Any business owner who is ignoring online marketing this year is doing themselves a disservice. The fact is these days everyone is online in some capacity. As competition for your online consumers attention continues to rise, it’s important that you take the time learn new strategies and skills that can help you further strengthen your brand loyalty, engage with your customers, and connect with new prospects.

This article will discuss some of the marketing skills you’ll need in order to take your business to the next level and beyond in 2015:

Tip #1: How to Make a Video That Brings You More Business

If you’re not yet convinced about the value and potential ROI of making and sharing a video online for your business, then these stats are sue to win you over.

- Website visitors are 64 percent more likely to buy a product from an online store after they have watched a video on it.

- 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and they are processed 60,000x faster in the brain than text.

This is the year that video marketing is going to skyrocket. If you haven’t taken the time to have a look at the various ways you can create an engaging video, now is the time. KISSMetrics has a great webinar that shows you how to set the right goals and follow the right process in order to accelerate your video marketing process.

Tip #2: Acquiring Customers through Email

Email marketing is another form of marketing that is going to take off for businesses in 2015. During 2014, more businesses than ever spent their resources developing and implementing various marketing strategies in an effort to connect to and retain more customers. For many businesses, this investment has paid off and they are now starting to reap the rewards.

This form of marketing can seem to be a bit intimidating if you’ve never used it to connect and communicate with your customers in the past, but the good thing is that it doesn’t have to be due to the great resources that are being published daily that can help you learn how to get the most out of it.

Tip #3: How to Automate Marketing

If you want to become an efficient marketer, it’s a good idea to invest in tools that can assist in automating your efforts.

In 2014, more businesses started to adopt and implement marketing automation tools in an effort to streamline their processes, understand their customers better, and increase their revenue and profit. There are reports out there that state that a quarter of all Fortune 500 companies are using marketing automation. If it’s good enough for a Fortune 500 company, then it should be good enough for yours.

If you’re not sure what it is, how it can help your business, or where to start, spend some time sifting through all the articles that are out there on marketing automation and bring yourself up to speed on it.

Tip #4: Becoming a Copywriter

Over the past few years, content marketing has become one of the main strategies that businesses are using to connect with people online. If you want to make your presence felt online as a business, you have to be willing to invest the time to write and publish blog articles on your website. However, quality beats out quantity every time here so posting week after week won’t help your cause unless you are publishing content that is thoughtful, original and is of some value to those you are trying to reach.

Your ability to write and share compelling and engaging content with your prospects, customers and followers is going to be more important ever in 2015. If you don’t think of yourself as much of a writer, perhaps you could look at employing a copywriter or even getting the help of an online marketing agency to create effective content for you on the web.

Tip #5: How to Use SEO Effectively When Developing Content

Despite what some are saying, SEO is still very much an integral component of building online awareness for your brand, boosting traffic to your site, and converting prospects into customers. However, SEO has undergone some drastic changes over the years. Google has been cracking down on and penalising businesses that implement what they deem as shady tactics in an effort to short change the system. Companies are now having to find different SEO strategies to accommodate Google’s strict ruling.

This doesn’t mean that SEO is dead. It’s just evolving and keeping those businesses who are implementing SEO strategies honest in the way they are trying to get themselves ranked. If you have an online marketing agency working to optimise your website, then they will be able to explain to you what these changes mean for you and how best to approach them.

These are just some of the main marketing skills you will need to be aware of to succeed in online marketing in 2015. With any luck, if you have the help of an online marketing agency they will have taken care of this already and will be able to explain to you what it all means for your business moving forward.