Approvals: keeping standards without becoming the bottleneck

Every multi-location marketing organisation eventually builds an approval process, and most build one that is slower than the opportunities it governs. When approval takes ten days and a local opportunity has a three-day window, operators stop asking. The governance then exists on paper while the actual marketing happens outside it.

Tier the review by risk

Not everything needs the same scrutiny, and treating a social post about a school fundraiser like a national campaign is what makes the process fail.

Make tier zero big enough to matter

The single most effective way to improve approval speed is to make more things not require approval. A rich library of pre-approved templates, images, offer structures and copy blocks means most local marketing needs no review at all.

Invest in the library rather than in the review queue. A reviewer approving the twentieth near-identical local flyer this month is a symptom of a missing template, not a workload problem.

Every approval request that looks like the last one is a template you have not built yet.

Automate the checks that are actually mechanical

Much of what a reviewer checks can be verified without a human: required legal disclosures present, discount depth within limits, offer expiry set and in the future, correct store details, logo and colours from the approved set, opt-out language present on messaging.

Automating those frees the human review for what needs judgement: whether the offer is commercially sensible, whether the tone fits, whether the timing conflicts with something else.

Keep an audit trail

When something does go wrong, an offer that cannot be honoured, a message to a suppressed list, a claim that cannot be substantiated, the questions are always the same: what went out, to whom, who approved it, and against what version of the rules.

Retain the creative, the audience definition, the approval record and the ruleset version together. It is unglamorous and it is what turns an incident into a contained problem rather than an investigation.

Audit after the fact, not only before

A process that reviews everything in advance and never checks what actually ran is missing the more useful half. Sample live local marketing periodically across stores, compare it to what was approved, and feed the gaps back into the templates.

Where the same deviation appears repeatedly, the template is wrong rather than the operators.

Questions