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Oct 7, 2025
For any ambitious team, whether you’re launching a marketing campaign, publishing content, or rolling out a product update, a clear and efficient approval process can make or break the final result.
The fundamentals remain the same: alignment, accountability, and streamlined collaboration. But specific approval workflows vary by context. For example, a social media approval process involves different stakeholders and faster turnaround times than a product launch campaign.
In this article, I’ll walk you through a tried-and-tested approach to building a solid approval process. I’ll cover what a well-designed workflow looks like, the key stages to include, and how to adapt it to fit your team.
I also spoke with two industry specialists to learn how they manage their approval processes and what helps them perform best within their teams.
An approval process is a structured, repeatable workflow, used to review and launch a variety of deliverables: documents, invoices, blogs, creative campaigns, products, and beyond.
The process clearly determines goals, quality standards, deadlines, and the people who can approve or reject.
Having all your feedback in one place, and knowing exactly who does what are just some of the perks of a solid approval process. This unbeatable speed-accuracy-accountability trio ensures the health of your teams and your budgets.
Designing a strong process will help up your game on these fronts:
1. Efficiency – Assets move quickly and deadlines are met.
2. Quality control – Errors get teased out at a better rate when the right people add their input.
3. Accountability – You rely on specific folks at predetermined stages instead of an approval vaguely depending on, say, a team of 5 people.
4. Transparency – It’s easy to track who added input, and when. Everyone knows what to expect in terms of timelines and type of feedback.
5. Consistency – When the same approvers pitch in across multiple assets and campaigns, they maintain brand voice and strategic alignment.
You build an efficient approval process by clarifying your predefined criteria for results and timeframes.
Specifically, you’ll need these elements:
I’ll get into this below, in the section that describes how you can enhance efficiency in 6 steps.
Writing good briefs is such a crucial skill and will set everyone up for success, all the way down to the final approval. Lashay Lewis, founder @BOFU.ai, covers it perfectly and I couldn’t agree more:
The brief is critical in my workflow approval process. Mainly because it’ll determine how the article is written and what’s included from both content marketing and product marketing.
Your software of choice is another key element when managing approvals. The right tool can simplify collaboration and eliminate messy email threads, all while keeping everyone on the same page.
Tools like Planable make it easier to manage custom workflows, centralize briefs, and leave contextual feedback right where it’s needed.
Custom workflows are tailored to your team and needs, while briefs have their dedicated space with contextual feedback in the mix. I’ll show you exactly how it works later in the article.
Here are some big ones (+ fixes) encountered by Daniela Turcanu, Head of Marketing @Walls.io:
To which I’ll add another dreadful trio:
You’ll notice that all of these are manual bottlenecks, so they can also be remedied with sturdy approval automation tools.
Effective approval workflows are achievable. Lashay, founder of @BOFU.ai, uses a simpler approach to build strong, streamlined approval processes:
Get clear on stakeholders. Don’t overstep boundaries. Work together to find relevant angles so the team comes to an agreement.
Respecting professional and personal boundaries is essential for the trust people need in order to give and implement fruitful feedback.
Let’s look at these approval steps in depth:
Multiple approvers are a common occurrence, but keep the number down as much as you can. And consider how the entire process needs to be an adjustable recurring template; if well-built, it can last you for years.
Head marketer Daniela Turcanu’s take is that
A good policy defines who approves what (based on risk or visibility), sets time limits for approvals, includes a fallback path if someone is unresponsive, documents what feedback is expected (e.g., strategic vs. stylistic). Most importantly, it empowers teams to ship, not just to wait.
And I especially want to zoom in on the “what feedback is expected” part. It’s so important for operational efficiency to teach people on your team, regardless of seniority, which types of feedback match specific stages of the project.
These predefined rules will prevent unnecessary delays over punctuation or formatting when the concept isn’t even clear yet.
Lashay Lewis admits that anything over 3 review approval requests is too many. To maintain clear messaging, limit the number of layers it passes through. The more people involved, the higher the risk of diluting the original intent.
Daniela Turcanu, Head of Marketing, concurs, saying
In my experience, more than two approvers tend to slow things down unnecessarily. At Walls.io, we keep it to one person who owns the asset (usually the content marketer or designer), a second person for strategic or brand-level input (typically myself as the marketing lead), and occasionally a third if we need a specialist’s view, like product or legal. Once you go beyond that, feedback becomes fragmented and deadlines start to slip.
