Best Project Management Software for Advertising Agencies

Marketing is one of the most important aspects when running a business. It has been said that a well-executed marketing plan can lead to 20% increase in sales. In order to achieve such results, it’s vital to spend as much time as possible on each campaign and keep your campaigns organized. This way you’ll be able to analyze which channels are bringing you the most profit, optimize them and improve their performance in the future.

If you’ve worked in an advertising agency then you’ve felt the severity of task management tools: important tasks that can’t afford to wait, too many tasks with different deadlines, and never enough people to handle the workload. If a project is taking longer than it should, or someone’s missing a task, you need to take action. The best project management software for agencies needs to prioritize and load-balance tasks accordingly. With marketing projects, time is money and it’s therefore essential that your project management tool helps you and your team get as much accomplished as possible while working within pre-determined deadlines.

Agencies don’t have a lot of time to set up project management software. I once co-owned an agency here in the United States and we were growing at a rapid rate. I had trouble keeping up with task management because my business partner failed to set up any system to keep track of clients. He sat down one day, and started working on this huge project. Of course I helped him, but it would have been better if he had me setup project management software, so we could stay on track and get more work done.

With the advent of technology, a lot has changed. Our world is now filled with project management software’s, born out of the need to better manage projects efficiently. Management software has come a long way from being used only in construction industries and small businesses. Today, advertising agencies – including digital agencies– are using project management software’s to handle their workflow more effectively.

What is creative agency project management software?

While there are many project management tools available today, not all of these are an excellent fit for creative projects.

Unlike construction and software projects, creative projects often do not need technical project management expertise.

Besides, every creative team has its own workflows and rarely follows any project management methodology.

As a result, creative agency project management software needs to be flexible and straightforward. Yet, it should help creative teams plan, track, and deliver projects on time and within budget.

Walling

Best for visually organizing project ideas and tasksWith Walling, your tasks and ideas are visualized side by side in one place.

Walling is one of the most visual creative project management software to manage projects and work within a clean, easy to use interface. Walling helps creative teams get organized and aligned by giving them one place that provides clarity on all their project tasks, ideas, and important information.

What makes Walling stand out is that it enables you to organize tasks, ideas, inspirations and files side by side to empower you to see the big picture of your work. The tool is also very flexible and has a variety of other views such as the kanban view, task lists, and database tables.

Walling’s collaboration features include adding comments on the block level, assigning tasks and adding due dates and reminders. The clear and visual experience of Walling ensures that everyone on your team is working towards the same goal. It gives your team a bird’s eye view of your projects to see clearly what needs to be done, why it matters, and when it’s due.

Walling integrates with Google Drive and it has a list of other third-party integrations planned on its public product roadmap.

Walling offers a free plan for up to 100 bricks. Paid plans cost from $6/user/month.

Wrike

Best for scaling organizations

Users can give feedback and collaborate on creative projects within Wrike.

Wrike is an award-winning creative project management software suitable for teams of five or more. Users can customize their workflows, dashboards, reports, and request forms with this highly configurable software. You can switch between Kanban boards, interactive drag-and-drop Gantt charts, and traditional workload views to visualize priorities. Wrike features customizable briefs and request forms, visual and customizable workload management, space for team members to provide feedback, and reporting and analytics.

Wrike has an easy-to-use interface and navigation with distinct spaces, folders, and tasks. You can switch between the home screen and timesheets, dashboards, calendars, reports, and a stream for notifications and messages. Users also have access to a variety of templates for common organizational processes.

The tool has over 400 integrations, including the most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, along with sales and marketing software from Salesforce and Marketo.

Wrike costs $9.80/user/month and offers four different price points, including a free version and plans which allow users to invite free external collaborators to a paid account.

MeisterTask

Best Kanban-inspired collaboration for creative teamsSleek, streamlined project management for creatives with easy-to-access checklists and action items.

MeisterTask is a Kanban-inspired software that enables effective, creative project management through stunning design and intuitive user experience. Teams can organize and manage tasks in a beautifully designed, customizable environment that perfectly adapts to their needs.

MeisterTask offers extensive collaboration options within projects—including comments and mentions, assignable checklist items, task and project watch, and advanced permissions settings—to provide teams with a robust platform on which to work together.

MeisterTask also helps teams bring all their task-related documents into a centralized location. You can attach files and images up to 250MB directly to tasks and browse through them using the integrated attachment viewer.

With MeisterTask, managers can easily automate recurring steps in their team’s workflow, ensuring team members work more consistently and get more done together. You can automatically assign tasks, move tasks between projects/sprints when they are moved to a new section, track time, or create recurring tasks that are due weekly or monthly.

MeisterTask comes readily integrated with popular tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Zendesk, Harvest, and various email apps. In addition to these native integrations, you can use Zapier or IFTTT to connect your projects with hundreds of other tools.

MeisterTask offers a free plan for up to three projects. Paid plans cost from $8.25/user/month.

 nTask

nTask offers a wide variety of features and customization options to adapt to the way your team works. For instance, they recently introduced an interactive Gantt Chart user-experience where everything can be customized as per user requirements. 

Furthermore, nTask includes all of the typical project management tools, such as: time tracking, recurring tasks, notification, reminders, and collaboration

Key Features:

• Calendar management
• Time tracking and timesheets 
• Create recurring tasks concerning the day of the week, month or any specific time stretch
• Admin approval process control
• Budget and resource management
• Create and manage tasks at various team levels
• Team management

Pricing:

Basic Version is introduced for free. Premium and Business Plan scale up from $2.99 to $7.99 per user/ per month.

