Higher education's most-cited stories start with data, not ad budgets.

A fixed-scope engagement where we take a data angle, build the research and assets around it, and pitch it to the press. You walk away with a publishable study, the branded visuals, and an outreach push, usually in a few weeks.

The flagship Earned Media Sprint is $10,000. Larger campaigns and ongoing research programs are scoped on a call. You do not need a long retainer to start.

Most run three to five weeks from kickoff to pitch, depending on how much shaping the data needs to support the angle.

A data-driven study or ranking, the branded assets (an infographic, a report, embeddable visuals), a press-ready pitch with target outlets and angles, and the outreach itself.

We lead with proprietary data, not ad budgets or generic blog posts. We run this method on our own site every day, so you are buying an engine that already earns links and rankings, not a deck that promises it.

No honest firm can guarantee specific outlets. What we can promise is a genuinely newsworthy, data-backed story and a disciplined outreach process, which is what actually earns coverage. We report transparently on what landed.

We do not, and you should be wary of any company that does. To stay inside Google’s quality standards, we never buy links or mentions on your behalf. Earned media depends on authentic content and relationships that are built over time. What we can offer is a proprietary read on how often sources get mentioned in your vertical, which lets us set benchmarks we can hit at a high confidence interval because they are statistically grounded. The value also diversifies: it shows up as reach on your own site and in search, not only as named pickups.

We combine public datasets with a college’s own institutional and private data. That combination, interpreted in a way no single source already shows, is what creates the information gain reporters and search engines reward.

That is fine. Many of our strongest stories are built entirely from public data interpreted in a new way. If you do have proprietary data, we fold it in for a sharper, harder-to-copy angle.

You do. The study, the visuals, and the underlying analysis are yours to keep, republish, and build on.

Colleges and universities, edtech companies, and education nonprofits that want durable authority and links rather than rented attention.

National and trade press, education and data desks, newsletters, and local outlets when a story has a regional angle. We match the angle to the desk rather than blasting one list.

The DataPyramid: proprietary data, original analysis, the story, shareable assets, then earned media. It is built as a loop, not a one-off. Each story earns citations that lift the next one, and that compounding record is what eventually makes the AI answers cite you too.

Yes. Many partners run a Sprint first, then move to a quarterly research program or a content partnership once they have seen it work.

Placements, backlinks and their authority, referral traffic, the rankings lift that follows, and increasingly whether the AI answers name you as a source. We report on what the campaign actually produced, not vanity metrics.

Yes, and it is fast becoming the main reason to do it. The same sourced, structured research that earns press is exactly what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI answers pull from when a student or reporter asks about colleges and outcomes. Original research gets cited by AI several times more often than republished content, and the more your work is cited and searched by name, the more the models treat you as a default source. That advantage compounds, so the institutions that build the record first are the hardest to displace later.

David Krug, who has produced higher-education content for over 20 years, leads every engagement. You work with the person who built CollegeRanker’s own data engine, not a junior account team.

Book a 20-minute call. We will tell you honestly whether there is a story worth telling and what it would take to land it.