11 Essential Content Marketing Tools That Will Help Your Business
Nearly 9 out of 10 marketers use content marketing as a marketing strategy.
You already know the benefits if your small business or startup leverages content marketing.
No matter your industry, writing is essential to reach an audience and market your company. As we previously wrote:
If you’re not creating content on the web, you don’t exist on the web. A 140 character tweet is content. A 1,000 word blog post is content. A commend to a blog post is content. Your website is content.
Content is king, and nearly every marketer constantly searches for content marketing unicorns.
Without content, we can’t share our stories or tell people why they should become customers. Some brave brands have taken content marketing to an extreme by experimenting with troll content marketing.
Doing content marketing effectively takes skill, patience, and the right tools.
Fortunately, tools can improve written content. Many free and paid paraphrasing tools can help you paraphrase content to ensure you never create duplicate content. Tools to summarize text can save time if you need to quickly understand long articles.
Whether you’re new to content marketing or have been doing it for a while, here are 11 of our favorite content marketing tools:
1. Workflowy
Some people sit down and start writing.
But this method doesn’t work for everyone. Many people we need outlines to organize research and ideas.
While outlines can be written on virtually any word processing software, Workflowy is an app that major entrepreneurs and CEOs love for its simplicity.
There’s no catch; it’s free to use.
You can even tag your bullet points to make reorganization easier. This is handy when writing pieces that can be organized in several ways. That’s pretty much the only bell or whistle on the site – with no extra settings, you can completely focus on outlining your writing.
Workflowy also has an app that syncs with the website for those of us on the go—although it’s undergoing a redesign to become more user-friendly.
We just emailed the info to you.
2. Grammarly
Grammarly is one of our favorite writing tools.
Grammarly is a desktop app, a website, and, more importantly, a Google Chrome extension. It also has a keyboard for iOS users!
Using artificial intelligence, Grammarly checks your writing for spelling, grammar, punctuation, word choice, and style errors, such as passive voice.
The best part is that each time it flags an error, it tells you why it flagged the error.
While Grammarly’s core product is free, there is a premium version.
The premium version looks for more detailed errors, completing genre-specific checks, and better vocabulary suggestions. The premium version also checks for plagiarism.
3. Hemingway App
Hemingway App is a website and a desktop app available to anyone for free.
The site checks for sentence structure errors, like the overuse of adverbs or passive voice.
The Hemingway App also looks for sentences that are difficult to read, categorizing them as yellow or red depending on their difficulty level.
It also gives you some stats on your writing. On the right side of the app, you get a readability score for your writing. You also get a reading time, word count, character count, sentence count, and paragraph count.
So depending on your quota, tracking through Hemingway is much easier.
4. Cliché Finder
Do you ever read a piece of writing and think that 30 other people could have written it?
That’s exactly what the creators of ClichĂ© Finder thought, so they built a website that could check for clichĂ©s.
The site looks for common phrases and highlights them in red, indicating that they tend to be overused. While it offers no alternatives, it’s a good way to check if your writing is unique.
5. One Look
One Look is a writer’s savior when finding words you just can’t remember.
The thesaurus has a reverse dictionary feature that allows users to type in the definition of the word they are thinking of and suggests several words that might match the description.
This is especially helpful when you’re stuck in a rut and can’t pinpoint what you’re trying to say.
The site is also available as a Google Docs add-on.
6. Portent
Portent is a wonderful tool for writers who often find themselves out of ideas.
The site lets you enter a keyword and generates titles with fun little word bubbles of notes on the topic. You can keep refreshing the generator for the same keyword if you don’t love the first idea.
While the technology is a little primitive and may not give you exactly the title or angle you are looking for, it makes it fun to jog your brain into thinking again. Since some suggestions can be silly, it’s a great way to start pushing your topic creativity.
And if you’re still stuck on generating topic ideas after using Portent, check out the ways these entrepreneurs stay creative.
7. Daily Page
While grammar and idea generation is vital to any strong writer, so is practice.
Daily Page helps writers build consistent writing habits.
The site sends you a daily email reminder to write and lets you write about whatever you want or choose a fun prompt.
Writing happens on the site and is distraction-free (with goal tracking). And while this habit builder isn’t free (it’s $3.99/month), it also gives you access to dozens of online lessons on style, storytelling, editing, and more.
8. Trello
We’re big fans of Trello at crowdspring!
For anyone trying to organize writing ideas on a micro or macro level, Trello is a great tool.
At crowdspring, we use Trello to track our blog content (and ideas). Pitches go in one column, and then we move them into in-progress, ready-to-edit, and ready-to-publish columns – depending on the topic’s status.
The best part about Trello is that you can work on your ideas and workflows alone or as part of a team. So, if you like brainstorming with a fellow writer, Trello can be a great space to do just that.
9. iA Writer
iA Writer is a desktop and iOS app that, unfortunately, isn’t free but is worth every penny.
The app is a simple word processor that eliminates all the distractions of traditional software like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or WordPress.
As you write, iA Writer highlights one sentence at a time and only writes in plain text. You can change between a few different layouts, but each one maintains iA Writer’s signature simplicity.
The ability to focus on one sentence at a time is powerful.
When we recently debated a logo design for a new brand, we spent time brainstorming about the company and the products the company would offer. Unfortunately, when we sat down to review and discuss our notes, there was a lot of “noise” on the page. We used iA Writer to review our notes one sentence at a time and were able to focus carefully and separately on each idea.
iA Writer lets you to store your writing in folders, see the reading time, character/word/sentence counts, and find and replace certain words or phrases. These are nice added features.
10. Draft
Good writers know that another pair of eyes is essential to creating great pieces.
Editors are vital, especially when writing for a company.
Draft is a fantastic product streamlining the editing process, allowing writers to track changes.
In many word processing systems, changes override each other, and going through the editing history is annoying.
Draft creates separate, side-by-side copies so that all edits are in another version, and writers can accept or reject them. Depending on the pricing tier, writers can also ask for help from professional editors.
Draft also connects to several writing platforms like Google Docs, and lets you mark major draft versions or old pieces, which is helpful when rewriting content.
11. CheckMy Links
Check My Links is a great Google Chrome extension that checks for broken links or webpage errors.
Since most written content is now distributed digitally, this is extremely helpful. Even though it doesn’t directly help your writing, it can help the overall credibility of your piece.
In the same way that a spelling error is off-putting to readers, a broken link is a sure way to break a reader’s trust.
Conclusion
Writing is a great place to start when improving your content marketing skills, but it’s not the only thing you can do to become a better business owner, entrepreneur, or marketer.
If you’re looking to improve other skills like how to publicize the content you write, check out this list of our favorite online business courses.
And if you’re really feeling ambitious, keep going! Don’t just improve your content, improve your brand. Be sure that your logo is as flexible as your marketing strategy.
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