The Engagement Marketing Playbook: Combining Education, Lifecycle, and Community

# Format: Best Practices & Playbooks

# Theme: GTM Strategy & Trends

# Role: Community/DevRel

# Challenge: Cross-Functional Alignment

How Education, Lifecycle, and Community Work Together to Drive GTM Success

September 22, 2025 · Last updated on November 7, 2025

Joshua Zerkel

For too long, many go-to-market (GTM) organizations have treated marketing as a pipeline engine. Campaigns generate leads, deals close, and then the spotlight shifts to sales or customer success. But in an era where growth increasingly comes from retention and expansion, not just new business, this model falls short.

Customers need more than a contract and a product. They need to learn, engage, and feel part of a broader network of peers and practitioners. This is where engagement marketing comes in: a holistic approach that integrates education, lifecycle, and community into one coordinated system. Done well, engagement marketing extends far beyond nurture emails. It becomes the connective tissue that helps customers thrive, which in turn fuels sustainable GTM results.

What engagement marketing really means

Engagement marketing is the practice of building lasting, multi-directional relationships with customers after they sign on. Unlike traditional lifecycle marketing, which often focuses narrowly on email touchpoints, engagement marketing looks at the full spectrum of how customers learn, adopt, and connect.

At its core, it brings together three disciplines:

Education: Creating content, programs, and experiences that teach customers how to succeed with your product and in their broader roles.

Lifecycle: Delivering the right content at the right time, typically through email and digital channels, to guide customers along their journey.

Community: Providing spaces, online and offline, for customers to interact, exchange knowledge, and co-create value.

Each is powerful on its own. Together, they form a unified strategy for customer engagement that drives retention, adoption, and advocacy.

Why this matters for GTM leaders

Retention is now a GTM priority. According to Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25% or more. For SaaS companies especially, adoption is the linchpin: if customers aren’t consistently using key features, expansion and renewals suffer.

This means GTM leaders, whether in marketing, sales, product, or customer success, must think beyond acquisition. Engagement marketing is not a "nice to have." It is a structural shift in how organizations align around customer value.

For marketing: It means evolving from a demand engine into a long-term growth partner.

For sales: It ensures the promises made in pre-sale are reinforced through education and community experiences.

For product: It creates real-time feedback loops from engaged users.

For CX: It amplifies onboarding and support with scalable education and peer-to-peer help.

The three pillars of engagement marketing

1. Education: building customer capability

Customer education is more than a knowledge base. It applies learning science to help customers adopt and grow with your product. Think structured onboarding programs, modular courses, live workshops, and contextual how-tos.

Examples in action:

Atlassian University provides structured courses that help customers master collaboration tools, driving faster adoption.

HubSpot Academy not only teaches customers how to use its platform but also builds their professional skills, creating loyalty and advocacy.

Tactics to try:

Develop a “golden features” curriculum that ensures every customer masters your most valuable product capabilities.

Offer blended learning: a mix of self-paced modules, live sessions, and community discussions.

Integrate feedback loops so education content evolves with customer needs.

2. Lifecycle: delivering the right content at the right time

Lifecycle marketing uses digital touchpoints, most often email, to orchestrate the customer journey. But effective lifecycle isn’t just campaigns and cadences; it is relevance.

Examples in action:

Slack uses lifecycle emails to spotlight new features, nudging users to adopt them incrementally.

Canva sends design tips tied to feature releases, making education both contextual and timely.

Tactics to try:

Map communications to customer milestones: onboarding, first value, expansion, renewal.

Build modular email templates that can personalize by role, industry, or product line.

Tie lifecycle content directly to community threads or education resources for continuity.

3. Community: creating connection and belonging

Community turns one-way communication into a dialogue. It is where customers ask questions, share practices, and build relationships with each other and your brand. More importantly, it scales what would otherwise be one-to-one interactions.

Examples in action:

Notion’s online community showcases templates and workflows built by users, making community-generated content core to the product experience.

Adobe’s Behance platform gives creatives both inspiration and visibility, creating a professional ecosystem tied to Adobe tools.

Tactics to try:

Anchor every major event or campaign with a companion community discussion.

Build role- or goal-based spaces where members can exchange tactics cross-functionally.

Recognize and reward contributors to foster a sense of ownership and advocacy.

The power of integration

Each pillar delivers value on its own, but the real impact comes from integration. Imagine this sequence:

A customer receives a lifecycle email introducing a new feature.

That email links to a short education module demonstrating how to use it.

Completing the module prompts the customer to join a community discussion where peers share real-world applications.

This connected flow turns information into engagement, and engagement into action. Over time, it builds habits that drive retention and create advocates.

Designing your engagement marketing system

Building an engagement marketing system does not mean reorganizing overnight. It means clarifying roles, aligning channels, and creating shared goals.

Steps to take:

Audit existing efforts. Map where education, lifecycle, and community live today, and where they overlap.

Clarify ownership. Make each pillar distinct, but ensure cross-functional coordination.

Define shared goals. Align all pillars on business outcomes like adoption, retention, and expansion.

Pilot integration. Choose a single feature launch or campaign to weave education, lifecycle, and community together. Measure adoption lift.

Scale gradually. Use lessons from pilots to build repeatable playbooks.

The future of engagement marketing

Engagement marketing is not static. AI, automation, and analytics are reshaping how we surface insights and deliver content. But the principle remains: customers don’t want more noise, they want meaningful guidance and authentic connection. By uniting education, lifecycle, and community, GTM leaders can create an environment where customers learn, belong, and grow.

This is not just about retention. It is about building a GTM engine powered by community superintelligence, where the collective knowledge and engagement of your customers fuels smarter, faster growth.

Looking ahead

How is your organization currently balancing education, lifecycle, and community, and where do you see the biggest gaps to close?

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Table Of Contents

The Engagement Marketing Playbook: Combining Education, Lifecycle, and Community

How Education, Lifecycle, and Community Work Together to Drive GTM Success

What engagement marketing really means

Why this matters for GTM leaders

The three pillars of engagement marketing

1. Education: building customer capability

2. Lifecycle: delivering the right content at the right time

3. Community: creating connection and belonging

The power of integration

Designing your engagement marketing system

The future of engagement marketing

Looking ahead

Popular

Related