Community-led marketing isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a high-impact strategy that empowers businesses to build trust with their audiences, keep them engaged, and ultimately drive sustained growth. Derek Weeks, CMO of Katalon, sat down with GTM Podcast Host Stephen Lowisz and shared priceless advice from the trenches of community management, offering practical, tactical approaches to putting this strategy into action.

If your focus is on targeting technical audiences like developers or quality assurance professionals, you know they’re not easily swayed by flashy promotions. This guide breaks down how businesses can create deep, meaningful connections with these discerning groups by fostering authentic, helpful communities.

Why Technical Audiences Require a Different Playbook

You’re not marketing to daydreamers here—technical professionals like DevOps engineers, software testers, and developers are naturally skeptical. They make their living identifying flaws, questioning systems, and breaking things (on purpose). Their internal “BS meters” are always on.

This means you need to ditch anything resembling puffery or over-sell. What works? Keeping it real, specific, and human-centered. These audiences value innovation, but only if it’s backed by genuine utility and credibility. Your focus should be solely on answering the question they care about most, “How will this make me better at what I do?”

Tactical Tips for Engaging Technical Audiences

1. Speak Their Truth, Not Your Hype
   Avoid empty buzzwords like “game-changing” or “world’s best.” These phrases mean nothing to someone evaluating hard evidence. Shift from chest-thumping to addressing real-world challenges with clarity. For instance, instead of “Our software automates everything,” try, “Here’s how we saved a client 20 hours a week on repetitive testing tasks.”
2. Put Peer Voices Front and Center
   Bring technical experts to the forefront. At Katalon, staff members with hands-on experience lead conversations, whether via webinars or thought leadership videos. This positions your business as a credible partner without being overly promotional.
3. Build Value Before the Pitch
   Offer actionable, helpful tools that enhance their day-to-day work. For example, create a free resource like a troubleshooting checklist or offer online certification courses related to their profession. By doing this, you establish trust before introducing your product into the conversation.

Starting a Community that Grows Organically

Kicking off a successful community isn’t about going viral overnight—it’s about cultivating trust, relevance, and collaboration from the ground up. Here’s how you can turn one great interaction into a thriving network.

Start with Small but Mighty Groups

Begin with as few as 10 highly engaged individuals. Invite them to participate in discussions around well-defined, relevant topics that truly matter to them. These discussions could happen in simple formats, like informal webinars, Slack channels, or even forums. The key here is fostering quality conversations, not chasing large numbers.

For instance, in the early days of Katalon’s community, Derek and his team emphasized ensuring that every initial participant found personal value in attending. Find your “early champions”—highly engaged individuals whose enthusiasm for relevant topics can amplify others’ participation.

Focus on Topics That Keep Them Coming Back

Not sure what will make your audience show up? Ask them! When you identify potential early adopters, engage with them about their pain points and aspirations. Structured questions like, “What’s one problem you’d love to solve with the help of others?” or “What would inspire you to join a conversation every week?” help you zero in on content that resonates.

Once conversations start flowing, facilitate fresh topics consistently. For example, consider weekly themes like:

• Strategies for moving from manual testing to automation.
• Best practices for transitioning from open-source tools to enterprise solutions.
• Building a center of excellence for quality assurance.

By showing you understand their pain points and offering expert-backed insights, you’ll build trust and ensure repeat interactions.

Turning Organic Conversations into Tactical Content

Your community isn’t just a hub of engagement; it’s also a content goldmine. Every answer, problem-solving thread, and shared success story can be turned into valuable materials for marketing or education.

Here’s how to maximize the value of community-driven conversations:

• Capture What’s Already Happening: Monitor forum threads, Slack discussions, or Q&A webinars for recurring questions. Summarize them into guides, blog posts, or even short videos.
• Reward Contributions: If someone in the community shares a powerful success story or a unique tip, amplify their voice. Publish their story as a case study or highlight their achievements in a feature email or LinkedIn post.
• Repurpose Event Content: At Katalon, they host conferences where community members lead topics. These sessions can be recorded, chopped into digestible clips, and repurposed into evergreen assets.

Bringing these authentic perspectives forward doesn’t just save your team time; it also resonates better with other technical users who trust peer insights over corporate statements.

Measuring What Matters

Many marketers miss the mark on communities because they fail to connect their efforts to measurable business outcomes. That’s bad news if you’re trying to justify the budget for keeping your community alive.

Keys to Successful Measurement:

1. Tie Community Touchpoints to Buyer Journeys
   How many of your prospects in the pipeline interacted with your community before making a purchase decision? Track these touchpoints to understand your community’s influence. A simple CRM integration can help you track when leads engage in forums or take advantage of training programs.
2. Use Engagement as an Expansion Predictor
   Increased post-sale activity in your community—like deeper thread participation or additional logins from account members—can signal expansion or upselling opportunities. Share these insights with your customer success team.
3. Set Concrete Metrics for Success
   Define qualifications for “marketing-influenced opportunities.” For instance, at Katalon, six significant interactions within the community are the minimum to attribute an opportunity to community efforts. This builds a clear case for how communities contribute to the bottom line.

Balancing Community-Led and Product-Led Marketing

One of the most frequent questions marketers ask is, “How much of my community should be focused on my product—and how much should we expand beyond it?”

The key to balance lies in separating product communities from interest communities.

• Product Communities
  These are spaces where members share detailed tips and tricks, ask product-specific questions, and troubleshoot in groups. For example, if someone asks how to integrate your product with a third-party solution, those discussions are unequivocally tied to your brand.
• Interest Communities
  These go broader and build on shared professional goals. At Katalon, for example, forums tackling topics like handling large-scale QA operations or scaling testing processes engage audiences without directly pitching the product.

Both serve a vital role, but interest communities often tap into a far larger audience and provide the invaluable long game of trust-building. Once participants see value here, they’re more likely to naturally engage with product communities later.

Real-World Example of Community-Led Success

When Katalon supported TestCon in Vietnam, they kept their branding deliberately low-key. Instead of presenting it as a company event, it became a forum for ideas and growth around QA and testing. With over 700 attendees, the trust and goodwill created went far beyond what any polished sales pitch could have achieved.

By doing so, they opened the door to future engagement opportunities. For example, attendees could be invited to download an industry report, join their online community, or attend another session—gradually moving closer to product discussions without pressure.

Takeaways and Next Steps

Community-led marketing requires commitment, but the results speak for themselves. Starting small, focusing on delivering real value, and capturing genuine insights create a win-win for your audience and your business. To recap:

• Nurture small, highly-engaged groups to start, letting their interests form the foundation of the community.
• Use every interaction as fuel for content creation.
• Measure the impact of community participation on pipeline and revenue for long-term alignment with business goals.
• Strike a balance between showcasing your product and building broader professional connections.

Community-led marketing is more than a tactic—it’s a mindset. When you treat it as a long-term investment in relationships, you’ll see results that boost trust, sales, and your brand’s position as a key player in your field.

There’s no better time to start building than today. Assemble your first group of 10, spark meaningful conversations, and watch as those seeds grow into a thriving, impactful ecosystem. And if you’re still looking for an extra edge, Derek Weeks’ book Unfair Mindshare offers deeper insights to guide your strategy to success.

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