The battle for attention in the media is real. Brands are producing incredible content, but the media market is oversaturated. If your brand’s content is seen at all, it may only be seen by existing followers and website visitors.
Brands used traditional PR to get noticed, which worked well during its mid-20th-century heyday. However, as digital media grew and newsrooms shrank, competition among brands to get media attention surged, and old tactics no longer worked.
Now, brands realize that sending out media releases like a firehose is expensive and ineffective. The likelihood of media outlets picking up on them is low. At the same time, PR agencies often lack the budget and bandwidth to cultivate relationships with hundreds of publishers on behalf of brands seeking top-tier media coverage.
Luckily, there’s another way: companies crafting thoughtful content can make a bigger impact with few resources by leveraging earned reach.
Earned reach is a form of earned media distribution tactic used in brand PR to increase the reach and visibility of branded content. It’s like content syndication, but a little more meaningful for brands. Crucially, it depends on high-quality content, such as original research and insights, that gets distributed across platforms and media outlets.
Content distributed via earned reach can snowball into broader press coverage using little to no resources to propel it.
Earned Reach in Action:
Other types of content that are good contenders for republishing are blogs, reports, webinars, infographics, podcasts, white papers, ebooks, and case studies. The secret is to make sure the content isn’t promotional and instead offers fact-based insights publishers will be eager to reshare, while still including a brand byline redirecting to the brand's site.
Earned reach can also leverage partners and influencers to syndicate or republish the branded content so it reaches larger audiences on reputable websites. It also establishes authority by generating valuable backlinks, showing the algorithm that the content is worthy of publication by other platforms.
TL;DR: Earned reach creates SEO and PR gold.
Earned reach is a form of content syndication that creates a symbiotic relationship between brands and publishers:
Brands are empowered by crafting their own content, using their resources and insights—without relying on partners to do the work for them and get it right.
Platforms publishing the brand’s content love getting access to free content that provides value to their readers without straining their newsroom’s resources even further.
The feedback loop is closed when content distributed on publishers' sites via earned reach provides reputable backlinks to the brands’ website and multiplies their exposure to new audiences.
An added bonus for brands is that content syndication marketing generates more leads than traditional marketing or PR. Demand Marketing research shows that it creates three times more leads when content is strategically placed.
The platform empowers brands to transform their press releases into editorial-style content that it distributes via a massive distribution network of 4,000 news outlets, significantly increasing the chances that brand content gets picked up and reshared. In fact, most stories on the Stacker Newswire receive over 100 pickups each.
This low-effort strategy is a valuable resource for both brands and PR agencies that want to showcase immediate results without actually conducting individual outreach to news outlets outside of the traditional top-tier news sites like Inc. or The New York Times. This leaves more time to focus on the long game, which is typically required to attract interest from these larger publications.
Being able to say, “We haven’t landed the New York Times yet, but we got 150 local pickups this week!” can go a long way to maintain momentum for your PR efforts. The swell of pickups from both local and national publications increases the likelihood of top-tier journalists taking notice of the brand, seeing that other outlets perceive the story or brand to be worth covering.
Using Stacker’s platform, brands and PR professionals can also get their foot in the door to build new relationships with media outlets. Stories placed using Stacker’s newswire create more opportunities for the brand to follow up and develop relationships with those outlets, using more traditional PR outreach.
Distributing brand content with Stacker can also extend the life of traditional PR campaigns, from product announcements to company-related news that often have a lackluster or short media attention life span. These announcements might not be splashy enough to make it to top-tier publications when they’re released, but they generate valuable data that can be repurposed into editorial content that Stacker can distribute. This keeps their new product at the forefront of people's minds for longer.
PR and earned reach together amplify messaging, enhance credibility, and maximize reach.
Using both strategically, brands can gain exposure, strengthen reputation, and drive meaningful audience engagement. Contact us to see how you can maximize your PR budget and efforts to get the best results possible for your or your clients’ brand communication.
Mirka Newman is a dynamic PR, communications, and earned media strategist with over 15 years of experience crafting compelling brand narratives and forging high-impact partnerships. As a Senior Account Executive at Stacker, she helps brands amplify their stories across top news outlets, leveraging her expertise in media strategy, marketing, and storytelling.
Photo Illustration by Stacker // Canva