In today's market, customers feel overwhelmed with choice - struggling to find real value through the noise. 78% of consumers have lost confidence even in the biggest brands. Then you add AI into the mix and brand trust could continue to nosedive while the cost of gaining new customers skyrockets. You might wonder: Is there a brighter way forward?

Relationships have always been key to business growth. With low value engagement creating a 23% loss in potential revenue, more businesses are realising that distracting ads and relentless emails no longer create connection. In both their personal or professional lives, people crave trusted knowledge and to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Enter community-led growth, where brands build trust and convert curious onlookers into loyal customers by bringing select groups of people together to connect and share knowledge. Dive in, as we demystify the challenges and outline best practices to make community the cornerstone of your customer acquisition strategy.

 

What is customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition strategy

Customer acquisition is the art and science of nurturing prospects from first being aware of your brand, to considering adopting your product or service, to converting into a paying customer. From a strategic standpoint, it's about understanding the larger market landscape, targeting segments of potential customers, and capturing their imagination with an unforgettable value proposition. The goal is to align the brand’s offerings with potential customers' needs and goals in a way that is distinct from competitors. A successful approach is proactive - anticipating shifts in market trends and customer behaviour to give prospects the right information, at the right time.

Customer acquisition tactics

Tactically, customer acquisition is all about the actions taken to reach and convert potential customers. This includes selecting the right advertising channels (like PPC, social media, or influencer partnerships), content marketing strategies (blogs, webinars, ebooks), and sales methodologies (cold calling, networking events, or partnership deals). Choosing where you can focus your time and energy to really move the needle should be driven by data and real-world feedback. Many of these tactics involve some element of knowledge sharing or connection, but many businesses experience limited engagement without a dedicated community strategy.

Customer acquisition KPIs

Metrics are crucial for gauging success of a custom acquisition strategy:

• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): The average cost to acquire a new customer.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of leads that become paying customers.
• Lifetime Value (LTV): Predicted net profit from the entire future relationship with a customer.
• Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS): Measures the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

In essence, customer acquisition requires strategic vision, tactical precision, and data-driven insight to make a measurable impact. In competitive markets and with fast changing consumer expectations, it’s harder than ever to deliver a cost effective customer acquisition strategy. To solve this problem, many brands are looking to leverage the participation of their communities of customers and prospects to help drive more efficient and sustainable growth.

 

What is community-led growth and how does it impact customer acquisition?

 

 

Community-led growth is all about leveraging the loyalty and participation of your community to drive organic business impact. Businesses can no longer rely on traditional and expensive marketing efforts to stand out from the crowd. Brands like Notion, Figma and Hubspot have proven that authentic relationships, user-generated content, and peer recommendations are the key to scaling customer acquisition. A study by First Round showed 80% of startup founders stated that building a community of users was important to their business, and 28% describing it as critical to their success.

Audience vs Community

To build an audience, you help people. 

To build a community, you help people help each other.

• David Spinks

 

Audiences and communities serve different roles in a customer acquisition strategy. An audience, shaped by buyer personas and data, focuses on one-to-many communication. When your brand voice is the only one that can be heard, engagement and connection is limited by the budget you have to create high quality content and amplify it.

A community extends beyond lead generation; it encompasses partnerships, collaborations, and mutual advocacies to drive many-to-many interactions. When your community is given a voice and a space to communicate with one another, engagement is limitless. Empowering your community to support each other to learn, share and grow is the most valuable experience a brand can offer. Knowledge sharing and connection can exist on open social media channels or in brand owned platforms, as long as members have the tools and security they need to share. 

Sales, Product-led growth vs Community-Led Growth

For any business focused on a traditional product-led or sales-led growth strategy to drive customer acquisition, a community-led growth strategy may feel like a shift in direction. In reality, community acts as a force multiplier to any existing growth strategy. 

Community elevates a sales-led approach with authentic evidence of customer satisfaction and proactive support. It also elevates a product-led approach by improving self-service and stimulating valuable feedback. Corinne Riley describes the difference between the 3 approaches as trusting the salesperson (in a sales-driven world), trusting yourself (in a product-led world), or trusting a community of peers/friends (in a community-led growth world). Particularly for marketing teams tasked with educating and nurturing leads, a focus on community creates new opportunities to increase conversions that are less dependent on product or sales teams to be successful. When done properly, your community can become both the reason a prospect discovers your brand, plus a key channel for providing timely value throughout the buyer journey, and beyond.