As you can see, it’s all on a case-by-case basis depending on the complexity of your project. But it’s essential to clearly define who approves what, and at which stage of the content process.
To find designated approvers for each project, consider its scope, how new it is for your company, and whether it needs more oversight or more security.
Incorporate department guidelines. For example, in a marketing team, managers may follow a brand book created by brand strategists, graphic designers, and copywriters, using it as a reference during the approval process to ensure all content aligns with brand guidelines.
Set some spending thresholds and narrow down scenarios where your approval workflows genuinely need an extra pair of eyes.
Service Level Agreement principles guide and measure your performance standards, but most importantly, they define the deadlines for each stage of the approval process.
They also incorporate potential risks and crisis management tools, like a plan for what happens when a teammate cannot contribute as scheduled.
A fortunate choice can save you loads of time by automating repetitive tasks and preventing bottlenecks through clear workflows that are easy to set up.
Look out for tools whose approval processes are as granular as the size and setup of your team requires. It’s best to have various layers of approvals, clear roles and permissions, plus easily assigned deadlines and labels on everything.
Beyond that, consider how well-rounded the software is. Especially if you’re running a small business, you’ll want a multipurpose platform that supports various social media and marketing efforts.
You’ll know a tool is a winner if, on top of reliable customer support, it provides features like tracking versions and sending mobile notifications. This last one is a must. So many approvals happen in between meetings or destinations.
Customizable approval workflow on a Facebook post in Planable
Hot tip: if you’re looking for reliable collaboration and approval software that covers everything from your initial submission actions all the way to reporting, Planable has you covered.
An efficient approval process stays fluid. From staying compliant with new legal requirements to making data-informed decisions, be sure to schedule regular reviews of your processes.
Multiple steps in new approval workflows can be refined to tease out smaller, less obvious bottlenecks. They become reliable, properly vetted templates.
Here’s what the “keyword to full article” pipeline can look like:
These steps come courtesy of Lashay Lewis, founder @BOFU.ai, who also adds: “My brief also has a section for product marketers to add input.“
Extrapolate her advice to your niche and consider when input might be needed from the legal department, the PR department, the R&D department, and so on.
Once again, the campaign brief is your starting point. It should cover, at the very minimum, the following: a business objective, the target audience, deliverables, and deadlines. It’s always a good idea to link back to brand assets like a style guide, a product demo, and some strong benchmarks.
Once everyone is on board with the scope and timeline, you can get to drafting.
Daniela Turcanu, the Marketing Lead of Walls.io, outlines her content approval process like this:
The flow described above is easy to replicate for almost any situation. For example, if a new product is involved, you simply have one extra step: looping in another stakeholder for review.
According to the marketing specialist Daniela Turcanu
For product-heavy pieces or cross-functional work (e.g. sales enablement), the relevant team lead gives a quick sign-off.
A typical example of how the process works for services purchased:
Daniela Turcanu from Walls.io shares the following tips:
In my experience, constantly flexing the muscle of granular feedback appropriate for each stage of your workflow is essential for an efficient approval process.
On top of that, you can save time by organizing templates, archiving previously approved requests, using conditional logic for the decision-making process, and integrating with existing stacks.
Last but not least, use a tool like Planable to remove roadblocks and keep everyone on the same page throughout the entire process.
You’ll never have to manually centralize conflicting feedback again. With Planable, the social media management tool for agencies and individuals that lets you plan, create, review, and approve any type of content, from social media posts to blogs, emails, and anything else.
Planable’s content calendar at a glance
Planable specializes in helping you reduce bottlenecks while simplifying the decision-making process.
Key features:
Multi-level approvals in Planable
Custom and create different workspaces in Planable
Users permissions custom settings in Planable
You’ve just traveled from “pending approval” to “ready to post” in minutes. Sometimes seconds.
A strong approval process helps maintain quality and meet compliance requirements, while also giving your team a competitive edge.
Instead of wasting time chasing approvals, your team can focus on creative and strategic work, allowing you to deliver better content, faster.
See how it’s done with Planable. The free plan has 50 posts you can test approvals on, access to most features, and no time limit.
Irina is a freelance conceptual copywriter with an ethical edge and an advertising agency background. If she’s not rummaging for good synonyms, she’s probably watching a sitcom or listening to radio dramas with plucky amateur detectives. She loves collage, doing crosswords on paper and shazamming the birds outside her window.
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