In the fast-paced world of marketing agency operations, overwhelming chaos can quickly derail efficiency and productivity. With so many moving parts, it’s easy to feel your agency is losing control of the situation. One moment, a client wants to change the scope of an underway project.
Then, you realize your team is missing deadlines, and your current processes are to blame. Before you know it, you’re stressed out and haven’t even had time to notify the client of the impending delay. If this scenario sounds all too familiar, don’t sweat it.
You're not alone. Fortunately, a simple solution can help you regain control and prevent this type of situation: ClickUp. In this guide, we’ll discuss how ClickUp for agencies can help improve your marketing agency operations so you can create and grow your productized service efficiently.\
As you’ll see, this guide is just the beginning. We also explore how Orchestra's grow your productized service template can help you achieve your goals so you can focus on what matters most—delivering for your clients.
What is Clickup for Agencies
ClickUp is the fastest-growing project management tool for digital agencies. It has all the features of a modern PM system.
Robust Hierarchy for Project and Task Management
ClickUp provides a robust hierarchy, allowing agencies to break projects and tasks into nested, manageable sub-tasks to fit their unique workflows. This means you can organize projects by client or team, create lists, and add tasks and sub-tasks to track every detail. Then, use the customizable task statuses to map out your project’s workflow and visualize progress as you move through your project.
Customizable Permissions
With ClickUp, you can customize permissions for different users within the platform. This lets you control what team members, contractors, and clients can see and do on your projects. For agencies that regularly work with outside contractors and have clients that want to stay in the loop on project progress, this feature helps maintain organization and reduce confusion.
Integrated Time Tracking and Estimates
Time tracking is key to running a profitable agency. ClickUp has built-in time-tracking features that let you track time manually or automatically as you work through tasks. You can also create time estimates for tasks and track your progress toward completing them on projects. This helps agencies stay organized and meet client expectations while boosting overall profitability.
Customizable Dashboards and Reporting Tools
Each agency has unique goals and processes. ClickUp’s customizable dashboards and reporting tools allow you to set up your project management environment to track and visualize the metrics that matter most to your agency. You can create multiple dashboards for different teams or projects and add widgets to monitor your KPIs, progress on tasks, financials, and more.
A Myriad of Views
ClickUp offers myriad views to help you visualize your projects and tasks in a way that makes the most sense for your unique team and goals. Use the List view for a traditional, organized approach to task management, or switch to the Board view to visualize your project’s progress with customizable task cards. Other view options include Calendar, Gantt, Timeline, Workload, and more.
Native Docs and Chat
Communication is key to running successful projects and avoiding costly mistakes. ClickUp enhances team collaboration with built-in communication features like Docs and Chat. ClickUp Docs allows you to create, share, and collaborate on documents directly within the platform. This means you can produce project briefs, client reports, and even SOWs to share with clients without having to leave ClickUp.
Notifications and Reminders
ClickUp’s automated notifications and reminders help keep your team on track and organized, so you don’t have to constantly monitor projects and tasks to ensure they are progressing as planned. Use ClickUp’s customizable notification settings to stay current on project activity and get alerts when someone assigns you a task or leaves a comment on a task you’re watching.
Custom Fields, Goal Tracking, and More
Every agency has unique processes, goals, and client needs. ClickUp is highly customizable to help you track and visualize your projects to fit your needs. In addition to the features above, you can create custom fields to track specific data points unique to your projects, goals to measure progress as you work, and more.
An Extensive Suite of Native & 3rd Party Integrations
ClickUp has an extensive suite of native integrations to help you connect your existing tools and streamline your workflows. Out of the box, ClickUp integrates with over 1,000 tools, including popular software like Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace, and more. This helps you avoid the pitfalls of working in too many disconnected systems that can hinder your productivity and organization.
Apps for Every Platform
ClickUp offers apps for every platform, including iOS and Android devices, Windows, and Mac. This means you can manage your agency’s projects from any device, anywhere in the world.
Clickup Price Plans
ClickUp's free plan is best suited for personal use as it offers generous features to get the basic project work up and running. Here’s a rundown of what’s included in ClickUp’s free plan: 100MB file storage. 60 custom fields. Basic views—list, board, and calendar. Limited use of time tracking. 100 uses of proofing: Image & PDF Annotation. 100 automation executions. One standout feature is the no-user limit, meaning you can invite as many members as you want at no additional cost.
The downside is that you will have no control over the permissions. Every user will have full access to your workspace. Another downside is that ClickUp offers advanced features such as whiteboards and dashboards but with a maximum cap. For example, you get only 60 whiteboards and 100 dashboards, pushing users to upgrade to higher plans.
