monday.com for Marketing Agencies: Workflows That Actually Work
Marketing agencies have a specific ops problem that's distinct from most other service businesses: almost everything they do is deadline-driven, client-facing, and involves multiple disciplines working in parallel. A campaign brief touches account management, strategy, creative, copy, digital, and production, often simultaneously, always under time pressure.
The operations system that works for a recruitment agency or a professional services firm isn't the system that works for a marketing agency. You need a setup built around campaign and project delivery, with clear visibility on capacity, deadlines, and client approvals.
This is what that looks like in monday.com.
How to set up monday.com for a marketing agency. Campaign management, client projects, resource planning, and the automations worth building. A practical guide for UK agencies.
The Core Problem marketing agencies Are Trying to Solve
When I talk to marketing agency founders and ops leads about why they're looking at monday.com, the pain points are almost always some variation of the same things.
Capacity is invisible. Nobody knows who's available for new work without asking three people and waiting a day for an answer. New briefs get assigned to whoever shouts loudest rather than whoever actually has the capacity to do it well.
Campaigns slip through the cracks. The big deliverables are tracked. The smaller things aren't. The client hasn't approved the copy, nobody's chased them, and the deadline is tomorrow. Or the brief came in, got delegated, and nobody checked whether it was actually picked up.
Client approval loops are chaos. Feedback comes in over email, Slack, WhatsApp, and sometimes a Word document attached to a forwarded email. By the time it's been collated and the revisions briefed in, you've lost a day and everyone's slightly irritated.
Reporting to leadership is a manual job. The MD wants to know how many active campaigns there are, whether anything's at risk, and what the team's capacity looks like for the next month. Assembling that answer currently involves talking to four people and spending an hour in a spreadsheet.
monday.com, properly configured, fixes all of these.
The Board Structure That Works for Marketing Agencies
Board 1: Active Campaigns and Projects
The operational centre of the system. Each item is a campaign or project. This is where delivery is tracked day to day.
Columns: project name, client linked to your client board, account owner, lead creative or strategist, type (campaign, website, brand, content, social, etc.), status (Briefed / In Progress / In Review / Client Approval / Amends / Live / Complete), brief date, go-live date, budget, hours logged, last client contact, approval status, notes.
Board 2: Campaign Tasks
Subtasks and individual deliverables linked to Board 1. This is where individual team members see their daily work.
Columns: task name, linked campaign from Board 1, assigned to, type (copy, design, strategy, development, etc.), status, due date, time estimate, notes.
The reason for separating campaigns and tasks into two boards rather than using monday.com's subtask feature is flexibility and reporting. With separate boards you can build views by team member, by due date, by campaign, or by task type. Subtasks are much harder to report on.
Board 3: New Business and Pipeline
Separate from delivery. Tracks potential new work from initial conversation to briefing. Columns include prospect name, source, value estimate, probability, stage, owner, and next action date.
Board 4: Client Accounts
One item per client. Tracks relationship health, active project count, total value, last contact date, renewal dates, and key contacts. Gives account managers a view of their full portfolio in one place.
Automations That Make the Biggest Difference
Approval reminder: When a project moves to Client Approval status, automatically set a follow-up date two days later. If the status hasn't changed by then, notify the account manager to chase. This single automation has saved more client relationships than anything else I've built for marketing agencies.
New project task creation: When a new item is created in the campaigns board, automatically create a set of standard tasks in the tasks board: brief review, kick-off meeting, first draft, review, amends, delivery. Saves the account manager 15 minutes per project and ensures nothing gets missed.
Capacity flag: When a team member has more than a set number of tasks due this week, flag it to the resource manager. A basic but effective version of capacity management that doesn't require a separate tool.
Campaign go-live alert: Five days before a go-live date, notify the account owner and lead creative. One day before, escalate to them and their manager. Stops the last-minute panic.
Weekly status digest: Every Monday morning, generate an automatic summary of all campaigns in progress, their current status, and any that have a go-live date in the next seven days. Send to account owners and management. One setup. Saves a standing meeting.
The Resource Management Question
Resource management is the hardest thing to solve for marketing agencies in monday.com, and I want to be honest about its limitations.
monday.com's native Workload view works reasonably well for high-level capacity planning. It'll show you how many tasks or hours each team member has allocated. What it doesn't do natively is granular capacity planning against a skills matrix, or forecasting based on potential new work.
For most agencies under around 30 people, the Workload view is sufficient. You can see who's overloaded, who has capacity, and make allocation decisions accordingly. It's not perfect, but it's vastly better than "ask around and hope."
For larger agencies doing complex resource planning, you may need to either extend monday.com with a purpose-built integration or accept that resource management happens in a separate tool that feeds into monday.com for execution.
What Good Looks Like
A well-implemented monday.com setup for a marketing agency at 90 days: account managers spending less time chasing approvals because the automation does it; creative teams knowing what they're working on without a daily Slack thread; leadership with a live view of campaign health, capacity, and new business pipeline; and the weekly ops meeting taking 20 minutes rather than an hour because everyone can see the data before they arrive.
That's achievable. It requires a proper setup and a genuine adoption process. But it's achievable.