If you're an SME, there's a good chance that your marketing budget has come under scrutiny since the coronavirus pandemic. Nonetheless, during crisis periods, businesses that have viewed marketing as a revenue facilitator - rather than an expense - have done well historically. These businesses tend to acquire and retain more customers, while their competitors flounder. Here's three reasons why it is important to keep spending on marketing, even though your gut instinct might be telling you otherwise right now:

TikTok is the latest social media trend, with over 500 million downloads on Google Play and the App Store, and over 1.5 billion active users each month. Although the platform has had a bad rap in recent months and is – currently at least – primarily a private user network, as a business owner you may be considering how useful it is as a sales and lead generation tool. In many ways, TikTok is in the same position as Twitter and YouTube were in 2010/11, with a suite of features that were useful to businesses in principle, but without a large and active community of business users.

As a business owner, all talk of customer journey mapping boils down to one consideration – although prospects have different priorities, expectations, and objections, the goal is to convert them into (preferably repeat) paying customers. The customer journey simply describes what happens at each point of engagement between the customer and your business. This can include anything from how customers locate your business (offline or online), what occurs during a transaction or visit, how they are treated by your staff, or what they say about your brand online after, before or during the process. Mapping the ideal customer journey is beneficial for SMEs and bigger companies alike. It is an objective, methodical way of determining the expectations of customers, which then allows you to improve customer experiences.

The popularity of LinkedIn Video has skyrocketed, since native video was launched on the platform in 2017. LinkedIn reports that video content has grown faster than any other type of content on its website. Apparently, people are twenty times more likely to re-share video content from LinkedIn - compared to other platforms - and five times more likely to engage with other LinkedIn members after viewing it. If written content is still King on LinkedIn, video is definitely its Crown Prince.

All businesses that are focused on growth should measure the effectiveness of their sales and marketing strategies. In an increasingly digitised world, the quantity of data elements to analyse has risen steadily. Moreover, this huge quantity of data is disjointed. Your measurement calculations can go skew-whiff rapidly, due to the diverse metrics and channels involved. This results in costly, substandard marketing. Happily, it is possible to manage this overabundance of data – by realising that some of it is not important, and concentrating on the aspects that are.

One of the things we’ve been working on at JDR throughout lockdown is looking at ways we can help customers take advantage of new technologies and trends, to get better results from their marketing and sales efforts. The biggest communication trend of 2020 is, of course, video. With physical workplaces closed for several months in some cases, businesses across the country have turned to video platforms, such as Zoom and Vidyard, to keep in touch, host meetings, and deliver services.

Over the past week our development team have been fending off a significant cyber security attack on a number of websites we host, part of a worldwide hack attempt affecting over a million websites. In light of the scale and sophistication of this attack, we are no longer recommending WordPress as a website platform.

So what is this hack, why did it affect WordPress websites and what are the alternatives to WordPress?

Every company needs to be forward-thinking in order to grow. What this means in practice is adopting and maintaining a mind-set for growth, proactively seeking out opportunities and embracing change as an opening for improvement. If you'd like to take your B2B business to the next level in 2020 – and yes, it is possible, despite Covid-19 and whatever else – here are the essential steps to take.

Let's be honest: the 21st century has been a series of struggles – or at the least a rollercoaster ride – for many businesses. As we weather the economic fallout from coronavirus, it's even more important to fine tune your conversion rate and make each sale count. However, despite hard work and dedication, for many businesses the same objections and barriers come up time and again, with promising inbound leads falling by the wayside. Get better sales results from today by overcoming these essential barriers.

In a traditional business, sales and marketing departments are kept separate. This might be the way that it's always been done - but in a modern environment, it doesn't make sense. By using "Smarketing" to bring the two teams together, you can harmonise your strategy for dramatically better results from both teams.