ClickUp

Many marketing agencies use ClickUp to manage their campaigns, clients, SOPs, and more. You can collaborate with your team, work with contractors and clients through guest permissions, and connect your data all in one place. Furthermore, if you need help getting started, ClickUp offers multiple templates for various marketing workflows.

Features include:

• Dashboards and Chat view to communicate with clients and stakeholders
• Gantt and Timeline view to visualize campaigns and relationships between tasks
• Proofing and annotation features to get feedback directly on files
• Docs to create content, outline processes and save internal wikis
• Recurring tasks and reminders to automate repeated tasks
• Sync with your calendar to view all your tasks, events and reminders in one place
• 1000+ Integrations to connect your marketing apps

Price: Free Forever (unlimited users), $5/mo. for Unlimited, $9/mo. for Business, Enterprise Plan available

FunctionPoint

FunctionPoint provides tools for multiple departments, including new business, accounting, client services, traffic, and creative.

Features include:

• File sharing and approvals workflows
• Scheduling and assigning tasks and managing individual workloads
• Financial reporting and invoicing
• Project and task dashboard for understanding timelines and profitability of projects

Price: $34/user/month

 Workzone

Workzone was built by experienced ad executives with the goal of helping agencies and creative teams bring more visibility into their work.

Top features:

• Personalized, individual to-do lists
• Create subtasks and task dependencies
• Set permissions for certain users (including clients) to access projects, tasks and files
• Quickly see statuses with Gantt charts
• Assign people to more than one task

What’s special about this tool: Workzone has a lot of powerful features but is easier to use than more complex project tools. Workzone is meant for the whole team to use.

Pricing: $24-$44 per month

Redmine

Redmine is an open source project management tool, made highly flexible by its volunteer community.

Top features:

• Gantt chart and calendar for planning
• News, documents & files management
• Project Estimation Management
• Permission Management
• Payroll Management
• Report Analysis
• Feeds & email notifications
• Time tracking

What’s special about this tool: Redmine is an open-source tool and has multilanguage support. To use the tool, you first need to download it.

Pricing: Free

Basecamp

The darling of project management community, Basecamp has won thousands of users’ hearts.

Top features:

• Projects with multiple users and tasks
• Message boards for discussing a project or idea
• In-app team collaboration
• Reporting on project performance
• Separate dashboard for showing to clients
• Email and desktop notifications

What’s special about this tool: Basecamp takes only 10 minutes to set up and is super easy to use. This same simplicity might start to limit more complex projects and restrict efficient collaboration.

Price: $29/month for unlimited users

COR

Best for Time Management

COR is the all-in-one management solution for Advertising & Marketing Agencies

COR is the all-in-one management solution for advertising and marketing agencies that automate timesheets plus leverage AI to predict profitability, reduce work overload and improve client engagements. Based in Silicon Valley, COR serves Fortune 500 Companies, has presence in more than 35 countries, and raised its Series A from top VCs and entrepreneurs, including 6 unicorn founders.

COR shows you your team availability in real time through dynamic Gantt Charts to help you make business and recruitment decisions about your business’ productive capacity. With COR you can take on future projects with confidence, having real-time visibility of your teams’ available work capacity.

COR integrates with many popular productivity tools such as OneDrive, Okta, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Dropbox, GitHub, and so much more.

COR costs from $35.30/user/month. They offer a free demo.

Toggl Plan

Toggl Plan is a simple yet flexible project management tool. It comes with an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy for creative teams to plan and track projects.

Project plan timelines make it easy to manage project schedules and milestones. Additionally, you can zoom in on a week, month, quarter, or year of the timeline. This way, you can look into the details or get a high-level overview of the project.

Team timelines help plan and allocate team members to projects. Also, they provide a clear overview of the team’s availability and workload.

Toggl Plan also has task boards that you can use to manage tasks. Plus, you can customize these boards to match your workflow.

It’s easy to assign a task to one or more members. Responsible team members can collaborate via comments and file attachments. Also, you can attach a task checklist to improve task completion quality.

Pricing & additional features

Toggl Plan’s free plan is suitable for solo users. It comes with almost all the features mentioned above. Paid team plans start at $9 per user per month.

Toggl Plan also has these features in addition to those mentioned above:

• Share a read-only timeline view.
• Recurring tasks.
• Time tracking with the Toggl Track integration.
• Integrate with Slack, GitHub, and Google Calendar.
• Favorite projects and quick search for easy access.
• Role-based access control.

Is Toggl Plan right for you?

If you’re looking for a flexible yet simple creative project management tool, Toggl Plan may be perfect for you. It’s a tool that all your teammates will enjoy using every day.

Who uses creative agency project management software?

Both internal and client-facing creative teams find creative project management tools useful. These teams include:

• Advertising agencies
• Branding agencies
• Web design agencies
• Marketing agencies
• Creative consultants

Conclusion

Advertising agencies, Get further with our project management software for advertising agencies. Our team of software developers have incorporated a wide range of features tailored to the needs of advertising agencies and those who work in related industries. All while including the comfort and ease you expect from our user-friendly interface.

Project management software is important for advertising agencies as well as offices. But how does manage projects in advertising agencies work? What are common tools for developing strategies and tactics to market a brand? Project management software are built to assist with organizing and planning, so there should be several helpful features of project management software.