Taavi Rebane is the Marketing Manager at Messente. Messente is a text messaging API and user authentication platform that allows businesses to connect with anyone around the world using their mobile phone. Taavi previously worked as a marketing and communications specialist at travel technology company Turnit.
What is Messente? A short elevator pitch, please!
Messente is a messaging platform for customers who value reliable and secure service and send business-critical information via messages: PIN codes, reminders, etc.
An example is an insurance company that sends a reminder to a customer before the contract is about to expire. Our main clientele comes from the financial sector. We are a business-critical messaging platform.
What are your main target markets?
Messente is a global platform and we have customers in Japan, Latin America and Southeast Asia, but our home market is still Europe. We have also gone to more distant markets because our customers in Europe operate in these markets, but we focus on Europe.
Describe the customer journey.
Our main marketing strategy is demand marketing. The journey starts with educating the customer – we are experts in messaging and we share our knowledge. We emphasise that messaging is a business-critical function and highlight problems that the customer has not thought about. Customers often do not analyse their messaging activities very thoroughly.
Ironically, there is also a lot to learn from scammers – for example, their copywriting is at a high level.
We talk a lot about fighting fraud and protecting your company and end customers. This is a topic that also speaks to very large companies. Everyone has probably come across fraudulent messages. If you have ordered something from an online store, you are at risk of receiving an SMS from fraudsters that looks exactly like a message sent by Omniva or DPD. They have become extremely skilled. Ironically, there is also a lot to learn from scammers – for example, their copywriting is at a high level.
We provide our customers with professional advice to detect and prevent such frauds and build tools to prevent fraud. By consuming the content we create, a potential customer who is already messaging should start to critically analyse their messaging partner and consider better alternatives, one of which could be Messente.
By continuously creating high-quality content this way, customers will develop trust in us and at some point they will contact us.
Then the sales process begins.
In B2B, you could target your messages even more precisely, at least by thinking about one specific customer and their needs. Have you thought about that?
We don't do hyper-personalisation nor ABM (account-based marketing) yet, ABM also requires different (larger) resources. Of course, in addition to demand marketing, we also have demand capture, for example, we do Google advertising and direct sales. Our customers today are not giants of the financial world, enterprise customers, but rather medium-sized companies with a couple of hundred employees, who are numerous in number and whom it is not reasonable for us to approach with hyper-personalised marketing with today's team and resources.
What is the average transaction size?
For the largest customers, the annual contract volume (ACV) can be in the millions. But there are not many of them and they are not exactly the simplest customers. Enterprise customers often have quite comprehensive wishes, requirements and conditions, from customer support to technical requirements. With such large clients, competition is fierce, price pressure is high, and the competitors are global giants, with whom it is difficult for us to compete. For us, the ideal client is one with a business volume of around tens to hundreds of thousands of euros per year.
In large companies, it is often difficult to understand who makes decisions, who needs to be influenced. Who exactly is your customer, what is their job title?
In most cases, there is no such position as a “message manager” in companies. Our customers today are product managers, marketing people, people in the operations field. It is quite difficult to address all of them at the same time in terms of marketing.
The end user of our product is usually not a decision-maker at the board level. But the board decides on the conclusion of contracts, and therefore it is necessary to find and create messages that would appeal to these people.
Another direction in marketing is to move more and more towards the end user. The person who influences decisions can bring our offer to the decision-maker’s table and by whom the choice will be made later.
How do you find out what appeals to your potential customers?
We conduct interviews, surveys, and research. It is quite difficult to get agreements for interviews, it requires a lot of patience. We offer, for example, an Amazon gift card in return, which makes persuasion a little easier. We also have a growing community of users, we get feedback from them.
We also use the Wynter message testing platform. It is relatively expensive, but we have received quite important input through it and, for example, have thoroughly changed our website.
How does prospecting, or identifying potential customers, work for you?
