services intimately and has extensive experience using them for multiple use cases.

Of course, they should also have other essential skills, like communication and the ability to resolve issues.

Make it a partnership

Involve your community in many company initiatives. Solicit feedback, ideas, and suggestions for new features, enhancements, or product offerings. Invite them to test new features before they’re released to the public.

Partnering with your community on projects, events, and processes fosters a sense of ownership and ensures that your products continue to meet your target audience’s expectations.

Measure and analyze engagement metrics

Track and analyze key engagement metrics, such as community growth relative to customer growth, active participation, sentiment (on social media and community channels), and referral rates, to assess the effectiveness of your community-driven growth strategies.

Use the insights from these analyses to refine your approach, identify opportunities for optimization, and allocate resources effectively. For example, if events aren’t working, channel the resources to working initiatives.

Choose the right community technology

The right community platform is crucial for building an effective and engaging online community.

The first step is to consider factors such as the size of your community, the types of interactions members prefer, and any unique features catering to your context and needs.

Some notable features to assess include:

Discussion forums
Content sharing
User profiles
Moderation features
Integration capabilities
Data analytics
Ease of use for the community
Scalability and customization
Security and data privacy

Before making a final decision, you should also consider taking advantage of free trials or demos by community technology vendors to test the platform's features, usability, and performance.

How to get started with a community-driven growth platform

A community-driven growth platform is a comprehensive solution that facilitates top-to-bottom community management, including engagement, moderation, analytics, and intelligence.

To get started, here are a few steps to consider:

Define your objectives.
Identify your target audience.
Determine where you are in the community maturity curve: seeding stage, building momentum stage, and having business impact stage.
Choose the right platform based on your objectives, target audience, and required features.
Design your community structure.
Measure and iterate.
Provide regular monitoring for technical issues, spam, or inappropriate content.

Types of communities to leverage for growth

There are numerous types of communities you can leverage. Your choice will largely depend on your type of business. That said, the most types common with startups and SaaS companies include:

Product-focused communities

Product-focused communities allow customers to communicate directly with your company, enabling them to engage with employees, ask questions, and provide feedback.

Members of product-focused communities can share their experiences, tips, and best practices for using your products or services effectively.

Product-focused communities also serve as a valuable resource for self-serve support and troubleshooting.

They can also share suggestions for new features, report bugs, and participate in beta testing.

With this feedback, your company can iterate and improve your products based on real-world user experiences, driving product development.

Topic-oriented communities

These communities may include forums, online groups, or social media communities that focus on industry trends, knowledge and resource exchange, and networking with peers.

Topic-oriented communities can help drive growth by establishing your company as a thought leader on the subject matter, positioning you as the go-to source for the topic.

Think about it: when you run a query on Google, there are specific websites you’re more likely to click on, depending on the topic, because you trust their authority on the subject, e.g., HubSpot on online marketing.

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Career-focused communities

These communities bring together individuals within a particular profession or field of expertise. Members can participate in discussions, workshops, webinars, or mentoring programs to enhance their skills, broaden their knowledge, and stay updated on industry trends and advancements.

The primary end goal of such communities is to empower individuals to advance their careers and stay competitive in the job market.

More often than not, your community will be a blend of multiple types of communities.

For example, a construction project management vendor can have separate sub-segments within the community for project management and another for building a career in construction project management.

How to build a community-driven growth team

A dedicated CDG team is essential for effectively implementing and sustaining community-driven strategies that drive business growth.

While you may be resource-constrained at the beginning, it’s still vital that you at least have someone taking the leadership role for your community strategy.

Other than that, here are a few steps to consider when building out a CDG team:

Define objectives and strategy and get organizational buy-in

Start by clearly defining the objectives and strategy of your community-driven growth initiatives. This could range from increasing brand awareness to driving user acquisition and improving customer retention.

Implementing a CDG strategy requires cross-functional effort, hence the need to get buy-in from top to bottom, irrespective of your organization’s size.

Getting everyone’s buy-in ensures alignment, support, and collaboration across different departments, especially product, sales, marketing, and customer success teams. The three most important things to do here include:

Educating stakeholders
Articulating the value proposition of your CDG strategy
Demonstrating potential impact with case studies

Pool together a cross-functional team

Identify the key roles and skills needed to support your CDG objectives, including community management, content creation, data analysis, customer success, marketing, and other relevant areas.

Next, assess your current team to identify individuals with relevant skills, experience, and interest in community-driven initiatives. If necessary, recruit new talent externally to fill any gaps in skills or expertise within the CDG team.

Remember, every member of the CDG team doesn't necessarily have to commit to community-related activities full-time, except maybe the community manager.

Establish clear roles and responsibilities

Define the roles and responsibilities of each team member within the CDG team. Ensure that you highlight and define clear KPIs and how each role links together and contributes to the overall goals of your community-driven growth plan.

Choose a leader for the team

Appoint a team leader who understands the importance of community-driven growth and can align the team's efforts with the company's overall goals and objectives.

This person will drive the community-led strategy and ensure that every team member performs their assigned roles and responsibilities and meets their KPIs.

Advantages of community-driven growth

Community-led growth offers numerous advantages for businesses seeking sustainable, long-term growth. The major benefits include:

Enhanced product development

Communities provide access to power users of your product who share valuable insights and feedback that can aid and fast-track product development.

These users share bugs, help identify prioritized features, and are heavily invested in seeing the product succeed.

Organic word-of-mouth marketing and brand advocacy

Exceptional communities enhance the relationship between members and the company, keeping the former engaged and invested in the product's success.

As the relationship grows stronger, each community member moves from adoption to advocacy, where they easily share your product with others within their network.

Such authentic endorsements carry more weight and trust and are more persuasive, leading to more cost-efficient customer acquisition.

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Increased customer retention

We’ve emphasized how communities create a sense of belonging for members. Customers are likely to stay where they feel valued and connected, spurring more loyalty and reduced churn.

Higher user engagement and sticky product

Within communities, members learn the full potential of your product. As others share popular and unpopular ways they use your product, beginners and experienced hands find new ways to solve their problems and additional use cases they can adopt.

This makes your product more sticky and translates to increased lifetime value.

Cost-effective Support

Community platforms can serve as an additional cost-effective channel for getting support.

Members can troubleshoot issues independently, find answers to common questions, and even share solutions with others, reducing the burden on your support department.

Ride the wave of community-driven growth

Community-driven growth, like Revenue Operations (RevOps) and product-led growth, can be a vital strategy for startups and tech firms. Amidst declining venture funding, CDG offers cost-effective solutions by leveraging online communities' influence.

Key components include a defined philosophy, value creation, active engagement, feedback loops, support, rewards and recognition, and a dedicated team.

Adopting the right technology and choosing the right blend of community types suited to your business further amplifies the impact of CDG.

This strategy leads to sustainable growth, enhanced product development, word-of-mouth marketing, customer retention, engagement, user-generated content, and cost-effective support.

At Peddle, we help businesses grow through a host of services, including sales enablement, RevOps consulting, HubSpot Onboarding and Implementation. Get started with Peddle today!