In-Ear Insights: How to Make Conferences Worth the Investment

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the worth of conferences and events in a tight economy. You will learn a powerful framework for evaluating whether an expensive conference ticket meets your specific professional goals. You will use generative artificial intelligence to score event agendas, showing you which sessions offer the best return on your time investment. You will discover how expert speakers and companies create tangible value, moving beyond vague thought leadership to give you actionable takeaways. You will maximize your event attendance by demanding supplementary tools, ensuring you retain knowledge long after you leave the venue. Watch this episode now to stop wasting budget on irrelevant professional events! Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here . Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-how-to-make-conferences-worth-the-investment.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here . Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! [podcastsponsor] Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher S. Penn – 00:00 In this week’s *In Ear Insights*, let’s talk about events, conferences, trade shows, workshops—the gamut of things that you could get up from your desk maybe, go somewhere else, eat hotel chicken, and enjoy speaking. The big question is this, Katie: In today’s absolutely loony environment, with the economic uncertainty and the budgets and all this and that, are events still worth it? This is a two-part question: Are events still worth it for the attendees, and are events still worth it for companies that want to generate business from events? Katie Robbert – 00:50 It’s a big question. And if our listeners are anything like me, it takes a lot to get them to put on real pants and actually leave the house—something that isn’t sweatpants or leggings or something like that—because you’re spending the time, the resources, the money to go out and actually interact with other people. In terms of an attendee, I think there can be a lot of value, provided you do your homework on who the speakers are, what their expertise is, what they’re promising to teach you in the workshop or the session or whatever the thing is. The flip side of that is it can be worth it for a speaker, provided you know who your audience is, you can create an ICP, and provided you are giving value to the audience. Katie Robbert – 01:54 So if you’re a speaker who has made their whole career on big ideas and thought leadership and all that’s fine, people have a hard time buying something from that and saying, “I know exactly what it is I need to do next.” So there is a time and place for those speakers. But for an attendee to really get value, you need to teach them something. You need to show them how to be very tactical, be very hands-on. That’s where an

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