Choosing a marketing automation platform is a pretty big decision. This is a system that will be running your online business. Many of my clients choose the most expensive, most intricate, most powerful application in that light. This is usually not the correct decision. You need to select a platform that best matches your needs and where you plan to grow into the future. 

Do you plan on building your marketing assets yourself? Do you have an employee that can do it for you? Are you planning on hiring an agency to run your marketing?

Your answers to these questions make a real difference.

If you plan to start off by running your own marketing, building your own pages, and doing things yourself, your best option is to pick the easiest system to use. This is definitely NOT Infusionsoft or Keap.

As an experienced Digital Marketing Agency owner, I can give you guidance here. I've been in this business for 20+ years. Yet I still get confused and frustrated when running a client's Infusionsoft campaigns from time to time. Yes, it can do many things that other platforms cannot. It can handle inventory, taxes, all kinds of important stuff for larger online businesses. But all of that complexity comes at a cost. Confusion. Anything new I want to accomplish in Infusionsoft, my general practice is to not even attempt to do it intuitively. The first place I head is to youtube to look up an instructional video on how to do what I am planning to do. 

If you are planning to run your business yourself at first, this is the most difficult option. Infusionsoft (Keap) is not intuitive. You will need a lot of instruction and training before you get started. 

The clear winner for the solopreneur or small online business is Kartra. You can be up and running with only a few videos of training.

Having a dedicated employee that runs your marketing automation is a great option for small to medium sized online businesses. You can send that person into all of the training and certification, and know that you will benefit from the time and effort. My suggestion, though, is that you dedicate some time to learn much of the functions along with the employee.

If you rely solely on the employee, you place yourself in jeopardy. In the use case of Infusionsoft or Keap, that training will be extensive. You will have to be patient as they learn and set everything up and make mistakes. 

Once this employee is fully trained, you have an additional hazard: people that are well trained in Infusionsoft can be poached from your company really easily. Experts in this field command high salaries. Don't think your employee won't abandon you for twice the money. You may have to increase their wages to keep them.

Make it a regular practice to meet with the employee and have them show you everything they have built. Not only what was built, but how they went about it. You need to know how to manage everything without them if they decide to leave or get hit by a bus. ;)

If you have an employee to run your marketing automation with you, I highly recommend Kartra. You can restrict their access to certain areas of the application, and easily learn to manage things right along with them. 

This is definitely not the cheapest option. Agencies typically charge a monthly retainer of $1000 to $5000, and add fees on to that for running advertising and such. But you do have a reasonable assurance that what is done for you will be functional and effective. You do not, however, have a guarantee that it will be profitable. 

Employing an Agency removes a lot of the guesswork and unknowns. Just be ready to make an investment that is not returned for several months. If you'd like to explore that option with MY agency, head on over to MixedSynergy.com. 

If you run or are planning on running an online venture with an extensive product line, where you have to manage inventory and want people to be able to add products to a shopping cart and check them all out together, Infusionsoft or Keap is the best option. Kartra does not manage inventory, nor does it have a multi-item shopping cart. It wasn't designed for such things. It's also a little clunky when it comes to managing sales tax on physical products.

But for all other situations, there is no better option than Kartra. It is intuitive and easy to learn. It was designed for marketing by highly experienced marketers. It is designed for a standard marketing funnel - where the prospect is asked to make only one choice at a time. Then they progress to new choices like bump offers and upsells. 

I have gotten new users up and running in Kartra in under an hour of one-on-one instruction. The entire interface is laid out logically. Once you learn how one section works, the others are very similar. So you can hop into a new area of Kartra and know what to do, intuitively. 

There are many advanced marketing functions that are built into Kartra. It uses something called "Behavioral Adaptive Marketing". Simply put, as a prospect moves through your marketing funnel, that funnel adapts to the actions or choices the prospect makes. The message, the offer, the follow-up all changes to meet the needs of the prospect. And it does so automatically. You can use these features in as simple or granular a fashion as you like. 

Kartra utilizes tagging and automations, countdown timers that can expire and redirect visitors, surveys and quizzes, and has video hosting that performs advanced functions right in the video. If you would like a detailed walk-through, just go to our homepage and watch the video: KartraGuru.com