Community-Led Growth: How to Build Trust and Prove ROI

Marketing leaders are used to proving their work through numbers that move quickly: leads captured, conversions completed and pipeline generated. Community-led growth, however, plays by a different set of rules. Its value often develops over time through relationships, conversations and shared experiences, and a strong brand community may influence business outcomes long before they can be traced to a transaction.

Gen-Z’s skepticism toward polished advertising campaigns is leading many brands to shift from chasing clicks to building relationships. The benefits go beyond simple discovery: A large audience may see a brand’s message, but a genuine community chooses to return, participate and bring others into the conversation.

Where many organizations stumble is in trying to create and manage community initiatives with the tools, timelines and expectations built for traditional demand generation. When leaders look primarily for immediate conversions, they may undervalue promising progress or pressure teams into tactics that weaken the relationships they’re trying to build. 

Further, with communities like TikTok and Instagram playing a large role in community-building, brands that don’t understand the priorities of today’s social media algorithms—which favor metrics like watch time, engagement rate and content relevance—may even struggle to get out of the starting gate.

Community-led growth, then, requires leaders to rethink both how value is created and how progress is demonstrated. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank draw on their expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising and customer engagement to examine where community-building initiatives go wrong, what leaders should do differently and how they can measure success more accurately.

“Leaders should stop asking, ‘How many leads came from the community this month?’ and start asking, ‘Is this growing problem awareness, market education and preference?’”

– Kurt Uhlir, Chief Marketing Officer for ez Home Search

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Stop Treating Community Like Campaign Traffic

Kurt Uhlir, Chief Marketing Officer for ez Home Search, says the fundamental mistake is expecting a community to behave like campaign traffic.

“A campaign can capture interest that already exists. A community can help more people see the problem, believe change can happen and trust your company before they decide to buy,” he says. “That is real demand generation, not lead generation with nicer language.”

He stresses that leaders accustomed to homing in on bottom-line numbers may need to change their ways of thinking; community building requires a big-picture perspective.

“Leaders should stop asking, ‘How many leads came from the community this month?’ and start asking, ‘Is this growing problem awareness, market education and preference?’”

Uhlir stresses that this does not mean the community gets a free pass. Rather, it means teams must track for community metrics and demand generation, not lead generation. He says some concrete metrics to track include repeat participation, member-created discussions, peer answers, content pull-through, branded search, direct traffic, referral conversion, expansion influence and churn reduction. 

Uhlir concludes by assuring that the benefits of community building aren’t simply limited to visibility.

“Community should make the market easier to sell into over time,” he says.

Build Around Belonging, Not Conversion

Evan White, CMO of ERIN, says community-led growth fails when companies treat a community like a demand generation channel, asserting that the moment every conversation, event or piece of content has to produce a lead, trust starts to erode. He explains that strong communities are shaped by what members receive from one another, not simply by what the brand wants them to do next.

“Great communities are built around belonging, not conversion,” White says. “People join to learn, connect, contribute and be recognized. Revenue should be a byproduct, not the purpose.”

He says the biggest mistake leaders make is measuring community with the same metrics they use for paid campaigns. Instead, he recommends looking at participation rates, repeat engagement, referrals, user-generated content, advocacy and customer-to-customer interactions. White is clear about why these measures matter—and make a big difference.

“Community is a long-term asset. Read that again: Community is a long-term asset,” he says. “Demand gen rents attention. Community earns it. The brands that understand the difference create audiences that stay long after the campaign ends.”

Let Community Members Do the Talking

Vinny La Barbera, Founder and CEO of imFORZA, says rigid lead targets, limited outreach and overly formal initiatives can undermine a community before it has a chance to grow—and destroy a brand’s ability to gain valuable insights.

“If you put MQL targets on your community, you’ve basically killed it, because the brand ends up doing all the talking. Members go quiet and the trust that pulled them in walks out the door,” he says. “Same thing when you only show up at launches or hire a demand-gen lead, because at that point you’ve got an audience, not a community, and an audience listens to you while a community talks back.”

