How CheapInsurance.com gained 20k earned media placements with Stacker

The Challenge

Online advertising campaigns and similar demand generation tools can be a great source of leads for many consumer brands. But for certain industries where trust-building is an important aspect of the buying decision, these campaigns may not be enough. As a company working in insurance for over 50 years, CheapInsurance.com recognized the need for building trust with potential customers, and the importance of establishing brand authority to enhance both their PPC campaign and organic conversion rates. They also knew that the best way to build brand awareness and authority is through third party referrals and valuable content. 

The Solution

CheapInsurance.com partnered with Stacker in order to access a network of almost 4,000 high-authority news domains across the U.S. This allowed them to distribute their editorial content to 1.4 million readers. 

Fausto Bucheli Jr., President at CheapInsurance.com, loves that Stacker enables them to put their name and content in front of a lot of new readers, while providing high-quality backlinks with positive impact on their SEO. But what Fausto likes the most about working with Stacker is the content strategy.

"Being able to work directly with the Stacker editorial team to ideate headlines and workshop content strategy was a big deal," says Fausto Bucheli Jr. "We learned so much from that process, and were able to eventually create our own content for the wire."

How It Works

Stacker combines an innovative earned distribution platform with human editorial expertise to enable the creation, optimization, and syndication of engaging stories from brands to a network of local and national news outlets.

CheapInsurance.com initially selected Stacker's newsroom-as-a-service offering called Connect+Studio, which pairs turn-key distribution with custom content production. With the Studio service package, CheapInsurance.com got to select from a curated list of unique, newsworthy story angles relevant to the insurance industry, leaving the rest of the storytelling process to the Stacker writers and editors.

After spinning up an in-house content team, CheapInsurance.com switched to Stacker Connect, which distributes brands’ ready-to-publish editorial content to thousands of publishers on the Stacker Newswire. Stacker's team ensures that each story meets journalistic standards, and is optimized and timed to maximize reach and engagement. After distribution, CheapInsurance.com receives detailed and real-time insights on the performance of their stories via a self-serve reporting dashboard.

With Stacker, CheapInsurance.com was able to distribute stories like 5 popular retirement activities—and the best cities for each, which earned 532 placements in partner publications. This coverage allowed CheapInsurance.com to greatly enhance its online brand visibility.

The Results

Thanks to its partnership with Stacker, 1.4 Million readers saw CheapInsurance.com's content and got familiar with the brand. This boost in reach also created great new downstream SEO value, with 20,000 earned placements helping to drive an increase of 8 points to their Ahrefs Domain Rating, and a 3x increase in organic traffic.

18 months after distribution of CheapInsurance.com's first story on Stacker:

The fresh coverage allowed CheapInsurance.com to greatly enhance its online brand visibility and authority, fostering trust with readers and making CheapInsurance.com a recognized name when these readers were ready to purchase insurance.

Over a period of 18 months, the company crafted and distributed 67 stories, achieving close to 20,000 placements and reaching over 5.5 million new readers throughout the US.

Conclusion

CheapInsurance.com sees clear value in working with Stacker, with outstanding growth to site authority and organic growth. After 2 years of working with Stacker, Fausto is eager to explore even more opportunities to continue to grow his business via brand editorial distribution.

"Stacker really exceeded our expectations," says Fausto. "Now, we're exploring new opportunities and bespoke solutions to boost our effectiveness even further. The Stacker team has been an amazing partner in our search for growth - always open to trying new ideas and launching new pilots. For brands looking to build trust and thought-leadership, I can't recommend Stacker enough."