On this episode of the Powerful Marketing Tips Podcast, Ruby Sweeney from The Events Hub joins host Mari-Liis to discuss the significance of events in marketing. Ruby emphasizes the importance of being proactive in event planning and strategy and highlights that events as essential for building trust and relationships with customers. She also discusses the value of aligning events with company values and using them as a marketing platform. Overall, events are a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes and sectors who want to connect with customers and grow their brands.   Ruby Sweeney is the founder of The Events Hub. Her key goals are to not only create engaging, memorable experiences for attendees but save clients the entire mental load from start to finish. To Ruby and her team, what they do is way beyond just events - it's about creating opportunities for relationships for businesses, being a trusted partner to take care of and nurturing clients’ business growth. With over 20 years of experience in the industry, Ruby was recently also recognized as one of The Most Influential Women in Events 2022 and emerged as a finalist in the Businesswoman category at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards. We are incredibly excited to partner with Ruby and The Events Hub for Malaga Marketing Week taking place in September 2023. Find out more about Malaga Week.   Quotes: “Events was the number one offline marketing activity that brands and businesses trusted in to help grow their business and meet their objectives. Now, I feel that we're getting to those levels once more in 2023 and beyond." (00:03:39) "Events are essential to businesses, marketers, entrepreneurs of all levels, all sizes, all sectors, and that they should be taken so seriously and they should be planned for strategically.” (00:03:57) “Strategy is that one place where everybody should start with events. And I see time and time again, there's so many organizations, so many individuals can be reactive towards events and we're not proactive enough. So we need to strategize about events in the same way that we look at business objectives, marketing objectives, sales targets, and get really smart about how we leverage events” (00:04:42) “You can build tons of trust around your brand because of the event, but you can market yourself via those necessary mediums, formats, platforms, before the event, after the event.” (00:06:00) “The number one thing, whether you're building a brand personal or business, or wanting collaborations, or wanting lead generation, it's about relationship building." (00:07:39) “Identify the sorts of conferences or events or interactions that you want to get involved with, the experiences you want to create, and how best you can leverage those things.” (00:10:08) “It's about looking at the best use of people's time when they're attending an event, but it's also about identifying which events, experiences, conferences, webinars, etc. are going to achieve those targets that you have set for your organization or your company.” (00:10:43) “From our side as the organizers, we need to be providing the attendees or partners or sponsors or exhibitors with the data, the intelligence around who is coming, what this event is about, and really focusing and niching down on what our event is looking to achieve so that on the flip side, those attendees, partners, sponsors, exhibitors know exactly what effort, what energy, what resources, what budgets to put against those events and those interactions, because we can't hide behind kind of mediocre events anymore.” (00:11:15) “There are lots of different areas of events where AI is starting to have an impact and event tech is starting to kind of embrace those.” (00:14:41) “When you look at the ROI of events as well, events are a really, really good value for money.” (00:18:50) “The best way you can identify what works for you is to go and test something. And it doesn't have to