La Barbera urges leaders to give community initiatives enough time and support to develop.

“Community pays back in years, not quarters, so build it that way,” he says. “Make members the heroes, show up when there’s nothing to sell, and put a real human voice on it instead of a brand handle.”

When it comes to measurement, La Barbera advises leaders to “track what trust leaves behind—how often they come back, how much members talk to each other versus the brand, referrals you never asked for, and revenue you can trace to a specific person, not a campaign.”

“The better question is not, ‘How many leads did the community generate?’ but, ‘Did the community reduce the cost of trust?’”

– Meghna Deshraj, Founder and CEO of Bullzeye Growth Partners

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Focus on Compounding Trust

Meghna Deshraj, Founder and CEO of Bullzeye Growth Partners, says community-led growth loses its value when leaders treat it as a lower-cost demand generation channel.

“Communities are not built to capture demand. They are built to create trust,” she says.

Deshraj cautions that when organizations force communities into MQL, lead or attribution frameworks, they often destroy the behaviors that make communities valuable: peer-to-peer engagement, advocacy, knowledge sharing and participation.

“The better question is not, ‘How many leads did the community generate?’ but, ‘Did the community reduce the cost of trust?’” she says. “The strongest communities accelerate buying decisions, increase retention, strengthen customer intelligence and create advocates.”

Deshraj recommends tracking participation quality, member-to-member interactions, referral influence, retention, expansion revenue and customer-generated content. The bottom-line impact, she assures, will follow.

“Revenue matters, but trust is the leading indicator,” she says. “Communities that compound trust eventually compound growth.”

Make the Community About Them

Daryl Travis, Founder and Chairman of Brandtrust, says the guiding principle behind community-led growth is straightforward.

“It’s a simple equation: Make the community about them, not you,” he says.

Travis explains that to win at community-led growth, teams need to ditch the transactional playbook and focus entirely on making real connections rather than forcing quick sales pitches. He points to Figma as an example of a company that created value by allowing users to contribute, share and shape the product experience.

“They built an absolute powerhouse by giving away ungated value, letting designers share templates freely and deeply integrating user feedback directly into their product roadmap,” Travis says.

He cautions that replicating that kind of success requires patience and a willingness to recognize and reward your brand’s ambassadors.

“You have to fund the community for the long haul—allow at least 12 to 18 months of runway to breathe before stressing about ROI,” Travis says. Along the way, make sure to treat your superusers like royalty by giving top contributors exclusive status, early access and plenty of shoutouts so they naturally want to champion your brand.”

Curate Conversations People Can’t Get Elsewhere

Amber Brown, Senior Vice President of Product and Marketing for Clario, says authentic brand communities become especially important as AI content floods the marketplace.

“One of the biggest mistakes leaders make with community-led growth is treating it like top-of-the-funnel demand gen with a friendlier tone,” she says. “In the AI era, generic awareness content is becoming functionally worthless. LLMs can already generate endless summaries, tips and recycled thought leadership at scale.”

Brown notes that most brands don’t have a content problem but a perspective and relevance problem. To address it, she says, marketing teams have to reconsider not only content quality but also how impact is measured.

“Community is no longer built through content volume. It is built through depth, originality, relevance and conversations people cannot get elsewhere,” she says. “That also changes measurement. Success is not just reach or engagement spikes. It is whether people repeatedly return to your ecosystem for insight, validation and decision support in a market flooded with interchangeable noise.”

Track Depth, Not Just Reach

Jonas Barck, Director of Customer Marketing for Mentimeter, says communities are often judged too quickly through metrics they were never designed to satisfy.

“The biggest mistake is judging community-led growth by demand-gen math—leads, conversions and quarterly pipeline,” he says. “Community doesn’t work on that clock, so it gets labeled ‘underperforming’ and cut before trust has time to compound.”

