The Challenge
LawnStarter's goal is to become the "Uber of lawn care" — a trusted resource for finding quality, affordable, and local lawn services. Achieving that required a significant boost to brand awareness and visibility for their platform.
While LawnStarter had fantastic editorial & marketing teams, they faced challenges in getting their content distributed. In order to improve their domain’s authority & drive long-term visibility to their domain, LawnStarter needed a way to get their content in front of readers.
The Solution
Kimberly Magerl, Editor, and Patricia Adler, Senior Marketing Analyst at LawnStarter, found the prospect of Stacker's earned distribution platform intriguing, but they’d been pitched so many times by paid content syndication players that they carried a healthy level of skepticism.
Over the next 12 months, our earned distribution campaign exceeded Lawnstarter’s expectations, driving over 6,600 earned news placements. These include placements in AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, and hundreds of local news domains like the Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald, and many more.
“Our link count has drastically improved year over year,” Patricia said. “We got a lot more links with you all than we did with the previous syndication network. It really isn’t comparable at all.”
Through Stacker's platform, LawnStarter earned high-authority news placements outside the capabilities of their existing PR efforts, resulting in impactful authority growth for their brand.
How It Works
Stacker takes your content and distribute it to our network of 3,900+ news domains, who can then easily share your content on their sites alongside their in-house content. This approach is entirely earned, and similar to a Creative Commons license. Newsrooms get access to hundreds of pieces of high-quality journalism each month for free - all Stacker asks is proper attribution back to the original publisher source.
For LawnStarter, their robust content strategy — rooted in data-driven storytelling — was a perfect match for Stacker’s earned news media model. 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 and tens of thousands of readers. Rather than gamble on whether anyone would see their highest-effort content, LawnStarter was able to guarantee an initial audience for this piece through earned distribution. This boost to your audience & overall authority signals helps your newsroom get the visibility they deserve across a huge network of U.S. news domains.
Stacker's value extends beyond the newswire, with our expert editorial and content strategy teams consulting directly with LawnStarter on future content ideas that support brand positioning and appeal to publishing partners.
"You guys have definitely helped us plan for future quarters," Patricia said.
The Results
The partnership resulted in fantastic nationwide reach for Lawnstarter. With 42 LawnStarter stories distributed we saw:
- 159 earned placements per story on average
- 6,697 total earned placements
- 872,580 readers for their content on publisher sites
By securing placements in trusted local publications, LawnStarter was able to reach every major metro in the US in a matter of days through Stacker’s platform. The strategy was significantly more cost effective than traditional Digital PR and satellite media tour (SMT) strategies, and was a game-changer for LawnStarter’s editorial and marketing teams.
Conclusion
LawnStarter unlocked a new, scalable distribution strategy to maximize reach and brand authority through Stacker’s platform. With turn-key access to a distribution network, expert editorial support, and unique reporting and insights, LawnStarter achieved the visibility they needed to position themselves as the leader in the lawn care industry.
