One of the tools I started using more recently is Google Sheets.
Don't get me wrong, I have used various spreadsheets ever since before my freelance business, for glossary building and text fiddling purposes alike.
However, I didn't use it from a marketing point of view. I have most of my work files on LSP.expert, where I can store clients and lots of other stuff, but that's not super flexible as an approach if you want to filter things quickly, copy and edit a new row for a client entry lightning fast, or have a clearer picture of your data.
I particularly like Google Sheets and I tend to prefer it to Microsoft Excel or other offline spreadsheet solutions because they're seamlessly synchronized and available across all the devices connected to my Google account, from PC to smartphone.
One of these marketing approaches I use with Sheets is creating a record table of my client's contacts. A table with a header and some information about it: client name, date of contact, any POC (email of a point of contact to refer to), outcome of the contact (whether the client did end up contacting me back or not; if pending, I usually wait a week before flagging it as no contact back, if I didn't receive any news from said client.
This spreadsheet is fairly easy to maintain. You can also add a column for any kind of notes you'd like to add. For instance, when a client clearly expresses their interest in NOT getting contacted back, I add that as a note.
Similarly, if the client states they have a potential project within X days or months, I save that as a note after the communication, so I know when to get back to them for news and not sound pushy.
You can also drag the header bar down by one column in Sheets, so to lock the header. This means that even when the sheet will be longer with many many entries (if you do this daily the list can get populated real quickly!), you'll always have the core information from the column within sight.
You can also filter this view using the specific 'quick' filter button in Sheets. This will allow you to show, for instance, only clients you applied to in the last month, or how good/bad is your ratio with contact back from clients as opposed to no contact.
This was just a basic use of Sheets. They can also be used in a variety of ways, such as storing your jobs, client data, invoice information, and other important marketing procedures that might be unique to your business formula. The same data can also be exported from LSP.expert and (with some text manipulation) imported back into the tool - in case one tool is not enough to do the job for you, and trust me, when your business gets bigger and bigger, the number of tools at your disposal is never enough!
That's all for now. More to come in a future blog post! Stay tuned.