How do you keep track of your marketing as a freelancer?

October 19, 2012 12:34 PM

How do you track your marketing efforts to potential clients as a freelancer?

I'm a freelance artist who markets my work to editors and art buyers at a large variety of organizations through various means. In the past I had a scattershot approach to all these things and loosely tried tracking who I talked to when through making notes in my Address Book or spreadsheets.

I'm trying to get more organized about this and that approach is not working. Ideally I'm looking for some kind of solution that will let me:

-keep my client info in one central place
-let me sort/refine that info and export to other places (Mailchimp for email newsletters, my label printer for addressing postcards)
-track all of my contact with every individual at each organization
-let me search by useful information or keep running Smart List type queries ("which editors in the SF area have I not had any contact with in the last 30 days?" or "who in New York responded to my last email promo?" etc.)

A few years ago I interned at an agency that did this using an unwieldy custom Filemaker Pro database that they had hired someone to make. Surely there are more elegant solutions than that? I was looking at HighRise but was wondering how other people solve this problem.

posted by bradbane to work & money (2 answers total)

OnePageCRM. It scales down nicely for freelancers, which a lot of the now hundreds of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions do not.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:50 PM on October 19, 2012

I like Time & Chaos. It should be able to do most of what you're looking for.
posted by Leontine at 6:55 PM on October 19, 2012