Is monday.com Good for Marketing Planning? Limitations for Campaign and Budget Management
Introduction
Marketers often ask whether monday.com is a good option for planning marketing campaigns, or if it comes with built-in marketing templates that can support strategic planning. The short answer is that monday.com is a powerful project management platform, but it is not a marketing planning tool. It was designed to track tasks and projects across many different functions, which makes it flexible but also limited when applied to marketing.
In this article, we examine the specific areas where monday.com (and similar project management platforms) falls short for marketing teams, and why purpose-built marketing planning software provides a more reliable foundation.
Not Built for Marketing
monday.com was not created with marketing in mind. It provides boards, columns, and automations that can be customised for almost any workflow, but it does not offer marketing-specific structures.
There are no built-in marketing templates for campaign planning, budgeting, or ROI tracking.
Third-party templates exist, but they are compromises, shaped by the constraints of a task management tool rather than the requirements of marketers managing strategy, programs, and budgets.
If your goal is to create a structured B2B marketing plan template, monday.com lacks the features to do this effectively. It will require users to design and configure their own templates and workflows from scratch. Although this is possible with some effort, there are limitations outlined below, that mean any plan will have compromises in structure, reporting, and visibility.
Limited Planning Depth
Marketing plans usually operate across at least three levels:
Strategies
Programs or campaigns
Tactics
monday.com only supports two layers: items and sub-items. That shallow hierarchy makes it difficult to reflect the real structure of a marketing plan. Some teams create separate boards to simulate additional layers, but that fragments reporting with limited ability to visualise or sum data across boards.
Whilst project management platforms are fantastic for tracking and collaborating on execution-level effort (the day-to-day tasks of content creation, event planning, etc), it does not easily tie these back to a broader plan and strategy.
Budgeting and Summation Weaknesses
Financial tracking is one of the most important functions of a marketing plan. Leaders need to see how planned spend compares to actuals, roll up figures across campaigns, and report totals against overall budgets.
monday.com does not allow for easy summation within a board, nor across multiple boards. Dashboards are easy to use but basic, and calculations cannot easily replicate the financial views marketing leaders require. This makes it hard to monitor investment or to answer critical C-suite questions such as “what is the return on marketing investment?”
Poor CRM Integration
Effective marketing planning requires tight integration with the CRM, where pipeline and revenue data reside.
monday.com does not allow data to be pulled directly into rows or columns of a board. Teams must update manually, duplicating effort and increasing the risk of error. The lack of seamless CRM integration means that plans are often out of date and disconnected from sales performance, requiring the use of two tools to track plans progress.
Restricted Presentation Options
Different stakeholders need different views of the plan. Executives want summaries, sales leaders want campaign-level details, and teams need tactical timelines.
monday.com offers two main formats: a spreadsheet-style board and a Gantt-style timeline. Both have value, but they are not enough to meet the varied communication needs of a marketing organisation.
Data in monday.com is organized in spreadsheet-like tables with limited ability to filter for different audiences. Unless boards and items are structured from the start with varies stakeholder views in mind, the likelihood is that any presentation of plans will require manual effort or exporting information into other tools.
Lack of Consistency and Governance
Because monday.com allows anyone to structure boards freely, different team members with edit access may build and interpret plans differently. What may start as a well structure marketing planning format, may quickly get changed without warning.
Over time, this creates inconsistency. Rolling up data into a single marketing view becomes difficult. What Monday.com offers in flexibility often ends in fragmentation.
By contrast, purpose-built tools enforce consistency and governance across strategies, programs, and tactics, ensuring teams remain aligned.
Escalating Costs
monday.com is priced per user. Marketing plans usually need to be shared across teams, executives, and agencies. As collaboration grows, licensing costs escalate quickly. What starts as affordable for a small team can potentially become expensive once wider access is needed across the business.
Conclusion
monday.com is a strong project management tool. It excels at tracking tasks and managing workflows. But it is not designed to be a marketing planning platform. For marketers, the absence of purpose-built templates, limited hierarchy, weak budgeting, lack of CRM integration, and governance issues make it unsuitable as the foundation for strategic planning.
If your objective is to connect strategy, campaigns, budgets, and results in a consistent, scalable way, then dedicated marketing planning software is a better option.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does monday.com have a marketing template?
monday.com does not have a dedicated marketing plan template. It offers templates for general project and task management. Some third-party users have created marketing templates, but these contaon compromises. They are limited by the platform’s structure and do not provide the depth that marketers need for strategies, campaigns, and budgets.
Is monday.com a good option for planning marketing campaigns?
monday.com is well suited to track tasks within campaign execution, but it is not well suited for full marketing or campaign planning. Marketing plans require multiple levels of hierarchy, budget management, and integration with CRM data. monday.com does not provide these features natively.
What are the main limitations of using monday.com for marketing planning?
The main limitations include: shallow planning hierarchy (only items and sub-items), weak budgeting and summation features, no direct CRM integration for performance data, limited presentation formats, lack of governance for consistency, and escalating costs as more users are added.
What alternatives are better for marketing planning?
Dedicated marketing planning software is designed to connect strategies, campaigns, budgets, and results. Unlike project management tools, these platforms enforce consistency, provide financial views, and integrate directly with CRM systems.
Can monday.com replace spreadsheets or PowerPoint for marketing plans?
monday.com is more interactive than a spreadsheet and more collaborative than a slide deck, but it does not solve the core challenges. Spreadsheets and slides are weak at consolidation and version control. monday.com adds some workflow capabilities, but still lacks the purpose-built features needed for marketing planning. See our article on Excel vs marketing planning software for more detail.