When thinking through your marketing strategy, it’s easy to overlook the value of effective communication. Not just the outreach plan or the message you want to promote, but the actual words being used.
Every copywriter understands the value of a well-placed word. It can turn an ordinary landing page into a tool for conversion. Or a low engagement blog into a viral sensation. While the world around us has changed, copy remains at the center of effective communication.
The way copywriters work however has changed. For many, there are no longer in-person brainstorming sessions and peer to peer editing opportunities. Instead, technology is now driving conversations forward.
Luckily, there are more tools available at our fingertips than ever before. If copywriters can continue improving their craft while leveraging technology, then they can unlock the highest potential for their brand’s content.
Here are four free tools and platforms our agency recommends to improve your brands’ copy:
Grammarly
Recommended by Alex Blair
“Our writing assistant scales to work seamlessly across multiple platforms and devices, and we offer a variety of plans to serve everyone’s needs. With a free account, you can improve and strengthen everyday writing.”
Grammarly is essentially a digital writing assistant that uses machine learning to check spelling and grammar while offering suggestions to improve clarity, readability, delivery style, and tone. It offers an intuitive, real-time interface that’s available in different forms to integrate with the platform or application you are using.
Grammarly achieves two things: simplicity and conciseness. It will call out when you don’t need words like “really” and “actually” while offering suggestions to improve your flow. It’s a great tool when writing emails, press releases, marketing campaigns, or when working on blogs.
Grammarly’s features include:
The Grammarly editor
The intuitive text editor is your central place on the web to write and to customize the types of writing suggestions you see.
Browser extensions
Grammarly’s browser extensions offer suggestions on a vast array of websites, including Google Docs, Medium, and Twitter.
Grammarly for Microsoft Office
Grammarly for Microsoft Office® brings Grammarly’s writing suggestions to you as you write in Word or Outlook.
Grammarly for your desktop
Grammarly’s desktop app replicates the experience of the Grammarly editor for users who prefer not to access Grammarly through a browser.
The Grammarly keyboard
For polished writing on the go, the Grammarly keyboard offers suggestions directly through your mobile device.
Evernote
Recommended by Jenna Lally
“Evernote is the home for everything you need to remember, and everything you want to achieve.”
Evernote is a powerful organizational platform that helps you take notes, capture images, and copy pages from the internet. Evernote’s browser extension also lets you annotate and share text from web pages. Having an app that syncs across multiple devices alongside a browser version is a crucial feature for writers looking to keep track of their work more effectively.
Depending on your needs, Evernote has incredible capabilities that make storing whiteboard notes or handwritten notes easy. Uploading images like these not only keep them organized into a highly-sophisticated app. (Did we mention you can even search for words in images!?)
App integration and device synchronization, while they are two of Evernote’s biggest draws, perhaps the biggest draw to Evernote is its searchability. Once you draft a note, it’s automatically searchable in the Evernote app. Didn’t make a title for the note? Didn’t organize the note in a notebook? No problem. With Evernote, you can still find everything you virtually ever wrote.
The other benefit? No need to press to ‘save’ – like most platforms today, Evernote updates and saves all notes automatically. Gone are the days of writing to-do lists on sticky notes.
F.lux
Recommended by Jonah Malin
“f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you’re in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again.”
For the early mornings and late evenings, f.lux makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day. You can go in and “control your light” to better adapt to your working habits.
Copywriters are staring at a screen for hours on end, and this technology can positively impact energy and eye strain throughout the day. If you are skeptical about the positive benefits of f.lux, you can read some of the research on their website which discusses the relationship between light and sleep.
Google Docs
Recommended by Mark DeVito
“Google Docs brings your documents to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs. Choose from hundreds of fonts, add links, images, and drawings.”
Organizing your writing makes it more effective. With Google Docs, you can create and access your documents from any device — even if you don’t have a connection. For writers specifically, the autosave feature is a game-changer. There’s nothing worse than losing an 800+ word document because of a computer crash. You can also use revision history to see old versions of the same document, sorted by date with identification of who made changes.
Google Docs eliminates a lot of the pain points that come with Microsoft Word while offering a more complete platform to collaborate and share pages.
It’s Time to Upgrade Your Toolkit
Obviously, there are some premium add-ons that a lot of these services offer, but at the end of the day, you can easily improve as a writer without breaking the bank. Hopefully, you enjoy some of these tools as we have to improve clarity, creativity, comfort, and organization. And don’t forget about the best part — these recommendations are free!
