Marketo Offers LaunchPoint, An App and Services Network For The “Marketing Nation”
Marketo is offering a new service called LaunchPoint, which is meant to serve the “marketing nation,” a term Marketo coined to describe an ecosystem of technology partners and professional service providers. The LaunchPoint service is essentially an app and services network for marketers.
The storefront-style service integrates with the Marketo marketing-automation platform and is geared toward marketing professionals — generally defined as those who do branding or communications. That perception is changing, as the number of apps for marketing professionals starts to scale and the people networks become more connected.
Marketo says the marketing nation, this year more than ever, has a deeper identity, and is defined by three forces:
- The marketing profession is bigger than ever.
- Marketing now actually drives revenue rather than being that “fuzzy cost center” with little ROI.
- Data/big data is just as big of an issue for marketers now as it is for other areas of business. For marketers, it’s not just about the volume of data, but the revenue-driving insights of behavior-related data over time.
Marketo LaunchPoint is focused on the needs of people who make up this marketing nation. These are people who work in multiple channels such as the Web and mobile apps. They develop lifecycle marketing plans as opposed to doing customer acquisition. They develop data-driven strategies and are accountable for review.
LaunchPoint has 71 partners that are divided into applications providers and services partners. Application categories are focused on analytics and big data; content marketing; events and webinars; lead data; lifecycle marketing; online ads and campaigns; sales tools; social media and top of the funnel. There are two service provider categories: agencies and general service providers.
Companies that participate and also integrate with Marketo include Badgeville, Datameer and HootSuite. Datarati, LeadMD and Babcock and Jenkins are a few of the services companies that are listed.
LaunchPoint is a one-stop shop for marketers. It has the partners but it feels more like a store than a community. It’s not the same as a developer ecosystem that you find at a company like Amazon Web Services where the tools are listed but the community is what makes the hive buzz. To create a super ecosystem, Marketo needs people to go with the vendors. Without that community, LaunchPoint really is nothing but a storefront to integrate third-party apps with the Marketo platform.
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