When Daniel Cmejla joined Apollo.io, they were getting about 15,000 organic impressions every month.

And when he left a year and a half later, that number had exploded to 3-7 million monthly impressions.

But that’s not all…

They also raised $100 million, reached a valuation of $ 1.6 billion, increased revenue about 600%, and 76% of acquisition came from programs that Dan managed.

The secret? Building a real community. 

Here’s the exact playbook he used to nail B2B community at Apollo, Chili Piper and beyond.

What exactly is a community?

Dan defines community as, “A space (physical or digital) where people who aren't explicitly paid to do so freely exchange knowledge and information.”

This can be: 

• Slack groups
• In person meetups
• The comment section on social media
• Facebook groups

You get the idea.

And community marketing is an effort to turn your customers into the primary distribution points for your brand. 

Community marketing is a shift of through instead of to. Traditional marketing means getting in front of our customers. But community marketing means building relationships with your customers so they'll deploy your messaging for you.

Build a blueprint for where to market

Where is your audience spending time? The absolute easiest way to find out where to market is always just to ask. 

• What groups are you in?
• What blogs do you pay attention to? 
• What podcasts are you interested in? 
• What social media platforms are you on? 
• Who do you respect the most on social? 
• What events are you attending? 

Talk to enough of your ICP and they’ll give you a blueprint of exactly where to market.

Turn this into an Influence Map

Once you know where your audience is spending time, turn it into an influence map, like this one Dan did built for Apollo:

The traditional approach looks something like: Take a community like Pavilion, and give them $100,000 to sponsor a Slack group.

Dan’s approach: Instead Dan asked Pavilion if they could sponsor memberships. So Instead of paying $100,000, they paid $6,000 total ($1,000 per member) to cover 6 memberships.

Dan hand picked people he knew loved Apollo and would spread the word organically within the group. 

That’s the difference between marketing to and through your customers.

But it all starts with the black dot in the middle. How do you create a culture of people who love talking about you in a positive way?

PSA: You cannot make this work without investing in a social media and customer marketing team.

Lay the groundwork for amazing relationships

It all starts with a single moment of customer love. 

When a customer mentions your product positively, that's not just a nice comment. It's the first step of what Dan calls "the advocacy journey."

Here's how to build that path:

1. Acknowledge every mention - When customers show love on social, reply 100% of the time. This seems obvious, but most brands aren’t doing this today.
2. Create a system for capturing advocacy - Dan's team at Apollo had someone dedicated to finding every positive mention, commenting publicly, then DMing to ask permission to add it to their "wall of love." All within 24 hours. Tools like Testimonial help a ton here. 
3. Build paths to deeper engagement - As customers show more enthusiasm, invite them to join your customer advisory board (CAB), speak at events, partner on case studies, or become formal advocates.
4. Deploy customer voices strategically - Map out all the communities where your audience gathers (LinkedIn groups, Reddit communities, events, etc.) and help your customers be visible in those spaces.

And once you’ve found your best, most engaged customers you can get into the really fun stuff. 

World-class LinkedIn

If you want to build a community, you need to celebrate your customers where they are. And when we think about community in B2B, a lot of it's happening on LinkedIn.

So outside of responding to every single person who mentions you, take the time to create a true strategy.

Validate content pillars - Test different content types to see what resonates with your audience. Track engagement metrics to refine your approach (Example: A content pillar could be as simple as showcasing customer love).

Vary content mediums - Distribute your message across different formats (video, short-form, long-form, polls) to reach various audience segments. 

Don't be basic - Stand out with content that delivers genuine value. When you’re up against most of the content other people are sharing on LinkedIn, it doesn’t take much to stand out.

The idea here is not to share  something that's 100% relevant to everyone. You want to aim to hit every single person in your following with something that's relevant to them at least once a week.

Apollo’s exact LinkedIn playbook

Let's say you have 3 Personas: Rev Ops, Marketing Leadership, CEO. 

Then you have your content pillars that fit under those Personas. Once a week, post content that’s 100% relevant to founders. The first one's a video. The second one is short form content. And then you keep iterating on this until you stumble on something that works and then you double on it. 

