In this edition of Cited Sidebars, Stacker CEO Noah Greenberg sat down with Tracy Middleton, Senior Editorial Director at Hone Health.
Tracy joined Hone Health in 2022 after years in the magazine world. She previously held senior editorial roles at titles including Yoga Journal and Women's Health. At Hone Health, she owns narrative strategy and content operations, including brand storytelling, editorial content, and thought leadership. She also built and scaled The Edge, Hone's health- and longevity-focused publication.
Tracy shared her thoughts on building a brand publication from the ground up — and how to know when it's working.
See the biggest takeaways from the conversation here.
1. Understand the business case for your content
Tracy said the most exciting part about joining Hone was the opportunity to create something from scratch while still using all of the storytelling skills she had built over the years.
However, making the transition from traditional journalism to brand journalism requires a shift in mindset. To thrive in this world, you need a good understanding of where a piece of content fits in a user journey and the ability to think strategically about how a journalistic story helps the business overall.
"At the end of the day we are all, in brand journalism, wanting to attract people to the brand and get them to become customers in whatever way that looks like for your brand," Tracy said.
She said they started the brand content program with a "we will build it and they will come" approach. The idea was that, if they created high-quality editorial content, the right demographic would see it and think of Hone when they needed the relevant care.
"We did a year of that, and then we reset a little and said, 'OK, this isn't driving the acquisitions we hoped it might over time,'" Tracy said. It was time to narrow their focus.
While many companies want to create brand journalism that converts, it's not necessarily reasonable to expect your content to achieve all your goals at once, she said.
From there, the conversation became: "We want to do some of each. We care about driving acquisitions, but we also care about building the brand," Tracy said.
She started thinking about their content in two buckets: mid- or bottom-of-funnel content that's designed to bring someone closer to making a purchase, and top-of-funnel content designed purely for brand-building.
2. Measure brand and acquisition content differently
Grouping content into two buckets meant those buckets would also have different measures of success.
For acquisition-oriented content, the team looks at conversions and click-through rates. For top-of-funnel content, they look at things like engagement time, return rates, and whether it's creating earned media opportunities through PR or distribution via the Stacker network.
Hone reached more than a million people in its first year running The Edge, but Tracy said that she now considers traffic a "vanity metric."
"We brought in this really big audience, but they weren't sticky," she said. "The company was so young when we started this that we hadn't really established a big brand identity, and our advertising budgets weren't what they are now. So they might find us through organic search, read an article, think, 'Oh, that's good.' It wasn't necessarily enough to bring them back."
She continued: "By narrowing the lens of what we focus on, now we've built that reputation more of being the source to go to for proactive longevity care or for hormone information, things like that. And I think that really has helped us."
3. Treat GEO as an experiment
Tracy said the team is also looking at AI citations as a measurement for both types of content.
For acquisition-focused content, they'll sometimes make updates to a piece’s structure to strengthen it for AI search.
And for brand-building content, they'll look at ways to use data and storytelling to connect their brand point of view to current events or seasonal trends. That understanding of how to make a piece of content more unique to the brand is something that AI optimization tools can't do as well as human writers and editors.
When it comes to GEO and optimizing for AI visibility, she said no one should be afraid to dig in.
"We're all learning it together. I don't think anyone has totally cracked the code on this. The algorithms are changing all the time," she said.
4. Get on the same page with leadership
If you're going to be an early content hire at an organization, it's important to align with whoever in leadership will be overseeing the operation to ensure you're on the same page for what success looks like, Tracy said.
"What do they want it to achieve, and how are you going to measure its success, and how will you know whether it's successful? Because that looks very different at different companies," she said.
Being really clear about those definitions makes it easier to evaluate what's working and what might need to change.
Her ultimate advice for journalists making the transition into brand editorial: "Enjoy the ride."
"Traditional journalists are so well-positioned for this space," she said. "Most teams are fairly small, and you have to be scrappy."
Madeline Stone is the Content Manager for Editorial & Insights at Stacker. She was previously a longtime business and tech journalist at Business Insider and a content and communications consultant for startups.
