Eek! Manual staging implementation! Run away, run away! 
Seriously this is going to be a nightmare in the long run. Managing content is not like managing code, although it's hard to tell that to a manager who used to be able to do deployment of pages (simple html or php files) and now doesn't necessarily get that there are no actual page artifacts to back up and deploy any more (since it is all dynamically generated through the database).
If they need or want some sort of approval control prior to going live, they will be much better served enabling local staging and doing the work in production.
Personally I've never heard a single scenario where LAR import/export works for this kind of thing. It's too easy for the environments to get out of sync, too difficult for average joe to export LAR correctly, not very helpful error messages on LAR import failures, ...
Seriously this is going to be a nightmare in the long run. Managing content is not like managing code, although it's hard to tell that to a manager who used to be able to do deployment of pages (simple html or php files) and now doesn't necessarily get that there are no actual page artifacts to back up and deploy any more (since it is all dynamically generated through the database).
If they need or want some sort of approval control prior to going live, they will be much better served enabling local staging and doing the work in production.
Personally I've never heard a single scenario where LAR import/export works for this kind of thing. It's too easy for the environments to get out of sync, too difficult for average joe to export LAR correctly, not very helpful error messages on LAR import failures, ...