Digging Into ClickUp's Unlimited Plan
The unlimited plan starts at a low price of $10 per user/month (billed monthly) and is best suited for small teams. This plan solves the most significant limitation of free plans, i.e., no permission for guests. You can manage permission levels to share your workspaces across stakeholders. Oyster additions include unlimited storage, spaces, and Gantt charts.
The user cap for some features still exists. However, it has increased: 100 uses of timeline and workload view, 100 uses of mind maps, 10 whiteboards, 1000 automation executions, and 100 uses of subtasks in multiple lists. This plan offers a higher degree of customization and advanced features for a comparatively lower per-user fee.
Navigating ClickUp's Business Plan
ClickUp positions its business plan as its most preferred plant for medium—to large-sized businesses. In addition to more control over workspace customization, the plan lifts nearly all use caps and offers unlimited whiteboards, mind maps, dashboards, and views.
This plan also provides more sprint and time management features, including sprint reporting, granular time estimates, and goal organization in the folder.
It would be the right fit for sprint—or dev-focused teams. Additional business plan features include advanced time tracking with notes, labels, billable time, private docs, and advanced automation through webhook, email, and SMS integrations.
Exploring ClickUp's Enterprise Plan
The enterprise plan offers the highest level of security, advanced integrations, and enhanced permission and control. For teams who want all this and have many seat requirements, talking to the sales team to get a custom quote would be the right choice. Some additional capabilities that the enterprise plan includes are custom forms and conditional logic. White labeling. Tableau web connector. US, EU & APAC Data Residency. SSO with Microsoft, Okta, and customer SAML. Dedicated customer success manager.
Why Choose Orchestra Over Other Growth Tools?
Launch your productized service effortlessly with Orchestra's all-in-one growth toolkit. Designed for creatives ready to scale, Orchestra provides a branded, white-labeled client portal, task management, and real-time analytics, with no coding needed—just your Stripe account. Whether you’re a designer, developer, or copywriter, Orchestra streamlines your workflow, letting you collaborate with clients smoothly while maintaining a private workspace with your team.
Add integrations like Slack and webhooks to customize your setup and deliver a branded experience. Boost your service with a platform built to grow alongside you. Try Orchestra for free and develop your productized service today!
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Use Cases of ClickUp for Agencies
1. Startup Agency Management: Get Things Done Faster with ClickUp
New marketing agencies need to prioritize efficiency to get up and running. ClickUp helps them do just that by providing a robust suite of tools that can be customized to meet their exact needs from the get-go. With ClickUp, marketing teams can jump into their work without wasting time figuring out how to connect the dots between multiple tools.
2. Build Beautiful Client Brands from the Ground Up
ClickUp provides marketing teams with the structure they need to build their clients' brands quickly and efficiently. The project management tool enables teams to create campaigns to support the brand and client through anything they can consider. With ClickUp, teams can build a beautiful client brand from the ground up.
3. Customer Journey Mapping
ClickUp has a ready-to-go customer journey mapping template to get marketing teams started, with a visual Whiteboard to document customers’ experiences with brands, products, and services. From here, teams can customize to include essential pieces, such as actions, touch, and pain points, to refine the perfect plan for clients.
4. Manage Multiple Clients and Projects
With ClickUp, marketing leads can simplify the management of multiple projects and clients simultaneously by clearly juggling activities, deliverables, deadlines, clients, and stakeholders. Marketing leads can set everything up and in place, prioritize and delegate work, and track progress without burning out.
5. Streamline Product Releases
ClickUp allows marketing teams to quickly and cleverly develop an iterative process for creating marketing materials and ads. Marketing leads can set a schedule, assign tasks with deadlines, track progress, and save as a template to use again for similar work or later phases.
10 Best Clickup for Agencies' Alternative Tools
1. Orchestra: The Ultimate Launchpad
The orchestra is designed for marketers who work with productized services. This tool helps teams launch their productized services quickly and efficiently with a collaborative client portal to manage tasks and projects. If you want to get organized before selling your services, Orchestra can help you get your ducks in a row.
The tool offers a branded, white-labeled client portal, task management, and real-time analytics, with no coding needed—just your Stripe account. Whether you're a designer, developer, or copywriter, Orchestra streamlines your workflow, letting you collaborate with clients smoothly while maintaining a private workspace with your team.
Add integrations like Slack and webhooks to customize your setup and deliver a branded experience. Boost your service with a platform built to grow alongside you; try Orchestra for free to develop your productized service today.
2. Asana: The Feature-Rich Project Management Tool
Asana can be a perfect solution for cross-functional teams that work with agile methodologies, such as website project development companies. However, agencies with more robust needs might find that certain features, especially regarding budgeting and financial performance, could be more developed.
