by: Anton Rius

Traditional, hand-drawn animation is one of the most beautiful and rigorous artistic disciplines.

There’s nothing like it.

I’ve always loved cartoons—to the point that when I went to college, I chose to major in animation and film. And while we learned about many different styles of animation, I fell deeply and hopelessly in love with the hand-drawn style.

But you can imagine the amount of work.

To maintain the illusion of life, you need 15 frames per second of film. That means for every minute the audience sees on screen, you need to produce at least 900 distinct pictures.

There’s a tremendous amount of planning that happens before you ever put pencil to paper.

The steps look something like this:

1. Have a good idea
2. Develop the story and script
3. Define how it should look, feel, and sound
4. Design your characters and environment
5. Create a storyboard to plan your camera shots
6. Film an animatic (a moving storyboard) to plan your timing
7. Determine your layers for each shot (background vs. foreground vs. moving parts)
8. Document the frame-by-frame timing for every layer so everything lines up with audio

After you do all that, you can (finally!) sit down and start drawing. And after you draw every layer and every frame of each shot, you film it and hope that all of your meticulous upfront planning pays off.

Because if your timing is off—even slightly—you have to go back to the drawing board (literally) and fix it.

In animation, as with any creative discipline, your results are only as good as the system behind it.

The same is true for content marketing. Yet most B2B businesses are in such a hurry to churn out content that they often skip straight to production. They don’t give proper time or attention to building out the system to support it.

Here’s the Problem

Companies obsess over results. Executives want to watch the numbers go up. Every month. Every year. For many content teams, that means creating more. More blog posts. More e-books. More video. More channels. More activity.

Look, I get that content is meant to support the business. I won’t pretend that content marketers create precious works of art.

Unlike animation, you don’t create B2B content for pure entertainment or artistic expression. But there’s still a very good business reason to invest in that same level of planning before you ever write a word of copy.

Because without a clear system behind your content, the work slows down.

People duplicate tasks.

You can’t manage workloads.

Your producers (both people and AI) won’t understand your standards or constraints.

And projects stall and get delayed because a) people are overloaded or b) no one knows their role or the expectations or what timeline to go by.

What’s stopping you from building your system?

One trap is the tyranny of the urgent. You have a blog post due Friday, a campaign launching next week, and a backlog you haven’t touched in two weeks. If you stop now to write a guide or document a workflow, it can feel like you’re falling behind, or worse, that you’re choosing to lose ground in a race you’re already losing.

There’s also the trap of believing you’ll build the system once things calm down. But things never calm down. You get more requests, your team grows, and suddenly you’re onboarding a new hire with no systems aside from a Notion page you half-finished eight months ago.

And if you’re just one person?

Being a lone content manager can feel like a good excuse. If you don’t collaborate with other people to produce the work, you might be tempted to avoid documenting your process.

Sure, you could hold it all in your head if it’s just you. But I wouldn’t recommend it for two reasons:

1. Preparing for Growth

As soon as you want to grow your content program (and your business), you’ll need to add a producer into the mix.

If you don’t document your system now, while you’re building it, you’re going to have to document it for someone later—and later usually comes when you’re too overloaded and stressed to make time for it.

So yeah. Better to do it now and save yourself the stress.

2. Managing Expectations

Ever notice that everyone in your company has an opinion about what you do and how you should do it?

Sellers want enablement content. Customer success wants something else entirely. And your boss constantly offers “helpful suggestions” based on the latest marketing fad they read.

Why do you think they do that?

Do they not trust you? Are you doing something wrong?

Nope. It’s because they don’t see your plan.

And because they don’t know what you’re working on, they don’t realize that you’re already working on a lot right now, and every “helpful suggestion” feels like throwing an extra sack of flour on your already-overloaded shoulders.

The best way to avoid these interactions (and the stress that comes with them) is to set expectations ahead of time.

That means documenting your plan and process, then sharing it with every stakeholder you work with. All of this eliminates any outside questions about your team’s priorities and workload, and protects your time against “helpful suggestions” and random acts of content.

Start simple with these two things

Before you build anything else, get two things right: who you’re writing for and how you want to sound.

Everything starts with your audience guide. Not fictional buyer personas like “CMO Steve” or “Ed the Engineer,” but a research-backed picture of who you’re writing for, their goals and motivations, and what’s making their life hard right now. Capture where they are today and how you want them to think and feel when consuming your content.

Your voice and tone guide describes what your brand sounds like. And just as importantly, what it doesn’t. Keep it separate from your audience guide even though the two are related. Version control gets messy fast when everything lives in one document.

Everything else—content briefs, production plans, process maps, and templates—builds on these two foundations. You’ll need all of it eventually. But if you start here and get it right, you can build the rest of the system from there.

Build a System to Scale

The next time you watch an old cartoon, you’ll know the amount of work that goes into producing it. Fifteen frames per second. Nine hundred per minute.

Every single frame is drawn and painted by hand.

As an animator, there’s no better feeling than seeing those countless hours of planning and drawing come to life on screen. We call it the illusion of life—all the planning and invisible work disappears the moment the character moves on screen.

The audience doesn’t see the system behind it—only what the system made possible.

Your content system works the same way. The people who only care about results will never notice it. But without it, there’s nothing worth noticing. ■

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Anton Rius is Sr. Director of Content Marketing at Corporate Visions, where he leads all content marketing strategy, SEO, PR, and social media. Anton’s extensive experience supporting B2B revenue growth with insightful content has been featured in publications like HBR, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur magazine. Anton writes regularly at longtailthinking.com.