Originally published on Aug. 30, 2016. Updated on Dec. 2, 2021.
When it comes to content marketing, it’s your ability to engage your audience and drive it to action that matters most. After all, what’s the point of creating content if no one is then compelled to further interact with your brand, convert on your landing pages, or eventually hop on the phone with your sales team?
Getting your audience to engage with your brand starts with great content. And while a solid story and fun examples certainly make for a great article, publishing a piece that’s full of errors and grammatical mistakes will weaken it — and turn off your readers.
The truth is that no one is perfect, and sometimes writing mistakes can slip through the cracks. Unless you plan to hire a team of content marketers to help edit your work, your best defense against these spelling and grammar errors is to use the right proofreading tools.
These five editing tools make it easier than ever to engage your audience with clean content writing:
Editing your own work is hard, and if you consider yourself more of a content creator than editor, it can be difficult to know where to begin. That’s where Hemingway Editor comes in. This content editing tool can help you polish up your text — and your skills. Paste your content into the app, and Hemingway Editor’s color-coded highlighting shows you where you can improve. Highlighting problems from hard-to-read sentences and weak words to basic grammar and spelling mistakes, this tool gives you a great place to start your editing.
Proofread Bot offers both free and premium editing tools, covering your editorial team no matter what level of support it needs. Its free proofreader turns up simple style and grammar errors, while its advanced check dives deeper and scans the copy for plagiarism. This content editing tool is great if you want a second look on a piece. Just paste in your copy, and Proofread Bot underlines your errors and offers suggestions for correcting it. You can also download the tool into programs such as Microsoft Office or Google Drive for faster turnaround times.
Grammarly not only helps correct contextual grammar and spelling mistakes, but it also goes deep into the readability of your text to enhance your vocabulary usage. That’s important because if your readers can hardly follow what you’re saying (even if you’ve spelled it all correctly), they’re not likely to come back for more. This tool comes with a built-in plugin that allows you to get suggestions while you write in different apps and websites. And because it goes beyond just grammar and spelling, it’s a useful tool for long-term use and learning.
This tool is a sentence search engine that comes with a handful of unique, valuable features for polishing content. Its advanced platform allows you to paraphrase sentences, find missing words, compare the frequency of two expressions, and more. Ludwig also comes with a downloadable app that allows you to utilize the tool anywhere you write.
Whether you’re writing a blog post, crafting an email newsletter, or preparing a pitch to an editor, having a click-worthy headline that grabs your reader’s attention amid all of the content noise is crucial. These content editing tools are incredibly useful for testing and figuring out which titles are more likely to keep your audience engaged. They offer ways to optimize your character count, sentiment, clarity, and other key components of headlines and subject lines.
If your goal is to engage your audience members and nurture them to take action with your brand, you must ensure the content you use is clean and high-quality. These five content editing tools will give you a solid foundation to improve your skills and create better, more polished content experiences for your readers.
Ensuring your content is edited to perfection is only one piece of the puzzle for exceptional content marketing. Follow this step-by-step guide to learn the rest!
