When the Marketer Becomes the Client: How Kara of The Kara Report Uses Enji to Run Her Own Marketing

Kara runs The Kara Report, a content marketing agency that helps small business owners get found online through blogging, SEO, and Pinterest (without living on Instagram). She helps other businesses build sustainable, search-driven marketing systems.

And she uses Enji to do her own marketing.

Which means she's not exactly our typical user. She knows what a marketing funnel is, what KPIs to track, what a campaign looks like before it launches, etc. So when Kara tells you Enji makes a difference, it means something different than when someone new to marketing says it. (No offense!)

The Problem With Managing Your Own Marketing (Even When You Know Better)

Kara isn't a small business owner who needed to learn marketing. She is the marketing. But knowing what to do and actually having a system to get it done are two different things—and that gap doesn't disappear just because you have the expertise.

(We’re willing to bet some of you reading this know “what” to do in your marketing too. That doesn’t mean it’s getting done).

Before Enji, her marketing tasks lived alongside her client work in ClickUp. But between different client tasks, they’d often get pushed to the next day or left as “overdue.” And once the task ended up in the overdue pile? It stayed there. 

Not because she didn't care about her marketing, but because when all your to dos feel less urgent than your client-related ones, marketing is the easiest can to kick down the road. But when she switched to planning her marketing in Enji, it became uncomfortably obvious that it was only her marketing tasks that were sliding into overdue in ClickUp.

Becuase when your marketing has its own dedicated space, you can actually see what's slipping and make real decisions about it. Instead of letting “write your weekly newsletter” sit with your other overdue tasks that you’re never going to do (probably between “set up a quiz funnel” and “update my Dubsado templates”), you can take another look at things and re-evaluate whether it really belongs in your marketing plan.

Planning Content Without Overcomplicating It

Kara's marketing right now consists of email marketing, podcasting, and SEO blogging. She quit Instagram in November 2025 and hasn't looked back (keep reading to see how Enji played into that decision 👀).

Her content planning process inside Enji is simple by design. Once a month, she drops her blog topics into the marketing calendar so she's never staring at a blank task that just says "write a blog." 

For the podcast, she adds episodes after she's decided on them and uses the calendar's status tabs to see what's drafted, what's recorded, and what's scheduled. 

"I love seeing how much runway I have. Sometimes it's nothing and I'm like, I need to get my stuff together. And sometimes I'm like—oh, I've got three weeks. That's fine."

Simple, visible, and enough.

Using Marketing Campaigns With an End Date

One of Kara's favorite things about Enji's marketing campaign tool is the thing most people don't think about: things can often not have an end date. But Enji makes you realize your campaigns can’t go on forever.

"So often we're adding to our plate and there's no end date to anything. So what if I just plan to run ads in Q3 and then reevaluate? Or for SEO tasks… I don't need those as recurring things twice a week forever. It's nice to have a push for something and then move on."

For someone launching something new to her audience (like her membership), the marketing campaign tool helps her plan the content lead-up without it bleeding into everything else she's doing. There's a start date, an end date, and a checklist of what needs to happen before it launches.

KPIs: The Data Enji Gave Her Along with “Permission” to Quit Instagram

Kara celebrates KPI day every month (the monthly “holiday” we celebrate with our community to look at our marketing metrics every month). And her KPI dashboard is where she tracks more than just website traffic—she tracks inquiries, clients, and revenue right alongside her marketing metrics. 

That combination is what made quitting Instagram feel like a strategic decision rather than a guilty one.

"I really gave Instagram a hard push for six months. And then I looked at the numbers and they did not move at all even though I put infinitely more effort in. So I'm never doing it again."

Without the data, that kind of decision is hard to make. You feel like you should be there. You feel like you're giving up. 

With the data in her Enji account, Kara was just looking at the evidence.

She also tracks a mix of business metrics that Enji can and can't pull automatically because that is how she can see the full impact of her marketing. So in addition to the website and social media metrics Enji automatically tracks, Kara enters in client numbers, inquiry volume, etc. so she can see seasonal patterns. After nearly two years of data, she can see when things are typically slow, when they pick up, and where she needs to keep her eye on things.

"What I love is that you can track your own things that other platforms can't auto pull. I can see number of clients, number of inquiries in the same place I'm looking at my marketing. And now I have two-ish years of data — so I can see it's always softer in these months, always busier in others. That's important for my nervous system."

For someone who helps clients build slow-moving, compounding marketing strategies, that long view is everything. You can't see a trend until you've been watching long enough to have one.

Reviewing Her Marketing Strategy Quarterly (and Blowing It Up When Needed)

Last but not least, Kara reviews her marketing strategy once a quarter. And she doesn't just tweak it—sometimes she rebuilds it from scratch. But that is a 5 minute thing with Enji!

"It's almost part of my quarterly routine. I'll start a new strategy, see what Enji recommends, add my own tasks, and evaluate. I'm looking at KPIs every month, but I take the deeper dive quarterly and decide what tasks are moving forward."

Most business owners keep doing what they've always done because nothing is forcing them to ask: should I still be doing this? So they never adjust their strategy.

Enji's Today tab makes that question unavoidable. If a task keeps sitting there undone, week after week, that's data.

Kara used that visibility to pause her YouTube channel. Unlike Instagram, where she was putting the effort in, her Youtube tasks often just sat there undone. She'd tried weekly videos, moved to every other week, and finally looked at the pattern and made the call.

"I love that Enji makes you hyper aware of what you're not doing. Those to-do lists just multiply and you're like — okay, I'm not doing this. Should I just delete it from the to-do list?"

What It Looks Like When a Marketer Actually Uses a Marketing Tool

Kara doesn't need Enji to teach her what marketing is. She needs it to do what every business owner needs: a dedicated, focused place where her marketing lives separately from everything else, where she can see what's working and what isn't, and where she can make real decisions instead of just moving tasks around.

If a marketer needs that kind of clarity, you probably do too.

Ready to give your marketing a dedicated home? Start your free trial of Enji today.