 

Types of community to drive customer acquisition

Community driven by product

Brand communities are often created for existing customers, supporting retention strategy by allowing members to swap success stories, tips and tricks, or share product feedback. Members of product communities are not just connecting with the brand – they're actively helping and guiding each other, turning challenges into shared experiences. On the surface potential customers may be limited in how they participate in communities driven by product. However, witnessing how your customers and brand experts support each other can be pivotal in their purchase decision. Also authentic discussion about your product and the problems it solves also increases discoverability on search engines - where most buyer journeys begin.

Community driven by practice

Communities built around diving deep into a topic such as a specific profession, interest or cause help members reach new professional and personal heights. Unlike communities of product, engagement is less about understanding 'what we have' and more about 'what we're all striving for'. These types of communities are perfect for engaging and building relationships with potential customers, particularly when your industry or product category is new, complex or fast changing. 

To really create an engaging community experience that spans the entire customer lifecycle, product and practice communities should co-exist. Providing a more personalised community experience depending on where someone is in the customer lifecycle can be achieved with the right combination of community strategy and platform.

 

How does community-led customer acquisition work?

It takes a lot of brand touch points to nurture a potential customer. It can take over 50 lead touchpoints in a B2B buyer journey. When nearly every purchase decision involves research via trusted channels - word-of-mouth recommendations, user-generated content, or community-driven events and workshops are key to winning trust. Community platforms or review sites often act as the initial touchpoints beyond a Google search.

When a potential customer enters your community ecosystem, they're exposed to authentic discussions, success stories, and user testimonies. These organic interactions provide a genuine insight into the distinctive value your product or service provides. Events, discussions, and resources also offer solutions to challenges in real-time. When active in your community, prospects are not sold to; they're nurtured, educated, and integrated into your brand, making the transition from potential lead to loyal customer more organic and seamless.

 

What are the key benefits of a community-led customer acquisition strategy?

To champion a community-led growth strategy in your business, it’s important to first understand how a brand community could remove friction from your existing approach to customer acquisition.

✓ Brand trust

Community emphasises your commitment to transparency, human relationships and customer support

✓ Discoverability

Community increases content creation, enhances SEO and drives organic visibility

✓ Lead education

Community increases creates valuable and engaging touch points to learn about solutions to their pain points 

✓ Reduced acquisition cost

Community boosts customer referrals and creates frequent touch points to keep your brand front-of-mind

✓ Market insight

Community creates authentic opportunities for customers and prospects to share the goals and challenges which motivate them to buy

✓ Content generation

Community drives user-generated content that can be repurposed into many different content formats as authentic promotional material 

By weaving community into your existing growth strategies to drive brand awareness and new sales pipeline, your business can harness its power to acquire customers in an authentic, trust-driven, and sustainable way.

 

Examples of community activities that impact customer acquisition

1. Member introductions discussion thread
   Create a dedicated space in your community platform where new members can introduce themselves, share their interests, and what they're hoping to gain. This fosters a sense of belonging right from the start. For potential customers, witnessing this active, welcoming environment can be the nudge they need to transition from interest to investment.

2. Expert-Led events:
   Ask your community members for topics that they’re most interested in learning about. Based on this feedback you can identify the right internal or external experts to collaborate with on online or in person events. These masterclass style sessions not only provide value to existing members but also provide opportunities for prospects to engage with your community in real-time. The affiliation with respected voices positions your brand as an authority, attracting potential customers keen on learning and aligning with credible brands.

3. Respected experts' learning guides:
   Collaborate with brand experts or external influencers to curate learning guides or write articles based on popular questions or topics discussed in your community. These resources empower your existing community with the knowledge they need and, when shared widely, act as trust signals for potential customers comparing brand's expertise and value against your competitors. 

4. Referral Incentive Programs:
   Although at the intersection between community-led advocacy and acquisition, identifying your most engaged community members and encourage them to bring relevant peers into the community by offering them rewards or exclusive content. Given that personal recommendations come with inherent trust, these referred individuals are far more likely to convert.

Each of these activities leverages the power of community, removing fiction from the buyer journey through high quality engagement and trust.

 

3 best practices for community-led customer acquisition

It takes a different mindset to successfully transition from broadcasting to a passive audience to driving many-to-many community knowledge sharing. The New-York based growth marketing agency NoGood refer to this as a shift away from aggressive acquisition advertising towards value-based marketing. These guiding principles will help you establish the right foundations for your community to directly influence customer acquisition. 

1. Prioritise authentic, meaningful participation

Communities thrive when their purpose is clear. By outlining a clear community value proposition from the outset means meaningful knowledge sharing will outweigh superficial chat or internal distraction by vanity metrics. Ensure that community managers and brand representatives proactively participate, answer questions, regularly share resources, insights, and updates that reinforce the community’s purpose and provide tangible value to community members. 

