🕵🏻‍♂️ The Dark Social Playbook

How to create awareness in the channels you can’t target directly and nurture your TAM - Fullfunnel.io and Chili Piper playbook.

For many B2B companies, communities and associations is the core awareness and pipeline generation channel. These communities host events & conferences, produce industry reports and act as the main market “knowledge” hub (think about cybersecurity, FMCG, healthcare, IT, etc).

But the truth is that in most companies there is no strategy to engage with communities and influence the dark social aside from the standard playbook.

You paid $10K to sponsor an industry report or get a booth at the event. You got a list of 500 sign-ups. Marketing declared victory. Sales got a spreadsheet.

Two months later?

Zero pipeline. Zero meetings. And a passive-aggressive Slack thread about “marketing-qualified garbage.”

The problem isn’t the communities. It’s in the lack of strategy.

Today I’m breaking down:

• Why your community strategy fails (and it’s not the community fault)

• The exact playbook we (Fullfunnel.io) and Chili Piper (feat. Arthur Castillo) used to transform community engagement from vanity metrics into actual pipeline

• The community investment checklist (from Chili Piper’s $500K lessons)

• ROI timeline and expectations

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Sign up for Sales in ABM: The good, the bad and the ugly.

We’re co-hosting this episode with Elric Legloire who workes as account-based enterprise sales rep at Chili Piper.

Join us to learn:

• The role and responsibilities of the sales team in ABM

• ⁠Account prioritization - what companies to select for 1:1 ABM

• Account planning - how to holistically engage the buying committee

• How to leverage business dinners to engage target accounts

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Why your community strategy is failing (and it’s not the community’s fault)

Here is the standard community engagement playbook I’ve seen:

• Sponsor community/event → Get attendee list → Mark as MQL and transfer to sales.

• Add everyone to retargeting campaigns

• Launch email nurture sequence begging for demos

Often it ends up as a cannon spam.

I once experienced a truly hilarious story.

One vendor invited me to speak at the webinar. Obviously, my email ended up in their sign-up list. Starting from the next day after the webinar, the sales rep from the same vendor started following up with me via email and LinkedIn, ignoring my message where I said I was a speaker. 🤦

I personally think this is exact reason why B2B companies struggle to get sign ups for their webinars/events and get 0 replies to their follow-ups.

Let’s look at the community event from the buyer’s perspective:

• They attend the webinar to learn, not to be pitched

• They engage in communities to connect with peers, not vendors

The fundamental mistake is treating community engagement as a buying signal.

Community members aren’t leads.

Community is the starting point to build the relationship with your target buyers and create awareness. But most companies burn those relationships immediately by pitching too hard, too fast.

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3-pillars dark social playbook used by Fullfunnel.io and Chili Piper to drive pipeline.

Here is our entire playbook.

PILLAR 1: FINDING THE RIGHT COMMUNITY.

Chili Piper sponsored 10+ communities since 2020. Here’s the checklist Arthur Castillo created after investing over $500k in community activities.

1.EVALUATING COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT.

Look at:

✓ What are the most popular channels in the community?

✓ How many responses per thread (vs. admin-driven posts)?

✓ How many unique daily/weekly logins?

✓ What percentage of posts come from members vs. admins?

If engagement is primarily admin-driven, you’re essentially buying ads—not accessing a real community.

2. EVALUATING ICP.

Check:

✓ Mentions of your company in the last 90/120/180 days

✓ Mentions of your competitors in the same timeframe

✓ Mentions of keywords your product addresses (be specific—not just industry terms)

2. EVALUATING AWARENESS-CREATION CHANNELS.

Figure out:

✓ Does the community have a newsletter with high open rates?

✓ Do they host events? What are registration vs. show-up rates?

✓ Can you negotiate custom program (not just standard sponsor packages)?

Arthur’s biggest insight:

“The best community sponsorships weren’t ones that just said ‘here’s a package with three webinars and an email blast.’ They were ones where we negotiated custom programs—like co-hosting research, running integrated campaigns, or bringing community members to our dinners in key cities.”

Takeaway: Don’t rent audiences. Build actual integrations with communities that make sense for your buyers.

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BECOME A FULL-FUNNEL B2B MARKETER

Full-Funnel Academy is a comprehensive B2B marketing training and Slack community for B2B marketers who care about revenue and want to move the needle.

Academy includes:

• All our B2B marketing courses including ABM playbook, Demand Gen Playbook, LinkedIn Allbound marketing playbook and 11 more courses that aren’t available publicly + all upcoming courses.

• Private Slack community to answer all your questions

• Personalized learning plan. If you are not sure what skills you’d develop in the first place and how to get maximum from the program, we can create a personalized learning plan accordingly to the time you can dedicate to education.

• Behind-the-scenes sessions. See what’s working and what doesn’t work and why on the “behind the scenes” sessions where we review the campaigns we are running for our clients and us.

Learn more and join the academy here.

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PILLAR 2: REGULAR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT.

Unfortunately, if you want to drive great results from community engagement, community members must feel that you’re one of them. How can you achieve it?

Via regular engagement in threads, attending community events, involving your SME. You’ll get much higher engagement with your sponsored activities if both community admins and community members know you.

Check this guide where we explain how to engage buyers that are not active on social:

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PILLAR 3: VALUE-ADDED NURTURING.

Here is a detailed breakdown of our framework.

1.Qualification and Segmentation.

Before you do anything else: qualify the accounts and segment by tier.

Remove from the list non-ICP buyers. Next, segment ICP by three tiers.

Here is the guide where we share step-by-step process:

Lastly, define the buying committee role: Champion, Decision-maker, or Influencer

There is a reason why we are doing this.

