Do you know that community plays a significant role in business development? Joining a business community can be a way or strategy to grow your business.
Additionally, involvement in a community can also increase brand awareness, build a positive reputation, and help you establish as many connections as possible.
A business community is a group of people who have the same business interests or ventures. They usually build connections with others both online and offline for business purposes.
Imagine if you have a business that relies on innovation and creativity, you would certainly need to exchange ideas with others or a community, right? Often, they understand and comprehend what you want to achieve.
Discussing with people who have many ideas, experiences, and connections will certainly make your business easier. It can be said that having a community is like having supporters.
It can be said that a community is a business asset with unexpected value, so it is important for you to build communication for good business development.
Benefits of Community in Business
There are at least three roles of community in business development. Here are the details.
As an opportunity to increase customer loyalty
Maintaining loyal customers must be done because they want to be understood or recognized.
So, when you focus on building a community, it means you are ready to get closer to customers and understand their needs.
Through the community, customers have a medium to channel their aspirations.
This way they feel recognized and have a role.
From here, you have the opportunity to increase loyalty to increase customer loyalty.
Read also about the update Loyalty Program from Opaper Application.
As a marketing medium
Communities can be an effective medium for marketing strategies by actively involving customers.
Through the community, communication between customers becomes easier and helps your business get valuable input in improving the quality of products or services.
The invitations made are also not forced, the information provided is more useful, both for business owners, consumers, and the market.
As a learning center
From the community, you can learn a lot about business. Of course, this makes the community a learning center or a place for joint learning.
As quoted from techinasia, MailChimp or the first email marketing service provided a special column for new users to provide product development suggestions.
Now, this is an example of building a community by involving users.
This method is needed to meet the desires of the target market and cover the shortcomings proposed by users. From there, you can improve your services to be even better.
Check out some Opaper webinars and events with several F&B communities.
Advantages of Being Involved in a Community
The main goal of building and being involved in a business community is to build a relationship with consumers. Here are some advantages of building a community.
Increasing brand awareness
Increasing brand awareness or people's awareness of the business you are running is not easy.
Even though you have promoted on social media, but still with the number of businesses that promote, it makes your brand difficult to develop amid competition.
Conversely, promotion by word-of-mouth can sometimes be an effective way to grow brand awareness. Consumers tend to trust recommendations from close people more.
Well, the community can be a marketing channel with high engagement because community members are people who have the same interests.
For example, if you have a coffee shop business, then you can join a coffee lover's community.
You can market products to people who like coffee.
This can certainly increase brand awareness and potentially increase sales. If they buy your product and like it, they will not hesitate to recommend it to relatives and friends.
This circle will continue to spin and in turn make your business grow.
Gaining and increasing consumer trust
Consumers, if they buy products, are more because they already know and trust a brand.
If consumers have no reason to trust your brand, they will buy products from competitors.
It becomes a challenge and your task to be able to gain consumer trust.
Well, joining a business community can be one way to gain consumer trust.
If you participate and are active in the community such as sharing positive content, consumers will see your business as trustworthy and deserving of trust.
Facilitating market research
Market research is very necessary for businesses to know consumer habits such as what items are in demand, shopping patterns, shopping times, to the minimum nominal spending.
In general, market research that is often done is by distributing surveys.
But this method is not entirely effective because consumers surveyed often give answers that are different from their habits.
On the other hand, market research through the community provides more accurate results.
You can do market research by observing the characteristics of community members.
This method is also more cost-effective because you no longer need to spend a lot of money to do market research.
Even community members can help attract potential customers.
Update information
Being active in the community provides opportunities to get information from fellow members about market trends, content that the public likes, and so on.
In addition, joining a community can also be a way to get creative ideas for developing a business.
Getting feedback from consumers.
A study mentioned that as many as 97 percent of consumers read reviews before buying something. If not, they will not buy products with poor reviews.
Well, joining a community provides an opportunity to get feedback from consumers. Community members will provide suggestions and feedback related to your product.
Building a positive culture
The next advantage of being involved in a community is building a positive culture. For example, you can hold charity events or the like.
By developing a positive culture, your business not only has an effect on consumers, community members, and the wider community.
How to Play a Role in the Community
In the digital era like today, joining a community is not difficult. You can look for communities that match your business niche and start joining.
The easiest way, you can join a community through social media. Currently, there are many communities spread across various social media platforms and look for those that match your business niche market.
If you have joined a community online, you can continue to actively participate offline, for example by offering to be a content feature creator or becoming a speaker for certain events.
Consider the community as a place to learn and a means to share knowledge with other members.
Suggestions and creative ideas can be motivation to develop a better business. Communities can also help expand your network to reach more consumers and be more focused.
Yes, the community plays an important role in business because it can be an arena or a place to meet new people. There you have the opportunity to meet consumers and can also meet investors for business.
In addition to building and being active in the community, you also need to take advantage of the Opaper application for business development.
In the digital era like today, not all work can be done manually. Your business must be more digital by using the Opaper application.
Opaper is an application that can help make business operations more effective. This business application can overcome your anxiety as a business owner, especially businesses engaged in the F&B field.
If you have problems such as lack of staff and high turnover, messy financial records, monthly POS system costs have to be paid upfront, online orders are often canceled by ojol, marketplace commission costs are too high, then it's time for you to switch to Opaper.
All your obstacles can be overcome with one application.
Hurry, register your business at Opaper. You can download the application for free through the Play Store and App Store.