What is a content approval workflow?
A content approval workflow is the defined route a draft takes from writer to publication, naming who reviews it, what they can change, and what happens to feedback, so that nothing goes public without the right person having seen it.
Also called: content approval process, review workflow, client approval.
The need appears the moment more than one person is involved. An individual posting for themselves has an approval workflow of one step. An agency posting for a client, or a company posting under an executive’s name, has a chain, and the chain is where the delays and the accidents live.
A workable process has three properties. Everyone can see the current state of every draft without asking. Feedback attaches to the draft rather than living in a separate thread. And there is a record of who approved what, which matters the first time something published turns out to be wrong.
The most common failure is the process living in email and chat. Drafts get pasted into messages, feedback arrives in three places, and the version that publishes is not always the version that was approved. Nobody can reconstruct why afterwards.
Speed is a feature, not a nicety. A review step measured in days pushes people to route around it, which is worse than having no process at all.
Common questions.
How do agencies get client sign-off without a dozen email threads?
Put the client in the tool as a reviewer rather than a recipient. The draft, the feedback, and the approval then live in one place, and the record of who approved what survives the project.
Does an approval step slow posting down?
Only if approval is hard to reach. A review that takes a minute from a phone costs nothing against a publishing schedule; one that requires a desk and an email thread is what causes teams to fall behind.
In the product
See also