Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Solène Tatton-Brown, EMEA & APAC marketing manager:

Carlota Pico 0:00
Hi everyone and welcome back to The Content Mix. I’m Carlota Pico your host for today’s show. And I’m excited to introduce Solène Tatton-Brown, who is marketing manager for the EMEA and APAC regions at DaXtra Technologies and has a wealth of experience in marketing. Welcome, Solène, and thank you so much for joining us today on tThe Content Mix.

Solène Tatton-Brown 0:34
Hi Carlota. Thank you very much for inviting me today.

Carlota Pico 0:38
The pleasure is ours. Okay, so let’s dive straight into your experience. Could you tell me a little bit about how you got to where you are today?

Solène Tatton-Brown 0:46
So I’ve been living in London for over 12 years. And as you can probably tell, I’m a French citizen , originally. Burt I started my studies I spent a couple of years abroad between the UK and the US and I’ve realized that I really enjoyed working with international companies. And so that’s why after spending two years in Paris, I decided to move back to London in 2008. And I worked for the satellite industry for over eight years before moving on to DaXtra where I’ve been working now for over three and a half years.

Carlota Pico 1:21
Okay.

Solène Tatton-Brown 1:22
I spent most of most of my career working in technology as you can see. I really explaining in simple terms, what complex technologies mean to people.

Carlota Pico 1:37
Yeah, because technology oftentimes has to be used in order to understand it. So to be able to communicate about a technology without using that technology must be a challenge.

Solène Tatton-Brown 1:48
It’s my job every day, really, especially explaining all the nuances between machine learning, semantic search—everybody talks about artificial intelligence as well, but yeah, it’s fascinating. And I was working for the satellite industry before, explaining all about the, you know—you spend a bird into space and then you just commercialize it. That’s not as simple as that. But that’s how it’s supposed to sound. So yeah, it’s really interesting.

Carlota Pico 2:20
Yeah. And it must be fascinating. Such a fast moving industry as well.

Solène Tatton-Brown 2:25
Yeah. Absolutely.

Carlota Pico 2:28
I was on your LinkedIn profile, Solène, and I saw that you’ve also worked at Disney?

Solène Tatton-Brown 2:33
I did, yeah! For a couple of years in Paris.

Carlota Pico 2:36
Oh great! Tell me about that experience.

Solène Tatton-Brown 2:38
It was really exciting. So I actually I was studying at the same time for the first year—I was doing my master’s degree in marketing while working as an apprentice for Disney. So I was working three full days a week actually and studying three days. It was long weeks. And then they hired me as a communications manager at the time. It was really, really cool. Very different from everything else I’ve done before and after. But yeah it wasa great experience.

Carlota Pico 3:13
That’s like my childhood dream—to work hand in hand with Mickey Mouse!

Solène Tatton-Brown 3:18
Same here. It can become reality. I’ll send you the contact if you want!

Carlota Pico 3:21
I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you. Okay, as a French citizen now living in London—you’ve been living in London for roughly around 12 years—what pitch do you have for industry professionals who are thinking about relocating to the UK?

Solène Tatton-Brown 3:38
Okay. London is a great city—I absolutely love it. So first of all, you know, people are really open minded. They’re really welcoming. And what I really like about it is you know, they come from all over the world. You can make friends come from lots of different countries. Same for you know, my daughter goes to school—there’s kid from all over the world. They speak English, but they all speak a second language as well, which is very exciting. But if someone wants to move to London for work, basically, I think the main difference with France is that the companies here tend to hire people based on their skills, and their motivation. And they will give you a chance if you haven’t been to, you know, Oxford or Cambridge or something. And whereas, you know, if you come, if you work in France, generally they, you know, hire you based on, you know, which school you’ve attended, your grades first of all, more importantly—more importantly than what you’re actually able to do. So I think it’s a big difference in terms of career. But if they want to come to London, they better come quickly before Brexit starts in the end of this year!

Carlota Pico 4:53
Yeah. How do you think Brexit is going to impact the workforce?

Solène Tatton-Brown 4:59
So for the time being, the the government said it’s not going to make any difference for any European citizens already in the UK. You know, your rights remain the same in terms of, well, everything—pension, health care, and all that kind of stuff. But for new people who want to come in after Brexit, we don’t have the details yet, but it might be slightly more difficult if they don’t earn—they have to learn earn a minimum of I think 35/40,000 pounds something per year to be able to, you know, have a decent life in London. You can’t survive on minimum wage. It’s quite an expensive city. It’s great in terms of going out and culture and everything. There’s lots of opportunities, but you know, if you come here just for a few months you really have to find a good job. It might be more difficult for people after Brexit and they might introduce some sort of point system kind of visa for this European workforce, so we’re not really 100% sure yet.

Carlota Pico 6:14
Okay, so only time will tell.

Solène Tatton-Brown 6:15
Yeah.

Carlota Pico 6:17
Okay. Now zooming into DaXtra Technologies, what is DaXtra Technologies?

