As many as 86% of businesses report that content marketing creates brand awareness, while 79% say it helps them educate their audiences and 75% use it to build credibility and trust. More than half say content marketing plays a major role in generating sales and revenue. These findings, from a 2020 report by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, underscore the sheer potential of top-notch content marketing.

However, to reap these benefits and maximize your outcomes, the quality of your marketing team’s writing must also be optimized. Improving your marketing team’s writing skills on an individual basis would take time, patience, and resources that you, as a leader, likely do not have much of to spare.

Implementing the right content writing tools will quickly improve your team’s content marketing writing skills—on both an individual and team level—by providing instant feedback, revision suggestions, and more. The ideal tools will also streamline the overall workflow and optimize the creation process, giving your team more time and resources to get creative and really push the limits of their potential.

Here are 25 of the best content creation tools on the market today, with each speaking to a specific pain point related to the writing process.

25 recommended content writing tools for marketing teams

The full list of recommended content writing tools has been organized into four basic categories—planning, drafting, editing, and productivity. Below is a list of all the tools Grammarly Business recommends:

Planning	Drafting	Editing	Productivity
1. Answer the Public	10. Google Docs	11. Grammarly	20. StayFocused
2. Google Trends	11. Ilys	17. Thesaurus.com	21. A Soft Murmur
3. Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator	12. Coschedule Headline Analyzer	18. StackEdit	22. OneTab
4. Portent’s Content Idea Generator	13. TitleCase	19. Yoast	23. TomatoTimer
5. Ideaflip	14. Canva		24. RescueTime
6. Evernote	15. Biteable Infografic Video Maker		24. Todoist
7. Feedly
8. Semrush
9. Trello

Now, let’s take a closer look at each of these tools and what they bring to the content creation table.

Planning tools for content marketing writers

Planning tools promote thoughtful research practices and good organization. This streamlines workflows and improves the flow of your marketing team’s writing.

1. Answer the Public

Use data from Google’s autocomplete search suggestions to generate thorough lists of potentially valuable keywords related to a single topic at a time. Your marketing team can search up to three times per day for free. Paid plans allow for unlimited searches and offer extra features such as downloadable reports, data over time comparisons, and more.

2. Google Trends

This is another (free) Google tool for content creation. Gauge interest in a topic over time and by location, or peruse insights into related topics and questions people are searching via Google. It also provides information on past and currently trending topics.

3. HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

Does your marketing team struggle to turn keywords into interesting, engaging topics? This free topic generation tool allows them to input up to five nouns and returns five title ideas right off the bat—or 250 titles if they input some basic business contact information.

4. Portent’s Content Idea Generator

With this tool, your marketing team can enter a keyword and cycle through as many title suggestions as they’d like until they find the perfect one. They can also save the titles they like for easy future reference or tweet out a title to gauge interest.

5. Ideaflip

Tools like Ideaflip are perfect for remote brainstorming sessions. This subscription-based tool combines virtual sticky notes with a simple, user-friendly dashboard to help your team members work together in real-time to create, develop, vote on, and export content ideas and strategies with ease.

6. Evernote

Note-taking tools like Evernote provide an invaluable means of keeping research materials organized and easily accessible. This tool also syncs across multiple devices so your teams can access their notes whenever they need them.

7. Feedly

Feedly lets your marketing teams subscribe to a news feed of their own design to stay up-to-date on blogs, websites, and YouTube channels of their choosing. They can set keyword alerts around core topics of interest, or set up alerts around your company name and branded hashtags to quickly gauge public interest in your brand on a recurring basis.

8. Semrush

This keyword tool makes it easy to discover new keywords and question suggestions. You can even filter options by location, search volume, and competition level. While it’s not free, there are free trials for individual accounts and several pricing plans to choose from.

9. Trello

Trello is a collaborative organization tool that allows teams to manage multiple projects and organize tasks using lists and cards on shared boards. They can also switch to a calendar view to manage schedules, quickly review deadlines, and more.

Drafting tools for content marketing writers

These tools make it easy to keep the words flowing during the drafting phase of content creation, allowing team members to write more efficiently and effectively.

10. Google Docs

Of all the online writing platforms, this free tool is one of the most user-friendly and most versatile. Numerous templates and a straightforward interface make it easy to compose a wide variety of content and share documents with multiple users for collaborative efforts. 

