From tactics to strategy: The evolution of community use cases

I’ve noticed a common pattern as a consulting strategist helping enterprise communities. Many start with a singular focus—typically customer support—but never grow beyond it. While this approach delivers value, it leaves so much potential untapped.

These communities need a broader vision. Online communities are capable of far more than answering support questions. They are ever-changing ecosystems that can fuel growth, build loyalty, spark innovation, and boost retention–when leaders decide to make the right investments.

Think of community use cases like a series of branching paths on a map. Each path you open, whether it’s adding onboarding resources, creating spaces to suggest product ideas, or launching advocacy programs, unlocks new value and opens the door to even more possibilities. What begins as a simple way to save money on customer support calls can transform into a powerful engine for product feedback, customer-led marketing, or even faster sales cycles.

Let’s make these potential transformations easier to understand. Here are four main groupings of value-driving use cases:

1. Support & Operational Efficiency: This is where most companies begin their community journey, seeing quick wins through fewer support calls and smoother customer onboarding.

2. Marketing & Growth: These communities boost your brand visibility, provide social proof when customers share success stories, and turn happy users into advocates who bring others on board.

3. Innovation & Product Development: Communities in this category help you hear customer needs more clearly, build better products, and respond to market changes faster.

4. Revenue & Customer Retention: Here, communities drive loyalty, help customers get more value from your products, and speed up sales—all contributing directly to your bottom line.

I’ll provide real-world examples of each use case category in the following sections. You'll see how communities can grow from serving a single purpose to becoming strategic assets that deliver value across your organization.

For many enterprise organizations, community strategy begins with a practical goal: reduce support costs. And it works! I’ve seen firsthand how peer-to-peer support forums, searchable knowledge bases, and staff-moderated Q&A threads consistently deflect tickets and free up internal teams.

Consider the findings from Aberdeen Research. Their study revealed that organizations with customer support communities reduced support costs by 32.9% year-on-year, while organizations without communities saw costs increase by 2.7%. This dramatic difference demonstrates how effectively communities can transform support economics while improving the customer experience through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

But the value doesn’t stop at deflection. Communities also accelerate onboarding, especially in complex SaaS or infrastructure environments. Instead of waiting days for a scheduled onboarding session, new users can immediately ask questions, browse setup tips from experienced users, and avoid common pitfalls—all at their own pace.

This self-service approach saves time for your support team and creates a better first impression for customers who can get answers when needed.

Once customers are up and running, communities help drive product adoption. I’ve watched members share advanced use cases, clever workarounds, undocumented workflows, or integration tricks that the product team never considered. This peer-learning effect extends the value of your product in ways that often surpass what official documentation can provide. When customers see others using features creatively, they’re inspired to try new approaches.

The key to support-driven communities is not to stop here. When well-managed, these spaces become fertile ground for advocacy, feedback, and deeper engagement. The real opportunity is to expand beyond deflection into education and activation–helping customers become more successful with your product rather than just solving their immediate problems.

When to prioritize this use case

Support and efficiency-driven communities are perfect fits for companies with:

• High support volume that's straining your team resources

• Repeatable product questions that could be answered once and referenced many times

• Strong customer-to-customer affinity, where users naturally want to help each other

• Complex products with multiple use cases or configuration options

• A need to reduce support costs while maintaining or improving customer satisfaction

These communities often serve as a natural first step for digital support transformation efforts, providing quick wins that build momentum for broader community initiatives.

How to expand from here

Once a support-focused community is active and trusted, it creates a foundation for broader goals:

• Incorporate marketing-owned content and SEO strategies to improve brand visibility, turning support answers into discoverable assets that attract new customers.

• Surface recurring feature requests and pain points to inform product development, creating a direct pipeline of customer feedback that helps prioritize your roadmap.

• Invite top contributors into advocacy or early access programs to deepen their involvement, recognize their expertise, and give them special access to new features.

• Create an educational content series based on common questions, transforming reactive support into proactive enablement.

Support may be the starting point for your community journey, but it shouldn't be the stopping point. The relationships and trust you build through effective support create opportunities beyond cost savings.

While support-focused communities excel at reducing costs and improving efficiency, their value extends far beyond operational benefits. As these communities mature, they naturally evolve into powerful marketing engines. Let's explore how the same spaces that solve customer problems can drive growth and brand visibility.

An engaged community doesn’t just serve existing customers — it attracts new ones. Active discussions, authentic success stories, and high-ranking content turn community platforms into powerful marketing engines that generate demand without feeling like traditional marketing.

Take Cisco, for example. Through its customer advocacy hub, The Gateway, Cisco generated 657 customer referrals and over 196,000 acts of advocacy, including product reviews, social shares, and event participation. The result? An estimated $5.4 million in ROI over three years. These numbers show the tangible business impact when community members actively advocate for your brand.

