Marketo's LaunchPoint

By Jerry Rackley

Marketo, a provider of cloud-based marketing software, yesterday announced LaunchPoint, described by the company as a complete ecosystem of marketing solutions. What are the implications for marketing professionals, and why should we care?

Marketo certainly has plenty of marketing cred. They are putting their marketing muscle behind LaunchPoint as one of the five pillars of another Marketo creation, the Marketing Nation – a community of marketing professionals, insights and solutions. The idea behind the Marketing Nation is simple: marketers helping each other find and use the ideal solutions. Conceptually this is all wonderful – what marketing professional wouldn’t support this?

It seems pretty clear that the Marketing Nation has already achieved critical mass. Demand Metric knows a thing or two about building a marketing community, and the folks at Marketo know these things as well. If they continue to put their name on this and invest in growing the Marketing Nation, I have no doubt it will quickly emerge as center of professional influence.

It’s fair to ask if our profession needs the Marketing Nation. After all, there are a number of “competitors” who all focus on marketers and have built a community to serve them with expertise, tools, and solutions, etc., Demand Metric being one of those communities. What we’ve learned is the relationships between these various marketing communities is more symbiotic than competitive. No one community completely and fully addresses the needs of all marketers everywhere. If the communities that exist today follow the established evolutionary track, some will grow, merge and eventually coalesce into a larger, dominant community that is more active and vibrant than the sum of its former parts.

LaunchPoint is a marketplace for the Marketing Nation, providing an online venue for marketers to find apps and services. Today, 65 Marketo marketing partners are represented in LaunchPoint, which resembles a Pinterest board covered with partner icons. LaunchPoint is a big tent, covering a broad range of marketing solutions as listed in the press release: Online advertising, Events and webinars, Content marketing, Top-of-the-funnel conversion, Lead-data enrichment, Social media, Sales tools, Analytics and Big data, Lifecycle marketing as well as Services.

So in the end, will LaunchPoint be a better place to find a marketing solution than Google? It certainly has the potential to, because Marketo – a company that knows marketing – has the ability to be selective about the partners it allows in to LaunchPoint. If Marketo vets candidate companies who apply to join LaunchPoint to any degree, it will provide the Marketing Nation with a welcome level of assurance.

I like the promise of LaunchPoint. It’s already starting to resemble a of Who’s Who of marketing solution vendors. If Marketo keeps the focus of LaunchPoint on providing value to marketers and ensuring that all partners are legitimate, there’s every reason to believe that LaunchPoint will become a dominant feature on the marketing landscape.