Pros
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It offers a free plan. Asana, as a project management software, is primarily concerned with helping small and medium-sized businesses. However, it is not limited to it. Thanks to its free plan, small teams on a tight budget can still have access to affordable project management software.
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Several integrations. This feature more than makes up for Asana's lack of some features. Several third-party apps and software can be integrated with Asana, including Salesforce, Slack, Dropbox, Google Calendar, and more.
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Time tracking. The Asana app also helps companies and teams see where their time is being spent. Jobs, tasks, and responsibilities are all sorted into different projects, ensuring you won't overlook anything.
Cons
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We know new users have a hard time understanding the Asana interface. With new users in mind, we've created an online tutorial to help guide users through the software and ensure they aren't intimidated by the interface.
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Asana is not ideal for small teams or single projects: It has overloading features, and it becomes overwhelming for a fundamental project. When you add new features, you have to balance the complexity of the application, and that’s where the problems start to happen.
3. Airtable: The Database-Driven Tool
Airtable is a cloud-based collaboration and project management tool that combines an easy-to-use spreadsheet with the potential of a database and the flexibility of custom applications. With Airtable, small teams can create highly collaborative workspaces for teams to work together on projects. The platform also integrates with other apps and services like Slack, Zapier, and Dropbox to provide a complete client management system for customer management.
Pros
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Actions to goals linking functionality to streamline reporting.
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Shareable forms to populate records into the Airtable base.
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Timeline View to track events, resources, and projects.
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Automation with Javascript functionality.
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Form View for contact management.
Cons
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Limited sorting and filtering options compared to other client management software tools.
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Limited customization options for workspace appearance.
4. Jira: The Agile Project Management Software
Jira is a flexible tool that fits well with marketing teams. It supports agile methods like Scrum and Kanban, which help manage marketing campaigns effectively. Its Sprints dashboard offered me a structured way to plan and execute marketing iterations for my company’s campaigns.
I also used epics and stories to organize my marketing projects into manageable tasks. Customization is another benefit. Jira can be adapted to your marketing team’s needs with custom fields, workflows, and issue types. Whether you’re a small team or a large enterprise, it scales easily to meet your unique marketing project and campaign requirements.
Pros
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A backlog feature keeps track of marketing tasks, ideas, and user stories.
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Comments, notifications, and tags make communicating about tasks and projects easier.
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Smooth integration with Trello, Confluence, and third-party apps from the Atlassian Marketplace.
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Rich dashboard features to track and analyze your marketing project’s progress and performance.
Cons
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Weak team chat functionality, such as struggling to connect with colleagues online via the platform.
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It takes time to set up projects.
5. Pipedrive: The Sales-Focused CRM
Pipedrive is a CRM system designed to help sales teams increase productivity and close more deals. It offers various features that help streamline the sales process, including contact management, email tracking, call logging, lead scoring, sales forecasting, and automated workflows. With Pipedrive, a sales team can quickly organize their leads, contacts, and deals to stay focused on the tasks that matter. The client management app allows users to easily create custom pipelines and automated emails to help nurture leads and increase conversions.
Pros
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Segment leads to create personalized, targeted communication.
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Drag-and-drop interface to quickly update deal statuses.
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Activity reminders and team collaboration.
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Customizable web forms.
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Revenue forecasting.
Cons
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Limited customization for user permission settings compared to free client management software.
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Project scope and document management tools are paid add-ons.
6. Confluence: The Collaboration Wiki
I found Confluence to be a fantastic tool for my team. It enabled us to create, edit, and organize documents and knowledge bases as a group. No matter where we were, we could all pitch in, which is especially handy for virtual teams. Take, for instance, the times I’ve used this feature extensively for our marketing efforts.
Whether crafting blog posts, coordinating social media campaigns, or putting together email newsletters, Confluence has been a lifesaver. It allows multiple team members to simultaneously work on the same document, leave comments, and track changes. All in all, it’s made collaboration a breeze for us.
Pros
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Mobile apps for iOS/Android allow team members to collaborate on the go, which is vital for virtual teams.
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Customizable workspaces where teams can create specific spaces for different projects, departments, or teams.
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Access templates and macros that simplify everyday tasks, such as creating meeting notes, project plans, and product requirements.
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Powerful search functionality makes it easy for team members to find the necessary information quickly.
Cons
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Some advanced features come at a premium price.
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Occasional sluggishness and technical glitches.
7. Productive: The Agency Management Software
Productive is a well-rounded agency management software with robust functionality that gives you the tools and data to keep an agency running smoothly. The tool was built by a team with a decade of experience in founding, managing, and scaling a software development shop, so it's especially well-suited to digital agencies.
