The approval workflow that actually gets used
You set up a proper approval process. Drafts in the tool, a reviewer column, a status for everything. 6 weeks later the client is sending voice notes at 11 at night and someone is copying captions out of a spreadsheet again. This is not a discipline failure. It is a design failure, and it is fixable.
Why approval processes collapse
4 reasons, in order of how often they kill one.
The client has to log in. This is the big one. A busy owner will not create an account, remember a password and learn an interface to approve 4 captions. They will reply to whatever arrives on their phone.
Nothing happens when nobody replies. A draft sitting in “awaiting approval” forever is a queue with no exit. Silence has to mean something.
Feedback arrives in 3 places. Comments in the tool, a WhatsApp voice note, a correction on the call. Now nobody knows which version is current.
Everything needs approving. If a reply to a comment has to go through the same process as a campaign launch, the process becomes the bottleneck for work that is time-sensitive by nature.
Rule one: approval goes to them
The client should never log in to anything. They receive a link, they see the posts as they will appear, they tap approve or write a note. That is the entire interaction, on a phone, in 90 seconds.
Every hour of friction you add here comes back as a week of delay. The agency logs in. The client taps.
Rule two: silence has a meaning, agreed in advance
Write it into the engagement, not into a policy document nobody reads.
The version that works: “Content goes out for approval by Thursday for the following week. If we have not heard back by Monday morning, we publish as drafted.”
Clients almost never object to this, because the alternative is that their account goes quiet and they know it. What it removes is the week where nothing ships and nobody can say why.
The one exception worth carving out: anything involving price, legal claims or a named third party waits for an explicit yes.
Rule three: one place for feedback
Not because tidiness matters, but because scattered feedback produces published mistakes.
If a client sends a voice note, the person who hears it writes the change into the draft as a comment before doing anything else. The voice note is not the record. The draft is.
This sounds like bureaucracy until the week someone acts on a verbal instruction that was later reversed, on a post that is now live, and nobody can reconstruct who said what.
Rule four: 3 tiers, not one
The most common mistake is treating all content as equally risky.
No approval. Replies to comments, review responses, community management. These are time-sensitive and low-risk, and a reply that needs sign-off arrives too late to be worth sending. Agree the tone once and trust the person doing it.
Batch approval. The standard calendar, approved a week at a time in one sitting. This is 90 percent of the output.
Explicit approval. Campaign launches, anything with a price or a legal claim, anything sensitive, anything naming another company. Individually, in writing, no exceptions.
Getting this split right is what makes the whole thing survive a busy month.
What to do about the client who never replies
Every agency has one. 2 approaches work and one does not.
Works: the deadline rule above, applied consistently from week one. They adapt or they accept what ships.
Works: a standing 15-minute slot. Same time every week, screen shared, approved live. For a certain kind of client this is the only thing that ever works, and it is cheaper than chasing.
Does not work: chasing. Three follow-ups a week trains them that the deadline is soft, costs you the time you were trying to save, and makes you feel like a supplier rather than an adviser.
The record you will be glad of
Keep who approved what and when. Not to win an argument, though it does that.
Keep it because 6 months into an account, the question is rarely “who approved this” and usually “how long does approval actually take here”. If the answer is 4 days, your Thursday deadline is wrong and the calendar should be built a week further ahead.
That is a process fix you can only see if someone recorded the timestamps.
EngageDigital is building approval workflows with client-side review by link, so the person approving never needs an account. It sits on the Business plan. See where it is in the queue or start free.