11. Ilys

This subscription-based writing tool is specifically designed for content marketing writers who struggle with perfectionism. With ilys, your writer enters a word count goal, begins writing, and can only go back to review and revise what they have written once they hit the target word count. This encourages faster drafting and a more streamlined individual and team workflow.

12. Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer

This free headline analyzing tool provides instant feedback on how to optimize titles based on factors such as clarity and conciseness, giving writers a score for each iteration so that they can easily choose the best of the batch.

13. TitleCase

This free tool helps content teams properly write titles by instantly converting headline case to a variety of styles, including AP style, sentence case, all uppercase or lowercase, and more.

14. Canva

With both the free and paid versions of Canva, users can quickly create and share simple yet effective images, charts, and animated graphics to accompany written content—no design degree required. Visual content is key to improving readability and engagement.

15. Biteable Infographic Video Maker

Create static or animated infographics quickly and easily from templates or from scratch for free. Or, upgrade to one of the paid plans for additional features like custom watermarks and higher-resolution images.

Editing tools for content marketing writers

These content writing tools facilitate quick and thorough editing processes. This will help ensure that no mistake is left unrevised and drafts are polished to their fullest potential.

16. Grammarly

This AI-based digital writing assistant provides an array of expert-level editing features all in one simple, user-friendly product. In addition to automated grammar, spelling, and punctuation checks, team members receive suggestions to improve conciseness and word choice, remove passive voice, avoid inconsistencies, and assess overall tone. 

17. Thesaurus.com

Thesaurus.com is easy to navigate, and provides a quick and simple solution for finding the perfect word to express an idea as precisely as possible—and because it’s free and online, it’s more readily accessible than a physical thesaurus.

18. StackEdit

This in-browser markdown editor makes it easy to copy text to and from WordPress, Microsoft Word, or Google Docs without losing the original formatting. Teams can also use it to convert plain text documents into .html format.

19. Yoast

Yoast is a WordPress plugin that reviews a draft’s SEO-friendliness and calculates the Flesch Reading Ease score directly in WordPress drafts. This makes revisions a cinch—free from copying text back and forth between programs—and you can see at a glance where there’s room for improvement. 

Productivity tools for content marketing writers

These tools make it easier for your content marketing team to focus on their writing, promoting better time management and more streamlined workflows.

20. StayFocusd

For content marketing writers who have difficulty focusing their attention during the writing process, this free browser app allows them to limit the time they’re able to spend on potentially distracting websites, including social media platforms.

21. A Soft Murmur

Soft ambient and instrumental music help many writers focus better, reducing drafting and revising time and, for some, improving writing quality. Free web-based tools like A Soft Murmur allow teams to create custom tracks that will help them get into the flow of writing more easily.

22. OneTab

Too many tabs are the bane of a writer’s productivity. Teams can use a tool like OneTab to compile all of their open tabs into a list they can easily click through and even share with others. For laptop users, this tool can greatly reduce drain on their PC’s memory usage as well.

23. TomatoTimer

Writing timers like TomatoTimer allow teams to break writing time down into twenty-five minutes of active writing interspersed with five to ten-minute breaks. Taking regular breaks can help prevent a wide array of health issues, such as burnout and carpal tunnel syndrome, and promotes a healthier, more productive work ethic.

24. RescueTime

This time management tool helps optimize productivity by assessing how users spend their time online and providing insights for more effective scheduling and organization.

25. Todoist

A task-tracking tool like Todoist takes to-do lists to the next level, allowing for quick and easy organization of numerous tasks at once. This makes it easy for writers to stay on top of deadlines and even track progress on various tasks.

Optimizing content marketing creation with multifunctional tools

Each of the aforementioned tools can provide a powerful solution for a specific pain point, whether your team is struggling to identify inspired topics to write on or needs a little extra support with proofreading. However, while all of these tools are recommended, it’s not recommended that your teams use all of them simultaneously. Striking a balance between implementing tools that speak to your content team’s greatest needs without overwhelming them with too many tools is critical.

The best solution is to focus on finding a single comprehensive tool—like Grammarly Business—that combines many features into one product. This is more cost-effective and efficient, and far less confusing than incorporating many different tools all at once. You can then add on a few specialized tools as needed, depending on your content marketing team’s specific areas for improvement and what functions your main tool encompasses.

Comprehensive content writing tools like Grammarly Business can help your marketing team improve their content quickly and easily—and it only takes a few moments to get set up. Contact us to get Grammarly Business today.