OREANDA-NEWS. October 14, 2015. The dawn of the digital marketer is here. The physical and the digital worlds have converged, and the traditional boundaries of CRM have blurred. Every marketer now has an unprecedented opportunity to connect with customers in entirely new ways.

Need more reasons why it’s a critical time for digital marketers to come into the spotlight? Check out these five reasons, based on Scott McCorkle’s Marketing Cloud keynote at Dreamforce. Get the new e-book of his keynote for more customer stories and examples of how marketers are bringing 1-to-1 marketing to life.

#1. Marketers are the treasurers of the customer experience. The future of marketing has never been so exciting. Thanks to the rise of the hyperconnected and multi-device consumer, we have new ways to reach customers wherever they are, in real time. Marketers are in a prime place to connect the dots around the customer experience, thanks to these five technology shifts: cloud, social, mobile, data science, and Internet of Things (IoT).

All these shifts combined have blended the physical and digital world. And as marketers, this blended world creates a unique opportunity for us to lead the expanded customer experience and manage it with digital tools.

#2. The IoT is here to stay. At Dreamforce, Salesforce announced IoT Cloud. IoT Cloud and Marketing Cloud have a special relationship because the growing number of connected devices provides valuable data to marketers who need to better understand their customers. IoT Cloud informs Marketing Cloud of events that start customer journeys and tracks the data that will move customers forward to the next stage of their journey.

At its core, Marketing Cloud manages your complete customer lifecycle from the earliest phases of awareness and acquisition to the transformation of customers into advocates — who are also your company’s best marketers.

#3. Sales and marketing are coming together. For companies with sales teams, a solid relationship between marketing and sales can be the difference between business success and failure. Increasingly, sales and marketing understand the need to be tightly coordinated and communicating. When sales and marketing work together, a company can better generate and qualify leads, shorten sales cycles, and ultimately close more business.

Pardot, the Salesforce B2B marketing automation platform, is helping companies achieve better sales and marketing alignment, which ultimately drives more business. With the combination of sales-marketing alignment and the right technology, you’ll always know exactly who you’re selling to — and how to move the person through the pipeline.

#4. Personalization at scale is possible. After a customer has made a purchase, your marketing should continue engaging them with the right message at the right time. The goal is to deliver personalized content that keeps your brand top of mind, even if the customer isn’t ready to make another purchase just yet.

Predictive intelligence technology now allows marketers to record information about customers interests and preferences with every click. By putting the customer’s needs and wants at the center of every marketing message, marketers can finally scale personalization efforts to every person.

#5. Customers are increasingly our best marketers. In the past, if a customer really liked your product, they could tell their friends and family — 20 or 30 people, maybe. In the social media age, when a single message can gain millions of impressions in minutes, customers can be a company’s best advocates. An integrated experience with your product and customer service is key, and if you get the combination right, your customers will thank you by advocating in return.

To create these vocal advocates, you must resolve customer issues efficiently, and de-silo social. Great customer service is great marketing. With the right technology and the right social strategy, people from different departments can collaborate to make customers happier, faster. You want to create your best advocates, not your worst detractors.

The customer experience is more than marketing. It’s the sum of every interaction a customer has with your brand, and that includes service, advertising, the selling process, and much more. Want to know more about how marketers are innovating — plus Marketing Cloud’s new announcements from Dreamforce ’15? Download the Dawn of the Digital Marketer e-book now.