How Establishing Buyer Personas Helped Us Strengthen Our Brand

Really understanding and executing your company’s brand identity is far harder than it looks. Many companies boast values and philosophies which they surely admire, but fall short of living in daily practice. This is why it takes a certain amount of insight, practice and research to truly discover a brand’s identity and how to build that identity into marketing efforts, everyday client interactions and touchpoints.

At NTC Texas, we discovered a particular exercise during our yearly branding conversations that gave us a level of insight we had never had before – Establishing Buyer Personas.

What Are Buyer Personas?

As described by the marketing gurus at Hubspot, “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal client based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” In short, these are simple profiles you build, describing your ideal client, based on interviews and insight gathered from existing clients, and even those potential clients who may have chosen a competitor.

Why Are Buyer Personas So Insightful?

Because instead of focusing on understanding your own company first, you are focused on understanding your clients, why they chose you and their journey through the buying process. Most companies make the mistake of trying to establish their brand identity by only focusing on themselves and their ideas. By focusing on our clients, what they were looking for when they were researching products, why they chose us and how they went about making their final decision – we gained an incredible amount of insight into what our strengths are as a company.

How Did We Conduct Our Buyer Persona Interviews?

With a lot of help from the Buyer Persona Institute and DMD, we were able to take a short class on conducting persona interviews and get through the process in a timely manner. We learned the basic guidelines to conducting buyer persona interviews and put together some mock interviews on our own. We practiced those interviews internally before we reached out to our clients. Finally, we compiled a list of our current clients as well as a list of those potential clients who chose a competitor and started setting up interviews. It didn’t hurt to offer a small gift card as a token of appreciation for their time and insight.

What Did We Do With the Data?

In the end, we were left with some great recordings of interviews conducted with clients that loved us as well as some prospects that chose our competitors. Their answers were GOLD. They described all the ways in which we did things right, some of the things we didn’t do perfectly and in some cases, why we weren’t a fit for their needs. All of this data was priceless. We used a format provided by the Buyer Persona Institute titled The 5 Rings of Buying Insight to organize quotes and standout info taken from the interviews. Once done organizing our information, we gathered as a team and translated the feedback into the strengths that would help us direct our brand and narrow our focus on the ideal client.

The great part about this process is, it doesn’t have to end. For us at NTC Texas it has been an ongoing process of discovery. With every interview conducted we are afforded better insight and a more laser focus into what our clients need and want. I would highly recommend this process to any company looking to better connect with their customers, strengthen their brand, and make a significant difference in understanding their business.

About NTC Texas

Since 2004 NTC Texas has partnered with businesses across multiple industries providing customized payment processing services. If your business is looking to accept payments and are overwhelmed with options, unfamiliar with rates or are just plain frustrated with an existing processor, you have come to the right place. Interested in finding out what payment processing technology would work best for your business? Take the Quiz!