Communities also significantly improve SEO performance in ways traditional content marketing can’t match. Every question answered and topic explored becomes long-tail content that can surface in organic search results. Companies like KPN and T-Mobile NL report hundreds of thousands of monthly visits to their community pages — many from prospective customers looking for answers before they buy.

This organic discovery path often leads customers to your product exactly when they’re researching solutions.

Similarly, communities offer authentic social proof that cuts through marketing noise. When customers solve problems publicly, share praise, or explain their use cases, they create content more persuasive than anything your marketing team could craft. In my experience working with B2B organizations, these peer endorsements and testimonials carry exceptional weight in decision-making processes.

In short, buyers trust other customers far more than they trust branded content.

The magic happens when community content starts appearing in search results alongside your marketing materials. Prospects see your official messaging and real customer experiences, creating a more complete picture of your offering. The combination of voices builds credibility in ways that traditional marketing channels cannot duplicate.

When to prioritize this use case

You want to improve inbound traffic and visibility through SEO, especially for long-tail keywords related to specific use cases or pain points.

• You're nurturing a base of power users or advocates who are enthusiastic about sharing their experiences

• Your buyers rely heavily on peer reviews and referrals during purchase decisions

• You need to differentiate your brand through customer stories rather than feature comparisons

• Your marketing team struggles to create authentic content that resonates with prospects

This approach is especially effective in competitive markets where credibility and reputation tip the balance between similar offerings. When prospects can see real customers succeeding with your product, it reduces perceived risk in the buying process.

How to expand from here

A marketing-focused community is a natural gateway to:

• Advocacy programs that mobilize loyal users as reference customers, creating a pipeline of case studies, testimonials, and peer references

• Lead nurturing paths where community activity feeds into CRM and marketing automation, helping you identify engaged prospects based on their community behavior

• Content strategy partnerships, using community insights to fuel thought leadership and FAQs that address real customer questions rather than what you think customers want to know

• User-generated content campaigns that showcase customer success stories and creative implementations

• Community-led webinars and events where customers share their experiences directly with prospects

When you position your community as a trusted resource, you don’t just educate your audience — you attract it. The authenticity of peer-to-peer conversations creates a magnetic effect. Your community becomes a destination, attracting existing customers and becoming a discovery platform for new ones.

While marketing-focused communities attract and engage customers through authentic conversations, they also create something equally valuable: a direct line to customer insights. Let's explore how these same community spaces can transform your innovation and product development approach.

Communities aren’t just for engagement — they’re front-row seats to customer insight. When structured intentionally, they become rich sources of product ideas, feedback loops, and trend detection that traditional R&D channels often miss.

Dell’s IdeaStorm is a classic example. It collected over 23,000 customer-submitted ideas and implemented around 500 of them into actual products. That kind of co-creation doesn’t just yield useful features — it builds customer loyalty by making users feel heard and valued.

When customers see their ideas implemented, they develop a sense of ownership in the product’s evolution.

Beyond idea voting, communities surface the day-to-day issues that frustrate users or lead to churn. Frequent questions, repeated pain points, and even praise provide product teams with a living feedback engine. Companies like Salesforce and Atlassian monitor community threads to spot bugs, inform documentation, and prioritize roadmap decisions. This ongoing stream of feedback creates a more responsive product development cycle than traditional market research methods can achieve.

Communities also act as early-warning systems. Shifts in sentiment or sudden spikes in conversation volume can signal emerging issues — or opportunities. Listening carefully gives organizations more time to respond, adjust, or lead. I’ve seen companies identify potential problems weeks before they would have surfaced through support tickets or sales feedback.

The beauty of community-driven innovation is that it happens continuously rather than in scheduled research cycles. Your customers are constantly using your products in ways you might never have dreamed of, discovering limitations you didn’t know existed, and imagining entirely brand new features. A well-structured community captures these insights as they happen, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

When to prioritize this use case

This path is ideal when you:

• Have an established base of active users who want to shape the product

• Have a product team that is committed to incorporating customer feedback

• Want to shorten the gap between feature requests and feature releases

• Have a product with multiple use cases or that serves diverse customer segments

• Need to validate product decisions with real user input before committing resources

It's particularly valuable for fast-moving SaaS platforms and enterprise tools that depend on ongoing refinement. When your product roadmap needs to adapt quickly to market changes or competitive pressures, community feedback provides the direction and validation required to make confident decisions.

How to expand from here

Once feedback loops are in place, consider:

• Launching private beta forums to gather early input before full releases. These spaces create a sense of exclusivity while providing crucial feedback from your most engaged users.

• Hosting ask-me-anything (AMA) sessions between users and product leaders. These direct conversations humanize your development team and demonstrate your commitment to customer-centered design.

• Developing innovation leaderboards that recognize community members whose ideas get built. This gamification element encourages ongoing participation and rewards valuable contributions.

• Creating dedicated spaces for specific product areas or features, allowing for more focused feedback from users with specialized expertise or use cases.

