If you plan on getting your Marketo Certified Expert (MCE) certification, you’re off to a good start looking for more information about it.

The MCE Exam is not particularly hard if you have over 6-month constant experience with the platform, however it does require some preparation. You won’t necessarily be familiar with all areas covered in the exam and there are some very specific questions that you probably won’t know just from regular Marketo use.

So here it goes some valuable tips and resources that will make your life easier. 

1. Go through the exam preparation material

Marketo has lots of resources available to help you prepare for the MCE Exam. Make sure you read the guides to understand the areas that are part of the exam and what’s expected from you.

• Marketo Certified Expert Preparation Guide

The guide will provide you the areas covered in the test and links to pages in Marketo Docs covering each topic.

• Certification Preparation Webinar

• Certified Marketo Expert Preparation Learning Path in Marketo University

There are also posts on the Marketo Community with tips and webinars about the test.

2. Do the MCE Practice Exam (as many times as needed!)

Taking the MCE Practice Exam is essential! The prep exam has 150 questions, no time limit and you can log-in/log-out multiple times. At the end you’ll get the overall results and also the results by category (basic administration and setup, managing customer data, leads and lists, etc).

The practice exam you help you:

– Get familiar with the format of the exam and types of question you will encounter

– Have an assessment about your current knowledge (how close you are from the 75% needed to pass), as well as the categories you are not performing so well, so you can focus your studies on your weakest areas

Taking the prep exam more than once may be repetitive, but highly recommended until all answers are clear for you. A few questions from the MCE exam (maybe 10%) are exactly the same as the ones from the practice, so you can guarantee some valuable points here.

3. Explore Marketo 

If you aim to get the MCE certification you should have at least 6 months hands-on experience with Marketo. There are things that you can learn from studying, but most questions involve practical situations and answers will be intuitive if you actively use the platform.

For the exam preparation, try exploring areas that you don’t use on your daily basis. You may use the Email Performance and Program Performance reports, for example, but have never used the other types of report. Explore, play with it and uncover areas that are new for you.

If you feel you need some guidance on the basics of Marketo, you can access the Marketo University or the Hoosh Online Training for Marketo, which provides a combination of digital marketing theory and hands-on Marketo exercises. The training is not focused on MCE specifically, but it’s really useful to quickly ramp-up Marketo newbies.

4. Take the exam in a testing center

You have the option of taking the exam at local testing centers or online. If there’s a testing center in your location, definitely do the exam there.

You’ll probably be nervous on the day of the test, and the last thing you need is worrying about Internet connection, if your webcam is working properly or having your mobile ringing at the wrong time. Just go to a center where you can focus exclusively on the test and nothing else.

5. During the exam, start with what you know

The MCE test has around 100 questions that need to be completed in 90 minutes. This time is pretty reasonable to complete the test, but needs to be managed properly, as there’re usually tricky questions that you might need more time to reflect on.

From my experience, the best strategy is to complete the easy questions first, the ones you are more confident about (you want to guarantee those points!), and don’t spend too much time on the difficult ones at first. Take your best guess and mark those questions to “review later”.

Unlike the practice exam, where you can’t review your answers, the actual exam allows you to mark questions for review and go through them at the end. After completing the 100 questions, you’ll see a table with your answers and the ones you marked for review. At this point, you’ll know how much time you have left and you can put more thought into those tricky ones with less pressure.

Overall, try not to stress too much about it! If you currently use Marketo and take the time to prepare, I’m sure you can do it. Good luck!