Solène Tatton-Brown 6:24
Well DaXtra itself the name means data extraction. And so basically we are recruiting software. So we help recruiters to find the best candidates for jobs. It’s funny enough, this is how they found me. My CV was matching the job description.

Carlota Pico 6:43
No way!

Solène Tatton-Brown 6:44
So I thought, well, actually it works really well because they obviously found me, and yeah, it’s proven to be a really good product that works really well. So there’s two aspects to the product. Basically, one side is matching the candidates to jobs. And the other side is making sure that the database of our clients is always up to date with the latest information. When you know, when candidates update the profile, their phone number, their experience, education, all of that is always up to date. And just to summarize, we just do all the admin tasks automatically for recruiters to make sure they can spend more time talking with clients and talking with candidates, which is really what the core should be.

Carlota Pico 7:33
Okay, so your natural client is a business—it’s a b2b company?

Solène Tatton-Brown 7:37
Yeah. Mainly recruitment agencies, but also corporate. So any employer who wants to hire people can use DaXtra as well.

Carlota Pico 7:47
Okay, let me talk a little bit about COVID-19 then because I’m sure that it’s affected a lot of your clients. How can your—how can future clients use your technology to find the right candidate?

Solène Tatton-Brown 8:02
Yes, so we’ve been we’ve actually looked at the effects of Coronavirus on the industry. And obviously, lots of people have lost their job, being furloughed. The agency was struggling for a while. Now you can see we can see that the numbers are picking up. What we really thought, realized, after talking to clients and prospects is that they have to be ready for when they’re going to receive, you know, lots of CVs. And new jobs are going to start opening as well, so having all this candidate data coming through the database, they have to be able to cope with the number of CVs coming in. That’s where DaXtra can help, basically, to make sure automatically when you receive a CV, it’s put into the system in the right place, coded properly—done automatically for you. And then also obviously on the other side, you put a query in and it automatically tells you “Okay, these same five people are the top candidates for the job because they are matching the job description so you should get in touch with these guys.”

Carlota Pico 9:04
Okay, so it helps clients to save time and also to save money basically.

Solène Tatton-Brown 9:09
Yes, exactly.

Carlota Pico 9:10
Excellent. Now, Solène, what type of questions have you asked yourself during COVID-19 times to help you relate better with your audience?

Solène Tatton-Brown 9:21
So we were wondering about, you know, some agencies might not survive, or it’s a tricky time. Some people actually are not working, are they gonna be online? Is it worth doing all these, you know, marketing activities that we usually do? Are they going to see all that effort? Are they going to notice all the work we’re doing? But yeah, we decided that actually, yeah—let’s do it, to make sure they are ready to, you know, when the recovery starts, which hopefully it should be quite soon. So we moved, obviously, all our face-to-face events online. They’re actually all next, in the next five or six weeks. It’s a lot of work. So, we’ve organized some webinars and explained the benefits of the product. And it brought us some good quality leads. What was interesting is to see that some people we have spoken to like, two, three years ago, who’d gone quiet, suddenly realized, okay, actually now is the time to invest in technology, so I’m going to get in touch with them. And we got lots of people who we haven’t spoken to for years, who suddenly you know, we’re very interested in having a more in-depth demonstration. So that there was, I was happy that we actually decided to carry on with all the marketing activities.

Carlota Pico 10:43
Okay, excellent. So since you weren’t able to host in-person events, you decide to take that strategy online, and you were able to tap into prospects that perhaps would have not attended your in-person events?

Solène Tatton-Brown 10:57
Yes, it is much more difficult, especially when you’re, you know, not everybody is based in London. So if you have people in other parts of the UK, they might not travel to London anyway. So it’s easier, obviously, to reach a much broader audience. And also the other aspect was carry on—as you know, this is your job as well—to write content which is really relevant for the audience, and this is what we are concentrating on.

Carlota Pico 11:26
Okay, now I want to take a walk down memory lane. Could you talk to me about some of proudest marketing moments? So perhaps a project or an international campaign that just really stands out?

Solène Tatton-Brown 11:39
From long time ago or recently?

Carlota Pico 11:44
Anything that you want!

Solène Tatton-Brown 11:46
Okay, well, first thing that comes to mind is when I was working for Disney because you like it, so I’m going to mention it. I had to create some very cool videos with all the characters, you know, Disney characters. And then seeing them in, you know, in reality and in the hotel lobbies, or the maps and all the leaflets communication tools that I had to create—even in hotels, in bathrooms, everywhere—you really have to communicate each point of the customer journey, and seeing them unite and actually seeing the guests using them, I think that’s…yeah, I love doing that. Otherwise, in my next job, I would say is probably the conferences that I was organizing for hundreds of clients. You know, I had to start from scratch finding the speakers, the venue, all of the logistics part of it, but also, you know, putting together the whole program and when it’s done, what a relief! You’re very happy and when the client comes to you and says thank you, you’ve done a great job, that’s pretty rewarding as well.

