As the world recovers and enters into a post-pandemic state, there’s no denying that everything has shifted to the digital realm. When it comes to digital marketing, content writing has become essential for many businesses looking to scale up. We're seeing a surge in requests to help brands bring their content up to date and have them catch up to the rest of the industry.

The pandemic forced businesses to shift online, and they had to utilize online platforms to reach and engage new audiences. In order to establish their presence, they had to showcase meaningful content. Most businesses resorted to hiring content marketing agencies (like us) to save them the hassle and guarantee the quality, but that's not always possible for everyone.

Now, content has become a valuable asset for businesses. Aside from reaching new customers, content has the power to improve customer retention. Useful information ensures that people will patronize services.

The power of content writing

We focus on Southeast Asia, which is where we're seeing a lot of demand. Partly because it is happening all over the world, but also because the region was far behind the rest of the developed world when it came to digitalisation. According to a 2020 report from Google, Temasek Holdings, and Bain & Company, there were 40 million people in six countries across Southeast Asia—Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand—who went online for the first time in 2020. That brought the total number of internet users in Southeast Asia to 400 million people.

Numerous research findings and surveys have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the shift to online is going to be permanent and even more competitive.

However, the issue is that producing good content that people want to read is not easy. If you do not have the budget to hire experts or internal teams, then you're already on the backfoot. Well, luckily for you, the internet provides an arsenal of writing tools that businesses can leverage in order to help them with their content needs.

From checking the grammar to generating key ideas for content marketing strategies, here are 5 tools that we believe businesses should be using:

1. Copyscape

Plagiarism is a problem that plagues the content industry and even accidental plagiarism can have negative effects. Your credibility is in question, and people may question whether your business is legitimate or not.

We suggest using Copyscape to detect plagiarism and it is pretty easy to use. The digital tool allows you to upload or paste your copy for free, to analyze if it is unique enough to stand out. This is extremely useful if you're using freelance writers to save some time - it takes a few minutes and guarantees they are not just copying content from elsewhere and passing it off as their own.

2. Grammarly

At first glance, grammatical mistakes and spelling errors look harmless on the website’s copy. However, research suggests mistakes can affect the credibility of a business. There are trust and quality concerns should your content be riddled with mistakes. I have to admit that we're massive fans of Grammarly and have written about this tech tool numerous times.

Using Grammarly to detect grammar errors and conduct spell checks is an easy, free (or affordable depending on what you need) and quick way to drastically reduce the number of errors that you make. The free version checks plagiarism, suggests writing styles and scans readability. Grammarly does offer premium (for individuals) and business (for teams) plans. Both are upgrades and can improve the clarity, engagement, and delivery of the content.

3. UberSuggest

Keyword research is often overlooked in content marketing because most people don't know what it is. If we were to summarize it, it is the process of researching popular terms that people type in search engines like Google. You need to know this because, by understanding what people are searching for, you can actually create content that is relevant to them and makes them want to visit your website.

A great example of how we used this recently, was focusing our efforts on reaching out to Southeast Asian audiences who love fashion. Through basic keyword research, we identified what our specific target audience was searching for and developed relevant content around Southeast Asian fashion that was helpful to readers, as well as relevant to our customer.

UberSuggest has a free version. It also offers three premium plans for deeper analysis. If this isn't to your fancy, we also suggest using an alternative to UberSuggest, which is Google Keyword Planner.

4. Hemingway Editor

Following up on using keywords, we should make it very clear that you shouldn't be stuck on trying to create content just to stuff keywords in it. A big part of ranking high in search engine listings is based on the readability or quality of your content. So, what we've seen is that good content that is deemed to be helpful and useful to readers is rewarded by search engines. This is where tools like Hemingway Editor can help you by improving your writing.

It works by analyzing your content and checking for issues that include passive voice, weak words, and long sentences. It is an easy way to make sure your writing is clear and concise, which really does have an impact on your ranking. It is free to use and we find it extremely valuable in our work.

5. Readable

So did you know that the average reader’s attention span is 7 seconds. So that's why we use Readable to analyze the readability of your content. It gives you a score based on if you've grabbed the readers' attention. This helps you to make sure your writing is appropriate and engaging to your audience.

We find it helps us reduce the use of avoidable jargon, while we can also benefit from its keyword tracking feature. Just so you know, Readable gave this section a solid B, which means there needs to be some improvement, but it is easy to understand. This is a paid tool that we use, but we think it is worth the investment.

There, we hope you enjoyed our list of 5 content writing tools that you should know. If we missed anything out or you feel like you just want to say hi, drop us a message in the comments.