The fix, Barck says, isn’t to stop measuring but to measure differently: not how many people showed up but how many came back.

“Track repeat participation, members helping members and people bringing others in without being asked,” he says. “That’s what advocacy actually looks like, and it’s a stronger predictor of long-term value than any conversion rate. Volume tells you reach. Depth tells you trust.”

“Human behavior and community strength often reveal signals before dashboards fully explain them, making success less about volume and more about trust, participation quality and voluntary advocacy.”

– Paul L. Gunn Jr., Founder of Signal & Anomaly and KUOG Corporation

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Pay Attention to the Signals Beneath the Surface

Paul L. Gunn Jr., Founder of Signal & Anomaly and KUOG Corporation, says that while traditional demand generation is often optimized around measurable activity, community-led growth creates value through human systems that aren’t always immediately visible or tracked.

“Leaders often make the mistake of measuring only leads and conversions while overlooking trust, advocacy and interpretation signals developing beneath the surface,” he says. “Cognitive empathy requires understanding not only what communities are doing but also how they are processing and contextualizing what they experience. Metacognition helps teams examine the assumptions shaping their own thinking.”

Gunn notes that when humans pay attention to what other humans are doing and saying, they can learn important truths that hard data alone can’t readily surface.

“Human behavior and community strength often reveal signals before dashboards fully explain them, making success less about volume and more about trust, participation quality and voluntary advocacy,” he says.

Narrow the Focus and Learn to Be Patient

Lee Salisbury, Founder and CEO of UnitOneNine, says community-led growth doesn’t skip the numbers, but it does require measuring different ones.

“The mistake is treating community like a funnel with better branding,” he says. “Leaders slap engagement metrics on top of community and call it measurement, then wonder why the board doesn’t buy it.”

Salisbury suggests looking at “repeat participation, unprompted advocacy and how often members bring other members in without being asked.” But he says the most important metric is often time.

“The real failure is impatience,” he says. “Trust compounds slowly, but leaders often pull funding right before it pays off because the dashboard looks quiet.”

Salisbury’s advice is to narrow the focus and learn to be patient.

“Pick two or three signals that predict retention and referral, ignore vanity activity metrics, and give it real time before judging it.”

Help Customers Reduce Risk

Bob Pearson, Chair of Pearson Advisory Group, says communities can produce valuable proof points for customers that make future buying decisions feel safer.

“A community creates ingredients for success, such as recommendations, testimonials and online reviews, even if they are informally done,” he says.

Pearson says that kind of authentic support provides audience members with the kind of confidence in a brand that may not be straightforward to measure but is essential. 

“If we agree that in most buying decisions our future customer wants to derisk their decision, then we embrace communities that help reduce this risk,” he says. “We also accept that metrics to prove this are less tangible but often more important than a traditional scorecard.”

“People participate when they feel there is shared value, not just another conversion path. Leaders should create space for dialogue, learning, feedback and connection, then measure success through the quality of those relationships.”

– Erin Lentz, Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion

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Create Space for Genuine Participation

Erin Lentz, Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion, says that too often, leaders approach community with the same mindset they use for campaign performance. The danger of that approach, she says, is that the message becomes too urgent, too transactional or too focused on what the brand wants people to do next.

“A community needs a more consistent and genuine brand voice,” she explains. “People participate when they feel there is shared value, not just another conversion path. Leaders should create space for dialogue, learning, feedback and connection, then measure success through the quality of those relationships.”

As for gauging success, Lentz explains that repeat participation, meaningful engagement, advocacy, product feedback, retention and long-term trust often say more than a short-term spike in activity.

“When people feel heard and valued, they are more likely to become true brand advocates,” she says.

Define KPIs Around the Community’s Purpose

Jessica Hawthorne, CEO of Hawthorne Advertising, says community-led growth requires different KPIs than traditional demand generation. She reminds leaders that it’s important to focus on the unique role communities are meant to play in long-term strategy.

