Looking to level up and set yourself apart as a Marketo consultant? With less than 200 people certified as Marketo Certified Solutions Architects (MCSA), passing the new Marketo Certified Architect exam will move you into the elite tier of Marketo users.
This new Marketo Certified Architect exam is in beta at the moment and it is intended to replace the previous presentation exam that was required by Marketo to achieve this certification. According to this post in the Marketo forum, there were less than 150 Marketo Certified Solutions Architects as of December 2017 so this is definitely an exclusive club to be a part of.
Marketo is releasing this new exam format to help with scaling and make it easier for people to become architect certified. Since I am a Marketo Certified Expert I was part of the lucky bunch that got a sneak peek at the Marketo Certified Architect Exam guide and took the beta test in October 2021 so I will share what I know here.
If you are not yet Marketo Expert Business Practitioner certified then I would recommend starting with this certification first and consulting the Marketo Expert Business Practitioner Exam Guide
N.B. Since you are clearly a go-getter and want to level up, take a look at the Marketo REST API Crash Course page and enroll in the course to take your automation game to the next level!
Take Tyron’s Course on Demand
The Marketo Certified Architect Exam guide has an “Exam Objectives and Scope” section which lists out all the areas that will be assessed in the exam so I won’t repeat what is in this guide already but I will try to add some color from my experience taking the exam.
As opposed to the Marketo Certified Associate and Expert exams, which focus on your knowledge of the Marketo platform itself, the Marketo Certified Architect exam focuses much more on strategic marketing operations thinking and the business impact of the Marketo implementation choices you make.
As such, the whole exam is tailored towards a Marketo consultant and many questions use the case study example of a company called “Unicorn” where you are asked to make certain decisions through the lens of a consultant. For example, one question I remember explicitly revolves around determining the necessary stakeholders for developing a new lead scoring model.
From my standpoint, there was more than one applicable option that I saw listed among the 4 groups of stakeholders I was asked to choose between and this was where I made a mistake, which I repeated throughout the exam. I spent too long deliberating over which of the options it should be instead of choosing one, continuing with the rest of the exam and nailing the questions I was more confident about an answer, and then coming back to all these ambiguous questions at the end of the exam.
The second mistake I made on this question, since it was the very first on the exam, was that I spent too long reading the entire case study description and trying to understand it because I thought all of it was needed for the question. However, the same description comes up again and again for other questions so you don’t need to read it all for each question you just need to be able to quickly parse the case study and find the section relevant to the question you are answering.
A lot of the other questions related to the case study ask you what initiatives should be prioritized taking into account the urgency for each initiative to be completed and how quickly they would take to complete.
Some particular areas I struggled with in the exam, since I did not have exposure to them in the one Marketo instance I have worked with at my company, are:
If you are like me and have not had much (or any) exposure to these topics in your day-to-day work with Marketo then I would recommend taking a look at the Marketo docs linked above before the exam.
The two main pieces of advice I would give you once you are in the exam are:
The Marketo Certified Architect exam will be launched in mid-February 2022 and if I did not pass this beta exam then I will be hunkering down to take the proper exam. I will update this post as I prepare for the exam and I will share all the study tips and other information I gather so if you want a study-buddy, subscribe to the blog to know when I update the post
In order to become a Marketo Certified Architect, you need to pass the Marketo Business Practitioner exam and the Marketo Certified Architect exam.
As explained in my Marketo Business Practioner exam guide, the new business practitioner exam replaces the old Marketo Certified Expert exam. If you are already a Marketo Certified Expert and your certification has not yet expired (the certification is only valid for 2 years after you pass the test) then you can take the Marketo Certified Architect exam without needing to take the business practitioner exam first.
If you have never been expert certified then I recommend checking out the business practitioner exam guide above to see my tips and tricks for passing the exam
The Marketo Certified Architect exam is 120 minutes long consisting of 46 multiple choice and multiple select questions.
There are 46 multiple choice and multiple select questions on the Marketo Certified Architect Exam and you will have 120 minutes to answer them.
Yes, the Marketo Certified Architect exam is an online proctored exam consisting of 46 multiple choice and multiple select questions.
The Marketo Certified Architect exam cost has not been disclosed yet but the exam is scheduled for release in mid-February 2022 so pricing will be finalized by then.
As a reference, the Marketo Business Practioner exam costs $225 in the US and $150 in India.
As of December 2017, there were less than 150 Marketo Certified Solutions Architects in the world.
According to Comparably a Marketo Solutions Architect makes $164k a year.
While this salary is based on existing Marketo Certified Solutions Architects who earned this qualification by the old presentation method, this figure should serve as a good benchmark for what newly accredited architects can expect.
Another good benchmark for estimating a lower bound for Marketo Certified Architect salaries is the $93k average annual salary earned by Marketo Certified Experts.
At a minimum, you should prepare for the Marketo Certified Architect exam by covering the topics below:
Greetings fellow MO Pros! As a previous mechanical engineer turned marketing operations lead, I now fancy myself as a full-stack marketer capable of designing websites, writing SEO-optimized content, and doing all the tracking and automation on the backend. That being said my bread and butter is marketing operations and I love to get down and dirty with the Marketo API, Python, Zapier, and Google Scripts.
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