602: Why In-Person Events Are Your Best Marketing Move

So the first thing that I wanted to touch on is, of course, the belief.

And it's the comeback that I think no one is really talking about.

I'm seeing a lot of content about this on social media, but that is because I'm constantly and consciously curating my feed to be giving me information about this kind of stuff.

And that is that most brands have really obviously built their entire strategy around digital now.

I think this was a big shift that I saw when we went into lockdown is that a lot of brands all of a sudden realized, and obviously I was bringing up the social collective, like the social collective was on the rise during lockdown.

And it was essentially all made possible because so many business owners recognized in that time, my goodness, I've relied so much on word of mouth or walk-ins or people just recognizing me off the street or through a flyer or a billboard.

But now everybody's locked in their houses.

space.

So we've seen more content, we've seen more ads, we've seen conversations happening in the DMs, we've seen more email marketing.

But I think what's now happening is we've spent the last, I mean, almost six years really leaning into the digital space.

And don't get me wrong, I own a digital marketing agency and I love the digital space.

But I think there's a real and a visible resurgence that is now happening right here, right now.

And I guess to name it clearly, it's not nostalgia.

It's not because we're going, oh my gosh, I miss those days.

No, it's a direct response to how saturated and how noisy the online community has become.

And so because there is so much, there's an oversaturation of content online, people are craving these real in-person connections because we are drowning in content.

One of the biggest conversations that we had on on the panel and you'll hear about it in next week's episode is being able to figure out who do we turn to when we're looking for an expert and I've seen this because firsthand I've been researching a lot about Claude because we've integrated a lot of the things we do with Claude into how our agency runs to make it faster to make it better to make sure that we are able to really spend more time being humans in the business and kind of simplifying a lot of the admin stuff that we do But I think at the same time, we're also seeing this big kind of uproar of so many people claiming that they are the AI experts.

And it was funny, Karina touched on this on the panel, that it's kind of funny when you see somebody say that they're an AI expert because what happened yesterday is different to what's going to happen tomorrow.

So how can you be an AI expert today? You know what I mean? Everyone is now, I'm seeing a lot of content, I guess, where people are posting a lot of screenshots saying, these are all the skills that you need to build, or this is my five-step framework to how I run my business through Claude and yada, yada.

And one of the things that came up in the Q&A portion of the panel on Thursday was that a lot of people are really struggling to figure out who to trust and who to really learn from and lean on when it comes to understanding how to use AI or how to grow your marketing.

And one of the best and easiest ways to do that and to figure out if someone is right for you or not right for you is actually meeting them in person.

I love going to conferences.

I mean, for anyone who's followed me on social media for a while, you'll know that I have been going to conferences for years, both in New Zealand and Australia, and hopefully someday I will go to one further abroad.

But I love being able to have the chance to listen to somebody in person.

and really connect with them and feel the energy and feel their vibe.