Foundational Marketo User Group: Professional Exam Preparation

Transcript

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our final fifth session in our series to prepare you to take the professional Marketo exam. This is our prep for that exam on that session to be at the foundational Marketo user group. I am going to be your kind of housekeeping person, slide runners for this session today. For those that don’t know me, my name is Brad Bedford. I run our Marketo user group and champion program. We have three great speakers today, AJ, James, and Tanya, but I’ll let them introduce themselves in a few minutes. As always, if you do have questions, please go ahead and put those in the chat or in the Q&A section that I just posted, and it is now live. So onto our slides. As we start any other Marketo Adobe user group session, some house rules, make sure that there is no self promotion. We’ve got contact people outside of the user group without their consent. And if anyone does share any specific use cases, please don’t use those for your own personal gain or share the information out without their individual consent. This meeting is being recorded. If for whatever reason you do not want to be recorded as an attendee, don’t worry, you can drop. We’ll post the recording afterwards on YouTube and then also on ExperianCelig where you can check that out later. If you have any concerns, feel free to email me or our advocacy at Adobe email addresses. Big updates. Adobe Summit registration will go live in just about two weeks. So if you have not marked your calendars, it is taking place in Las Vegas, April 19th through 22nd. And I’m starting promotion on this earlier than I usually do because that is a month later than what we normally have. Adobe Summit takes place in March. So if you want to save your maximum amount at attend live, do register at summit.aw.com for $600 off before the end of October to make sure you get the maximum discount to attend. Next thing also happening on October 31st is the deadline to apply for the ExperianCelig Awards. We have 10 categories this year with one of them being new called the Groundbreaker who is laying the foundations for increasing personalized experiences. This is our red carpet event. This is where you walk away with an award if you are a winner that you can see there on the right. And if you are selected as one of our three finalists for any of those 10 categories, you receive two complimentary passes to attend Adobe Summit and two invitations to actually attend the gala itself taking place on April 19th in Las Vegas. All about certifications today. We have certifications not just for Marketo as you can imagine, we have certifications across all of the Adobe ExperianCelig Cloud Solutions. So if you don’t just use Marketo and you’re interested in applying or taking another exam, we have tons and tons of options for you to get that certification in your badge. I’ll put it out to your LinkedIn show off that you are one of the best and brightest in the world. It’s a really, really great program that we have here today. So since we’re talking all about certifications, I wanted to make sure that we let everybody know about all the different resources that we have for you to go ahead and get certified with Adobe’s solutions. We’re also always looking for feedback and helping improve how people are finding out about Marketo engage. So we have G2, we have Trust Radius, we have Gartner peer reviews. So here are two. If you are, like to get any feedback on any of the Marketo solutions, please go ahead and scan these QR codes and fill that out when you get a chance. We will also be giving you a $25 gift card as a thank you for sharing your feedback with the Marketo and Marketing Outmission community and with us at Adobe.

All right, that’s enough of me talking. We have a great agenda here for today. We’ll kick it off with introductions here in a second. Then we will go into exam prep, study guide resources, talk about some practical advice for actually taking the exam itself, any type of chat DBT, copilot, all the different AI tools that you can use to go ahead and compare exam smarter. And then we’re also going to have Tanya talk about the courses that we will be launching in Experience League that she’s been championing for to finish off this session. Then we’ll wrap up with Q&A resources and all of the great things to help you prepare.

So speech or introductions, I will go ahead and turn it over in alphabetical order to Ajay first.

All right. Thank you for joining everybody. My name is Ajay Navarro. I am a current Adobe Champion, a marketing operations manager at Sprout Social. And I’m just passionate about this topic today because I’ve taken the exam quite a few times just in my career as well as help teams prepare for the exam. So just really passionate about just helping everybody prepare and what to look for in probes and the gotchas when preparing to take your exam as it’s a big milestone and accomplishment in your Marketo career.

Cool. Hey, I’m James. I was a Marketo champion and then I boomeranged back to Adobe. So my background, I used to help manage our own internal Marketo instance. So any new marketer that we had coming onto the team, I’d have to help get them prepared for the exam at some point in their Marketo career. But now I am a technical advisor. Don’t do too much account management, but I work with our CSM. So whoever your CSM is at Adobe, if you ever want to meet, just ask them to pull me into a call. It’s my job’s talk shop.

