For small businesses, deciding which online marketing techniques to use is a daunting task. With many online tools at your disposal, which ones really perform? To find out, we took a look at 15 online marketing tools and their performance rankings by 500 CEOs and other executives in professional services.

Here are the top 5 most effective online marketing techniques:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – While “tagging” a website with the right keywords so that it appears in top Google spots is the broad goal, the key is to focus on crafting informative content.Including keywords in the title of your page and two to three times in the page’s text will help your page rank in Google – but it just doesn’t work unless your content is also useful to your audience.
2. Blogging – Blogging is a great way to publish fresh ideas and educational content on a regular basis. It also establishes you/your business as an expert on a particular topic and earns trust from your readers. Blogging goes hand in hand with SEO: well-written content attracts links and can potentially improve your website’s SEO performance.
3. Web Analytics – Web analytics help track visitor activity, including web visitors, downloads and form fills. These tools are a must-have for helping you assess what’s working and what’s not in order to improve your site’s overall performance.
4. Email Marketing – A great tool to nurture your prospects, email marketing involves cultivating a target list of contacts and periodically reaching out to them with content and offers. This channel helps reach and nurture prospects throughout the buying process.
5. White Papers – The idea here is that you’re offering educational content pieces, similar to but more substantial than blog posts. They help earn trust from your readers while increasing your brand’s visibility. In a hands-on sense, white papers help build lists for email marketing purposes.

Focusing on these top 5 online marketing techniques will allow you to nurture your target audience while tracking success along the way. Selecting a few techniques to really dive into as opposed to tackling several at once will reap much higher dividends over time.

About The Guest Author: Elizabeth Harr is a Partner at Hinge and leads the firm’s Technology Services practice. She has participated in several of Hinge’s research projects and has co-authored two reports, Online Marketing for Professional Services: Technology Edition and How Buyers Buy: Technology Edition.