The Launch Point portal has gone through a makeover recently! Apart from the new look, the following features were also rolled out:
- Improved search navigation
- Integration with G2 Crowd, a peer-to-peer review aggregation service
- Categories, a new way to search the LaunchPoint partner applications, with a 2x2 grid to highlight popular applications
- Stack Builder - an interactive tool to model and visualize MarTech stacks
The Stack Builder allows you to explore sample stacks curated by us, visualize your current MarTech stack or conceptualize a brand-new stack from scratch.
Here is a brief walk through the salient features of the Stack Builder. Please check it out and let us know what you think.
Using the Stack Builder
Launch the Stack Builder by visiting this page here. The page opens up with the Featured Apps engagement stack. This stack is a collection of featured applications from the LaunchPoint ecosystem.
The stack is partitioned into six buckets or phases – Plan, Engage, Measure, Content, Data, and Platform. A tile under each bucket represents an application from the LaunchPoint ecosystem. Mousing over each application tile brings up a small popover which shows the prominent highlights about the application. Clicking on the application opens up the application listing page, where further detailed information is available including a form to get in touch with the partner directly.
Plan, Engage, Measure, …:
The Stack Builder is partitioned in to 6 buckets: Plan, Engage, Measure, Content, Data & Platform. The Launch Point ecosystem uses categories as a way to group applications. The Stack Builder builds on top of that, by further grouping application categories into partitions. This helps to visualize the stack in the order of data/process flow during the various phases of marketing.
For example, the following application categories are grouped together under the “Plan” bucket: Budgeting & Finance, Conversion Optimization, Customer Intelligence & Data Science, Optimization & Testing. The application filter tool provides an easy one-click button to limit all the application categories and the applications that belong to those categories, which can be used to narrow down the choice of applications to consider for the stack.
To learn more about the Plan, Engage, Measure framework, check out this webinar.
Creating stacks with the Stack Builder requires an account on LaunchPoint. If you don’t have an account already, please create one by clicking on the Sign-Up button.
Login:
Once logged in to the LaunchPoint site, additional navigational items show up on the side bar.
My Stacks is where you will find all the stacks you created using the Stack Builder.
My Inquiries is a handy tool to keep track of messages sent to partners using the “Get Started” form available on each of the partner listing page.
Create a new stack from template:
The quickest way to create a new stack, is to use one of the pre-made templates as a starting point.
- Select one of the existing Engagement Stacks or from one of your own from My Stacks and open it.
- Click Save As
- Fill out the details of the new stack (name and description)
The new stack will now show up under “My Stacks”.
Edit Stack:
Once created, a stack can be edited to modify the applications in it. The edit mode uses the application filter as a quick way to search, select or remove applications from the stack.
The application filter has partition filter buttons on the right-hand side corner. Selecting one of the buckets, limits the listings in the filter as well as the buckets shown below.
This is very useful to focus on one partition at a time, to search and select applications.
Click on the checkbox to add/remove an application to your stack.
The application partition buckets are listed below the filter in order (Plan, Engage, Measure, Data, Content & Platform).
Unlike the view mode, in the edit mode the tiles are rendered as larger tiles, with details about the application in the tile. Mousing over the tile, brings up the popover with more details about the application (just like the view mode).
In addition, while browsing through the applications in the partition, it is easy to remove an application, by clicking on the cancel button on the popover.
With the improved search and grouped categories added in the latest Stack Builder update, companies will be able to build their marketing stack in a more efficient and organized manner. If you’re interested in checking out these new changes, you can visit the LaunchPoint Stack Builder here.
Have any questions or comments? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
This article was written in collaboration with the Marketo Web Development team
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