Evaluating ROI When Responding to Inbound Inquiries

Kylie Kinnaman, Engagement Strategist,  TVP CommunicationsWhen so much of our time as media relations professionals is spent proactively pitching our clients’ expertise, inbound queries can feel like a gift. Much of the work is done, right? Not exactly. While some opportunities seem off-the-bat perfect—high-profile outlet, on a topic that precisely matches the client’s expertise—much more often come the requests that give us pause. There are a few lenses we can examine a request through to evaluate whether a query is worth our client’s time. Thinking of visibility and impact, it’s important to consider the number of unique monthly visitors online outlets receive. Sometimes an unfamiliar website may have surprisingly large traffic, so run all names through a tool such as Muck Rack to get a feel for how many eyes could see an expert citation. One hundred thousand is typically a good benchmark. However, like much of what we do as communicators, this isn’t a hard and fast rule.  A site with slightly lower traffic could still be worth one’s time; the tradeoff can be the audience makeup of a website. For the colleges and universities that make up TVP Communications’ client base, an up-and-coming parenting blog might be worth engaging in if readership is clearly composed of parents of teenagers who plan to pursue higher education. Evaluating the publication is a necessary step. By clicking on a few different articles in various sections of the website, it should be pretty clear if the writing is high or poor quality, if they produce a wealth of original content versus repurposing stories from other websites and if any political leanings are in complement or antithetical to the client’s mission. And after getting a general feel for the publication itself, scan through some articles authored by the reporter who reached out. Do they cover your client’s area of expertise frequently? Is this seemingly a one-off opportunity or is there potential for a relationship to be built, with more clips in the future very possible?  Assessing visibility and impact of an outlet and potential audience can help guide a communicator in pursuing an opportunity for an unknown site, but even an inbound request from The New York Times needs to be carefully considered. High-profile clips are extremely valuable—when they are positive. For any inbound request, communicators need to understand what the reporter is asking about, and often read between the lines to see if there is potential for an article to use their expert’s commentary in a way that backs up a reputationally harmful notion. This is a critical part of how media relations professionals serve their clients to minimize the chance interviews are, at best, a waste of time, and at worst, damaging.  These tips can also be engaged when evaluating the queries that come through source request resources such as HARO and ProfNet. They’re not quite the same as a more personal inbound query, but there are impactful chances for commentary that can be mined from these sources if you're being mindful of outlet, audience, and fit. Instead of chasing links and risking burnout with our clients, carefully considering the oftentimes incalculable value of an opportunity before saying yes will net a higher return on investment.  

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