I’ve had the pleasure of working in paid, unpaid, and earned media—mostly within the context of marketing or external communications—so I have a wide range of opinions on what it really costs to bring content-based strategies to market. Invariably, I’ve found that most people focus a little too much on what numbers are available; it’s not wrong, it’s just myopic. There are other, potentially greater, costs.

That’s certainly the case in engagement marketing, that flavor-of-the-month label that’s tossed around to make digital marketers and guys with soul patches feel more professional about what they do. I work in this field, so yes, I’m joking. But not about the soul patches.

A big hippo the industry has wrestled with is how to assign numbers to engagement marketing activities, and while that’s an important endeavor, I’m not here to argue one or another approach or debate the relative ROI of a given tactic. I’m not a CMO (I’ll edit this once it happens, rest assured), and I have an eight-month-old who takes most of my free time. Besides, everything I need to know about the real cost of engagement marketing I learned while running a coffeehouse.

That’s not a joke; I really did run a little coffeehouse/cafe for a while. It was a radical departure from my education and experience—not to mention my time, money, patience, and sanity—but I did it. It’s on my resume. I learned quite a few things through that experience, not the least of which being that independent coffeehouses are modern repositories of gossip, debate, exposition, and good, old-fashioned gabbing. They’re about engagement. And engagement is the best marketing the independent shopkeep has.

I encouraged it at my joint, for myself, my employees, and my customers, and in the course of business, I definitely felt its cost. Bear in mind, I have no documentation or empirical evidence to offer; what I have is a set of impressions that came from wearing an apron, working 14-hour days, making food and drinks, mopping floors, and more. And this is the real cost of engagement marketing:

Human cost

I’m not just talking about the time spent engaging with your markets, though it’s a factor; I’ll leave it to every other social media expert to discuss the wisdom of assigning your summer intern to curate your Facebook page. What I’m really getting at here is the basic concept of opportunity cost, or what you must give up in order to engage. Truth is, many businesses just don’t have the cash to hire someone specifically to man a Twitter account or run interference when someone trashes the brand online, so that means an existing employee must be taken away from another duty.

One of my favorite activities during my coffee days was leaning over the counter and talking with my customers, but I always knew there were dozens of tasks piling up behind me; the same was true for my employees. All the while, I couldn’t help but think about all the wonderful things that could be done while those conversations continued. Instead of focusing on how late I’d have to stay in order to do everything, I should have reminded myself that the 5-10 minutes I talked with one person may have resulted in a satisfied customer—and, perhaps, several referrals.

Loss of control

During the entire run, I was dedicated to coffee. In my mind, this was a coffeehouse, despite the fact that I sold hand-dipped chocolates, baked goods, and a full menu of lunch items. I wanted the shop to be known as the premier DFW location for coffee and espresso. Interestingly, my customers didn’t really see things that way, and I was forced to concede that it was sandwiches, not Sumatra Mandheling, that had them talking up my place.

In academic terms, that’s a loss of brand control. For the most part, I sneer at marketers who talk in absolutes about how “You don’t own your brand, the customers do,” but most businesses do need to understand they can’t control all market perceptions. It would have been easier for me had I embraced what brought people to my door and used it as a means to getting them equally excited about coffee.

Limited patience

Imagine, if you can, spending a lot of time chatting up a new customer and educating them about your product, finally selling them something, then realizing you just took 15 minutes to make 30 cents on a 15% margin. That hurts. The possibility—even the likelihood—that this customer will return, buy more product, and urge their friends and family to buy from you is far from your mind when you’re ringing up that sale. Patience is hard to come by in that scenario.

It’s often the same in engagement marketing; you put in quite a bit to get out what seems to be (initially, at least) very little. It’s difficult to imagine the long-term sales possibilities when you’ve got bills due that month, so the effort seems wasted. In many cases, it’s not (though you should be testing it), but it’s still hard to stomach.

That’s the real cost of engagement marketing, and since those factors elude convenient methods of measurement, it’s up to experience and individual judgment to decide if there’s value in the activity. One parting note: while I haven’t covered them here, there are several benefits to engagement marketing that don’t have numbers attached, and you should consider those before jumping in or jumping out.