If you’ve ever needed something done around the house, like rewiring your bathroom — you might already know the “online on-demand home services” market pretty well.
These marketplaces make it easier for consumers to find a home service provider and offer providers a place to market themselves. It’s like a much better version of Yellowpages, or you could say, the Uber of Getting Stuff Done Around the House.
The increasing competitiveness of the market
The demand for these platforms in the U.S. is through the roof. The industry is expected to increase more than 16% year over year until 2030, according to Grand View Research. And as the market moves online, providers are increasingly having to compete with even more companies.
Meanwhile, the budgets of home service providers have not budged much. As a result, it’s getting harder to stand out from the crowd or be covered in the media to increase your customer base. To differentiate and be seen, more home services brands and marketplaces are becoming content creators, but find their audiences are usually restricted to their own websites and social media accounts.
LawnStarter, an online on-demand home services company that connects lawn care service providers to local customers, once had this problem, too. But its partnership with Stacker increased its reach to hundreds of thousands of new readers, boosting its brand authority and visibility — and ultimately enabling the company to strengthen its position as a leader on the on-demand lawn service market.
What LawnStarter was up against
Since 2013, the LawnStarter platform has helped more than 3 million people find affordable lawn care services in more than 34,000 neighborhoods across the United States.
With the boom of home service marketplaces and the increase in competition, it became crucial for LawnStarter to find innovative strategies to continue growing the business. They had all the right ideas for long-term success: Rank online so that customers would discover their platform more easily, improve their organic SEO through a robust content strategy rooted in data-driven storytelling and high-quality editorial. They also had the building blocks in place to become a content powerhouse with a strong in-house marketing/editorial team.
However, like many home services businesses, LawnStarter’s path to growth was stunted by limitations to distribution. Some users were finding their content and enjoying it, but using their own distribution channels only gave them so much reach.
LawnStarter had heard from a swath of other paid content syndication players and distribution services, but they were expensive and didn’t offer much ROI — often providing low quality referrals, or very limited reach.
To expand their visibility, LawnStarter required a scalable earned distribution solution — or as we call it at Stacker, earned reach.
Swooping in with a distribution solution
Stacker’s earned distribution platform, Stacker Connect, had great promise to solve LawnStarter's problems; They just needed some convincing first.
The idea of Stacker Connect was intriguing, it promised to generate 10x more pickups for editorial content and could multiply the brand’s engagement and reach. But was that really possible?
How partnering with Stacker kick-started LawnStarter’s success
LawnStarter took the leap with Stacker and it paid off quickly.
Together with Stacker, LawnStarter produced and distributed dozens of stories such as this highly relevant story analyzing flood risks in various areas of the US that provided tons of valuable insights for the LawnStarter audience.
The story was timely, coinciding with the flood season, and included strong methodology and data storytelling to rank the U.S. counties most at risk for flooding. Like all stories distributed on the Stacker Newswire, it wasn’t promotional, and just had passing mentions of LawnStarter’s name without discussing their services. Rather, it was service journalism that used their proprietary data. From it, readers would be aware if their county was at flood risk, learn how prepared their community was, and how much a flood could impact their local economy, while knowing that this data came from a company called LawnStarter. Brand journalism at its finest.
This story, along with many others created in partnership with Stacker, enabled LawnStarter to build trust with readers on third-party news websites. And they knew that was SEO and brand authority gold.
Here’s a deeper dive into some of the strategies that gave LawnStarter success with Stacker:
- Stories were optimized to a high level of journalistic standards that built on the already-valuable content from their in-house team
- Distribution expanded to over 3,900 publishers, providing hundreds of republishing opportunities to LawnStarter while offering publishers content to supplement their existing coverage.
- Internal performance insights and editorial planning helped shape the best distribution strategy, factoring in seasonality, cultural trends, and news pegs to determine which topic, release date, and beat would provide the most coverage
- Real-time reporting provided powerful insights for every story sent out on the platform to continuously improve content and distribution strategies
- SEO-optimized stories, graded for a high level of authority by the search algorithm and leveraging Stacker’s status as a reputable media company, combined with useful content
LawnStarter’s Results Using Stacker Connect
Once LawnStarter’s content, strategy, and distribution on the Stacker Newswire were fine-tuned, their stories kept on receiving widespread attention.
Over the course of the partnership, Stacker’s platform enabled LawnStarter to reach reputable publications across the country and locally in a matter of days, including The Miami Herald, MSN, AOL, and more. It resulted in:
- 42 LawnStarter stories distributed
- 159 earned placements per story on average
- 6,697 total earned placements
- 872,580 readers for their content on publisher sites
KPIs aside, the strategy was significantly more cost-effective than traditional digital PR and satellite media tour strategies. Over 12 months, LawnStarter worked with Stacker’s expert editorial and content strategy teams to build more content ideas that supported its brand positioning while also appealing to major publishers.
Stories like A rare, historically massive cicada season is coming: How to protect your lawn, trees, and landscaping resonated with publishers and readers alike, earning 200+ placements in Stacker partner publications thanks to its timeliness and value to readers. This coverage not only amplified LawnStarter’s visibility but also reinforced its brand as the authority for lawn care.
“Our link count has drastically improved year over year,” said Patricia Adler, Senior Marketing Analyst at LawnStarter. “We got a lot more links with [Stacker] than we did with the previous syndication network. It really isn’t comparable at all.”
Working with Stacker and their Connect network to distribute their collaborative editorial pieces exceeded LawnStarter’s expectations. "You guys have definitely helped us plan for future quarters," Patricia said.
Kimberly Magerl, Editor at LawnStarter told Stacker, “I really felt like you knew our brand — that was the thing I loved about you guys the most. The studies you recommended for us were really good.”
LawnStarter’s Lessons Can Be Amplified Beyond the Home Services Industry
As the on-demand home service industry becomes increasingly competitive, LawnStarter found an innovative way to maximize the reach of its earned media efforts and stay top of mind for consumers looking for lawn care services. But LawnStarter’s strategy can be easily replicated in any industry where brand authority and consumer trust can keep you ahead of competitors.
If you want to build authority and trust in your brand with earned reach and high-quality brand editorial, get in touch for a free demo of Stacker Connect!
Doriane is Stacker’s Director of Marketing. She previously headed marketing departments in various companies, owned a marketing agency for 7 years, and built a startup combining automated marketing workflows with a marketing services marketplace.
Photo Illustration by Stacker // Canva