For our twenty first interview series, we feature Clément Delangue Head of Marketing at Mention. Mention offers a media monitoring app for brands to obtain filtered, organized and prioritized information from the web and social networks.

In this interview, you can read more about his work at Mention, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.

Your location: Paris & New York

Your favorite gadget: We have mention smartphone covers that stick your iPhone to any surface, like a wall, or a window.

You start your day with: A walk.

Your favorite time-saving trick: I forget what is not important — even if it seems urgent.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: Buffer Blog , Inside Intercom, Hacker News.

"Mention is the best way for professionals to go beyond Google Alerts."

Describe an average day at Mention?

I usually wake up without an alarm clock. That’s a clear sign for me that I enjoy what I’m working on, rather than just working for the paycheck. I walk to the office. It’s an important time for me to think about the day that’s beginning, what my priorities will be, and what I need to achieve. I’m ready to get as many things done as I can, before the office really gets going. Once the day starts, I’ll often be brought in for questions and meetings with different teams, meaning I’ll have less time for more long-term projects and ideas.

Each day is different from the next, especially as we’ve grown and my position has changed. I started as an inbound marketer, then moved to managing our marketing team, and I’m now in charge of our US expansion on top of that. This is why I haven’t developed a completely fixed daily routine, and it’s one of the reasons I really love startups, because otherwise, I get bored pretty fast if it’s the same day in and day out. The only thing that doesn’t change is my walk home — usually after having grabbed some beers with friends. Again, this walk home is important for me as a way to create some distance from the day-to-day work and think of our long-term goals.

How is mention different than Google Alerts?

Mention is the best way for professionals to go beyond Google Alerts. It’s a next step and can really improve your media monitoring ROI. In addition to detecting more accurate mentions — especially from social networks — we’re also detecting them in real-time, providing advanced tools for brands, plus analytics and collaborative tools for teams. With the ability to react to mentions directly within the app, mention saves time and centralizes your community management. All this with sleek interfaces across multiple platforms, including email alerts, desktop, web, and mobile apps.

As a marketer/founder, what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

It may sound like a strange one, but my favorite productivity hack is to forget. As a startup guy, you won’t be able to do everything. So you should focus on the things that will have the biggest impact. I’ve found that the best way to do so is not to use a to-do list, because they’ll make you regret failing to do everything. And you can never do everything. On the contrary, I only do what I remember or what someone makes me remember — which usually means it’s important.

As a person who is well-versed with online marketing, I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts. What are the top 3–5 tools you use?

I do. Intercom is probably the most important tool besides mention that we use. I’ve written an article about why: “How Mention Increased Activation Rate by 50%.” In addition to Intercom, I use mention (of course) specifically with our Buffer integration for managing my own online presence. I’m also a big fan of Zapier, GoToWebinar, and Unbounce for our high profile marketing campaigns.

How do you’ll drive traffic to Mention? What are your top 3 sources and what is your strategy to convert visitors to paid customers?

Our top 3 sources for new users are referral, newsjacking, and content marketing. Referral is now pretty standard in our industry. I’ve written about Newsjacking here: “4 Easy Ways for Startups to Get Media Coverage.” Content marketing is the fastest growing channel for us. It’s also where we’re still experimenting a lot, and trying out new things. To convert visitors, we have a mix of automated marketing processes in place (see my article about Intercom), as well as great 1-to-1 interactions with our fantastic customer success team.

Mention has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

We’re increasingly leveraging the enormous amount of data we deliver to share insights; to directly share what would normally be only internal numbers with our community. It really fosters great company and community culture, and this is something that Buffer has especially pioneered. A good example is our recent infographic, powered by the over 1 billion mentions that we’ve detected for our users over the past two years.

Is there any advice you’d like to give to budding startup marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?

Setting up your goals and measuring your progress is the best way to stay on the right track for continuous improvement. When we started doing stand up meetings at the end of each day to go over what we’d accomplished and what we were planning for the next day, our entire team found themselves seeing a bigger picture — how each project contributed to the whole. Ideas would cross-pollinate a lot better, as well, and progress was really easy to see.

A big thanks to Clément for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you check out Mention.

The ‘How Marketers Stay Productive’ series asks marketers their tips & strategies for staying productive. Every month we’ll feature a new guest and the tricks that keep them working smart. Know someone you’d love to see featured? Email Us.