You can have thousands of followers, impressive reach, and a very active content calendar. But how many people actually feel connected to your brand?

At HeyOrca’s Community-Led Marketing Summit, marketers from Canva, beehiiv, CrowdRiff, VIASOX, and Candybox Marketing shared ways to build stronger relationships with the people behind those engagement numbers.

Their advice puts participation, trust, and belonging at the center of community growth.

Here are five ideas worth borrowing:

• Create opportunities to belong. Canva emphasized giving people ways to participate, from customer meetups to spaces where members can exchange ideas and help each other.
• Make conversation part of the job. beehiiv’s Chi Thukral recommends spending 30 minutes a week joining relevant conversations. Think of it as relationship-building time that can also uncover content ideas.
• Choose relevance over follower counts. CrowdRiff highlighted the value of niche creators whose audiences trust their recommendations, even when their communities are relatively small.
• Let customers influence what comes next. VIASOX turned a community member’s love of sloths into a product line and recurring tradition. Pay attention to the ideas your audience brings to the table.
• Measure participation and advocacy. Candybox Marketing encouraged looking beyond likes and follower growth to understand referrals, relationships, and community health.

You don’t need to launch a massive Discord server or create another social channel to get started. A small group of engaged customers can be a meaningful community when people have reasons to connect.

The question is whether you’re giving people something to participate in, or just another account to follow.

Head to HeyOrca for more.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, here’s what we’re covering:

🔒 Apple’s secret blocklist: How Safari’s restrictions work and which ad tech companies have been affected.

📉 The impact on advertisers and publishers: Why disruptions to ad delivery and audience signals could affect campaign performance, publisher revenue, and programmatic advertising.

📊 The measurement problem: Why winning an ad auction doesn’t always mean an ad actually appeared on a user’s screen.

⚖️ Privacy vs. platform power: What happens when the company controlling the browser also operates an advertising business?

🛠️ What marketers should do next: Audit your ad tech dependencies, verify campaign delivery, strengthen your first-party data strategy, and ask vendors about their contingency plans.

Apple’s approach raises a bigger question for the open web: How do we protect user privacy while maintaining the infrastructure that supports digital advertising?

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• AI Is Killing Entry-Level Marketing Jobs (12:55)
• Microdramas Are Taking Over Marketing (10:43)
• AI CEOs Want to Slow Down. The AI Race Won’t. (11:39)
• Reddit Is Changing SEO & AI Search (10:55)
• The Creator Economy Rules Gaming (43:53)
• Dark Patterns Are Becoming a Legal Problem for Meta (12:06)
• Dissecting the Brand Apology (11:35)
• Google Image Search is… Pinterest? (9:26)
• Sony & The Death of Physical Media (8:57)

🎙️ Now streaming on Youtube, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music.

The Daily Carnage reaches decision-makers at brands, agencies, SaaS companies, and startups who are actively researching solutions, evaluating vendors, and making purchasing decisions every day.

Now, we’re opening up a limited number of Friends of The Daily Carnage partnerships for brands that want to build a consistent presence with our audience, not just run a one-off ad.

Friends get discounted sponsorship inventory, priority booking, first access to unsold placements, bonus opportunities, and performance reviews throughout the year.

Partnership levels include dedicated newsletter features, premium placements, podcast pre-rolls, classified ads, social promotion, and more.

Past sponsors include Canva, HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Marketing Brew, and dozens of other leading brands.

Interested in reaching marketers who actually click? Reach out to get started!

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• 💬 Join r/TheDailyCarnage on Reddit
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😎 See ya there.

Apparently, even supervillains have a favorite fast-food spot.

KFC is teaming up with Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday, and it’s siding with the villain. In the new campaign, Doctor Doom surveys a city reduced to rubble, where every fast-food restaurant has been destroyed. Every restaurant except one very lucky KFC.

Created by Mother, the crossover also includes a Doom-inspired menu, limited-edition packaging, and collectible Colonel Sanders figurines dressed as Marvel characters.

Destroying an entire city is one thing. Destroying the Colonel’s chicken? Apparently, that’s where Doom draws the line.

Philco, 1948