A few years ago I sat down with the senior marketing executive at a large company, call him the sponsor, to discuss the content strategy his team had been running for two years. They had spent roughly $450,000 producing informational articles, how-tos, and thought-leadership pieces. The traffic numbers looked great. Informational page traffic was up 700%. Average rankings and visibility had climbed about 40%. By every dashboard he showed me, the strategy was working.
Then I asked the question he had not been asked yet.
"Why aren't your money pages being prioritized?"
The traffic was real. The rankings were real. The revenue had barely moved. That gap is the entire reason this conversation has to happen at the start of a build, not the end.
The numbers were ugly when you held them up to the right light:
- $450,000 invested over two years
- Around $120,000 in additional revenue produced
- Conversion rates actually down
Brand-related searches were up 17% over two years, real, but not what pays the bills when 80% of commercial searches are non-branded ("men's running shoes," "men's running shoes for half-marathons").
They had built a great library. They had not moved the part of the business that pays for libraries, however.
To his credit, he leaned in instead of pushing back. By the end of lunch we were planning a partnership. That conversation is the template. Here is how to have it before any function-driven content project starts.
Indirect content marketing versus function-driven content
The first thing the conversation has to establish is which type of content the company is actually buying. They are not the same, and conflating them is how budgets get spent without revenue showing up. Use real numbers if you have them; in the conversation I had, they looked like this:
Indirect content marketing · the path they were on
Two years of articles, how-tos, and thought leadership. $450K spent · +700% info traffic · +40% visibility · only $120K added revenue
Several years to recover the cost, and only if a competitor does not start the same strategy and slowly chip away at the rankings. Visibility is not revenue.
Function-driven content · what they pivoted to
A two-month build to add specific, updatable content to product and category pages, the money pages, at catalog scale.
Targets the 80% of commercial searches that are non-branded, where the buyer is ready. Revenue follows from the start, because the content sits on the pages that convert.
The point is not to attack the existing strategy. The previous content was good content. The point is to be honest about what each type does: informational content builds brand and authority slowly, function-driven content moves the commercial pages now. The sponsor needs to know which one they are funding before the project begins, or the wrong dashboard will get watched for the wrong year.
What the conversation must establish
Before any code is written, three things have to be agreed in the room and, ideally, written down. None of them are optional.
That third one is the one most teams skip and then regret. If the only metric anyone looks at is total organic traffic, an honest function-driven win can look indistinguishable from no change at all, because the most valuable traffic was already there, it just was not converting. Set the right scoreboard at the start, or the right scoreboard will be invented at the end to fit whoever needs cover.
The single most important question to actually ask
Most stakeholder kickoffs are pitches. This one should not be. The question that earned the partnership in my real conversation, after all the data was on the table, was not "will you approve this." It was simpler than that:
The question that opens the partnership
"Are you opposed to learning about a content strategy that will directly increase your online revenue, one that does not require much writing at all?"
Notice what that question does. It is not a pitch. It is not a request for budget. It does not ask the executive to admit anything is wrong with what they have been doing. It asks for permission to explain a different option, on their terms, on their timeline. Almost nobody refuses that question, and the answer to it is what opens the real conversation.
The patience clause: the slow first quarter
Function-driven content works. It also takes a minute. The same project that updates 5,000 pages in ten minutes still has to be designed, the templates approved, the shortcodes vetted, the savings algorithm wired to live data, the conditionals tested, the in-stock signals connected. That is real engineering work, usually six to ten weeks before the first big batch ships. Then Google has to crawl and rerank. Then conversions start to follow rankings. Then the revenue line moves.
The sponsor needs to know which clock the project is on. Two months is realistic for the first templates live. Six to nine months is realistic for the revenue picture to clearly favor the new approach over the old. Anything faster is luck, and anything slower probably means the conversations at the start did not happen.
The trap door
The fatal mistake is selling the project as a quick win to get it approved, then living with a sponsor who expects the revenue chart to move in week three. When it does not, the project gets a "let's revisit this next quarter" that almost always means cancellation. Be honest at the start about the slow window. A sponsor who says yes to a realistic plan stays a sponsor; a sponsor who said yes to a fantasy becomes the person asking why nothing is working in week six.
The takeaway
The stakeholder conversation before the project is not a pitch, it is a contract. Establish which pages count, agree the first quarter will look slow, pick the right metrics in advance, distinguish indirect content marketing from function-driven content so the right dashboard gets watched, and ask the permission question that opens the partnership instead of the pitch question that closes a sale. Do that, and you protect the build through its quietest weeks. Skip it, and you will be defending a working project from the people who said yes to the wrong version of it.
The next Insight covers the build itself, the four-phase approach that takes a signed sponsor conversation and turns it into a shipped, ranking, revenue-producing system.
From the book
The conversation in Sizzle: An E-Commerce Revolution covers the $450K versus $120K case, the difference between indirect content marketing and function-driven content, the 80% of non-branded commercial searches, and how to set the right expectations with an executive sponsor before any code is written.