Making Events Valuable

This post was originally featured in the 10.29.2025 newsletter found here: INBOX INSIGHTS: The Case for Knowledge Blocks, Making Events Valuable

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about a follow-up to last week’s column – what are the things that we do to make sessions valuable for attendees at conferences?

Since it is still conference season, by the time you’re reading this, I’ve been in London and I’ve conducted our first full-day Trust Insights event – Agenda AI for B2B Marketing – spending time with 25 people in a room. How do we make this valuable? How do we make any conference session valuable?

Last week we talked about the Marketing AI Conference, MAICON, and how we design and structure our workshops and sessions to be valuable for attendees. People need to learn in the moment, but they also need opportunities to network, have real conversations, and experience as much as possible. Reading teaches, listening teaches, but nothing compares to learning by doing. Whenever possible, foster hands-on learning experiences. Learning by doing with others is even more powerful because collaboration and group problem-solving trigger positive neurotransmitters in our brains – we’re fundamentally social creatures who learn best together.

So how do you do this? We start, of course, with the 5P framework. We figure out what is the purpose of the session or workshop or keynote. Who are the people involved? Who’s in the audience? We build detailed ideal customer profiles. We construct these profiles for the very best audiences and the highest-value attendees. We gather data from social media, conference registrations, and past interactions. We gather data from in-person conversations and networking. We talk directly to people about their interests. We look carefully at who wants follow-ups from us and what they’re interested in. We use all that data to build rich ideal customer profiles because someone who wants a follow-up from us clearly sees value in what we do, and they naturally become part of an ideal customer profile for the conference. That understanding informs our people strategy.

Our process is to identify the specific content that people need the most based on their unique ideal customer profile and their stated interests. We want to present information and tools that people will find genuinely valuable and immediately useful. Ideal customer profiles based on real people and real data are incredibly helpful for this, allowing us to say with confidence, “This is what this person probably needs because this is what they’ve told us they care about.”

Then the platforms – what tools do you need to create something valuable? And the performance – how do you know it was valuable? Immediate feedback is telling: “That was a great session, I learned a lot,” “I love all the takeaways.” That information shows us how well a session resonated. Longer-term performance metrics matter too: did we generate business from it? For us as a company, that’s ultimately the purpose. The audience’s purpose is to skill up. Our purpose is to generate new business – beyond the fun, there’s real business value.

Our big focus has always been teaching, and teaching very information-dense sessions. There’s a reason for this. One of the tenets of good presentation is to not overload your audience. Expert public speaking instructors like Tamsen Webster and Michael Port emphasize the “one big idea” TED Talk approach. That works for certain talks. For workshops or applied AI sessions, that approach doesn’t fit.

We teach the way I learned from my martial arts instructors: present as many techniques as possible in a short time, since students may not return for another year or two. With sufficient material to practice, they can develop skills independently. This isn’t best practice for a “one big idea” approach, but it’s ideal for maximizing value for students.

Obviously, this approach causes information overload. After a certain point, people can’t consume much more. That’s why we reassure people at the start: “This talk is being recorded. You’ll get the audio, slides, transcript, and all the materials.” But people are busy. In the session, you think, “Yes, I’ll use this. I’ll invest the time.” Back at the office, your to-do list explodes. Those passive takeaways collect dust. They become shelfware. This is human nature in our information-overloaded world.

This brings us to what additional active learning tools we can provide to maximize your conference experience. Because we’re already creating all the information products anyway – the transcript, the audio, the video, the screen share, all those materials – we realized generative AI can help us create even more value for you.

There are two different avenues to provide even more value.

First, if a conference talk covers a high-value process, we can turn it into a GPT or Gem. For example, creating a great Gemini 2.0 Flash prompt for video generation is perfect for this approach. We build a GPT that takes your initial prompt, asks follow-up questions, and generates a high-quality 2.0 Flash prompt. This turns learning into action—instead of trying to remember how to do it, you have a practical tool.

The second aspect is the professional development piece, where we take all the conference proceedings from our session and upload them into Notebook LM. We pre-generate an audio overview for you, pre-generate a video overview of the key concepts, and pre-generate an interactive mind map of the material structure. This gives you multiple ways to consume the content initially. But then comes the real power: you can take that notebook and ask it specific questions. Because it’s drawing directly on the conference transcript, the slides, and all the materials from our session, you can ask it questions as though you were sitting in the room with us having a conversation. If we covered the information in the session, it’s your way to get at the specific piece of information exactly as we originally delivered it.

You can say, “what did Katie say about how to set your purpose”? Or “what did Katie say about how to use an ideal customer profile in this”? That becomes very easy for you to ask follow-up questions, or to ask questions specific to your situation to say, you know what, we didn’t have time in the session to answer this question, but if you want to upload your own document into a copy of the notebook, you could. Or copy and paste stuff from a document into a prompt and say, “hey Chris and Katie, how would you have handled this particular instance”?

That’s how we provide value. It’s no longer a passive product collecting dust. It’s an endless QA session. With Notebook LM, if the information isn’t there, it can’t provide an answer. That’s fine. But if you attended and thought of a follow-up question, wanted us to explain something again, or needed advice tailored to your situation – that’s what these notebooks are for. They’re designed so the session never ends. The QA never ends. You can return anytime to extract exceptional value from it.

That’s the essence of how we approach teaching and designing our sessions, workshops, and keynotes. We want you to walk away with tactical, practical tools that genuinely help you do your job better—tools so valuable that you can’t help but say, “I need to return to this event to see Trust Insights again. I need to bring them in to do this type of training with my team.” That’s our goal as educators and practitioners. We’re direct about it: we want you to hire us to consult, teach, and develop processes that are specific to your organization’s unique needs.

We provide this value so when you pitch your leadership, you can say, “No other conference session gave me this much.” We also want to help the conference. We boost the conference’s reputation wherever we speak. We want attendees walking away thinking, “I have to return to this conference. That Trust Insights session was so good, I can’t miss this event next year.”

It’s mutually beneficial: when Trust Insights provides exceptional value and you return to the conference, it’s clear that our presence elevates the event. Conferences continue to bring us back because we deliver value that attendees don’t want to miss.

The key takeaway here: conference sessions, keynotes, and workshops are fundamentally about providing information in multiple different formats. Package content in as many ways as possible so you can enjoy and access it however you learn best. With generative AI tools at our disposal, we have essentially infinite ways to repackage information to match your unique learning style.

Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.