Why Is ROI Important in Marketing? Fix Underperforming Marketing Campaigns

18 August 2025
Tina Tucker

Why Is ROI Important in Marketing? Delivering measurable ROI from marketing can feel like trying to grab smoke. You’ve planned and delivered lots of activity, launched campaigns, published posts, and sent emails, yet the link between that activity and meaningful revenue growth remains frustratingly vague. You’re not imagining it: many marketers don’t measure ROI on their campaigns. Meaning that their activity is judged on perception, not proof.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most marketing in recruitment doesn’t underperform because of poor execution. Marketing fails to deliver ROI because it’s not aligned with your commercial outcomes in the first place. Without that alignment, you’re not measuring ROI effectively, you’re measuring busyness.

Common Signs Your Marketing is Failing to Deliver Value

Even agencies with award-winning marketing teams can fall into the trap of mistaking activity for progress. If your marketing reports read like a list of tasks completed rather than a demonstration of business impact, you’re looking at the wrong measurements.

Here are the tell-tale signs that marketing is missing the mark, even if your team looks productive on paper.

You’re unclear how leads are generated
Campaigns might be running, but if you can’t trace a clear path from marketing activity to fee-earning conversations, you’re not measuring ROI in a meaningful way.
Metrics are vanity-led
Followers, likes, and impressions look good in reports, but they rarely pay the bills. Industry data shows that more than seven in 10 (71%) B2B marketers rate their content or social strategy as ‘moderately effective’ or ‘not effective’; often because they focus on likes and impressions.
Sales and marketing speak different languages
Marketing focuses on brand awareness; sales are focused on hitting quarterly targets. Without a bridge, commercial outcomes suffer.
No agreed definition of success
If the leadership team and marketing can’t clearly articulate what success looks like, you’ll never know if you’ve hit the target.
Campaigns are reactive, not strategic
Activity spikes around certain events, but there’s no sustained plan designed to achieve a measurable commercial goal.

How Misalignment Between Leadership and Marketing Hurts ROI

The biggest reason measuring ROI is difficult in recruitment agencies?

Misalignment between your business goals and your marketing strategy. Neither happen in a vacuum. Yet for many agencies marketing is either treated as a design and post function producing attractive content with no direct link to revenue, or as a support service that responds to requests rather than leading strategic initiatives.

Marketing should be the engine that supports your agency’s growth ambitions. But it can’t do that if it is comprised of outputs that don’t map to leadership’s real business goals. If the goal is to break into a new sector, yet marketing is still pushing content that’s unsegmented and untargeted, there’s a clear disconnect.

This misalignment often happens because leadership teams and marketing speak in different terms. Leadership thinks in revenue, profitability, and market share, while marketing reports in clicks, reach, or engagement. Both matter, but without translating marketing metrics into commercial outcomes, you’ll never know what good ROI is in your context.

What Good Looks Like in a Recruitment Agency Marketing Function

ROI is so important in marketing because without proof of return, marketing becomes the first cost to be cut in tougher market conditions. If marketing is strategically tied to business development and talent attraction, and you’re measuring ROI correctly, it stops being a cost centre and becomes a growth driver.

A high-performing recruitment agency marketing function is not simply busy. It’s commercially intelligent. That means:

Strategic alignment from the top down
Leadership and marketing work together to define objectives. For example, “Increase market share in the UK tech sector by 10%” becomes the marketing north star, with campaigns and KPIs built to achieve it.
Clear and agreed measurement
Marketing knows exactly how success will be measured, using KPIs tied to revenue and profit. Measuring ROI here is not about open rates alone. Instead, it’s about the number of sales-qualified leads generated and their eventual conversion into placements.
Marketing embedded in the sales process
Marketing doesn’t just post on social media and hope for the best. It works alongside sales to identify and nurture prospects until they’re ready to convert, ensuring no opportunity is wasted.
Data-driven decision making
Campaigns are adjusted in real-time based on what’s delivering results, not on what “feels” like it’s working and generally is not.
Integration across brand, talent and client attraction
Recruitment 3.0 agencies understand that employer brand, talent attraction marketing, and client acquisition are interconnected. Marketing is the link that unites these strands into one growth strategy.

When marketing functions like this, measuring ROI is straightforward because you’re tracking against the right indicators based on commercial outcomes, not just marketing outputs.

How to Diagnose and Fix Marketing Underperformance

If you suspect your marketing isn’t delivering the return it should, the first step is diagnosis. Thrive’s guide “50 Questions Recruitment Leaders Should Ask Their Marketing Departments” arms commercial directors with jargon-free, practical and pragmatic insights designed to cut through the technical nuances of modern marketing and understand how (and if) it’s moving the dial..

This isn’t a marketing checklist of “post more on LinkedIn” or “send a monthly newsletter”. It’s a commercially focused diagnostic tool designed to uncover:

Where marketing is delivering real commercial value and where it’s not
Whether leadership and marketing have a shared understanding of priorities
If marketing is measured on the right outcomes
How well marketing integrates with your sales function
Where the bottlenecks are in turning awareness into actual revenue

Once you understand where your marketing is struggling, you can begin to build a strong strategy that delivers ROI.

The Takeaway for Recruitment Leaders

Marketing should be your revenue multiplier, not your cost sink. If you can’t clearly articulate how marketing is contributing to commercial outcomes and back it up with data, it’s not performing at the level it should.

The solution isn’t necessarily spending more or hiring additional people. More often, it’s about aligning leadership objectives and marketing strategy, defining what “good” looks like, and putting in place the measurement to prove it.

If you get this right, delivering ROI becomes straightforward and marketing becomes business critical.

Download 50 Questions Recruitment Leaders Should Ask Their Marketing Departments to see exactly where your marketing is adding value and where it’s costing you.

Key Takeaways

Activity isn’t the same as impact – If you can’t directly connect marketing outputs to revenue, you’re not measuring ROI, you’re measuring busyness.
Misalignment kills performance – When leadership goals and marketing outputs don’t match, even the best executed campaigns will underdeliver.
Good marketing is commercially intelligent – Strategic alignment, clear measurement, and integration with sales drive commercial outcomes.
ROI needs consistent tracking – Those marketers who track ROI do have a better understanding of success.
Diagnose before you invest – Use the 50 Questions guide to uncover whether your marketing challenge is poor tracking, flawed strategy, or a bit of both.