Awesome. Hi, everyone. I’m Tanya Sedavnicia. I’m a product manager on the Experience League team. Experience League is the website where all of the free of charge resources around Adobe products live. I’m super excited to be here today. Excited to give you all a sneak peek into the upcoming courses functionality and connect with all of you one on one.

All right. So I’ll take kind of the first step here, and I want to really start us off with talking about the exam prep resources. And we’re going to start kind of at the core here with the official Adobe prep resources. And first up is really looking at the Experience League. So this is Adobe’s own learning platform and one of your best starting points when getting ready to prepare for the exam. There’s learning paths built in for both the professional as well as the business practitioner exam. Each path has its own set of modules, self-paced lessons, video modules, as well as quick quizzes and sample tests that align directly to the certification blueprint for that specific exam. So again, it’s a great place to start. You heard me touch on this, but next would be the exam guides and practice tests. So again, within the Experience League, you’ll also find some of the practice exams. I tend to find these as your cheat sheet of what’s actually on the exam in terms of the topics and the situations. They break down the type of question categories, the weightings and sample questions. So really there’s no surprises when it comes to test day. One of the things that I like to do is either print this out, save it on my desktop. And as I’m taking or preparing for the exam, mainly I will highlight the areas that I feel weakest in and go study up on that through either the documentation or through the learning path that Adobe has prepared. And again, I just tie this into my overall study roadmap. Another big resource is the Marketo community. I’m going to come back to this, but this is a huge resource. And I like to think of this as just my overall study group. If you go through Experience League or Marketo Nation, we can look at the different type of topics that fall in the exam. I could read through old threads and see how other people have solved these problems or even conveyed some of these solutions in order to help me learn and really prepare and study. On that same note is to not skip any of the Champion or User Group content. Brad, you heard him say earlier to join the MUGs. It’s a great area for you to come in and also just another cheat code to talk to Champions directly, see what they’re posting, but also a lot of the MUG contents, whether in person or virtual, we’re talking about things that are happening in Marketo, gauge on the daily. And a lot of it is what’s going on, what situations you’re going to find yourself when taking the exam. So I tend to find that the Adobe Champions blog is gold as well as just any of the past MUG recordings. Again, they’re full of just real world use cases and exam level explanations from people who’ve already passed.

Now, the next thing is what I would probably call, you heard me say this earlier, the real secret, I think, to passing the exams, which is community. This is something that helped me when I was first preparing, when I first got into Marketo and I didn’t really know my way around. I didn’t really know Champions or anything like that, but I stumbled upon a lot of the blogs. Adobe gives fantastic material, but I find that the fastest way to really learn is to be around these people who use Marketo Engage every single day. So the next place that I recommend joining again is those Marketo user groups from both your local chapter or the virtual ones. Again, these are just great for seeing the live examples. There’s a ton of study strategies that are shared and just meeting others that are also working towards that certification. Again, I’ve ran some study lessons in the past where we’ve built out decks, recordings, and even sample quizzes, which supplement what Adobe’s already providing. And this is just a great study refresher when preparing for this exam. The next place that I’d also recommend would be like marketingops.com. This is just another, if you’re a MOPs practitioner, this is one of the biggest Slack communities. Again, just full of marketing ops professionals. You’ll find channels such as CareerGrow, Certifications, Marketo, and you can really ask anything. And a lot of these people in this same community are also in the MUD community. And again, it’s just getting around more people who are preparing or who have already passed the exam. And of course, there’s also the LinkedIn and Adobe and Champion Network. For those who are also just active outside of Slack, you’ll often see champions post all their thoughts and different things across LinkedIn or study strategies, tips, and just prep across all their different experiences. The last thing that I would say is to really find a study buddy and a pair-up approach or accountability, whatever you want to call it. When I was first preparing, I’d often have a friend, again, that I either met in a MUG community or even at one of the Adobe Summit. And we would routinely just check in with each other every week or so as we were preparing for the exam and schedule like a 30-minute check-in and we’d quiz each other and share notes. All this combined, just when you implement community, the user groups, all the documentation Adobe provides, and you’re really setting yourself up for success, that just makes that much more of a difference when you’re prepping for this exam.

