5 Steps to Agentic Marketing: A Practical Guide for Modern Marketers.

Marketing has always evolved with technology. But today, with artificial intelligence (AI), marketing isn’t merely evolving, it’s making giant transformational leaps. AI is transforming how marketers operate, and customer expectations are moving faster than ever.

Traditional tactics alone won’t keep pace. Companies that delay or hesitate to approach agentic AI risk being outpaced. In McKinsey’s March 2025 survey, 78% of organizations reported using AI in at least one function — up sharply from a year ago.

That’s where Marketing Cloud Next comes in: a complete agentic marketing solution, natively built on Salesforce’s core platform. It’s purpose-built for agentic marketing with actionable data, cross-departmental workflows, and autonomous AI agents that don’t just assist — they act. From creating content and building audiences to optimizing campaigns and personalizing at scale, agents work as always-on collaborators, turning every channel into a two-way conversation.

Unlike with standard automation, with agentic marketing, you define the strategy — such as “increase loyalty among at-risk customers” — and AI agents handle the execution. Agents create content, build audiences, personalize messaging, optimize performance, and orchestrate handoffs between teams and channels, freeing your team to focus on strategy, creativity, and growth.

This guide will help you unlock the benefits of agentic marketing and walk you through five essential steps to get started today.

1. Get Clear on the Business Case
2. Get your Data AI-Ready
3. Activate Agentic Use Cases with Marketing Cloud Next
4. Understand How Agentforce Works and Make It Work for You
5. Upskill (and Unblock) Your Team

Before diving into tools or templates, step back and ask: What specific marketing problems are you trying to solve? Perhaps it’s campaign production cycles that drag on for weeks instead of days, inconsistent personalization across channels, or media budgets being spent without clear visibility into what’s working. These pain points are the perfect starting point for agentic AI.

Begin by prioritizing:

• What repetitive tasks are slowing us down?
• Where do we see performance gaps but lack the resources to address them?
• Which areas could benefit from more speed, scale, or personalization?

Once you’ve identified your high-impact goal, assess your organization’s AI readiness. Understanding where your people, processes, and technology stand today will guide the journey.

Starting with one clear use case builds value over time, creating tangible and exciting proof points for broader adoption.

You don’t need perfect data to start — but you do need connected, accessible signals, powered by Data Cloud.

Data Cloud gives marketers access to real-time customer profiles, so Agentforce can make smarter decisions without depending on stitched-together spreadsheets or delayed batch processing, and without needing you to hold its hand through every variable or decision tree. Whether you’re optimizing media spend or triggering a loyalty offer, Agentforce uses engagement signals, purchase behavior, and preferences to act in the moment.

The best part? Marketing Cloud Next is built natively on Data Cloud. This means you can:

• Unify fragmented customer data across systems and departments
• Tap into key signals like clicks, purchases, or site visits with clicks, not code
• Leverage real-time customer data for immediate action and hyper-personalization

Brands like Pacers Sports & Entertainment are using this approach to connect sales, service, and marketing data for real-time personalization that drives loyalty and revenue.

You can take the same first step – starting with the data you already have. Website behavior, email engagement, basic segmentation, and expand from there as you iterate. The goal is to launch your first AI-powered use case and build momentum. The sooner you start, the faster it will learn

The next step is to put your use case into action. With Marketing Cloud Next, you unlock a platform designed to help you personalize the right moments across the customer lifecycle through two-way conversations powered by actionable data, cross-departmental workflows, and autonomous AI agents.

Whether you’re new to Marketing Cloud or already invested, start using Marketing Cloud Next to get access to ready-to-use Agentforce templates built around common marketing goals. These templates combine Agentforce’s AI-powered skills, topics, and actions that do the work for you, so you can spend less time building from scratch and more time driving results.

Here are a few high-impact places to begin, based on your top priorities:

Agentforce isn’t just another smart assistant. It’s the agentic AI engine embedded in Marketing Cloud Next, built as your always-on collaborator.

Each agentic use case you launch is powered by:

• Skills: The job to be done (optimize ads, create offers, personalize content)
• Templates: Preconfigured setups that bundle the logic and actions needed to get fast, reliable results with a minimum of setup or growing pains
• Topics and Actions: The specific instructions the agent follows and the tasks it completes

These ready-to-use capabilities help you launch fast — with clicks, not code. From there, tools like Prompt Templates, Flow, and Agent Builder let you evolve any use case into a dynamic, scalable strategy.

For example, launching a new product promotion could start with the Campaign Creation template in Marketing Cloud Next. With one prompt, you generate a full brief for your new promotional launch, including journey structure, channel mix, and first drafts of email and SMS messages. It’s a massive time saver, especially for teams juggling multiple launches.

From there, you can use Prompt Templates to fine-tune the content based on audience or campaign context. Want a more casual tone? Want to highlight premium features for loyalty members? You can create reasoning that adapts to tone and understands context, and follows your guidance on how to use customer-grounded data.

Next, use Flow to expand how the campaign responds to customer behavior. You might trigger different journeys based on how someone engages with the first email, route high-value leads to sales, or send a service follow-up to customers who clicked but didn’t convert. Flow connects your campaign to broader customer experiences without requiring manual coordination.

Finally, when you’re ready to scale this model across future campaigns or product lines, use Agent Builder to design a custom use case tailored to your business. For example, you can use Agentforce to automatically detect high-interest products, then generate a campaign plan that adapts it based on loyalty tier, inventory, or audience affinity.

Think of Agentforce as your agentic toolkit:

• Prompt Templates give you personalized messaging at scale
• Flow automates multistep processes and extends actions
• Agent Builder lets you create reusable solutions tailored to your business

You launch fast with templates and grow with the tools that make agentic marketing your own.

New tools require new ways of working. But don’t let that slow you down.

Marketing Cloud Next is designed for marketers, which means you don’t need SQL or dev support. But success still depends on teams having space to learn and experiment.

Agentic marketing works best when teams see AI agents as creative collaborators that help them work smarter, not as replacements. For marketing teams, this means shifting from spending hours on manual campaign builds, list pulls, and reporting — to spending more time on strategy, creative direction, and customer experience design.

Practical ways to make it stick:

• Identify “AI champions” within your marketing team who experiment with agents, share successes, and inspire peers
• Create an internal hub to share wins, results, and templates that can be reused for future campaigns
• Offer role-specific enablement: e.g., Prompt Templates training for content owners, Flow orchestration for marketing ops, Data Cloud basics for Marketers

Reskilling focus for marketers:

• Human skills: Creative direction, brand voice stewardship, customer empathy
• Agent skills: Prompt engineering, agent oversight, performance optimization
• Business skills: Campaign strategy, data-driven decision-making, ROI storytelling

Encourage curiosity, not perfection. Marketers don’t need to become engineers, they just need to understand how to guide and scale the AI that’s now working with them. When marketers see agents as partners, adoption grows, output accelerates, and the work becomes more creative, personalized, and impactful.

Agentic marketing isn’t an all-or-nothing transformation. It’s a series of smart steps that build momentum. Whether you started with campaign creation, media optimization, or loyalty promotions, the next move is to iterate and expand.

Marketing Cloud Next makes it easy to go from one use case to many, using tools that span every marketing job to be done. You’ll go from manual to autonomous, from reactive to real time — because the marketers who embrace this shift today won’t just be more efficient, they’ll be the ones creating experiences no one else can match.

Join us at Dreamforce, October 14–16 to learn more about how you can prepare for your agentic marketing future.