• Establishing a formal process for evaluating and responding to community suggestions so members know their input is being considered even when it can't be implemented immediately.

Great products aren't just tested — they're co-designed. A community can make that process continuous, turning product development from discrete releases into an ongoing conversation with the people who matter most: your customers.

While community-driven innovation helps create better products through customer insights, these collaborative relationships deliver another powerful benefit: strengthening the bonds that drive long-term revenue. Let's explore how these engaged, co-creating users translate into sustained financial impact and improved retention.

As communities mature, their role shifts from support and engagement to something more strategic: sustained revenue impact. I’ve observed that engaged users don’t just renew—they spend more, stay longer, and bring others with them.

Forrester’s analysis of Salesforce communities revealed a 15.4% increase in incremental revenue per customer and a 28.3% reduction in annual churn after launching a community. The reasons? Greater adoption, higher satisfaction, and stronger customer relationships. These numbers demonstrate the tangible financial impact of community investment beyond the initial cost-saving benefits.

Communities also create natural upsell and cross-sell opportunities. As users share advanced use cases, discover new features, or ask about integrations, they often uncover needs they didn’t know they had. The community becomes a subtle, trusted sales channel where customers educate each other about additional value opportunities. This peer-led discovery feels more authentic than traditional sales approaches.

For partners, especially in channel-heavy models, community is a force multiplier. It allows resellers, integrators, and service partners to access resources, share expertise, and find new business, accelerating time-to-value for everyone involved.

When to prioritize this use case

Retention and revenue use cases make sense when:

• You have a maturing customer base ready for deeper product use or expansion

• You need to protect and grow recurring revenue

• You want to improve renewal rates or reduce dependency on 1:1 customer success outreach

• Your product has multiple tiers, add-ons, or complementary offerings that customers might not find on their own

• You have a partner ecosystem that would benefit from closer collaboration or knowledge-sharing

This is the phase where community ROI becomes visible not just in savings but in new revenue. When your community starts influencing buying decisions and expanding customer lifetime value, you unlock its strategic potential.

How to expand from here

To deepen this path:

• Launch advocacy programs that reward and amplify loyal customers.

• Build partner enablement hubs within the community. These dedicated spaces help partners access resources, share best practices, and collaborate on customer solutions.

• Track community engagement signals as part of your customer health scoring model. Active community participation often correlates with renewal likelihood and expansion readiness.

• Create pathways for community members to connect with product specialists when discussions reveal expansion opportunities.

• Develop community-specific offers that reward active participation with special access or pricing on additional products.

If you think long-term, community becomes not just a tactic but an asset. The relationships, content, and engagement patterns in your community represent intellectual property that competitors can’t easily copy. This creates a sustainable competitive advantage that grows stronger over time.

Throughout this article, I've shared how communities evolve across four key dimensions: support, marketing, innovation, and revenue. But it's important to note that this isn't a linear journey. While many organizations begin with support-focused communities, yours might start elsewhere based on your business needs. A product-led company might prioritize innovation first, while a partner-heavy business could begin with revenue and retention.

The critical insight isn't which use case you start with — it's recognizing that communities deliver compounding value when you expand beyond a single function. Each new use case you add creates connections to others, building a network effect that strengthens your entire business ecosystem.

As you consider your community strategy, ask yourself: Which business challenge would benefit most from the collective intelligence of your customers? Start there, but don't stop there — plan for expansion from the beginning, creating structures and processes that can grow to support multiple objectives.

Remember that the most valuable communities aren't siloed within a single department — they're strategic assets that touch every part of your organization. By building with this broader vision, you transform the community from a tactical solution into a sustainable competitive advantage.

If you're ready to explore this evolution in practice, watch the full webinar: The Executive Edge: How Online Communities Drive Growth, Innovation, and Customer Success. You'll find deeper insights, real-world examples, and ideas you can implement immediately.

1. Aberdeen Group – Research Report
   "Online Communities: How to Improve the Customer Experience While Driving Customer Loyalty and Retention." https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/64e4e4744d3f3cf2831cfbff/6632039146af4dde08204107_Aberdeen_Report_Online_Communities_2018.pdf
   
   

2. Cisco Advocacy Program Case Study – B2B Marketing
   “Learn how Cisco hit an ROI of $5.4 million through 196,933 acts of customer advocacy.”
   https://www.b2bmarketing.net/case-studies/learn-how-cisco-hit-an-roi-of-5-4-million-through-196933-acts-of-customer-advocacy/
   
   

3. Dell IdeaStorm – Wikipedia
   “Dell IdeaStorm.”
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_IdeaStorm
   
   

4. Salesforce Community Cloud – Forrester Total Economic Impact Study
   “Improved Customer Experience and Reduced Service Costs Enabled by Customer Community.”
   https://a.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/www/ocms/assets/pdf/communities/Forrester-TEI-Customer-Community-Case-Study.pdf