I’ll pass it over to James to talk about the study guides and key concepts. Cool. Thanks, AJ. Sweet. So, I mean, part of the job that I had at Marketo was helping all the marketers that came in. Some had Marketo experience previously, some were just really good at demand gen or customer marketing. They were learning the Marketo platform. And there was always this essential 30, 60, 90 type thing to say, well, here’s what we’re going to do, not 30, 60, 90, but essentially with months. Here’s what we’re going to do first. This is what we’re going to focus on after that. And this is where I want you really focusing on in the Marketo platform. Now, a lot of those folks didn’t have to do lead scoring. They didn’t have to do program templates or email templates where a lot of the more, I guess, the smaller teams, we had 100 plus marketers in Marketo at that point. So it’s a pretty big team. The smaller ones will have to do a lot more. So looking at the more entry level exam that’s geared towards earlier marketers or people newer to Marketo, that is the professional exam. So this is really great for someone that’s getting their feet wet in Marketo. They’ve done the core concepts training. They’re just showing that they have the understanding of the system. I think it’s really easy. I’m sure AJ would agree with me here, I hope, that it’s easy to get pigeonholed into something in Marketo, especially with your experience. My experience, my bread and butter was always life cycle scoring, Salesforce sync, things like that. That doesn’t necessarily lend itself to being super successful when it comes to email templates or understanding email calendars or audience building, things like that. So there’s a lot of pieces like that that are really important. I like to think about it if I’m going to drive to work or ride my bike to work, I understand everything else that’s going on in the road. I might not be riding the bus, but I know the bus is right there and I know where the bus stops are. You have to know everything else that’s going on in the instance. That’s the general idea with Marketo is you want to see it as a business use case and what’s that use case solving in your business. All that to say, if we dig into this, the professional exam, you’re going to want to know program types. How does a program type differ from a channel and where did the channel sit? How do you add a period cost? How do you make that period cost inclusive of or the membership inclusive of that period cost as you get into reporting piece? As we see down there, we have different email reporting, email performance, program performance. You basically want to know end to end, like here are my channels and my program types that I’m launching. Here are the different tags I might throw on those. It could be the team, demand gen, customer marketing, product marketing, whatever it is, or that you could have a different tag of the audience that you’re reaching out to. Then also understanding what’s the engine that’s driving all those campaigns. It’s your batch and your trigger smart campaigns. Understanding those qualifications, the different smart lists in there. Obviously, when you set up the smart list for a smart campaign, you have your green filters, which are like static filters for batches, setting up list logic, things like that. Whereas your orange filters, if you add more than one, they’re always going to be in any type of logic. It’s really thinking theoretically, how is this supposed to work? The general idea here is that you have multiples choice questions. We’re essentially trying to validate how you understand Marketo Engage as a practitioner. If we go to the next slide.

The next step there is a business practitioner exam. This is called the MCE Marketo Certified Expert previously. This is going to be a similar scenario based multiple choice questions.

Basically looking at a little bit more. I apologize if there’s someone named Jeff on the call. I always like to say when we talk about roles and permissions and workspaces and stuff like that, you want to make sure that the people that are in the instance, like Jeff from the content team, can’t go in and press all the right buttons, send an email to the whole system. How do you prevent that? There’s multiple ways of preventing that. It’s really understanding who is in this system, how do I want people to interact within this system. You might not be the admin if you’re doing the business practitioner exam, but you do need to understand how the admin can affect the day-to-day practitioner within Marketo. A lot of that’s within partitions, roles, permissions, things like that.

