What Makes Content Strategy Different at Stacker? | Earned Media

I remember a time — not too long ago — when content marketers believed that a high content output was one of the most important KPIs, with random benchmarks like, “We must publish one article a week!” or “Brands like ours need to post 10 times a week on social to stay in the conversation!” Frenzied feeds were filled with brands’ blogs that were dying to be seen by the algorithm.

Thankfully, with catalytic changes to the algorithm, the time of ad-hoc storytelling is over. As budgets tighten in rough economies, brands need a crystallized strategy for how content will generate ROI or reach other business goals.

At Stacker, we provide content strategy support that doesn’t just drive reach but also supports clients’ outcomes.

We harness the power of our editorial experts to provide brands with a blueprint to engineer more impactful editorial content. And our clients gain publishing power over their competitors when they put our intel into action.

Why Content Strategy Matters More at Stacker

Stacker promotes the data-driven storytelling readers want, paired with our publisher relationships that help propel our clients’ content to the next echelon of brand authority at exponential rates.

This is what makes our content strategy guidance unique. We can guide our clients toward ideas for topics the media is interested in without being subjective. Our recommendations are backed by real-time insights and proprietary data from our platform, Connect, which pinpoints what content is performing and why.

How Stacker Helps Brands Maximize Reach & Authority

Since we started in 2017, we’ve been working on our product and the problem of how brands can get the coverage they deserve in a continually competitive media environment.

Here are two snapshots to show how we take on a brand’s needs head-on to drive results.

hims & hers - Building new brand processes while giving old content new life

• Challenge: The client, a one-stop shop for men's and women’s personal care, wanted to develop their brand journalism process while building brand authority on key health topics, such as mental health and weight loss. hims & hers also wanted to repurpose existing content wherever possible to maximize the reach and efficiency of their content efforts.
• Stacker’s Solution: We provided data-driven insights on how they could develop their content and reuse what they already had. Stacker provided:
  • High-interest topics that aligned with media interests and their audience demand
  • Keyword-optimized headline recommendations to engage readers and generate clicks
  • Strategic timing recommendations for their earned distribution to increase their chances of broad reach and visibility
• Results: For just one story, The 10 Healthiest (and Unhealthiest) Fast Food Sandwiches in America, hims & hers generated 213 pick-ups, doubling our benchmarks. The story was syndicated by AOL, MSN, and local TV and print outlets, bringing in more than 300,000 readers in one month.

Red Ventures - Using insights to expand reach

• Challenge: With multiple brand domains and a portfolio of businesses, Red Ventures needed to expand its reach online, sustain strong backlink profiles to its websites, and find opportunities to repurpose existing content. They also wanted data-backed content insights to help optimize how their stories performed so they could be strategic with how to create content for Stacker’s platform within their current workflow — and using their existing editorial team.
• Stacker’s Solution: Stacker analyzed their top-performing content and provided strategic advice for upcoming opportunities for Red Venture’s brand, Best Colleges, including:
  • Insights on potential news interest and engagement trends that were relevant for their brand in the months ahead — narrowing in on the Olympics and the U.S. election
  • Guidance on the best timing to launch that content
• Results: Best Colleges worked with Stacker to distribute:
  • One Olympic story, Standout college athletes competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics, with 254 pickups, including Yahoo! Sports.
  • Two election-related pieces: What a Kamala Harris presidency could mean for college students, higher education with 251 pickups, and Where did Tim Walz go to college? with 255 pickups, including AOL.

These stories were among the Top 10 Stacker stories by pickups in July and August 2024, with pickups growing in the double digits and doubling our benchmarks.

Want to outperform our benchmarks, too?

We don’t blame you if you’re curious to see how well your content could take off if it was enriched by our publisher data. Contact us for a demo and see where your brand can go.

Tamara Sykes is a strategic communicator specializing in content strategy, PR, and brand storytelling. As Head of Client Content Strategy at Stacker, she helps brands achieve earned media success through journalist-crafted content strategies. With expertise in digital PR, media partnerships, and audience engagement, she’s passionate about elevating brand visibility and driving meaningful impact.

Photo Illustration by Stacker // Canva