Meta Advisory launched a start-up business line

META Advisory, Estonia’s leading public relations advisor, has created a new business team, Meta Alpha, focused on supporting the growth of start-up companies. The team is made up of experts in startup communications and marketing.

Over the years, META Advisory has advised Uber, Starship, Lightyear, Walt, Kwota, Äio, Bikeep, Snabb, Jobbatical, MeetFrank, Skeleton, Clevon, Eleport, Futugrid, GScan and many others. “We have already spent a decade supporting the growth of dozens of Estonian tech startups – from building messaging platforms to fundraising and communicating their expansion into foreign markets. The lessons learned are simple: start-ups communicate differently from profitable market leaders. A start-up that wants to grow fast also needs an advisor who can deliver rapid and measurable results, a willingness to experiment, make mistakes and try again from the ground up. But above all, flexibility – both in terms of the forms of collaboration and the changing objectives. Based on this experience, we designed a separate team with a higher risk appetite, with working time and capacity equal to that of our start-up clients, and with the ability to take into account the particularities of the start-up’s developmental stages,” said Ann Hiiemaa, partner of Meta Advisory and head of Meta Alpha.

Just as Meta Advisory was founded at the bottom of the great financial crisis in 2009, the time to build an advisory team with a tailored approach to start-ups is now, when tech finance is struggling and more needs to be done with less. It also means that META Alpha’s service portfolio is much broader than just media relations and local PR. The team includes the market’s strongest growth marketers, SEO specialists and business advisors.

“Our strength lies in our experience – our team members have built start-ups and consulted both leading Estonian start-ups and businesses just starting out. We’ve learned from our own successes and also from difficult decisions. We know what gets results and what just burns money and energy. We focus on where we can expect results and growth,” Hiiemaa concluded.

Prior to the creation of the new business line, Meta Alpha conducted a survey among startup leaders, which clearly showed that the main focus of the companies is raising money and launching new products or services. While more than half of start-up founders do their own marketing and communication, 30% of respondents use an in-house specialist and only 10% use an external agency.

According to Lily Mägi, Head of Client Relations at Meta Alpha, there are not enough strong people and resources with a marketing communications background in the early stages of start-up development. “One person cannot cover all the marketing needs of a company. META Alpha is a marketing communications team that works with the company on everything from positioning to growth marketing. Our job is to create order where a start-up company is still in disarray – we build up the functions that support the growth of the start-up’s core business,” added Mägi, who said the survey showed that it was important for one-third of respondents to reach the world’s leading media outlets that are important to their target groups. This is why Alpha is focusing on expanding its global PR strengths. “Meta Alpha is also part of Convoy, the world’s leading technology communications network. This enables us to quickly find strong partners in all the world’s major capitals and business centres,” said Mägi.

META Alpha is a business line of META Advisory, Estonia’s leading public relations advisor, created to support the development of start-ups in the Baltic region. The team includes Madis Trei, who focuses on growth marketing, SEO specialist Annika Helendi, copywriters Maria Magdalena Lamp and Vira Suarez, and product and service development consultant Anni Sinijärv. In addition, Meta Alpha’s startup portfolio includes international technology communications network Convoy and Rud Pedersen Group companies in Europe and other Meta Advisory partners worldwide.