Then moving on from there, knowing your campaign management. Someone comes in from a paid social ad and they download a piece of content. Which program is getting the acquisition program credit? Are you adding custom fields to the program member itself to sync over to maybe your CRM? That could be like UTMs, anything that’s like a snapshot in time when they fill out a form. Then getting into smart list constraints. What’s the most effective way to build a smart list? Which of these smart lists is probably good to build into a segmentation instead? Really just understanding how does the system interact with all these different assets that are almost like a web of this is related to that, but there’s a strategy behind it because you’re creating the strategy. It’s showing the proficiency and understanding how all that works essentially. Then the last piece, performance insights. That’s free with every instance now, essentially making sure that when you’re looking at reporting on there, it’s not only your program costs that you’re pulling in, but it’s also just the basics of adding people as members and successes to campaigns themselves. Setting up something like that that is, I don’t want to say foolproof, but consistent. You’re always going to run into things where there’s gaps and you got to fix and you have to backfill that stuff. I feel like I still do that 10 plus years later. I should know better, but you’re always going to run into that. It’s about like templatizing and scaling these things. That’s more of the business practitioner exam. Some common pitfalls essentially that a lot of people run into.

Over-memorizing. We’re not looking for you to regurgitate the information that you’ve read. We’re looking for you to read it and understand it and understand the use case and why you might approach something a certain way. Outside of that, also release notes. Pretty much anything that changes within Marketo is going to be in a release note. An example, we had a customer recently that had an old, I’d probably call it archaic, API service hooked up to their Marketo instance through JSON. That JSON endpoint got deprecated, but nobody was looking at the release notes even though it was basically coming up that it was getting deprecated because maybe they’re not looking at release notes for this reason or another. Basically, they didn’t know that it applied to them. You never know what could apply to you within your own Marketo instance. Outside of that, all your program setup details, having a campaign rubric that basically says you create it in Marketo by cloning from a template and then you sync it to Salesforce if you have Salesforce. You have to change the tags and add a period cost as a placeholder and then change some start date, end dates, all those things that need to happen. You basically want to create a rubric around that and just understand that when you get tested on that, that a lot of those things are going to be similar for everybody else that’s working out of Marketo. We already touched on practicing hands-on, especially for the business practitioner exam, the second one. I would always say six, eight, 10 months in the system is usually a really good footprint. Working in Marketo every single day is probably a good way to essentially introduce yourself to all the different scenarios that you might run into and how the system works. The misreading scenario questions, I’ve done that in the past. I remember taking it for the first time probably about 10 years ago. I would say don’t over complicate it. Occam’s razor is popping up in my head that if the answer is likely the most simple answer, you’re like, oh, duh, there’s no way that could be it. That’s probably the answer. We’re looking for what the logical way or the logical answer would be in those scenarios. We can go to the next section, I think. Cool. Practical advice as we go through here. It’s what we were just talking about. Knowing the cross-functional piece, how do you set up a campaign that’s looking at two channels? How do you need to set up two different campaigns? Really just understanding the more broad scope of your instance and how things are tracked. If someone comes to your website and fills out a form and there’s nothing in Marketo that’s adding them to a program for that form fill, it’s probably a bad sign. Just knowing any engagement that occurs, you want to register that engagement in Marketo somehow. We talked about that. We talked about clarifying the intent. Eliminating outliers is multiple choice. By default, you probably have about 25% chance of getting one of those questions right. I wouldn’t go into it with that mentality. By default, you’re starting off with a pretty good chance at finding the correct answer. If you work backwards in that, start doing a process of elimination and just saying there could be two answers that make sense. I know I’ve seen that before where there are multiple answers that make sense. AJ, I would hope that you agree with me that there’s a hundred different ways to do something in Marketo. There’s about 10 ways that are a good idea. Then maybe two or three of those ways are best practice. We’re looking for those best practice answers. If you can back up something like your answer with something from Experience League or some Adobe approved documentation, then that’s probably going to be the right answer. Really, that’s what we’re looking at. As you go through Marketo instances, I feel like now in this role as an advisor, I see a lot of instances. I always have to say I’m not here as I know everything about your audience and your tech stack and everything that’s occurring. You do have to take this information and apply it to your own business. We’re asking you to pull yourself out of your own business and understand that this is how Adobe wants you to envision the Marketo certification. Go to the next one.

