Listed in: Marketing

Creating strong partnerships to build brand awareness

Customer Success Manager, Severine Lenting, shares her insight on using partnerships to help build brand awareness - and brand advocates.

4 minute read

The regional BNZ Connect events are bringing practical and helpful advice to Kiwi businesses all around the country.

Severine Lenting from leading payment gateway provider, Paystation by Trade Me, shared her insights on building brand awareness and growing sales at our Connect event. Her presentation was packed with advice on creating strong partnerships, getting clear on your goals, and the importance of staying nimble. Here are some of the key insights.

Partnerships can help build brand awareness, trust, and sales

For Paystation by Trade Me, strong partnerships have been key to business success.

“Paystation’s main business model is basically selling through our partners,” says Severine. “So we focus strongly on growing sales through creating strong partnerships.” For businesses that rely on collaboration, staying on the look-out for new partnership streams is a must. Severine explains that recently, this was a big focus for Paystation.

“Research was showing that people looking for payment options usually talk to either their bank or their web developer,” Severine explains. “We already had a really strong bank network, so we started specifically targeting web developers, and trying to understand why they’d be interested in working with us.”

Building stronger word of mouth

Word of mouth is considered one of the most effective forms of marketing and goes hand in hand with close partnerships.

As Severine puts it, Paystation’s partnerships have effectively given them an extended sales team. “Payment gateways is a very crowded market,” she says. “Most of our customers try to get information from their friends, or similar businesses, to try to understand their best option.”

That’s when having a network that explains what you do and advocates on your behalf becomes a powerful sales tool.

Validating your assumptions

Most businesses tend to have a general idea who their customers are, and a gut instinct for where to focus their efforts. Severine recommends going a step further and validating those assumptions with research.

“Talk to your customers, research your competition, and have a plan for the year to help focus your efforts.” Building partnerships can be a long game that takes a lot of time, effort, and energy. So, make sure it all pays off by checking that your assumptions about where the opportunities lie are correct.

Have clear and measurable goals in place.

Once you’ve got a plan sorted, set some goals against it. Severine recommends checking in on things regularly. “After three or six months, look back at your plan and measure how it’s going,” she says. “How many leads did you get from that event? How many customers did you get through that reseller? Is it what you expected, and was it worth it?”

Severine’s advice is to stay nimble and be ready to change your strategy if things aren’t working. “If you’re investing $1,000 in sponsoring an event and it brings in $200 in revenue, is that okay or not? Maybe it’s okay if you were just looking for brand awareness. But if the goal was sales, you may need to revise your strategy.”

Paystation was one of New Zealand’s first ever payment gateway providers and was acquired by Trade Me five years ago. Today, Paystation by Trade Me partner with a wide range of businesses - from start-ups to multinationals - helping process billions of dollars in transactions across New Zealand.

Related articles

References to third party websites are provided for your convenience only. BNZ accepts no responsibility for the availability or content of such websites.

This material, and the content provided in BNZ Connect Events, is for general information purposes only and does not constitute, and is not intended as, personalised financial advice or as a replacement for legal advice. This material should not be relied on as personalised advice and BNZ strongly recommends you seek advice specific to your personal financial or legal situation from a qualified adviser. The views expressed by the individuals and speakers in this material, and at the BNZ Connect Panel events, are those of the individuals and speakers and do not purport to represent the views or policies of BNZ. Neither BNZ nor any person involved in the material accepts any liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage arising out of the use of, or reliance on, all or any part of the content.