JUNGLE BASE GROUNDS
Jungle Base Grounds is a local coffee shop in Pampanga. The team behind Jungle Base shares how their digital community, consisting of regulars, new customers, and content creators who make the most out of their picturesque space on social media, has grown organically since they opened last November.
How did you utilize social media as a marketing strategy?
NICOLE AQUINO-BERNABE: The brand and the products have to be good for it to gain traction. You can have all the marketing strategies you want, pero kailangan strong talaga yung wordof-mouth presence pa rin. From word-of-mouth it translates to, “Someone talked about it, and I also see it online.” With that, parang na-amplify lang yung social media presence because people also talk about it. More than just sponsored and boosted posts, kailangan may word-of-mouth as
pect rin siya for people to really want to go and visit it. How did you grow your online community? AINA AQUINO: How we see social media is that it has to be a reflection of what the brand is and who we are. When you do that, you get to attract people with the same interests. When we post, we try to inject stories about the space or about the things we care about, like sustainability or locally made products. It so happens that the people who follow us are also interested in those things. That’s how the community kind of grew from there, because they believed in the same things we believed in, or they were interested in the things that we shared.
Do you have any practical tips on how to grow one’s social media engagement?
BER GARCIA: A practical tip is to know your audience. Hindi puwedeng naka-focus ka lang sa
brand itself. Like, kung ikaw may ari nito, hindi puwedeng yung gusto mo lang. Especially sa inquiries and reviews, doon mo malalaman kung anong hinahanap nila, at doon ko rin bine-base yung mga pino-post. Learn to listen: know what they want, and know how you can help.
What would you advise aspiring young business owners?
NICOLE: Just keep trying and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Personally, I’ve had brands that have closed; I have brands that are still there — and so many lessons talaga from trying and learning. As long as you’re not scared to try and to adjust, you’ll grow.
When you’re a business owner, you have to be able to accept criticisms all the time and not take it personally. Sometimes people will say to us, “The food is like this,” or “The drinks are too sweet.” You have to take it as a fact and then check it.
AINA: It’s important to have the willingness to learn, whatever field you’re trying to get into. Even though both of us weren’t baristas or chefs — we didn’t have that background — it was important that we took the time and investment to learn those things so we could understand the everyday operations.
You can plan all you want, but at one point you’re just going to have to take the lead and figure things out as you go. I think that requires a lot of courage, because you’re used to wanting everything to be perfect. You’re going to learn along the way. You have to allow yourself to make those mistakes and figure it out as you keep on going and growing.
NICOLE: There will come a time when you don’t have to know everything. Even ako, when I started my first business, feeling mo pag hindi mo alam, parang mali or palpak. But ask any business owner, they always make mistakes but they always learn from them.