Customized Stacker stories drive big traffic in South Dakota

Stacker Media’s newswire provides a great opportunity for all publishers to take dynamic content and make it work for their audience.

NewsCenter1, a TV station in Rapid City, South Dakota, is one of those media organizations using Stacker’s unique content to drive audiences on its own site.

Stacker creates thousands of original, data-driven features designed to help fill coverage gaps and complement any newsroom’s original reporting. This gives publishers access to a library of timely and relevant content.

NewsCenter1 is taking their partnership one step further and not only sharing Stacker’s content directly to its website, but by framing those stories with specific headlines and SEO relevant to their coverage area. David Arkin Consulting, which has been working with NewsCenter1 for the last year on digital content strategies, created a workflow with the newsroom as the station transitioned to the BLOX Digital platform, which integrates Stacker content into their Content Exchange platform.

“This content has provided us a real boost and our audience seems to really enjoy it. The ease at which we can find it and the workflows we have set up to customize it, has made this a real winner for us"

Mark Walter, Station Director, NewsCenter1

Here’s how they do it

Look at the daily newswire to find relevant content

• Each day, NewsCenter1 has a goal of finding four Stacker stories to use, that are not only relevant to the South Dakota area but also what fits in line with the organic content and topics covered by their newsroom
• Because of the data-driven approach to Stacker's content creation, many stories will look at set data to see how it compares state-to-state and also compare it to other data
• NewsCenter1 specifically looks for South Dakota state news or data stories that break out Rapid City, vs the rest of the state

Rewrite the headlines and story ledes to fit the audience

Stacker already provides SEO-friendly headlines for each of its stories, but NewsCenter1 has been modifying some headlines to make them more relevant.

For example, NewsCenter1 took the headline “Best-run cities in America” and changed it to read “Two South Dakota cities made the best-run cities in America list! Can you guess which two?”

That story resulted in more than 135,000 page views, making it one of the top stories that month for the station. As you can see from the published story links, much of the body copy did not need to be changed. The headline was simply altered to make the story relevant to NewsCenter1’s audience.

Here are some more examples:

• Stacker headline: States where the most residents are struggling to find their next meal
• NewsCenter1 headline: South Dakota ranked higher for residents that struggle to find their next meal compared to other states
• Impact: 26,000 page views

• Stacker headline: Best and worst states for small businesses
• NewsCenter1 headline: Best and worst states for small businesses: You might be shocked at where South Dakota ranks
• Impact: 3,100 page views

• Stacker headline: Best places to live for people who love the outdoors
• NewsCenter1 headline: Is there any love for South Dakota on the list of the best places to live for people who love the outdoors?
• Impact: 7,900 page views

Because Stacker also analyzes data down to a hyper-local level on some cases, not all headlines will need to be altered to fit in with NewsCenter1’s feed, like the following stories:

• 5.99% Of All South Dakota Jobs Are in the Construction Industry, Above U.S. Average
• 50 roasters across the US: A guide to coffee in every state
• The best school district in every state

We Would Love to Connect

To learn more about how the Stacker Newswire can help you grow and retain your audience, reach out to us at publishers@stacker.com.

This case study was produced in partnership with David Arkin Consulting. To learn about the work David Arkin Consulting is doing with newspapers, TV stations, digital pure plays and magazines in digital audience and revenue, branded content and content creation, email David at david@davidarkinconsulting.com.

Feature Image Credit: Brandon Mowinkel / Unsplash