Interview with Matthieu Vaxelaire, CEO, Mention

Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be part of a social media monitoring company?

I’m the CEO at Mention. My main focus is to enable our team to work happily and safely and to try to make the right decisions for company growth.

I started out studying finance in Belgium (I’m from Brussels). From there I went to work in banking in London and Paris, before realizing that I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I joined eFounders – a startup studio that creates and fosters new businesses – and we launched several startups from there. In the end, I joined Mention (an eFounders company) as CEO, because I’m convinced that every company needs to know what’s said about itself and its competitors online.

What are the decisive factors that influenced Mention to partner with BuzzSteam, Bitly, Later and others?

We wanted to create a unique hub for people new to (or wanting to improve their) influencer marketing strategy. We already have a lot of resources on influencer marketing, and we wanted to find other businesses who could provide different perspectives.

We chose Later, Bitly, Buzzstream, The Shelf, and Shane Barker because they all care about influencer marketing and have a lot to offer, but each of those brands is quite different from the others. This gives the project balance and lets us tackle issues that users have from different points of view.

How do you see the contemporary trends in customer experience management and social media tools influencing enterprise content strategies?

Customer voices are becoming an even bigger part of brands’ content strategies, and vice versa. Reviews and case studies are so valuable to marketing teams, and finding these really isn’t possible without a good customer experience.

At Mention, for instance, we love sharing customer stories about how they use the tool. That’s so much more authentic than any blog post we could write. But we can only get these stories because our customer success and sales teams work so closely with each customer. They really understand their goals and problems, and they work together to improve both.

What startups are you watching/keen on right now?

There are lots of great French startups at the moment. We’re big fans of Hull.io, Livestorm, Slite, and Aircall.

What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

Apologies for the long list (and this is just the marketing stack!): HubSpot for lead management and inbound marketing; Customer.io for email newsletters; Hull.io as our main user database; Intercom for chat in-app and on the website; WordPress for the website and blog;

Would you tell us about your standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)

It’s not a single campaign, but more of a strategy we’ve been using for a while now.

We got heavily into webinars in 2016, and have never looked back. We specifically try to work with influencers or other companies who we know have a big name (or a big database). As a lead generation strategy, it’s been by far our most successful, and is lower effort than other content marketing we do.

So we identify other voices or brands with similar audiences to ours (small-to-medium businesses and agencies), and partner to tackle a problem or explain a strategy to the audience. The live format adds value to the viewer, as they can ask questions and interact.

This lets us generate leads in large numbers in a relatively short amount of time. We try to measure success based on both the number of leads generated, but also how qualified those leads are.

One word that best describes how you work.

Enthusiasm!

What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?

Zapier – A lot of our aren’t yet integrated, so Zapier helps build connections between them.

Slack – We love staying connected this way, and many of the team members use it outside the office too.

Trello – It’s so useful for project management, and makes it easy to share work.

What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

• Night shift mode on my Mac and iPhone all day long to be able to work more without a headache 🙂

What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

I’m late to the party but I just started listening to podcasts. Such a great way to get info on the go!

And I’m currently reading Principle by Ray Dalio.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Don’t get married in Vegas!

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Gilles Bertaux, CEO of Livestorm.

Thank you Matthieu! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.