In today’s fast-paced digital marketing landscape, managing content across multiple channels while maintaining brand consistency requires sophisticated approval workflows. This article examines the key features of marketing platforms that offer built-in content approval systems specifically designed for cross-channel campaign management.
Essentially, you need a central hub that empowers your team to create the content, approve the content, and even publish the content to as many of your different channels as possible.
With the right platform you are able to work in one space – yet have an impact across all of your channels. That’s the mission and that’s what we’re exploring here.
The Challenge of Cross-Channel Content Management
Modern marketing teams face unprecedented complexity when executing campaigns across email, social media, web, mobile, and traditional channels. Each channel has unique requirements, regulations, and best practices, while brands must maintain consistency in messaging, visual identity, and compliance standards. Without proper approval workflows, organizations risk brand dilution, compliance violations, and inefficient resource allocation.
Having a dedicated cross-channel marketing management platform ensures that your team can maximize their impact. Not only is finding this platform about limiting the duplicative busywork but also creating stronger content that is best tailored to the nuances of each of your channels.
How We’re Evaluating These Platforms
To evaluate how effectively each tool supports cross-channel campaign orchestration, we’re examining how capably they accommodate the most frequently activated marketing touchpoints:
- Organic Social
- Paid Social
- Website/App
- Digital Ads
- Video
- SMS
Specifically, we’re focusing on how clearly these channels are depicted within the tools’ interfaces and to what extent purpose-built capabilities are available for each.
For every channel listed, this guide will classify each marketing platform using one of the following categories:
- Advanced – A high degree of functionality designed around this channel, adding significant utility when building and managing it in the platform. This could include realistic previews of how the content appears natively or the ability to publish directly from the platform.
- Moderate – Represents some attention to the channel. For example, the tool may enforce best practices like image ratios or character limits, but lacks a workspace that mimics the native experience.
- Basic – These tools acknowledge the channel in name only, offering limited to no differentiated support for it.
In addition, we are going to evaluate the content review and approval features of each tool, using the following categories:
- Advanced – These tools offer multifaceted content review workflows and allow for commenting directly on content.
- Basic – These tools have modest features to review content by placing comments and setting approval or rejected status. Finally, we are going to be giving bonus points for any platform that can directly publish or publish via an integration. We will be listing which channels to which the platforms can publish.
The Marketing Platforms We’re Evaluating
- Opal
- ClickUp
- Optimizely
- Asana
- Plannable
- SmartSheet
- Sprinklr
Disclaimer (as of August 5, 2025): This post is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute a promise, warranty, or guarantee of specific product features or performance. Product features are described to the best of our knowledge and may change over time.
Exploring 7 Marketing Platforms with Built-in Content Approval Workflows
Tool Name: Opal
Category: Cross-Channel Marketing Platform (CMP)
Summary: Opal is purpose-built for orchestrating marketing campaigns across channels with clarity, precision, and true-to-life content visualization. Designed for teams that need visibility, collaboration, and consistency across the campaign lifecycle.
Channel Support:
- Organic Social: Advanced
- Paid Social: Advanced
- Website/App: Advanced
- Digital Ads: Moderate
- Video: Moderate
- Email: Advanced
- SMS: Advanced
Opal supports advanced planning and visualization for all major channels. Teams can not only schedule and visualize campaigns, but also view actual content (e.g. social posts, email layouts, text messages) in formats that mirror real-world delivery.
Approval & Review: Advanced
Notes: Robust workflows allow for collaborative review, commenting directly on content, and managing multistep approval processes across internal and external stakeholders.
Publishing Capabilities (Bonus):
Integrated Publishing: Organic Social
Opal supports publishing through integrations with all leading social platforms (Sprout, DashSocial, Hootsuite and Sprinklr) and supports all main content types.
Tool Name: ClickUp
Category: Project Management Tool
Summary: ClickUp is a versatile project and task management platform that’s been adapted for marketing teams. It supports campaign planning and team coordination but lacks the channel-specific depth needed for full content orchestration.
Channel Support:
- Organic Social: Moderate
- Paid Social: Moderate
- Website/App: Basic
- Digital Ads: Moderate
- Video: Moderate
- Email: Moderate
- SMS: Basic
ClickUp provides general support for managing channel-related tasks but does not offer channel-native previews or purpose-built content interfaces. It’s best suited for coordinating workstreams rather than composing or visualizing final content.
Approval & Review: Basic
Notes: Supports simple commenting and status setting, but lacks structured workflows or inline feedback mechanisms for content review.
Publishing Capabilities (Bonus): Not Supported
ClickUp reflects a growing trend of project management tools being extended into the marketing space. While its task coordination features are strong, it wasn’t designed for creative or channel-specific content work. As a result, teams using ClickUp for campaign management often supplement it with other tools to handle visualization, review, and publishing.
Tool Name: Optimizely
Category: Content Marketing Platform (CMP) / Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
Summary: Optimizely CMP is a robust, enterprise-grade solution for creating, managing, and publishing content across multiple channels—designed for teams that demand unified workflows and high-level collaboration.