2. Amplify and celebrate user-generated content

Make sure that the impact of your community is made visible by showcasing testimonials, case studies, or user experiences that showcase the real-world impact. Contests, challenges, or reward programs encourage members to share their personal stories and create a blueprint for participation that other members can follow.

3. Measure, Adapt, and Evolve

Regularly gather feedback from community members to understand what's working and where improvements are needed. Use this feedback to refine strategies, ensuring your community remains focussed on influencing customer acquisition.

By adhering to these principles, your business can turn its brand community into a powerful acquisition engine.

 

What metrics indicate community impact on customer acquisition

The ultimate measure of community impact on customer acquisition is to compare the conversion rate of active community members vs non-active community members. At Zapnito, we’ve found that when prospects are successfully engaged in a brand community they are 50% more likely to convert as a customer. 

Your ability to track leading indicators of your community is influencing customer acquisition will be heavily dependent on the tools you use and engagement activities. An enterprise community experience platform like Zapnito would provide a 360 view of community member engagement. With the right setup, your CRM may also provide a source of attribution for community impact. These are examples of metrics which indicate how your brand community influences customer acquisition:

Referral Traffic and Conversion Rate

Measure the number of potential customers coming to your main site or product page from community platform links, and the percentage of those that convert to actual customers.

Calculation: (Number of Conversions from community / Total Number of Visitors from community)∗100 

Why it matters: An increase in referral traffic and a high conversion rate indicates that community members are actively directing prospects to your product or service, and these referrals are high quality.

Content Engagement Metrics

Track interactions (likes, comments, shares) on community-generated content, especially on posts discussing the benefits or use-cases of your product. Why it matters: High engagement indicates that the content is resonating with the audience. Content that effectively highlights product value can influence potential customers to convert more quickly.

Number of Active Community Advocates: Track the number of members who actively promote your product, share success stories, or assist potential customers with inquiries.

Why it matters: A growing number of advocates indicates a strong community endorsement, which can sway potential customers more effectively than traditional marketing efforts.

By tracking these KPIs, your business can gain a clear picture of how community efforts are directly influencing potential customers, facilitating faster decision-making and impacting the overall acquisition process. In addition, it's important to track how individual initiatives are performing so you can focus your time and energy on impact. For example measuring the number of event RSVPs, new member growth or how often members are logging into your community platform.

 

What department should own a community-led customer acquisition strategy?

In a business aiming to leverage community-led growth for customer acquisition, a cross-departmental approach ensures comprehensive and cohesive strategies. Typically customer acquisition is driven by marketing, making them natural owners of community-led customer acquisition strategy. In the latest CMX Community Industry Trends Report, acquisition was the top community objective of 22% of existing brand communities and marketing is the most common departmental owner of community initiatives.

Marketing is all about helping someone solve a problem and guiding them to become the person they want to be. Bringing the right people together to share knowledge is the only way to do that effectively at scale.

Here's a breakdown of key departments and roles contributing to community-led customer acquisition:

• Marketing: Drive brand awareness, foster community engagement, and amplify user-generated content.

• Sales: Help answer community questions, gather insights about potential customer needs to improve the sales process.

• Product Development: Extract insights from community feedback to innovate or refine products, ensuring they resonate with market demand.

• Customer Support: Utilise the community as a first-response mechanism, where community members assist each other, reducing overall support tickets.

• Executive Leadership: Offer overarching support, ensure alignment of community strategies with business goals, and allocate necessary resources.

While individual departments hold specific responsibilities, a community-led growth strategy's success requires collaborative ownership. The blending of insights from each department forms a holistic approach, maximising the strategy's impact on customer acquisition and beyond.

 

How to expand your community impact beyond customer acquisition to adoption, retention and advocacy

Clearly identifying the different groups that will engage in your community is the first step to planning pathways that leverage your community to drive acquisition, adoption, retention and advocacy. The content and connections you recommend to new prospects should be different from long-term customers. Choices like whether your community platform is public, gated or private will influence how you drive awareness for your community with potential customers. The most common approach is first to create a space exclusively for existing customers or advocates to share knowledge before opening up to non-customers. This allows you to build a base of valuable engagement before inviting members with less existing brand loyalty in to take part. You can check out our guides to community-led product adoption, customer retention and brand advocacy to learn more.

 

Conclusion

Community-led growth isn't just a trend; it's the future of customer acquisition. Making the right investment to foster genuine connections and nurturing knowledge-sharing should be a top priority for any business looking to increase brand awareness and new sales pipeline. Depending on traditional acquisition tactics to drive scalable growth is a risk. 

If you agree that now is the time to leverage the loyalty and participation of the people that matter most to your business for it to really thrive - Zapnito could be your ideal partner. Book a personalized demo call to learn more about our community knowledge-sharing platform and expert guidance.