We are currently actively working on updating this area. We will start using ABM techniques more in sales work. We plan to conduct several tests and find out how sales conversations can best be conducted. We still start from our current ideal customer profile and try to get customers from nearby markets to talk to us in order to test messages and try to find just the right system to escalate to a wider market or region.

So far we have mainly talked about digital marketing. But in B2B face-to-face communication is also very important, for example at trade fairs and conferences. What is your experience in this area?
It is worth visiting a trade fair, but often it is not worth buying a trade fair booth, which can cost tens of thousands of euros, even a hundred thousand. The best thing is to get your people on stage, this is usually done through a conference sponsorship package.
In the case of conferences, the quality of the participants is the main thing, because even a conference with 50 decision-makers can be very useful. There you are in a clear focus and you know that every person you talk to can be a decision-maker or a potential customer.
Face-to-face meetings are also very important, they help to dispel the image of our Eastern European background a little.
Events with a few hundred participants are the best for us, because it is quite difficult to get attention at mega-events with tens of thousands of participants. In the case of conferences, the quality of the participants is the main thing, because even a conference with 50 decision-makers can be very useful. There you are in a clear focus and you know that every person you talk to can be a decision-maker or a potential customer.
The main pillar of your marketing is demand marketing. But it is quite difficult to measure and in my opinion many people give up on demand marketing precisely because of this.
It is a myth that demand marketing cannot be measured! You can, but it has to be done differently than when measuring demand capture campaigns. For example, we measure reach and engagement. In addition, you need to ask your customers open-ended questions about their journey – how they found us. In this context, it is not important whether they came from a specific post, but what is important is that the posting as an action brought them to your company.
Success in demand marketing comes gradually and although it is a long-term strategy, the first signs can be seen quite quickly.
The first goal should be to find 10 stable leads every month. Contacts who came through one of your demand marketing channels – be it LinkedIn, podcasts, etc. If you can do this consistently and have several hundred thousand dollars in leads coming in within a quarter, then you have proven that the strategy works.
In my opinion, Messente is the most active Estonian company on LinkedIn. Your manager Uku Tomikas is in my (and thousands of others') thread with his video messages almost every day. However, if you look at the engagement, the numbers are not very high.
We don't look at each piece of content or post separately, but at the results of the activity as a whole. We measure the ROI of each piece of content, for example, an e-book. But this is only one touchpoint in a complex and often long B2B customer journey. The number of downloads of an e-book does not show anything, because those who downloaded it may have been interested only in that book, not in our products. They had a completely different motivation.
Of course, it takes time to see the results of demand marketing on LinkedIn, but you can still see the first signs early on.
By the way, 90% of users leave no sign on LinkedIn that they saw your content. But they consume it – watch the video, read the text. The impact is still there.
Should you promote your company's corporate profile on LinkedIn or highlight individuals, brand ambassadors?
People want to communicate with other people on social media, not with companies. People trust people, not companies. LinkedIn's algorithms also do not favor the spread of posts made on corporate profiles.
We prefer video, because the impact of video is the greatest. Here are some tips:
The quality of video production should not be overestimated, but editing is important.
The beginning of the video must attract attention.
A phone is enough to record the video, but the sound must be of high quality.
Sound is even more important than the image.
An overproduced video may not work well because it does not look authentic.
Good things in marketing take time and effort, but it pays off in the long run.
There is a lot of talk about content creation, yet there are few good examples. Why do so few brands create quality content?
The short answer is that it is difficult. It is much easier to run a Google Ads campaign, tune it, and see the results immediately. But it is only short-term, with increasing inefficiency, and does not build your brand.
Content creation is also largely brand building and it is a long-term activity, the impact of which will later be many times greater than the activities of paid channels.
Good things are hard to do, if it were easy, everyone would do it. It is hard to find good content creators, it is hard to find the right topics. The big challenge is to create content consistently. Content creation and demand marketing are a long-term strategy, a way of thinking about providing value to your customers. Good things in marketing do take time and effort, but it is very worthwhile in the long run.
Taavi's recommendations - which brands' content should you follow?