Channel Support:
- Organic Social: Advanced
- Paid Social: Moderate
- Website/App: Advanced
- Digital Ads: Basic
- Video: Moderate
- Email: Advanced
- SMS: Basic
Optimizely CMP excels at delivering rich, channel-aware content experiences – especially for web, email, and social.
Approval & Review: Advanced
Notes: Supports full editorial workflows, with inline commenting, multistep approval routing, and tracking across multiple contributors and stages.
Publishing Capabilities (Bonus): Optimizely allows native publishing to organic social, websites and email.
Optimizely is engineered to streamline content creation and distribution across channels — allowing marketers to ideate, review, and schedule everything in one place. From web pages and email campaigns to native social posts, you can finalize copy, gather feedback, and publish directly within a unified interface. It’s the central hub for teams aiming to move faster and smarter with content operations.
Tool Name: Asana
Category: Project Management
Summary: Asana is a widely used project and task management platform that has been adopted by marketing teams primarily for campaign planning. While it provides strong coordination tools, it lacks channel-specific features for content creation, review, or publishing.
Channel Support:
- Organic Social: Basic
- Paid Social: Basic
- Website/App: Basic
- Digital Ads: Basic
- Video: Basic
- Email: Moderate
- SMS: Basic
Asana does not offer native or simulated support for marketing channels. Any cross-channel planning is task-based, not content-aware. Teams often build custom workflows using templates or dependencies, but they won’t find tools that reflect the nuance of each touchpoint.
Approval & Review: Basic
Notes: Comments and task assignments are available, but there are no structured content review flows, inline markup features, or creative-specific approval systems.
Publishing Capabilities (Bonus): Not Supported
Asana’s presence in marketing workflows often comes down to organizational inertia—many teams already use it, so they extend it into campaign work. But while it’s effective for aligning timelines and responsibilities, it doesn’t provide the creative or channel-specific depth needed for content execution. It’s best viewed as a generalist planner, not a marketing operations platform.
Tool Name: Plannable
Category: Social Media Planning
Plannable is a content collaboration platform built primarily for social media teams. It offers true-to-life previews for both organic and paid social content, making it a strong contender for social-first marketing workflows. Its support for non-social channels, however, is more limited.
Channel Support:
- Organic Social: Advanced
- Paid Social: Advanced
- Website/App: Moderate
- Digital Ads: Basic
- Video: Moderate
- Email: Moderate
- SMS: Basic
Plannable delivers robust, channel-native support for social content creation and planning. Its preview and collaboration capabilities enable teams to see content exactly as it will appear on social platforms, but this depth does not extend equally across other touchpoints.
Approval & Review: Advanced
Notes: Offers intuitive approval flows, inline commenting, and client-friendly review modes. Designed with social collaboration in mind, it excels at content-stage feedback and final sign-off processes.
Publishing Capabilities (Bonus): Native Publishing to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), TikTok
Plannable stands out when it comes to social content. Its high-fidelity previews and built-in feedback workflows empower creators to produce better posts with less back-and-forth. But its focus on social means that teams seeking a centralized solution for omnichannel campaigns may need to supplement it with other tools. It’s a great fit for social-first brands or agencies prioritizing streamlined collaboration on social content.
Tool Name: Smartsheet
Category: Project Management
Smartsheet is a highly customizable work management platform that supports marketing coordination and asset management at scale. Through its integration with Brandfolder, it offers strong DAM functionality—especially for video. While it includes limited support for campaign planning and scheduling, it lacks direct publishing and channel-specific execution features.
Channel Support:
- Organic Social: Moderate
- Paid Social: Basic
- Website/App: Basic
- Digital Ads: Moderate
- Video: Advanced
- Email: Moderate
- SMS: Basic
Smartsheet supports surface-level coordination for multiple channels, but its channel-native support is limited. Most functionality centers around asset and workflow tracking rather than content execution or previewing.
Approval & Review: Basic
Smartsheet supports review workflows through status tracking, attachments, and comments, but it lacks inline content feedback tools tailored to marketing assets.
Publishing Capabilities (Bonus): Smartsheet offers very limited publishing via Hootsuite integration to allow scheduling only with no content previews.
Tool Name: Sprinklr
Category: Unified Customer Experience Management Platform (CXM)
Sprinklr is an enterprise-grade platform designed to manage customer experiences across marketing, advertising, care, and social channels. Its strength lies in its comprehensive support for social media and digital advertising, offering deep control and scalability for large organizations operating across multiple touchpoints.
Channel Support:
- Organic Social: Advanced
- Paid Social: Advanced
- Website/App: Basic
- Digital Ads: Advanced
- Video: Advanced
- Email: Moderate
- SMS: Moderate
Sprinklr offers rich, integrated capabilities for social and advertising campaigns, including full-funnel planning, publishing, and performance insights. Its support for web, email, and SMS exists but isn’t as robust or central to the experience.
Approval & Review: Advanced
Notes: Sprinklr enables configurable approval workflows, content permissions, and detailed audit trails, tailored for enterprise-grade governance and brand compliance.
Publishing Capabilities (Bonus): Sprinklr natively publishes across nearly all major social and digital advertising platforms.