IBM Amplify 2016 took place last week at the Tampa Convention Center in Florida. Each year, the conference aims to help businesses better serve their customers from where they live, work, and play. Guest speakers included Gwyneth Paltrow from Goop, the executive director of ING Direct, the vice president for global eBusiness servicing from MetLife, former CEO of Gilt, CEO of Net-a-Porter, and more. Reaching and engaging customers is crucial to the success of an organization, and the conference provided some great learning opportunities:

• Streamline marketing execution to deliver superior customer experiences.

Marketing must keep pace with the speed at which customer behaviors and expectations change, and brands must be able to respond quickly with relevant messaging as the customer engages across multiple channels.

• Test and deliver optimized and personalized content to every individual.

Studies show that highly relevant content drives deeper customer engagement and higher conversion rates. Content optimization is based on a complete contextual view of the customer, including insight into his or her most valuable interactions and real-time behaviors.

• Better understand marketing performance and take immediate action to drive business impact.

Managing marketing performance can be difficult and complicated, impacting how fast and accurately marketers can make decisions to fine-tune their marketing approach or discover best practices to replicate success, so it’s important to understand how to take immediate action to drive a successful impact on business.

• Cognitive Commerce in action can help create a deeper understanding of consumer buying habits.

In-context deep learning—preferences, personalities, and historic buying patterns—can help understand customer behavior. Merchandisers who identify trends gain insights in real time from a multitude of data sources about what consumers are discussing and what they are buying and why.

• The delivery of digital experiences engages and satisfies from the first touch.

Marketers can build individualized curriculum and deploy technical strategies, as well as business value solutions on how to target, engage, and win customers across multiple channels by combining proven best practices with emerging technologies from all touch points.

A vast majority of business is now conducted over digital channels such as websites, social media, and mobile so health marketers need to focus on helping businesses make smarter decisions that will help them form stronger relationships with their customers and prospects through personalized engagement, customer centric platforms, and content.