Study game plan. As we go through here, learning the fundamentals, just making sure you understand the core concepts. There is a core concepts class. I think it’s really helpful. That information gets updated quite frequently as well. Reviewing that exam guide, understanding the weak areas. Let’s say you work in marketing ops. You do some email sending. You do some webinar planning, some integrations, stuff like that, but you don’t do much with engagement programs. Just knowing that that’s where we have a little bit of a weak side. Let’s hone in on that and just try to extend yourself in that way. Then moving into week two. Practicing the application. Get hands-on experience. You don’t really need a sandbox to do this. You can create your own little testing environment within your production instance. Don’t test in prod. I’m not saying to test in prod. If you’re building that engagement program, you don’t need to add people to the program. You can also create some… If you have people in your instance that are practicing this, you can remove their permission or assign them to a different role that has a different permission set that doesn’t allow people to execute smart campaigns or run email programs. You can build, but you can’t execute, which is great. If you have a sandbox, obviously that’s the best way to do it. Then using real reporting tools to test that logic. Anytime someone fills out a form that came from this refer with these UTMs, everything flows the way you want it to flow. Moving into week three. Testing and review. Simulate that exam. I did a lot of mock testing for people who were on the marketing team at Marketo. Sometimes we try to get them with a clever one. Sometimes it’s just pretty straightforward stuff. How far ahead do you need to do the head start on an email batch program? Why would you want to do head start? Basically just making sure that people understand the concepts behind it. Then joining those Marketo user groups. I think they’re great because there’s no selling. I hated going to some Marketo dinner at Summit or something like that and getting sold to. It’s really nice to know that everyone else sees that same weird Tuscany email batch program background in Marketo. That’s not unique to you. Everyone experiences the same thing. Then moving into week four. Scheduling that exam. Giving yourself a deadline. Basically hold yourself accountable with that. I would also dedicate the full day to that exam. I think that sometimes people try to fit it into a different schedule, but it’s not really necessary to do that. It can be a really good career booster as well for doing the Marketo certification. A lot of people that use Marketo are looking for Marketing Ops people or marketers that already know how to use Marketo.

The last slide for me, just looking at the actual exam day strategy. I always like to promise myself that I’m going to go buy myself a nice beer afterwards. If you don’t drink, maybe it’s a coffee or a chai tea or something like that. Maybe it’s a slice of pizza. I’m gluten free. That might kill me, so I’m not going to do that. Promise yourself something.

You’re going to go on a nice stroll. Basically just take that day to really make it your own. Starting with confidence, you know the material. If you go through the practice exams and all of it makes sense, you know the material. You trust yourself. Then you have 90 minutes, so just make sure you’re finishing with a few minutes to review. Mark the hard questions. Come back to later. As we saw, I think you only need 36 out of 50 for the business practitioner to pass. Then it’s 36 out of 55 around that. It’s on one of the slides there. Then the tactical tips. Using real world logic like we talked about, the simplest answer is probably the most reasonable one. Then eliminate those wrong answers first and give yourself a better chance. From here, I think I’m passing it off to Tanya.

I’ll be talking about how to use AI to prepare smarter. I think this is also just another big hack. Think of AI tools such as chat GPT, claw, Gemini. There’s a ton out there. Pick which one you like. I’m a GPT guy. There’s no right or wrong. Find the one that works for you. I like to think of these as my personal study coach. I ran this exact same approach for my team for both the practitioner and the expert exam. What we did was we built different types of agents to do certain things to help us prepare. Really what we can do here is we can use AI to one, summarize long experience leak articles into key takeaways.

We could make these AI agents quiz us on specific concepts or topics. Again, if I find an area where I’m weak in this example, my team was struggling with grasping reporting. Great.

We can use it to coach us on the scenario based practice questions. One of the things I loved about using AI was I was treating it like a conversation with a Marketto expert and I was helping teach my team the theory versus just memorization of a sample question and test. On the next slide here, I’m going to move to some prompt frameworks that I’ve actually used and still use when preparing for this exam. The first one is that study summarizer. I’ll use this when I want to turn different types of docs into quick notes. Again, feel free to take these prompts and adjust as needed, but it’s something as simple as, hey, summarize this Adobe Marketto engaged article and the key takeaways I should know for the certification exam.

