Want to Grow? Don’t Target Communities
TLDR: 4 Takeaways from this Post:
Communities aren't customer segments. Customer segments are organized around your product. Communities are organized around shared identities, interests, challenges, and aspirations.
Trust has become more localized. Communities are becoming increasingly important to business growth.
You have two strategic choices and they require different investments and expectations.
Contribution is the price of admission. Communities quickly recognize who's there to belong and who's there to sell.
Many businesses are skilled at optimizing the customer journey for their core audiences. They've built the personas, refined the campaigns, and tuned the funnels. They know their customers well.
Then growth flattens, and to reach the next stage, they need to look beyond the people who already know and trust them. Eventually, they find themselves asking three questions:
Where are our people?
How do we engage with them?
Should we build a community to get more customers?
Here's what I think is happening.
As social media has become noisier — and arguably less social — people are investing more time in smaller, more intentional communities: professional associations, membership organizations, local events, conferences, industry Slack groups, Substacks, Reddit, neighborhood organizations, and countless other niche spaces.
Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer gives some shape to this. It describes a world retreating toward smaller, values-aligned circles. Roughly seven in ten people now say they're unwilling or hesitant to trust someone whose values, information sources, or background differ from their own. That's a finding about distrust of difference as much as it is about community — but the practical effect is the same: people are putting more weight on the judgment of their inner circle, and less on broadcast messages from brands they don't already know.
As information becomes cheaper, relationships become more valuable.
That creates an opportunity for businesses. It also creates a temptation to ask the wrong questions:
"How do we target this community?"
"How do we get this community talking about us?"
"How do we get people in this community to buy our services?"
>>> Communities are remarkably good at recognizing who's there to belong and who's there to sell. <<<
Once you've found your people, there's only one question that really matters: how can we become valuable to them?
Before you decide whether to build or join a community, consider this: one of the biggest mistakes I see is confusing a customer segment with a community. Customer segments are organized around your product. Communities are organized around shared identities, interests, professions, challenges, beliefs, or aspirations.
The first decision: create or join? There are generally two paths.
One: Create a community
Sometimes there's a genuine unmet need to bring people together, and if so, creating a community can be incredibly valuable. But make sure you've really considered what makes a community worth joining — it takes much more than a platform, mailing list, event, or discussion forum. You're creating a place where people connect and help one another, which means asking yourself whether you're prepared to invest in the platform, the purpose, the leadership, and the consistency required to earn trust. The community has to create value for its members whether they're buying from you or not, and that's a high bar.
Take GitHub as an example. It didn't grow because Microsoft (or GitHub before it) ran a great acquisition campaign. It grew because developers could find answers to obscure problems, discover projects worth contributing to, and build a public record of their work that other developers actually relied on. The commercial relationship (private repos, enterprise plans) came after the trust, not before it.
Communities that fail usually have it backwards: declining value, low engagement, founder fatigue, financial strain, and misaligned expectations, because the organizers built the room before they built the reason to stay in it. Take an honest look at those risks before you build something from scratch.
Two: Join a community
For many organizations, this is the better place to start. Why build something that already exists? Your customers already attend conferences, participate in associations, volunteer, read newsletters, join organizations, and help solve each others’ problems. So why launch another webinar series, another online forum, or another LinkedIn group when your industry already has trusted places where those conversations are happening?
Joining an existing community demands more flexibility and less control, because you won't own the room or the platform. But if your goal is to own the room, community probably isn't the right growth strategy in the first place.
There are four components to establishing your reputation in an existing community:
Listen before you speak.
Learn the culture.
Contribute before you promote.
Earn your place.
Build or join? The responsibility is the same.
Whether you create a community or join one, your role isn't to extract value from it — it's to create value within it.
Picture a mid-sized professional-services firm deciding how to show up in an industry Slack group its clients already use. The extractive version looks like a rep dropping a case study link every few weeks and tracking reactions. The version that actually works looks more like a partner spending a few months answering questions with no pitch attached, sharing a framework without gating it behind a form, and generously connecting two members who have shared interests. Six months in, when that firm does have something to sell, the group already knows who they are — and that's the entire difference between targeting a community and belonging to one.
None of that is primarily about lead generation. It's how you demonstrate commitment to the community and make the community stronger — and the leads only come once that trust is established. Organizations that earn trust behave like members, not marketers.
Six questions to consider
If community is becoming part of your growth strategy, ask yourself:
Where do our customers already gather?
Is that actually a community, or just a customer segment?
Would this community miss us if we disappeared?
If we create a community, how will members create value for one another — not just engage with us?
If we join an existing community, what can we contribute that would make it stronger?
Are we measuring attention, participation, or trust?
The best community strategies don't start with "how do we get in front of these people?" They start with a simpler question: how can we leave this community better than we found it?
Growth doesn't come from gaining access to communities. It comes from earning their trust — and trust is earned by building a reputation as a contributor, not a taker.
Don't target communities. Contribute to them.
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