Design habits of businesses experiencing hypergrowth
Key takeaways
- According to 63% of marketers who worked for companies experiencing hypergrowth, creativity and design were the No. 1 contributors to that success.
- Companies that used templates to make content were 5x less likely to struggle with increasing their creative output.
- Nearly 3 in 5 marketers who worked for companies experiencing hypergrowth said keeping up with quality was their biggest design/creative challenge.
Business growth is always hard-earned, but some businesses are able to achieve hypergrowth: a maintained growth rate of 40% or higher for more than one year. With millions of new businesses annually, how can you make sure your business stands out and has what it takes to go the distance? One key way is through creative marketing.
With this in mind, we surveyed over 1,000 American marketers who work for companies that have experienced hypergrowth in the past year. We asked them about the role that creativity, design, and marketing have played in their success. What were their biggest challenges? In which areas are they working to grow next? Let’s find out.
Summary/Overview
Fearless creativity leads to rapid growth
Many factors lead to a business’s success. But what has helped companies reach a state of rapid growth in the past year?
Hypergrowth is when a company has an annual growth rate of 40% or greater, meaning they’ve quickly become profitable. Creativity and design were the main factors leading to hypergrowth for 63% of the businesses we studied. This was especially true for those with little-to-no hierarchy. This “flat” or “organic” structure allows a business to focus on communication and collaboration, which may be why 72% of marketers working for these types of companies said hypergrowth happened because of creativity and design.
To support creativity at work, companies that experienced hypergrowth most often:
- Set up creative spaces.
- Supported brainstorming sessions.
- Encouraged employee time off.
- Fostered a culture of experimentation.
- Embraced failure.
When a business celebrates even the roughest ideas and gives makers creative space, it allows them to experiment without fear of failure. Such an open and supportive culture fosters innovation and design that can make a company stand out and grow fast.
Shifting marketing focus to achieve results
Nurturing creativity and outstanding design requires more than just an encouraging environment. How else have businesses experiencing hypergrowth focused their creative marketing efforts?
Over half of the businesses that experienced hypergrowth focused their resources on social media and visual content. A few (18%) invested in influencers, which might also be considered a social media investment since it’s a big part of today’s social media marketing space.
Looking to the future, marketers working for businesses that experienced hypergrowth shared what they would like to improve in 2023. Their answers focused more on branding and user experience (UX) than content creation.
Over half of the marketers surveyed said they want to develop better branding and improve UX design, and 47% want to improve user interface (UI) design. Millennials really want to prioritize UI design, 26% more so than other generations. This shift highlights the continued importance of creativity and design, as both are vital to branding and user experience.
Design defines a brand
When it comes to hypergrowth, the most important aspect of design is scalability. Scalable design is consistent, easily translates between different media, and is affordable to reproduce. What makes a design easily scalable so a business can achieve hypergrowth, and which roles are businesses experiencing hypergrowth looking to add to their in-house teams?
For scalable design, marketers suggested simplicity, preferring serif or sans serif fonts — easily legible at any size — over decorative, script, vintage, or modern fonts. Simple fonts can be bold and timeless, making them excellent choices for branding (think Nike or GAP). Marketers also suggested using simple monochromatic colors.
No matter the font or color palette, they agreed that a talented graphic designer is worth having on their team: 71% preferred hiring an in-house graphic designer over outsourcing one. Given the importance of branding, having dedicated graphic designers on the team could be key to rapid business growth.
Creating the right content
What are the best strategies for increasing content creation? Marketers shared their top tips.
According to marketers, analyzing existing content and setting measurable goals were the top strategies for scaling effective content production. Analyzing existing content, also known as a content audit, is assessing all of a company’s published content in order to see what’s working and weed out what’s not. Content audits are an important tool for improving brand content and making sure it can grow with the company.
Building a content calendar was another top tool for increasing content creation. Successful social media marketing involves posting regularly, which can be overwhelming for those managing multiple accounts. Content calendars organize and schedule content publication, helping you stay on top of content marketing across all platforms.
Templates are other easy-to-use tools that make creating content simpler and faster. Companies that used templates to make content were five times less likely to struggle with increasing their creative output.
Managing growing pains
Growing pains are a part of business, and hypergrowth comes with unique challenges. So, what are the biggest creative struggles of business hypergrowth, and how can you overcome them?
Over 90% of marketers said their companies struggled to increase creativity and design while they experienced hypergrowth over the past year. Keeping up work quality was also a difficult challenge for 57% of marketers, while 47% struggled with maintaining processes/guidelines and keeping up with demand.
Of the 10% of marketers with no issues scaling creativity during hypergrowth, 69% managed quality control challenges by creating brand guidelines. Brand guidelines help designers keep design consistent across platforms and placements, streamlining processes and reducing errors. Of the marketers who could meet growing content demands, 71% had used a content calendar, and 69% recycled their content.
Marketers also revealed the weakest areas of their marketing departments: visual content, email, and social media. Interestingly, these are also what marketers said their companies had invested in most, which shows strengthening these weaknesses is their next goal.
Achieving hypergrowth through creativity and design
Every business wants to succeed and grow. Encouraging a creative work culture and hiring talented designers to produce a bold, timeless, and scalable brand identity is what worked well for the marketers we surveyed. Using tools to audit, organize, make, and schedule content were other tips they had for focusing and delivering a brand’s message directly (and often) to followers and customers.
Overall, prioritizing innovative marketing and focusing on creativity and design can give you the best chance at success –– and maybe even launch your business into hypergrowth. That’s where we come in. Adobe Express helps you make and share standout content with beautiful, unique designs that your audience will love. With just a few clicks, our customizable templates and high-quality, royalty-free Adobe Stock images will have your business on the track to hypergrowth in no time.
Methodology
For this campaign, we surveyed 1,001 marketers in the US who worked in companies experiencing hypergrowth (annual percentage growth of 40% or more) in the past year. Among them, 58% were men, and 42% were women. The company size breakdown is as follows: 25% worked for small businesses, 61% for medium businesses, and 14% for large businesses.
Fair Use Statement
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