Project management for marketing agencies and their clients

Anyone who has worked in an agency knows the thread. The client emails notes on the poster, their marketing manager adds two more on WhatsApp, someone mentions the logo size on a call, and by Thursday your designer is working from a PDF called v4_FINAL_amends that nobody else has opened.

In Klusko each deliverable is one card. The brief sits in the description, the artwork is attached, and every round of notes goes in the comments with a date on it. When the account manager @mentions the designer, it lands in their Inbox with a preview, so ‘did you see the new notes?’ stops being a daily question.

We can’t make clients send tidy feedback. We can give it one place to go.

Invite a client as a Guest and they’re added to one project. They can follow the cards on it and comment, and they won’t see your other clients. Guests can read public channels, though, so make #studio private, or the client may find the thread where someone wrote ‘push back on the extra round’. That thread is, we suspect, why so many agencies keep clients out of their team chat altogether.

A simple habit works well. Give the client two stages to watch: With client, then Signed off. When they reply ‘approved’ on a card, drag it across. You now have a dated record of who said yes, which is handy in March when somebody asks why the brochure went out with last year’s logo. More on this in our page on managing client work.

A retainer is the same month over and over with different content: the social report on the 5th, a batch of posts every week, the newsletter on the first Tuesday. Set each one up once as a recurring task and when someone ticks it off, the next one appears with its new due date.

For one-off briefs, save a task template. A campaign template might carry subtasks for concept, first round, second round, final artwork and sent to print, plus a custom field for the client’s PO number. New brief comes in, apply the template, assign it.

Before you promise the client a Friday turnaround, open the Workload view. It shows each person’s load against the team average, so you can see Kwame already has three launches that week.

Klusko has no time tracking. If you bill by the hour or report hours against a retainer, keep your timesheet app; we can’t connect to it, because there are no integrations or API yet. There’s no proofing tool for marking up artwork and no Gantt chart. We think most small agencies probably plan fine with due dates and a Calendar view, but if a client expects a timeline in the monthly deck, we’re the wrong tool for that slide.

Each task has one assignee. When the copywriter and designer share a job, split it into two tasks with one owner each.

On cost: say you’re an eight-person studio. Team is £40 a month billed yearly. Slack Pro plus Asana Starter came to about $168 a month as of September 2026, partly because Asana sells seats in steps of five, so eight people pay for ten. Right now every Klusko plan is free during early access; see pricing.