An approval workflow is a defined sequence of required sign-offs — from brand, legal, analytics, or other stakeholders — that a marketing change must pass through before it’s allowed to go live.
Approval workflows only function as real safeguards if the sign-off is explicit and attributed — a specific person, confirming a specific version, at a specific time — rather than an implicit assumption that "someone probably looked at this." The gap between an informal approval culture and an enforced approval workflow usually only becomes visible the one time something ships without the review it was supposed to get.