The next one is the concept explainer. I’ll use this when I am struggling with a topic or it feels unclear, something like smart campaigns, period costs, things like that. I’ll input a prompt of, hey, explain the concept of insert topic into Marketto engaged as if I’m preparing for the certification exam. Again, really focusing on theory, include what it does, when to use it, and one to two real world examples. Again, this just helps convey on how it is and the theory behind it. So when I’m in this particular situation on the exam, I get just a much clearer understanding or how this works versus just the sample question on the test. Now, speaking of sample questions, I’ll also use a practice question generator. So I’ll use this when I’m trying to create scenario based quizzes or questions for myself. And one of the things I’ll do here is what you see in the prompt, create five scenario based multiple choice questions on X topic. Each of these questions should have one correct answer and three plausible distractors. Very similar to what you’re going to find in the Marketto exam. But again, I’m trying as best I can to get away from memorization. I suffer from this where no matter how much I take the practice exam, eventually you take it four to six times, you’re going to know the answer just based off of your memorizing it. I want you to really focus in on the theory and the why behind these options or these questions or these answers are the answer to set question to think like someone who’s been doing this for four to five years. The next one would be the flashcard generator. Again, this is great for a five to one quick memorization drills. So I’ll create either a study guide using AI or I’ll take Adobe study guide or document and I’ll throw this into 10 flashcards format each as a question and answer and focus on the Marketto engaged specific terms. You can even take this a step further and it’ll draft it up into a quizlet form that you could just upload directly into quizlet and study that way. All of these I put in a combination. This is exactly how my team all six of them pass their certification exams for both again, the practitioner and the Marketto engaged expert or certified practitioner. I know it as the expert exam by again, layering in not only the Adobe awesome articles and the learning paths, but taking it one step further with the tools that we already have in front of us again, to just hone in on that theory. So I’m just a big fan of using AI to prepare to just take these exams and smash it and pass it with flying colors. Now go ahead and pass it off to Tanya.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Let’s talk courses on experience league. Brad, if you don’t mind, I’m going to steal the screen share because I want to. Awesome.

You should all see the screen. Awesome. Okay. So courses on experience lake, which is another resource for foundational knowledge or even the exam preparation material. So one of the most consistent requests from experience, the customers from you guys is for guided learning experiences that help you all to onboard into new products and build skills in Adobe tools. That’s why we are working on introducing new courses on experience leak that will help you to quickly gain your foundational product skills. So you can start driving those business results faster. You can learn on your own schedule. We all are busy. So that’s why we are breaking those courses down into bite sized modules. After you pass the quizzes within each module, you will earn a digital certificate of completion, which you can showcase on platforms like LinkedIn, and the best part of it. Those all are free and accessible to everyone on experience leak. That’s a nutshell what the courses are. But now I’m going to give you a sneak peek into the courses flow on the experience leak. And since I did not appease the demo gods, I will be using the clickable prototype for that. So let me do that. There it is. So to navigate to the courses, you will go to experience leak, it will be part of the learn drop down, there’s going to be a new section for the resources called courses. Once you are in the courses homepage, depending on your authentication status, as you all know, you don’t have to authenticate with experience league. However, if you are authenticated, and if you already started engaging with courses, you’ll have an opportunity to see the courses that are already in progress. But what’s most important for you in this space is to be able to discover the courses that are available on experience like you’ll be able to filter those by product by your progress. And then going forward as we add more course material to the experience leak will add more robust filtering functionality for all of you. And once you’ve identified the course that you’re interested in, you’re going to land on this basically linden page for the course, which will talk through all of the skills that you’re gonna gain from this course, it will tease out the certificate of completion that is coming towards the end of the course, and it’s going to give you this visual breakdown of all of the modules available and all of the steps that you will need to take within each module. And as you can see, each module will end with a module quiz. 80% correct answer is the requirement for that. And then once you’re done with all of the quizzes within the the course, you will be awarded of that certificate of completion. But before we jump into that, I’m going to walk you through the overall flow of the course itself. So let’s say you are exploring this Marketo engage core concepts course, you will be you will land on the experience that walks you through the each step for the module, which includes the text information, some interactive widgets, video content, you name it, each step is going to be represented on a page and you’ll be able to navigate between each step by clicking through previous or next button. Once you’re done through once you’re done going through the steps within that module, you will you will have this orientation page basically walking you through what you’ve learned so far within this particular module before you take a quiz, then you’re going to move to the module quiz. And as I said, it’s going to be a pretty straightforward, simple, single select or multi select type of questions, you’ll need to get 80% of the questions correct. And then if you got it right, you will have some visual clues indicating that you’ve passed the quiz. If you will have to retake the quiz, it will also be displayed in the UI and you’ll have an opportunity to retake a quiz, go back to the step one or start the course from the very beginning up to you. And then once you’re done with all of the quizzes within the course, you will land on the page with the certificate of completion for that particular course. This certificate of completion is going to be tied to your experience league profile, it will also going to be this information is going to be used to provide you more personalized recommendations across the experience website in terms of the next best resources that would be appropriate in your learning journey. You can share this certificate with your network on LinkedIn, you can download the digital image, and you can engage with the community and talk about what you just learned. And you can explore other resources that are related to the course or to the path and the previous experiences that you had on the experience league. So that’s courses in a nutshell, I just wanted to give you the high level flow and the overview of those. We are targeting to launch the first kind of the MVP of this initiative towards the end of Q4. Basically for us, it would be end of November this year, and we are working with content creation teams on adding more course material to the experience league. If you have any kind of feedback for me, or if you would want to be if you would be willing to connect one on one with me, I would love to have this opportunity to provide your feedback around courses or talk about anything else experience league related, please reach out to me through the email that you see on your screens, and we’ll take it from there. That’s courses. Brent, over to you.

