Today, great marketing puts the customer at the center of every experience and interaction — and that's true across products, sales teams, and service, because marketing isn't a siloed responsibility anymore.

As Barbara Agoglia, Chief Marketing Officer, Global Commercial Payments, AMEX, beautifully puts it: "It doesn't matter where you work in the company — your customers are experiencing your touchpoints."

People expect a 1-to-1 relationship with your brand. We're living in the age of the customer. So how can you guide those 1-to-1 journeys as just one marketer? And how can you grow your career (and, bonus, get promoted) in the process?

In the new Salesforce e-book, Marketing Field Guide for the Customer Trailblazer, we explain how marketers can lead the way to creating a connected experience for each customer. If you're looking for practical leadership advice as a digital marketer in this changing world, this field guide is your ticket.

Here are 10 steps from the e-book to become a true customer trailblazer. Download the full guide for many more details.

1. Build personalized customer journeys.

Marketers can meet their customers where they are by anticipating — and reacting to — events as they happen. Connect across one seamless customer experience and onboard, engage, re-engage, sell, and support by aligning your strategy across marketing, sales, and service. Automate 1-to-1 interactions by building a strategy once, then offering a unique customer journey for every individual at massive scale — so you can focus on growing your business.

2. Create ads that inspire action.

Target more precisely with all CRM data across sales, service, and marketing. Securely use customer data from any source to drive digital advertising. Always ensure you're aligning ad campaigns with other channels, and use Journey Builder to connect advertising across search, display, and social to the rest of business — from your marketing strategy to your sales teams.

3. Make marketing that makes your sales teams smile.

Help sales close more deals. Here’s how:

• Grow pipeline with quality leads.
• Accelerate the sales cycle with personalization.
• Measure marketing ROI.
• Understand marketing influence on revenue when managing your customer lifecycle.

Track prospects from lead generation to closed-won deal, and account for every dollar you make — from every dollar you spend.  Salesforce makes it easy to capture customer information at the point of engagement, segment your customers based on what you know about them, optimize your content for your audience, and deliver the most relevant content to the target buyer.

4. Drive commerce — anywhere it happens.

Deliver unified shopping experiences, whether online or in your stores, by coordinating shopping experiences across digital channels. For retailers, that means transforming the digital consumer experience across all digital channels and delivering point-of-sale capabilities. Weave personalization into the fabric of the unified commerce experience through predictive recommendations on the web and via email.

5. Deliver email, deliver results.

Personalize relevant emails at scale, and enjoy the #1 marketing ROI generator. Here's how: Store and share pre-approved assets, and set custom approval rules to help teams build engaging emails and campaigns quickly. Place relevant content in emails based on customer behavior and attributes using a powerful scripting language and dynamic content. And adopt a mobile-first mindset.

6. Connect in moments that matter with mobile.

Send alerts based on customer behavior and actions through SMS, in-app push notifications, and group messaging. For starters, link your mobile strategy with other channels and use mobile strategies to drive email subscriptions. Send notifications of a promotion or sale, and respond in an instant to trends in your industry with relevant mobile content.

7. Build apps lightning fast.

Build, deliver, monitor, and scale apps on the leading cloud-based platform. Drive loyalty and commerce and increase engagement by rewarding your best customers, and use customer data to power sales promotions through branded app experiences. In all you do, integrate Salesforce data to deliver more personalized app experiences.

8. Transform products into connected experiences.

Capture billions of events from any connected product, service, device, or app. Build real-time logic to create journeys that cross sales, service, and marketing. Send proactive, real-time messages to every customer at the right moment as you re-engage customers who have stopped interacting with your product, or respond to a recent surge in product engagement by sending the right message at the right moment. 

9. Turn social fans and followers into loyal customers.

As anyone who's tried to have a conversation at a party knows, every great conversation starts with listening. So start listening to the social conversation before you interact, analyzing social conversations different sources with social media monitoring software. Discover what customers are saying about your brand, products, and competitors. Then begin scheduling, publishing, and promoting social posts and engaging with fans.

10. Build communities that bring people together.

Communities online are likely already talking about your products or services, like it or not. So capitalize on the conversation and create a branded environment for your customers and employees to engage and interact with each other, from anywhere. Recognize and reward your most valuable community members. Intelligently guide customers to the experts, articles, and support they need, and anticipate and prepare for customer concerns before they arise by listening to the conversation in your branded community. 

Download Marketing Field Guide for the Customer Trailblazer now for tips on 1-to-1 marketing all the way from awareness to advocacy.