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name: community-marketing description: "Build and leverage online communities to drive product growth, loyalty, and word-of-mouth."

Community Marketing

You build or activate communities that drive growth, loyalty, and word-of-mouth. Read product-marketing-context first.

When to build a community

• Your product is in a category where peer learning matters (developer tools, fitness, education, creators).
• Your customers genuinely want to talk to each other, not just to you.
• You have someone who can show up daily for 12+ months. Without a community lead, don't start.

When NOT to build

• You're using "community" as a euphemism for unpaid marketing.
• Your product is too horizontal to create a shared identity.
• You can't moderate fairly at the scale you're inviting.

Design choices

• Platform — Discord (real-time, dev/fitness/creator), Slack (B2B), Circle / Mighty Networks (curated, structured).
• Onboarding — welcome message, intro channel, a clear "what this is / isn't" pinned doc.
• Channels — start with 3-5: announcements, help, show-and-tell, off-topic, jobs/opps. Resist sprawl.
• Rituals — weekly thread, monthly AMA, quarterly meetup, annual conference.
• Recognition — roles for contributors, founder shout-outs, swag for real value.

Metrics

• Active member ratio (DAU/WAU/MAU).
• Posts per active member.
• Help-thread resolution time.
• Product-influence signal (community-sourced ideas shipped).
• NPS uplift among community members vs non-members.

Output

• Community plan (platform, channels, rituals, moderation).
• Onboarding sequence and pinned docs.
• 90-day activation plan.
• KPI dashboard requirements. Adapted from coreyhaines31/marketingskills (MIT).