If you treat all contacts the same way, don’t segment and qualify, you’re likely:

• Deal with sales frustration and the feedback about garbage leads

• Been ignored by tier 1 accounts that require fully personalized engagement

• Your message won’t resonate with the different buying committee roles.

I know that at this point you might say: “But we don’t have resources to create personalized emails for different tiers of accounts and buying committee roles?”

Fair enough.

That’s why we do a completely different follow-up.

2.Sending content hubs in the post event email.

Instead of blasting everyone with generic follow-ups, we used to create dedicated content hubs for every community event we’ve sponsored.

How it works:

• After the event, create a content hub (we use Aligned).

• Include: event recording, slide deck, related case studies, implementation frameworks

Track who consumes what content—this reveals actual interest

The insights from this approach are golden.

Someone who visits your content hub 34 times and spends an hour consuming materials is definitely interested in the topic you’ve covered. Content consumption patterns tell you what problems they’re actually trying to solve, allowing you to personalize based on their interests rather than guessing.

3. Progressive Profiling Through Multiple Channels.

Don’t rely on a single touchpoint. Instead, engage on different channels to understand where buyers actually are in their journey (you’ll need sales buy-in for this).

Example:

Instead of following up with: “Thanks for attending our webinar! Want a demo?”

Try this: “Did we cover the questions you had, or was something left uncovered? My marketing team is working on ABM strategy for 2026 guide—curious what’s the #1 thing you’d love us to cover ?”

Marketing can do a progressive profiling via email by asking a segmentation question:

“Can you share what’s your #1 priority right now? What topic are you most interested in?

Here is our example.

Based on their answer, route them to relevant nurturing content sequences—not demo-begging sequences.

4. Add qualified buyers to relevant retargeting layers.

The key point is to match the current level of demand. Here is a detailed playbook: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/demand-generation-for-long-sales and course.

5. Enroll Tier 1 & 2 Accounts into personalized ABM programs.

For your highest-potential accounts from community engagement, graduate them to fully personalized ABM programs.

Check our detailed guide: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/how-to-create-abm-playbooks-new-pipeline and course.

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Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.

If any of these challenges sound familiar:

• You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.

• You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it

• Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.

• You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.

• You clearly see that you’re already behind your revenue targets

We can help.

We’ll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.

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How can you replicate it?

Let’s say you sponsored a community event on “B2B demand generation strategy” that generated 300 sign ups.

What you shouldn’t do:

• Send an email blast: “Thanks for attending! Book a demo!”

• Send all contacts to sales and ask them to follow-up

• Add everybody to social retargeting.

Instead, use this framework and timeline.

Week 1: Content Hub + Segmentation

• Qualify accounts: 180 fit ICP, 120 don’t

• Create dedicated content hub with recording, deck, related resources

• Tier segmentation: 25 Tier 1, 60 Tier 2, 95 Tier 3

Week 2-3: Progressive Profiling

• Sales LinkedIn outreach to Tier 1/2: “Did we cover what you needed, or was something missing? What are you working on for 2024?”

• Email to all ICP accounts: “What’s your #1 priority?” with topic selection

• Track content hub engagement: Identify 40 accounts with 3+ visits

• Map out 1-1 account plans for Tier 1 accounts and reach out with the bridge activities (strategy sessions, product snapshots, etc)

• Start multi-threading to buying committee members

Weeks 4-6: Demand Gen Layer

• Route Tier 3 accounts to email nurture aligned with their selected topic

• Add all qualified accounts to LinkedIn retargeting with educational content (not product pitches)

• Identify 8 highly engaged accounts from content hub data

• Start deep account research on 8 highly engaged and reach oyt to them with personalized bridge activitiees

This isn’t sexy. It’s not “10X your MQLs in 30 days.”

But it actually works—because it’s aligned with how buyers actually buy.

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ROI timeline and expectations

Here’s the question everyone asks: “When do community investments turn into pipeline?”

The honest answer: It depends—but probably longer than you want.

Here is our experience.

• Short-term (0-3 months): Brand awareness, relationship building, account identification

• Medium-term (3-6 months): Engaged accounts, content consumption patterns, progressive profiling insights

• Long-term (6-12+ months): Sales opportunities, especially for complex/enterprise deals

The mistake you’d avoid is measuring community sponsorship the same way you measure paid ads. Communities are top-of-funnel awareness plays—not bottom-of-funnel conversion tactics.

What you CAN measure immediately:

• Account engagement (community threads, evnet sign ups, content consumption in content hubs)

• Booked “bridge” activities

• Replies to sales follow-ups

What you CANNOT measure immediately:

• Direct pipeline attribution

• Linear “this event produced X revenue”

If your leadership expects immediate pipeline from community sponsorships, you need to reset expectations before you write the check.

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TLDR

Dark social and community engagement strategy often fails because companies treat community engagement as linear funnel. Stop treating community members like MQLs. Start treating them like peers you want to build relationships with—and watch what happens when you actually help instead of pitch.

Key rules for an efficient dark social strategy:

✅ Community engagement is an awareness touchpoint, not a buying signal

✅ Event sign-ups mean “I want to learn,” not “I want to buy”

✅ Scalability comes from non-scalable operations with your best accounts

✅ You need 3-12 months of nurture before most accounts convert

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Watch Full-Funnel Live - Dark Social: How to create awareness and generated demand in the communities.

*If you want to attend the next live episode, sign up here to receive an invite. Usually, we host them every Wednesday at 3:30 pm CET (Central Europe) - 9:30 am ET (Eastern Time).

In this episode of Full-Funnel Live, Andrei and his special guest Arthur Castillo (Chili Piper) spoked about:

• How Chili Piper drives awareness through Slack communities: examples of dark social programs

• How to measure the success of your dark social & community engagement strategy

• How to define engaged accounts and proceed with nurturing and activation

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