Useful Writing Tools for Small Businesses

Effective communication can also help small businesses build relationships with customers as well as clients and potential partners. Writing is one of the most common and effective means of communication employed by businesses. Writing skills are paramount for anyone with a small business with goals of growing the business and building relationships. Estimates put 30% of business work being accomplished through the use of writing communications. This makes the need for tactful business writing very essential in the business world, and for achieving the goals set by the business. Be it report writing, proverbs and quotes writing, appointment confirmation emails, website publications, compare and contrast essays, SEO article writing or copywriting, business writing skills should be honed by the continued practice of writing skills. Small businesses can also outsource their writing needs, to professionals to write business communications for small businesses. Should the small business desire to keep all business writing in-house, there are writing tools that can be used to help tailor business writing to the desired language, the proper writing formats and make edits that will polish grammar and sentence structure to give the piece of writing a professional look and feel.

Grammarly

Grammarly is one of the most popular writing tools that exist and it’s a multipurpose tool meaning it offers you more than one solution for your writing needs. There are essentially two versions of Grammarly available for businesses; the free version which offers very basic writing solutions, and the premium version which has a variety of writing solutions that comes at a fee of about $140 per year. Grammarly is effective in assessing grammar and punctuation errors like comma splices, fragments, run-on sentences among others. It is also useful for checking every word in a piece of writing for spelling errors and offers what is considered “near-human” suggestions and tips on the writing style and sentence structure. It can also be used to scan a document and identify cases of plagiarism and similarities with other published works. Grammarly offers not more than just grammar and spelling mistake corrections, but also offers detailed writing enhancements that focus on the clarity, conciseness and the tone of the document and can be installed as an extension of web browsers and other writing tools like Microsoft Word free of charge. It is very useful tool for small businesses that run a blog, for the business involved in content marketing and copywriting and for business tasks like drafting reports, narrative essays, presentations and business emails.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is essentially the most used office software that offers a variety of writing tools for all purposes of writing needs. It is a sophisticated word processing program that allows people to create documents with a variety of fonts and offers a lot of formatting options. Microsoft Word is very useful when one needs to write a long document with many sections. MS Word is part of suite software and tools that are used by businesses like PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets, with the full collection of the Microsoft software being inclusive of a lot of writing and editing tools. Modern MS Word is integrated with online features, which can allow for online storage of documents and increased versatility with other related programs. MS Word provides formatting options like APA outlines for creating automatically formatted documents. Other formatting options provided by MS Word include MLA and Chicago format outlines.  

Canva

Canva is useful tool for illustrating content pints, breaking up text walls and working as an image creation tool. Creating and placing images is important to business writing, especially for business blogs, copywriting and business presentations. Images help make business content attractive, and when someone looks at the content on a website, a wall of words without appealing images can be intimidating to readers. Canva allows you to select an image from a variety of options, and with hundreds of templates, presentation backgrounds, and icons, customize the image and the content to your liking.

Keyword Planner

The keyword planner allows you to choose and insert the most applicable keywords in a document. Keywords are important to content writing, especially for SEO writing, as without them search engines will not know how to categorize a website for SEO. If the business website or copywriting content is not indexed well by search engines, then finding it will be difficult among all the content that is available on the internet. Keyword Planner is a Google keyword research tool that is applicable for website content or content for social media campaigns. The tool allows you, as a business contracted to do social media campaigns, to enter a topic, industry or website which will give you a selection of keywords that are organized by subject, popularity, and level of competition, and the most appropriate keyword for the particular business writing needs to be chosen from the available selection.

Google Docs

Google Docs is an online document processor that works well as a writing tool for businesses. The tool has collaboration and organizational features that help you as a small business owner or copywriter to draft a copy of your intended content and share it with editors and friends for comments. The tool allows you to store the documents on Google Drive, which allows you to access the content anywhere for review and editing purposes. As a copywriter and small business owner who has to stay on top of business projects, Google Docs can help in this regard.