All right, I’ll reshare my screen here quick. I think we’ll just go with the wrap up.

Talk about resources already? I don’t know if we have. Do you want to take this last one? Yeah, I can take this one. Yeah, so just to bring us home here. You’ve got this. If you’re watching this, go crush the exam. I have full faith and confidence that there’s everything that you need to really prepare for this. And to kind of sum up the key resources is A is that experience league. Again, there’s full learning paths for both the professional and the expert exams. Next is the exam guide. So again, taking the sample questions, the breakdown of what the exam focuses and sections are and the different types of weightings and the question types. Next would be the market of user groups. You’ve heard us talk about this, but join those local virtual sessions. There’s people who have taken this exam or are taking it or looking to take it. And again, it’s the best way to learn. On top of that, follow the community with their weather market or nation experience or just the champions blog to get those real tips from certified experts as well as AI tools. So to take this one step further and supplement your learning, use the prompts from this session to reinforce your study plan. And the last thing I put it on here, I don’t know why it didn’t show up is that what Tanya talked about that foundational course prep once it actually goes live. So all of these, incorporate them into your tool belt and you should definitely use the exam by using all these. You’re going to see it a bunch of different ways. You’ll have a bunch of different prep. So just again, really focusing on the theory and the why behind the questions and most importantly, the answers to these questions for this exam. So if you have any questions, again, feel free to reach out to me, whether I’m LinkedIn or anything like that. I’m always happy to chat on the exam and just helping you prepare. So thank you for joining today.

Awesome. So I think with that, we have time for questions. I saw a couple that came through in the chat. If somebody was between roles that don’t have access to an instance or to a sandbox, where do you guys think would be the best place for them to get some hands-on experience with a Marketo tool or Marketo resources, anything like that? James, what are your thoughts on that? That’s a tough question. I think just because of the nature of Marketo, I don’t know if there’s a way to access a Marketo instance if you’re not a customer. Yeah, that’s tough. I don’t really have an answer for that.

To my knowledge, I think the only way you’re actually going to be able to get access to instances is to either be a current customer or a partner, or luckily enough to be considered an Adobe champion or part of the Marketo User Group Program. So I think it’s a tough one, Jackson, I think. I can tell you this. If you are a proficient Marketo user, we have a lot of great consulting partners that are also always looking for adjunct consultants to come in and help that would give you access to something like that. So look through who are considered our partner class and we can definitely connect you with some of those folks if you need any recommendations that way.

