Digital marketing can take a lot of time and effort. In fact, it can be extremely demanding, especially if you are trying to do everything at the same time all by yourself. It can even become counterproductive when you try working with every type of digital marketing while not having enough time to manage it.
Luckily, there are certain tools you can use to help you during content creation and distribution that will make your content marketing campaigns easier to execute.
Why Should Marketers Use Writing Tools?
Before looking at the best tools you can use to make your writing easier, it’s worth looking at the reasons why you should use these tools. As a digital marketer, you will need to work with a wide variety of processes that will require a lot of your time and attention. Moreover, writing will probably take up a significant part of all your work.
With so much work to do, your productivity and efficiency may be lower than if you weren’t overworking yourself. This is why using writing tools to help you is crucial. These tools pretty much do part of your work for you and make the rest easier. As a result, you will be able to do more things in less time. What follows are the five best writing tools every digital marketer should use:
#1 Grammarly
You’ve probably heard a thing or two about Grammarly, but it’s truly one of the best tools writers of any kind can use. Not only is it a free tool you can use on a variety of platforms (online, desktop, browser extension), but it is also a tool that offers many features at the most basic level. And once you need something more advanced, you have the option to upgrade to a paid premium plan.
Marcus Travers, an expert from the college paper writing service reviews site, explains it this way, “Grammarly is popular for several reasons. First, it’s easy to use and available in different forms. Second, it has a great set of features even with its free plan. Third, it allows you to set up the tool to fit a certain type of text and analyze it in a particular context. All three of these aspects are the reasons why Grammarly is so beloved.”
The features Grammarly offers (and how they can be used) include:
- Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation Checker: Detects the issues in your text and suggest possible changes you can make to resolve these issues.
- Audience, Formality, Domain, Tone, and Intent Goals: You can set up the tool to better understand your text and its context (e.g. expert audience, informal, business writing, confident and respectful tone, intent to tell a story).
- Word Choice and Misplaced Words: Improves your wording and makes your text more coherent and easier to read.
- Clarity, Engagement, Delivery: Detects subtle issues that impact the clarity, engagement, and delivery of your text.
- Language Preference: Allows you to select your variant of English (American, British, Canadian, Australian).
- Plagiarism Detection: Checks your text for potential plagiarism issues.
#2 Hemingway Editor
While Grammarly is definitely a favorite among writers, there is another very popular writing tool that is probably used just as often as Grammarly. Hemingway Editor (or Hemingway App) is an online tool for checking your text and detecting more subtle issues within them than just grammar or spelling mistakes. The tool is also now available as a paid desktop app (the online version is absolutely free).
This writing tool is named after none other than the famous writer, Ernest Hemingway – and there’s a reason for this. Hemingway was known for a certain style of writing that was always clean and clear. There were no unnecessary words in his works which is one of the reasons why he is considered one of the greatest writers of all time. Hemingway Editor takes this approach to writing to help you improve your texts.
When you input your text into the tool, parts of it will become highlighted in different colors. Adverbs will be in blue, passive voice in green, complex phrases in purple, hard-to-read sentences in yellow, and very hard-to-read sentences in red. Hemingway Editor will give you suggestions for your adverbs, passive voice, and complex phrases, but it’s up to you to break up your sentences. Through these changes you make, your writing will be clearer and the flow will be smoother, making your texts easier to read.
#3 Google Docs
A good word processor can be a huge game changer. You should be able to export your documents easily and share them with others. Likewise, a good word processor has a design that doesn’t distract while still providing you with the tools you will need for writing, editing, and formatting your texts. MS Office Word instantly comes to mind – after all, it’s the most popular option out there. But for digital marketers (especially those working with teams), Google Docs may be a more appropriate solution.
At its core, Google Docs is just like Word, but online. Word does have an online version too, but the difference between Google Docs and Word (online) is that the former is much better for real-time collaboration. In other words, when you are working with a team, Google Docs will be a better tool to use purely because of its collaborative capabilities. You can still use Word (online) for collaboration, but it won’t perform as well as Google Docs does.
Among the many features offered by Google Docs are templates, editing and formatting options, word count, viewing options, voice typing, commenting, printing, spelling and grammar check, exporting options, and others. You can also choose how you want to share the document and there is an option to present it in a meeting. When different people are working on the document at the same time, all of the changes appear in real-time, so the workflow is always smooth and very collaborative.
#4 Moz Keyword Explorer
All of the content you create as a digital marketer will be used for different purposes. Some of it will be used for ads, or for articles posted to a website or blog, and so on. And, of course, the main purpose of all the content you create is to serve your marketing goals. That’s why you need to make sure that all of your texts are optimized for search engines. The best way to do this is by using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer to find all the keywords you need beforehand.
The way this tool works is simple. For example, you need to find keywords similar to “write my research paper for me” or “write my dissertation” – or you want to get keywords for a specific topic. You enter your initial keywords, topic, or URL into Moz’s search bar and the tool gives you suggestions in return. Moz Keyword Explorer has hundreds of millions of keywords in its database and analyzes over 170 Google search engines. In other words, it’s as high-quality of a keyword research tool as you can get.
You can also use other features the tool provides, including:
- Keyword Search Volume: To predict how much search volume a particular keyword receives (with over 95% accuracy).
- Keyword Lists: To generate and save keyword lists for the future.
- Data Exporting: To export your findings (suggestions, analysis, and lists) as CSVs.
- Question Keywords: To find long-tail keywords in the form of questions for voice search optimization.
- Keyword Sorting: To sort keywords by difficulty, volume, and organic click-through rate.
- SERP Analysis: To review SERP details by keyword.
- Country Sorting: To sort keywords by country for targeting international markets.
- Competitors Analysis: To see which keywords your site ranks for and which keywords your competitors rank for.
#5 Google Trends
Last but not least, another tool you can use for topic and keyword research is Google Trends. There are different alternatives you can use, but Google Trends is both free and extremely user-friendly which is why so many marketers favor it.
It’s the perfect tool for quickly comparing different terms to see which of them has higher search volume as well as for checking the current trends in your niche.
You can compare metrics for different sub-regions within a country as well as for different countries on a worldwide level. You can see the latest trending topics and the different keywords within relevant topics. Moreover, you have access to data from years ago which can help you find old topics that can perform well if they get a new spin. In other words, Google Trends is a treasury of relevant keywords to use and topics to cover.
Conclusion
To summarize, all of these writing tools will be of great help to digital marketers. It isn’t worth trying to do everything yourself – you will simply spend a lot of time on things that can be automated or done faster with the help of additional tools. Consequently, using these tools is essential to the efficiency of your marketing efforts.
