How confident are you about your content marketing spend? If you’ve ever asked “What’s our return on content marketing spend?” or “Is this worth it?” – You’re not alone. Many executives are blind to what their customer acquisition cost from content marketing is, which makes it difficult to celebrate the incoming traffic and high email open rates.
The most valuable resources any business founder has at their disposal are cash and employee time to help the company grow. So is it worth it to spend those resources on content? Enter customer acquisition cost.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) allows you to track your marketing spend closely. Simply put, the metric is used to determine the average total cost you spend to acquire a new customer. Without CAC, it’s impossible to know the cost of content marketing truly.
Calculating Your Content Marketing CAC
At its core, Cost of Acquisition is a simple calculation where you add up costs and divide by the number of customers you get from spending that money:
Get the Spreadsheet: We’ve built a spreadsheet model to help you calculate your CAC from content marketing.
Your content marketing costs should split into three buckets: Per Article, Salary, and Technology.
- Per article costs – Covers everything from content writer costs to images per article.
- Salary costs – Full-time employees, developers, and any partial or outside agency costs.
- Technology costs – Any software used for content marketing. Partial costs can be attributed here also.
To show content contributes to your conversions, you need to be able to not only determine each of these content marketing costs but also to prove the value. Keep in mind that your content marketing efforts should:
- Increase lead quality and quantity
- Improve customer retention rates
- Provide shorter sales cycles
- Build a strong online presence
If you aren’t positive about your content marketing ROI, start looking at the numbers. Calculating your content CAC will help you connect the dots between your marketing efforts and the bottom line. As a bonus, when you know your total CAC, you can begin to craft highly targeted campaigns that grow your online presence.