Another one was outside of the core concepts course, where do you guys think is the best place to advance someone’s knowledge that can take them up to getting ready for an exam outside of what we’ve had before? So I know we mentioned AI tools, we mentioned Experience League, we’ve mentioned marketing nation, we’ve mentioned Marketo User Groups. AJ, do you have any special Slack groups that you want to drop as like, hey, this is where I go sometimes if I’m stumped like that? Yeah, for me, the two main slackers would either be like the champion slack or most importantly, like the marketing ops slack community, I would say I rely heavily more to like, on a lot of the old blogs that have been posted. There’s a ton of gold in there. Honestly, if you just navigate to our commission type in certification exam. And I think I’ve actually linked that in this presentation, one of the links like you will just get threads of people either asking questions, sample quizzes. And then like the theories behind this question. So even for me, when I was preparing that stuff, like that is a tremendous unlock. I would also add in this a little bit different, but kind of taking it a step further for like AI, it’s something that we are actually doing right now, this helps if you have access to an instance. But I think the next level is to find a way to creatively challenge yourself. And so like something that we’re doing here at Sprout is now that everybody’s taken and passed their certification exams, we’ve started implementing lovely challenges, where as admins, we created these programs where something is specifically wrong, that admins know what’s wrong, but we’re presenting that challenge to our team for them to go and solve for. And so again, this is a little bit going above and beyond here. But the why this works is it gets you to really start to thinking like an admin. And I think James touched on this, like the 10 different ways that a problem can be solved. And it’s just to expand your thinking. Again, this is outside of the realm of just passing the exam. But I’m just so honed in on focusing on the why and the theory behind why this mechanism or this lever that you’re pulling may work. And so I think that’s just a big unlock. We’ve seen just a ton of like progression with people in our instance, who literally have only been familiar with email building, are now doing more advanced lead scoring and nurture techniques because of the challenges that we put in front of them for them to go solve for and self audit and think of how can I solve this short term but then how can I build this to solve for scale in the future. So I think that’s just a big unlock. Find a way to creatively challenge yourself by presenting yourself maybe just some creative challenges. And I would relate that back to any of the sections that you may be struggling with.

Great time at a nuggets on experience like that you want to drop outside of what you talked about today? No, I just know that we will be exploring more opportunities to add more robust and different levels of content to to upskill yourself on Adobe solutions. So that could be a resource. We’re partnering with Adobe learn team to see if they have any good resources that we could borrow, you know, and kind of repurpose and be and make those available free of charge on experience league. So we’re definitely thinking about those ways, you know, to bring more content more robust content to experience league.

The other thing I know too is that experience league is not personalized. So like if you are a marketo person, you’re going to get fed marketo content more often than anything else. Is that right, Tanya? That is true. That’s a very good point. We do encourage everyone to go to your profile to the experience league profile and update your interests. However, without going into a lot of details, we do have we use our own technology target for personalization and target tool is smart enough, you know, to have those signals. If you visited marketo pages, we know what would be the next best step for you in your learning journey. But you know, the the more you tell us in your profile, the better the recommendation engine would become. So we do encourage you all to do that.

Great. All right. Well, I think that wraps up with all of our questions for today. So thank you all so much for sharing your knowledge with our marketo community. This really, really helps us as a group, you know, level up our knowledge, get us certified, get us the next place in our careers that we want to go to. So thank you all for sharing so much of your knowledge. The last thing that I’ll mention, and I say this for last on purpose for anyone who’s still here, there is a very strong likelihood I’ve been teasing this now for the last two or three sessions that we’ve had here, there is a very strong likelihood that I’m going to be getting access to some vouchers. So you can actually take your professional exam at no cost. This is not an opportunity that comes around very often. So this is a special approval that I’ve worked with a certification team to get. So if that is something that you are very, very interested in doing and saving the gets like 200 250 bucks that you’d say by taking this exam through a voucher, shoot me an email, shoot me a slack, shoot me a LinkedIn message. However you think that you’d like to get involved. I’m also on Experience League and marketing nation. If you want to get in touch with me there, I’ll be looking at all those different places. But this was an opportunity for you to take this exam. There’s also a few of you who attended every single one of these sessions as well. I’ll reach out to you on a personal basis to make sure that we get you an exam for all of your awesome engagement. So with that, we will conclude this first series of the foundational Marketo user group. Thank you so, so much all for attending. Thank you to our amazing speakers today throughout the entire session. And we’ll be starting up a new version of this probably in either December or in January. So if this was something that you enjoyed, please share it with a friend. We’d love to see this community continue to grow and we will catch you next time. Thanks. Bye everyone. Bye.