Creative Artists are naturally focused on creating their Art, yet other tools, especially marketing
tools, are necessary if Artists expect to have their Art sustain their business and career. CRMs
help artists and creatives keep track of and connect to the people who are invested in your
work–your paying Fans, SuperFans donors and audience members. A Customer Relationship
Management system is one such tool. Here’s what you need to know.

What is a CRM and Why Do Artists Need One?

CRMs are digital marketing services that let you create profiles for individuals, groups, or
segments. Using those profiles, you can see a Fans’ history of how they engage with you,
whether they have attended your events, which emails you’ve sent them, any texts you’ve had
with them, and more.
CRMs typically show you the information that’s most important to you, and then allow you to
segment and tag Fans so you can target your Fans with communications that’s most relevant to
them. You can use information from your CRM to guide outreach strategy, see how you are
progressing towards your sales goals, and more. CRMs often combined with other tools that are
important to artists, like email marketing platforms, SMS Text Marketing programs, Landing
Pages, mobile marketing tools, marketing automation, online payment systems, and other
systems. Or, like the Adva Mobile platform, many of these services are integrated.

What Makes a CRM Good for Artists and Creatives?

The first factor is affordability. We know that artists are often operating on tight budgets, and
Artists are unable to afford CRM tools that will break the bank, no matter how good they might
be. We also think that CRMs for artists should be intuitive to use with a nice user experience
(UX), without requiring a ton of onboarding time. They should strike a good balance between
being easy to set up immediately and customizable if you need it to be. They are a time-saving
tool so that you can spend more time making and sharing your work instead of trying to learn
complicated software.

Finding the Right CRM as an Artist

As an artist or a creative, you don’t need a CRM for the same reason that a for-profit business
does. Before investing your effort (and maybe money) in a CRM to help you better engage with
your community, think about what your needs are. What are the most important features to
you? Is it most important that something is free? Customizable? Integrated with other features
you use? Adaptable as you grow and change? Sometimes this means using the same tools that
businesses use. Other times, a CRM specifically focused on what Artists are tying to accomplish
is best.

Keep reading about marketing for artist in our blog.