“A common mistake is measuring community by leads and short-term pipeline,” she says. “Instead, define channel-specific metrics that reflect its purpose—such as engagement, trust, advocacy, loyalty and long-term business impact.”

Foster Real Contribution and Engagement

Kurt Allen, Vice President of Enrollment, Marketing and Communications for Notre Dame de Namur University, says community-led growth fails when leaders treat communities like another lead funnel, push branded messaging too aggressively, or measure success only through short-term conversions, noting that such an approach erodes trust and participation.

“Leaders should prioritize value creation, authentic engagement, peer-to-peer connection and shared ownership,” he says. “Communities thrive when members feel heard, recognized and empowered to contribute.”

Allen recommends measuring engagement quality, retention, advocacy, referrals, sentiment, customer lifetime value and the speed at which members influence adoption and trust. For him, the broader value of community extends well beyond immediate revenue.

“Strong communities don’t just generate pipeline—they build credibility, resilience and long-term brand loyalty.”

Turning Community Trust Into Sustainable Growth

• Measure whether the community is expanding awareness, education and preference, not simply producing monthly leads. Track signals such as repeat participation, peer discussions, branded search, referrals and retention to understand whether the market is becoming easier to reach over time.
• Build the community around belonging rather than conversion. Give members meaningful opportunities to learn, contribute, connect and receive recognition, then treat revenue as a long-term outcome rather than the purpose of every interaction.
• Let members shape the conversation. Show up consistently even when there’s nothing to sell, use a human voice and evaluate whether members are returning, talking to one another and recommending the community without prompting.
• Treat trust as a leading indicator of growth. Look for evidence that the community is accelerating decisions, improving retention, strengthening customer intelligence and inspiring advocacy before expecting revenue to appear.
• Create value for members before asking for value from them. Invest for the long term, offer useful resources without unnecessary barriers, and recognize highly engaged contributors with access, status and public appreciation.
• Offer perspectives and conversations members can’t easily find elsewhere. In a market flooded with AI-generated content, prioritize originality, relevance and depth over publishing volume or short-lived engagement spikes.
• Use repeat participation to distinguish trust from reach. Returning members, peer support and voluntary invitations reveal whether meaningful relationships are developing.
• Look beyond dashboard activity for early signs of community strength. Pay attention to how members interpret their experiences, advocate voluntarily and interact with one another, while also challenging the assumptions guiding your team’s analysis.
• Choose a small set of meaningful metrics and give them time to develop. Focus on two or three indicators tied to retention and referrals instead of chasing vanity metrics or cutting investment before trust has had time to compound.
• Evaluate how effectively the community reduces customer uncertainty. Recommendations, testimonials and informal peer validation may be difficult to attribute directly, but they can make purchasing decisions feel safer.
• Create room for dialogue, feedback and connection. A consistent, genuine brand voice and shared value will encourage stronger participation than urgent messaging built around the brand’s next desired action.
• Define KPIs according to the community’s specific purpose. Measures such as engagement, trust, advocacy, loyalty and long-term business impact will usually provide a more accurate picture than short-term pipeline alone.
• Give members real ownership in the community’s success. Encourage peer-to-peer interaction, recognize contributions and measure whether members are influencing adoption, strengthening loyalty and helping the community become more resilient.

Community Success Can’t Be Rushed

Community-led growth doesn’t eliminate the need for measurement; it requires leaders to measure the right things. Rather than forcing community initiatives into a traditional lead-generation framework, teams should watch for repeat participation, member-to-member engagement, advocacy, referrals, retention and the quality of the relationships being formed. Those indicators can reveal whether trust is growing well before that value appears in a conventional pipeline report.

As AI increases the volume of interchangeable content and customers become more skeptical of polished brand messaging, communities may play an even larger role in how people evaluate companies and make decisions. Wise brands resist the pressure to turn every interaction into a transaction, invest long enough for trust to compound, and build measurement systems that connect human behavior with lasting business value.