Agencies are under more pressure than ever to deliver visible results and deliver them fast. Clients want proof that their stories are being seen, shared, and trusted, but they also expect lean teams, no wasted spend, and performance that keeps pace in an algorithmic world.
Agencies are being tasked with that, while balancing creative output and operational efficiency. Even in the age of AI, that’s a lot of moving pieces and points of excellence that are being asked of them.
It’s also why Stacker’s agency and channel partnerships have quietly become one of our fastest-growing verticals.
More agencies are realizing they don’t need to build new services or hire PR teams to deliver earned credibility. They can plug into it.
Take elk Marketing, for example, a full-service SEO and content agency that’s worked with hundreds of growth-focused brands.
When they first partnered with Stacker, they weren’t looking for a new product to sell; they were looking for a way to deepen their results.
They already knew how to make content rank. The missing piece was helping clients understand why visibility mattered and how to prove it in a way that felt tangible.
“We could get content to perform well in search,” their team explained, “but clients wanted to see their work recognized. They wanted that third-party validation that said: this brand knows what it’s talking about.” - Danielle Work, Head of Content elk Marketing
That’s where earned distribution came in.
By running their clients’ stories through Stacker’s editorial and distribution network, elk started seeing credibility metrics. Stacker gave elk the kind of ROI you can show in a performance overview or renewal conversation, including:
It gave elk a new way to tell their clients’ stories and a new kind of data to prove success.
Agency leaders often tell us the same thing: they want to expand impact, not overhead.
That’s why Stacker’s earned media model has become such a natural fit. It gives agencies distribution at scale in newsrooms across the country. Allowing agencies to lean on our content insights team and publisher relationships, while continuing to do what they do best. Stacker does all this without adding overhead to agency teams; instead, we make teams more effective.
elk put it this way during our conversation:
“Stacker feels like an invisible extension of our team. We get the reach, but we keep the relationship. Our clients trust us to bring them results, and Stacker helps us deliver those results faster.” - Danielle Work
Stacker’s agency partnerships are designed so agencies remain front and center, maintaining creative control, client communication, and strategic direction, while we power the behind the scenes.
This shift underscored the changes in how agencies think about visibility.
Search performance is important. But in a world where AI is rewriting the rules of discovery, authority is becoming the most defensible metric. It’s the determinant of who is being cited in AI search and it’s what builds a brand that doesn’t fall victim to changing algorithms.
That’s what elk and our other agency partners have discovered: when your client’s content appears on trusted publisher domains, it does more than simply generate backlinks.
For Stacker, agency and channel partnerships represent a new kind of collaboration model: one built around complementing digital PR and marketing efforts.
Our partners bring the strategy, creativity, and client relationships. We bring the distribution at scale.
Together, that combination delivers outcomes at a scale neither could achieve alone.
And in elk’s case, it’s created a flywheel effect where every published story fuels SEO and brand equity, compounding over time for more brand authority for their clients.
The agencies growing fastest today are the ones leveraging smarter partnerships.
elk Marketing’s 3,600+ earned pickups and hundreds of high-authority placements show what’s possible when you integrate earned media distribution into an existing strategy.
It’s efficient, measurable, and aligned with what clients want most right now: visibility that’s earned, not bought.
Stacker makes that scale possible.
Read the full case study here.
Want to see how your agency can add earned media distribution to your client toolkit? Let’s talk about partnership opportunities →
Benjamin Chipman is a GenZ brand and content marketer at the intersection of media and storytelling. Informed by his experiences across the creator economy and the legacy media, Benjamin has unique perspective about where traditional and new media converge. Passionate about where brands come together with culture and community, he brings this to all things marketing at Stacker. When he's not locked in to work, he's probably trying a new restaurant or planning his next trip to Spain.
Featured Image Credit: Photo Illustration by Stacker // Shutterstock, Canva