The tool's features fully satisfy my criteria for agency management tools. You'll find client and prospect management in the Sales Pipeline (manage deal flow, get sales organized). The Resource Planning feature, time tracker, and task collaboration tools fit the resource and project management criteria I look for in an agency tool or platform.
Billing and invoicing can also be managed straight from the tool, along with valuable reports on profitability and costs to help with finance management. The reporting feature goes quite beyond that, with real-time reports on margins, utilization, and much more—including reports on individual employees' or contractors' history with the company, salary reports, etc. Productive's integrations include Zapier and Jira, Open API, QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Exact.
Pros
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Customizable Dashboards: Enhanced customization allows users to tailor their workspace to their needs, providing a more personalized and efficient management experience.
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Integrated Financial Management: This feature integrates financial tracking with project management, offering a smooth experience for budget and expense oversight.
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Client Portal: Including a client portal sets Productive.io apart, enhancing client engagement and transparency.
Cons
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Learning Curve: New users may find the platform slightly complex, requiring time to understand and fully utilize all its features.
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Customization Constraints: While customizable, some users might find the extent of customization options insufficient for their specific needs.
8. Scoro: The Business Management Software
Scoro project management offers a range of features to help you manage your projects and resources. It’s a good option for service-providing businesses looking for a single platform to manage their day-to-day operations, but it can be difficult to onboard.
Users like Scoro because it’s a good business management software with many features to help teams collaborate and manage tasks. Since it focuses on project management, time tracking, and invoicing, it can be a good choice for businesses looking to automate daily processes.
Pros
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Data-focused and detailed, perfect for project managers.
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Offers a continuous and logical flow, from quote to project to invoice to final project delivery, suitable for many different business processes,
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Offers a good onboarding experience.
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Although a lot of data is presented, it puts the most essential information upfront, like the profit margin for all issued quotes.
Cons
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It is a lot to take in and quite overwhelming at the beginning.
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Moving to Scoro will take a lot of time due to the amount of data we will have to transfer, and the time it’ll take to introduce our team to Scoro.
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The UI, although modern, could use some improvements to package the amount of data it presents or requires better, like in the many numbers we can enter when working on our quotes.
9. Workamajig: The Creative Project Management Tool
Workamajig is a fair project and agency management tool that integrates essential financial tracking and support with project management features. However, the most notable downside of Workamajig is the somewhat outdated user interface and occasionally poor platform performance, as reported by multiple reviewers. This can make some features more complicated than they initially seem.
Pros
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Comprehensive project management features.
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Ideal for creatives and well-suited for freelancers.
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Provides analytics and reporting in real-time.
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Teams can collaborate from a single message portal.
Cons
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Some users have concerns about slow customer support response.
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The software loads slowly at times.
10. Kantata: The Data-Driven Agency Management Tool
Kantata is an agency management system that can manage everything from client relationships to workflows and project tracking. This highly customizable tool allows agencies of all sizes to streamline operations and increase profits. This guide will explain how you can use Kantata for successful agency management. Kantata has various features designed specifically for agencies, including tools for client onboarding, project planning, time and resource tracking, invoicing, contracts, communication management, and more.
With these features in place, you can easily monitor your team’s progress against deadlines or budgets and track the status of clients or projects at any given time. You’ll also have access to key performance data such as team utilization rates or revenue forecasts. Kantata's core function is to provide users with comprehensive data management solutions.
It allows you to store customer information, generate reports, manage tasks and projects, track expenses, collaborate with colleagues or partners remotely, and share information organizationally. Additionally, it offers real-time insights into customer trends and market conditions so that you can make informed decisions quickly. This makes Kantata an excellent solution for businesses that need to stay ahead of the competition by utilizing data-driven insights.
Pros
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Intuitive Task Management: Kantata simplifies work organization by allowing easy assignment and tracking tasks and subtasks.
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Real-time Collaboration: It supports immediate communication and file-sharing among team members, ensuring everyone stays updated.
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Robust Reporting: Kantata offers comprehensive reporting features that aid in making informed decisions and tracking project progress effectively.
Cons
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Limited Integrations: Kantata doesn’t support many third-party integrations, which may limit its flexibility and usability.
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Learning Curve: Some users might find Kantata challenging to navigate initially, requiring time to grasp its functionalities fully.
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Try Orchestra for Free to Grow Your Productized Service Today
As the owner of a marketing agency, you're always looking for ways to improve your operations and profitability. If you want to streamline the delivery of your productized service and enhance your clients' experience, look no further than Orchestra. This platform offers an all-in-one toolkit to help you launch, manage, and grow your productized service.
With Orchestra, you get a fully customizable client portal to deliver your service, manage tasks, track analytics, and more. The best part? There’s no coding required, so you can get started right away
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