The Business Case for Brand Journalism: Lessons from Industry Giants

What do industry giants like J.P. Morgan, Redfin, and HubSpot have in common? This summer, they began working with Stacker to amplify their in-house stories.

But why are these ROI-driven companies choosing to invest in editorial? As newsrooms get leaner, market leaders like American Express, Intuit, and Wells Fargo began creating high-brow editorial content themselves — rather than relying on publishers like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg to tell the stories they want to share.

Your company should be prioritizing brand journalism and earned distribution if you’re aiming to be an industry leader. And in the age of AI, this has become more important than ever. But the question remains—how do I make that argument to leadership? Read on…

The Business Case for Brand Journalism

Watching these companies develop huge content libraries to serve their customers' interests and provide crucial information is like receiving free brand marketing advice that would otherwise be under lock and key. If these industry leaders believe it's smart to invest in brand editorial or service journalism, others who want to increase brand visibility in LLMs or deepen relationships with their customers should do the same. Watching what industry leaders are doing isn’t a novel idea—but it’s still early enough in the LLM/GEO race to be a brand that starts producing high-quality content and reaps the benefits of the early-mover advantage.

How Strong Editorial Leaders Lift the Bar in Branded Content

These companies are not investing in just any content. The way these companies hire their editorial leads says something about how they value high-caliber storytelling.

For instance, the Wells Fargo Editor-in-Chief was previously a journalist at U.S. News & World Report. He knew that their content needed to be news that their ideal customers could use. When they built out the Stories section of the Wells Fargo site, the company offered stories on financial literacy, advice on spotting scams and first-time home ownership, as well as storytelling around affordable housing.

Many other well-known companies, like Wells Fargo, are also already data-driven with lots of data sets and troves of research and stories to tell. But with many of these companies doing the hard work to develop great storytelling, some are stopping short of their full ROI potential by relying too heavily on smaller channels, like owned media, and are missing out on new customers that they could reach through earned distribution.

Earned Media Gets Major Industry Players on the Board in the New Era of AI

In this new zero-click environment, companies need to become discoverable in LLMs, which favor trusted sources like media mentions. Brand content that gets picked up by the media builds the authority of the brand online in SEO ranking, and increases the likelihood that the brand will show up in AI overviews and snippets.

Why?

The algorithm prioritizes unique data originating from authoritative sources and evaluates credibility based on the number of backlinks and citations received from other high-quality websites and publishers.

Added Distribution Power Brings in the Dollars

Getting brand editorial redistributed on major news sites isn’t easy for brands alone. Media outlets need great content that doesn’t strain their under-resourced newsrooms, but they won’t look twice at advertorial brand storytelling instead of a journalistic lens.

They won’t distribute content from just anyone.

They rely on trusted relationships with content providers that developed over time. Luckily, Stacker’s built trust with publishers over the past eight years and brought credibility to brands that distribute through our earned reach platform. Publishers appreciate that Stacker provides them with free, fully baked content that has already been vetted by Stacker’s editorial team.

Earned media distribution — or earned reach, as we call it — is:

• the most effective way we know of to gain traction in AIO and LLM discoverability
• a way to ensure that data storytelling lives on beyond its own channels
• an effective strategy to gain authority and be seen by new audiences

If these companies are coming to a bootstrapped company like Stacker to scale their reach, clearly we’re doing something right. They’re joining LegalZoom and other blue-chip finance and professional services companies that we work with, which understand that their content needs to work harder in LLMs and earned media to justify it.

For a play-by-play of how LegalZoom improved upon its already stellar domain authority, check out our case study.

Brendan Collins is VP of Sales at Stacker, where he helps brands unlock the power of earned media through scalable content distribution. With a decade in ad tech and sales leadership at Cybba, Drift, and Placester, he brings a sharp eye for growth strategy—and the occasional avalanche survival skill.

Featured Image Credit: Photo Illustration by Stacker // Canva