“Words can inspire. And words can destroy. Choose yours well” — Robin Sharma.

Words are what content marketing is all about. Using them to raise awareness of your business, offer value and build trust with potential leads.

The most popular content marketing model is to give value and generate brand awareness through blog posts, and then capture lead information (mainly email addresses) in exchange for a lead magnet.

Content marketing works well in combination with live customer support for many reasons. But at its core it’s because it isn’t a hard sell. Building relationships first and growing trust is much easier to achieve when you can talk directly to customers in real-time.

Let’s look at the benefits of this relationship in more depth:

Interactive Education

Turning visitors into leads can be hard today. 61% of B2B marketers see getting high quality leads as their biggest challenge. Visitors to your site are more reluctant to give out contact details because literally everyone is asking for them. Live support can help to give you the edge. Potential leads may have started reading your blog post because they are interested in what your company offers. They may want to know more and have specific questions that are not answered in the post. Live customer support allows them to ask these questions instantly. Your reps can educate them and build trust in your business in the process, making them much more likely to part with precious contact info.

Capture with Kindness

Getting lead information through a form can be an effective way of generating leads. But there are lots of things you can get wrong and automation lacks the human touch. A live support rep can proactively pop up after a set time period to ask if the reader would like to sign up to your mailing list or offer them a lead magnet and take the details. Leads may be much more responsive to a nice human being asking them for details rather than a pop-up obstructing their view. And if the lead isn’t receptive, trained reps might be able to talk them round or at least build a greater understanding of what your company does.

Avoiding the Hard Sell

Content marketing is not about selling your product no matter what, convincing people that may not even need it, just to make a sale. It is a more, slowly but surely approach, giving value to potential leads before you ask for anything. Using live support software in combination with a blog is a great way to add value in a tailored, personal way. A blog offers some value and gets people to your site and then a representative can find out exactly what the visitor needs and give it to them, whether this is in the form of more information or a specific lead magnet.

Softly, Softly, Catchy Leads

With the world and his wife trying to get lead contact info, combining live customer support with your content marketing strategy will keep you a step ahead of the competition when it comes to turning visitors into leads. With a quality live support software such as Xeno, you can engage website visitors after a set amount of time and collect customer contact information with ease. The great thing about Xeno in particular is that you can do all of this free!