That's how Apollo grew faster than any other B2B SaaS company on LinkedIn last year.

The Distribution Multiplier

Once your foundation is solid, focus on stacking distribution channels to amplify your reach. 

Dan likes to divide into 3 buckets here (at Apollo, he had a team for each):

1. Customer Evangelism

• Customer Advisory Board
• Customer Community
• Peer-to-peer networks
• Affiliate and referral partners

2. Community Partners

• Influencers
• Integration partners
• Partner communities

3. Employee Evangelism

• Executives
• Employees

This is how you can go from 5,000 organic impressions a month to 7 million. Because each piece doesn't have to be massive. 

Let's say you have:

• 50 people on the customer advisory board and half of them participate in each marketing campaign
• 20 friends on social
• 100 affiliates
• 2 influencers
• 50 partners
• 100 employees

When you think about it like this, it changes the game entirely. Compare that to what you probably have today and there’s just no competing.

How do you get the rest of the team bought in?

You want to create a culture within the company where people realize it's in their own self interest to evangelize across these channels. 

And the easiest way to do it is to start with the executives. You have to get them to have their first “aha moment.” 

If they’re too busy to do it themselves, sit down and write posts for them. Figure out what’s top of mind. For example, if they’re hiring, post about that. Maybe they hire their Senior Director from that LinkedIn post. Boom. They go from not having the time to “I have to do this.”

And from there it ripples down throughout the rest of the company. But if you place a couple people as the center, you are making yourself vulnerable. It has to be at the core of your company’s culture. 

Build a Customer Advisory Board (CAB)

Who are your absolute best customers? They're already there. They're your beta testers, they’re showing you a ton of love, they’re up for case studies. But have you built a formal structure around it?

This is how Dan has structure it:

And no, you don’t need to create 6 separate CABs, but it is important that you have at least one. 

Example: At Chili Piper, Dan asked the CAB to share their professional superpowers. 3 months later, they show up at the next meeting to a deck of Pokemon cards with their powers on it. Then they all post those cards on social. That's 50 people posting on average 5,000 impressions. That's 900,000 organic impressions right there. Fnd ways to celebrate people authentically and they'll celebrate you back.

Time to create your own community?

After you’ve built your distribution system, defined your influence map, have a killer LinkedIn presence, and everything else up until this point, *then* it's time to start building your own spaces that hold influence.

Because if you spend all your effort building your own community from day 1, you're not necessarily evangelizing across all the other communities where your prospects and customers are spending time. So what you really want to do is focus on the customer relationship and deploy that across other spaces first. 

Only then should you consider one of these:

1. Customer community - Focused on product usage and success
2. Peer-to-peer community - Connecting professionals in your space
3. Idea-based community - Rallying around a concept related to your brand

Just remember: building your own community is the final step in your community marketing journey, not the first. 

Proof that community building really works

Community marketing delivers results that traditional approaches simply can't match. Dan has seen massive growth over and over again using this exact playbook:

• Modern Sales Pros: Scaled from 1,000 to 14,000 members, generating $2.5M in revenue
• Chili Piper: Grew from 5,000 to 1-3 million organic impressions monthly, with 60% of acquisition attributed to community programs.
• Apollo.io: Increased from 15,000 to 3-7 million organic impressions monthly, with 76% of acquisition from community programs. Gained 57,000 LinkedIn followers in a year (they started with about 15,000).

The numbers speak for themselves. Dan has consistently been able to deliver by doubling down on community. And you can do the same at your company. Start small, find your super fans and build incredible relationships with them.

Create an unfair advantage for your company

Building a B2B community isn't about rushing to create a new Slack group or launching a customer forum on day one. It's about methodically building relationships with your customers, empowering them as advocates, and deploying their authentic voices across the spaces where they already spend time. 

In a world increasingly saturated with AI-generated content, this human-centered approach offers something algorithms can't replicate: genuine enthusiasm from real people who truly believe in what you're building.

As Dan has shown over and over again, this approach delivers results that traditional marketing simply can't match.

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