Carlota Pico 12:56
Yeah, I definitely agree. I love when clients compliment us on our work. Okay. Now, let’s say you had the opportunity to do it all over again—would you still choose a career in marketing?

Solène Tatton-Brown 13:10
Wow, good question. I think so yeah. What I love about marketing really is the teams I’ve been working with. You know, when I was in US it was a really small team—there was four of us in the whole company. So you really had to get on with them, and it was like second family. It was great. And when I worked for the satellite industry, we had a much bigger team, but based in different regions. So it was very different. You had to deal with different time zones, cultures, as well, and my colleagues were so nice. And let’s see…now, we have a very small marketing team, but we’re part of the sales and marketing, and I work with colleagues in US, in APAC—so it’s mainly Hong Kong—and Australia, and then we have offices in In Scotland as well, so having to speak to people in different parts of the world is cool. And what I really like about marketing, I think, is the communication aspect. So I think communication is key. And obviously you have to speak to your colleagues, but also suppliers, clients, prospects. Without communication, nothing would happen, and I think I was born to do that! So yeah, I really enjoy it.

Carlota Pico 14:29
That’s a really, really powerful quote, actually because, I mean, I completely agree with you. Oftentimes, as communication professionals, we’re only—we only concentrate on the ways that we need to communicate with our clients or future clients. We don’t necessarily look at how we should be communicating within our team as well with our colleagues or distributors or providers or anything because everything that we do requires us to communicate with other human beings.

Solène Tatton-Brown 14:58
Yeah, also works with your personal life, your friends, your family and everything.

Carlota Pico 15:03
True! If you can’t communicate with your partner, you’re in a lot of trouble!

Solène Tatton-Brown 15:08
You can avoid a lot of arguments by just communicating very clearly about that.

Carlota Pico 15:12
Yeah, definitely, definitely. Okay, well, moving into our set of rapid fire questions are basically your recommendations for our audience. To get this section start off, I’d like to ask you about your source of inspiration. Who do you admire?

Solène Tatton-Brown 15:26
Okay. So for inspiration, I was thinking of my…I was talking about my previous experiences, and I really enjoyed working with my boss in San Francisco. She was the most inspiring person you could think of. In fact, after working for the Chamber of Commerce, she moved into politics. And then she set up a business helping entrepreneurs in France to set up their own startups. She taught me a lot, you know, very tough at the beginning, you know, telling you what to do, but also you learn how to network and also very down to earth and explained to me like, you know, networking is fine because you know, you can talk to people at any level, it doesn’t matter if he is the head of huge company, they are still a human being, and I think I learned a lot from her on lots of different aspects of work, but also personally.

Carlota Pico 16:27
What’s her name?

Solène Tatton-Brown 16:28
Carole Granade.

Carlota Pico 16:30
Okay. Nice little shout out to your first boss.

Solène Tatton-Brown 16:36
Yeah.

Carlota Pico 16:38
Okay, and now moving into a resource. So what book, publication, group, community or event would you like to recommend? And obviously feel free to recommend any of your own events.

Solène Tatton-Brown 16:48
Of course, come on to all of the DaXtra events! Well, I really liked in the past year are the Grow With Inbound events. So it’s basically giving you lots of tips about HubSpot. They always have inspiring speakers, I have to say. You know, you’re not bored for one minute—you actually listen really actively and you can always come out with lots of ideas, like “Maybe I should look into this!” And then I have lots of action points. So they used to do them face to face but now it’s online. The next one is next week, actually. So there’s lots of things to learn, so I really enjoy that.

Carlota Pico 17:31
Okay, excellent. And to finish up this interview, and as a technology connoisseur, what’s your favorite app at the moment?

Solène Tatton-Brown 17:40
Personally, I would say you probably JustEat on the road because I enjoy take out and trying to help local restaurants to survive. But from a work perspective, what I’m using at the moment mostly is HubSpot. So I use it because basically it makes marketing automation, much easier. But I also like the analytics tool, which is good and easy to use. So it makes my job easier and it’s a great tool to use as well.

Carlota Pico 18:12
Okay, excellent. So kind of like the technology that you offer to your clients, right? It helps you save money and makes your job easier and helps you save time.

Solène Tatton-Brown 18:19
That’s right, yes!

Carlota Pico 18:21
There’s a common theme.

Solène Tatton-Brown 18:23
Yeah, for me, I’m just… it’s just what I’m used to doing now.

Carlota Pico 18:28
Okay, excellent, Solène. Thank= you so much for joining us on The Content Mix. It was a pleasure to meet you and to pick your brain on so many different subjects.

Solène Tatton-Brown 18:35
Thanks very much for having me today. It was a pleasure.

Carlota Pico 18:39
The pleasure has been ours. And to everybody listening in today, thank you for joining us on The Content Mix. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out The Content Mix. We’ll be releasing interviews just like this one every day, so keep on tuning in. Thanks again, have a fantastic day and see you next time. Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai