Surely, content marketing has immense benefits – both tangible and intangible. As with other performance metrics, measuring the tangible benefits is easier. However, ask any SEO company and not one will said that this cannot be said for intangible benefits no matter how apparent these intangible benefits are.

Here are some of these intangible benefits and why or how they should be measured.

 

1) Customer service

Brands are using digital contents in connecting with and helping the customers help themselves. Such a practice is not only valuable to the customers, but also cost-effective for the brands. Did you know that a brand spends about $8 to $10 in solving issues of a customer through a call center assistance?

Imagine how much your brand can save if you are going to publish a how-to guide in using the product properly. For instance, if an online manual was viewed 31,000 times, you can save from $248,000 up to $310,000 (31,000 x $8/10). That’s the potential value of the how-to content!

2) Workflow efficiency

While there are brands that understand the value of its contents, there are instance that they remain struggling when it comes to streamlining processes. Not just only when it comes to creating and publishing contents, but there are digital contents that help in organizing internal procedures for the employees and other stakeholders.

Published press releases, for instance, may form part of the internal marketing wherein there is no need to send a memo to each department. This could mean huge savings particularly for multi-department firms. If you are spending $1 for each memo to be delivered to 2,000 employees, you can save $2,000 (2,000 x $1).

3) Engagement

Engagement, in terms of marketing in general, is a vague word and not always easy to quantify. Nonetheless, it remains to be an important key performance indicator (KPI) of the success of content marketing.

Take a viral Facebook post as an example. There can be millions of interactions from likes to comments to shares that can be equated into an interaction. What if about 2% of all the interactions are converted into paying customers? Not to mention, Facebook is not even a paid media (well, it can be a paid media for sponsored posts).

 

Further, there are more potential content marketing KPIs such as:

• Brand sentiment
• Purchase intent
• Customer retention
• Brand loyalty
• Feedback
• Consumer insights
• Product innovations
• Product knowledge
• Brand advocacy

This means that the failure to publish high-quality contents on a regular basis has its serious consequences. Remember that there is an opportunity cost, which is not always in figure, involved in content marketing. For instance, if you are regularly publishing contents that your audience expects and failed to do so at a particular day, then you are running the risk of your audience looking for other related contents. What’s worse they may find delight reading contents of your rival.

The message is clear: publish contents on a regular basis not just to meet the expectations of your target audience, but to reap the tangible and intangible benefits of content marketing.

 

If you are going to discuss return on investment (ROI), make sure that you take into accounts the intangible benefits listed above. True enough, metrics are foundational aspects of ROI ad getting the most of the analytics is a must if a content marketer wants to gauge the efficiency of the strategy more accurately.

Quantifying the measurable indicators may not necessarily provide the insights that content marketers should be looking at instead. The insights will only be shortsighted and will not offer a holistic view on the success of the strategy. This is how important the intangible benefits are.

 

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