Everyone loves chocolate. And your consumers can't get enough. They not only want it, they want it in combinations, packages, and volumes you've never dealt with before.

Businesses that figure out how to offer this kind of experience stand out from the pack. They lead with design — emphasizing the look and feel of their experiences. And they ensure that every element of their brand works and blends with the ones around it. When you think of businesses like this, think Apple. Think Nike. Think Coca-Cola. This design-led emphasis helps your customers create an emotional bond with your brand. This makes them much less likely to switch brands when making purchase decisions.

In our previously released report, Achieving Deliciousness: Adapting to an Increasingly Content-Hungry World, we compared content to chocolate to show the kinds of information that consumers find engaging. Now the question is: How can your team design and create enough content to meet the needs of your consumers faster than ever? In other words, how can you make more chocolate with the factory you already have?

We've gathered insights from Adobe experts, drawn examples from successful businesses, and gone right to your peers. We've surveyed more than 285 businesses globally to understand how they are keeping up with design and other content demands, while still offering a great customer experience.

So, put on your hard hat and let's go behind the scenes of the chocolate factory.

Why the customer experience matters.

Marketing researcher Craig Borowski put it well when he wrote in a 2015 Harvard Business Review article:

"A consumer's impression of a brand is like a mosaic. It's made up of many individual touchpoints. When a consumer is faced with a big decision, say abandoning a known brand for its competitor, the overall mosaic impression is often what convinces them to stay"

Your business has a lot of customer touchpoints to manage. And if these touchpoints don't present the overall picture your customers expect, they move on. So it's time for you to take a step back and audit the experience your team is creating, and how it's being delivered to your customers and employees. Is it relevant? Consistent? Personalized? Does it tie together, clarify, and enhance the story you want to be telling with your brand? If it doesn't, you're not using design as an advantage.

Watch IdealSpot discuss the importance of offering personal customer experiences ›

How you can shape that experience.

It's important to get a real pulse of what your customers think. Don't just guess or rely on whatever worked in the past. Lean on your marketing analyst and customer experience teams to share the data.

Mature design-led companies break down barriers between design and the customer experience. Their executives support connecting their data analysts and content creators to improve collaboration. When companies have a design focus that starts from the top, the chances of offering a top-notch customer experience increases.

Why the recipe matters.

If you don't have a plan, it's much harder to prioritize. If your business is like ours, then requests are coming from every corner of the company. It doesn't take long before requests and project briefs far outnumber the hands you have to fill them. Designers, producers, and other creative team members can quickly find themselves mired in negotiations, explanations, and frustrations as they try to prioritize on the fly. Instead of a strategic approach to creating content, your operational model devolves into supporting the squeakiest wheels or requests from the highest paid person in the room. Neither is a strategy for success — and neither results in your business offering a "level 10" customer experience.

Offering that top-notch experience comes from long-term planning. Thinking strategically from one end of the sales funnel to the other. IDC put it another way, "Content marketing innovators are shifting their focus from content creation to planning the overall experience the audience will have as it interacts with the content." (IDC, The Content Marketing Supply Chain: Meeting the Demand for Content Marketing at Scale)

How to crank up the factory.

To create the additional content with the resources you have today is going to come down to working — as the saying goes — smarter, not harder. Find ways to get more use out of the content you're currently creating. And efficiently share the content that already exists with other teams, rather than having to create the same content from scratch.

The best way for SMBs to do this is through content synchronization. Have all of your assets live in a cloud repository, so all designers and other content creators can access and use the same assets —such as brand guidelines, color swatches, and logos — from that central location. When an asset needs to change, your team knows where it is, permissions are set regarding who can change it, and the change is made universally.

The design team at Uber faced the challenges of growing fast and struggling to keep their brand tight and consistent. Watch this video to see how they were able to use tools that connected their designers and assets across the organization.

Read our report about creating change in your business ›

Why the right tools and processes matter.

Even with a plan in place for design prioritization, you still need some help turning a to-do list into projects that you'll actually execute. Think about what's getting in your way.

We've already talked about collaboration issues. If your creative and marketing teams are not all working from the same set of assets in a single system, then you're likely wasting time hunting or recreating them.

For example, your creative team, web team, social media practitioners, and mobile team will all be working with the assets for a campaign. It doesn't take much for a campaign to become unwieldy as it crosses into different teams, channels, and geographically distanced offices.

And think about the approval process. Approvers need to be able to easily see — or even interact with — the right assets. They want to be able to share and approve whether they're at the office or on the go, so it helps to use mobile.

Watch more about Creative Cloud collaboration ›

Why organization matters.

Data from our survey shows that companies that rate themselves as a "10" in the customer experiences they offer, spend twice as much time managing their creative assets as everyone else. Being organized actually opens up more opportunity for creativity. As you design for more channels, the importance of organizing assets grows as well.

Organizing assets and storing them centrally can definitely be a time-consuming investment, but it keeps businesses from churning on low-impact content, or duplicating work that's already done.

Why mobile matters.

Businesses want to create more mobile experiences, but they're struggling to design them in an effective way. The lack of value that SMBs are seeing from mobile apps has made them cautious about investing in design resources for apps.

Much of the challenge resides in the format. With so many different screens and surfaces, mobile apps, mobile websites, and operating systems, the task of building content for mobile can be overwhelming for your team. But, these are the challenges that successful mobile marketing businesses are learning to solve.

How you can improve your mobile content.

One obvious way to produce more mobile app content is to make it easier for your designers to create. You need to provide tools that allow them to quickly prototype experiences for different screen sizes and devices. Prototyping is important because it takes the mobile concept from brainstorming and sticky notes on the white board into reality. Onto a real device. And into a hand. Good prototyping tools will give you a sense of how a mobile app works and feels on different device types.

There are also tools available that help designers actually publish mobile apps — beyond simply prototyping. Give them the capability to build mobile apps, and even manage and improve them after launch. Putting this ability into the hands of marketing and creative teams helps to break down the silos that slow the production of mobile app content.

Your investment in mobile is not just in creation tools, but also analytics and testing solutions as well. Ask your marketing analytics manager to help you bake testing into your content strategy.

See how Audi's website and mobile app drive more business ›

Why trying new varieties matters.

Desktop content is decreasing, but not going away. The other side of that coin shows that new content types are being added. You need to have the tools in place — so your team can efficiently create content for multiple channels as well as the ability to experiment with new forms of media.

How to serve the new varieties.

Don't spend time resizing and reformatting the same file over and over. Invest in tools that help you create, share, and publish cross-device content in an efficient way.

Also, be open to the newest and seemingly insignificant opportunities. Tomorrow they may blow up, and you'll find yourself behind the curve. Companies that barely got around to Facebook and Twitter now find themselves playing catch up with Instagram and Snapchat. So, you need to budget a certain percentage of production time and resources to continuously test content for new media and channels.

And then there are games. Pokémon GO made quite the splash. Now businesses are thinking about creating their own augmented reality games. That's fine, but now they'll look like a copycat instead of an innovator.

The bottom line is you need to take care of your fundamental needs — but do it faster and more efficiently. And then keep experimenting. Try new channels. And explore new strategies in existing channels. Customers remember ingenuity. They expect the companies they use to innovate — or they quickly leave them behind.