- 10 April 2025
-
Kristie Perrotte
Ever feel like your marketing efforts are all fluff, no impact?
It’s a common story for many recruitment agencies. Pushing out content, sending newsletters on top of newsletters, testing the latest tech tools and yet somehow, it still feels like nothing is landing. If that sounds like you, chances are you’re suffering the effects of a poor marketing strategy.
Marketing in recruitment has long fought the perception of being the “colouring-in department.” That reputation exists for a reason. Too often, marketing is reactive, not strategic. It’s driven by daily requests, not by a long-term plan tied to revenue and hiring outcomes. Instead, marketing must be measurable. It should support revenue growth and hiring success. And most importantly, it should be aligned with how your business is growing, not how it operated a decade ago.
In this article, we’ll break down five key warning signs that you’re operating with a weak marketing strategy. We’ll also show you how to plan a marketing strategy that brings clarity and delivers real results.
Inconsistent Messaging and Branding
The Red Flag:
Your brand voice, visuals, and messaging change depending on the platform, the team member, or the campaign. LinkedIn says one thing, your website says another, and your recruiters are telling a third story altogether. One week you’re pushing high-volume contingent recruitment. The next, you’re talking about your consultative RPO model. Candidates and clients are left asking: What do you actually do?
Why It’s a Problem:
Recruitment agencies are reimagining their offerings, from embedding employer branding to delivering onboarding programmes and DEI strategies. If your messaging is still built solely around your people or your speed to match, you’re behind. Clients and candidates alike want to know what you do, how you do it, and what value you bring. That clarity is your commercial edge.
The Fix:
Get clear on your proposition. What are you really offering and to whom? Create a brand framework anchored in your Value Proposition and Unique Selling Points (USP). Define your service offering in terms your clients and candidates care about and make sure that same message threads through your website, socials, pitch decks, job ads, and outreach. This is what a marketing strategy should look like: consistent, coherent, and connected.
Lack of Clear Goals and KPIs
The Red Flag:
You’re doing “marketing” but have no real idea whether it’s working. You might be tracking vanity metrics such as likes and followers but you’ve no sense of how marketing supports your bottom line. Worse still, you’re not tying marketing activity to business outcomes. There’s no clear route from content to conversion.
Why It’s a Problem:
This is one of the clearest effects of a poor marketing strategy. 42% of marketers say their strategy is ineffective due to a lack of clear goals. If you don’t know what success looks like, how can you achieve it? Worse still you have a lack of ROI. If you can’t measure the impact of marketing on your pipeline, how can you prove marketing’s impact and justify investment when budgets are tight?
The Fix:
Understand how to plan a marketing strategy around SMART goals. Every campaign, every channel, and every piece of content should be tied to measurable outcomes. Think: number of CVs received, candidate applications, marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), job orders, downloads of key assets like salary guides. These are the numbers that drive growth.
Stop tracking for the sake of it. Start tracking what matters. If you want an example of a strategic marketing plan, it should start with a clear set of goals that are connected to recruitment KPIs and monitored in real time.
Over-Reliance on Tactics Without Strategy
The Red Flag:
You are in constant reaction mode. Marketing is treated as a support desk dealing with requests for pitch decks, last-minute social posts, ad-hoc email campaigns. You post every day. You’ve dabbled in paid ads. You’ve sent out a few email campaigns. But none of it feels connected and the results are sporadic at best.
Why It’s a Problem:
One-off campaigns are not a strategy. They’re distractions. A weak marketing strategy tends to chase shiny objects, new tools, new platforms, without thinking about the bigger picture. If 80–90% of your marketing resource is reactive, you’re not directing that expense towards high-return areas. You’re not driving strategy; you’re responding to noise.
The Fix:
Start by identifying your highest-value commercial goals (business development, candidate attraction, brand positioning. Then build a strategic roadmap that channels your marketing resource in support of those goals. A strong example of a strategic marketing plan will show clear messaging pillars, defined candidate personas, a mapped-out funnel, and content designed to move people through it. This is also when having measurable KPIs comes into play. Without them, you won’t know which activities are worth repeating, scaling or scrapping.
No Defined Audience or Candidate Personas
The Red Flag:
Your marketing content tries to speak to everyone. It ends up resonating with no one. You’re unsure who your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is, or what motivates them to engage. Trying to market to everyone across multiple sectors, seniority levels, and geographies dilutes your brand and makes meaningful connection impossible. As a result, you’re launching into new markets without a focused entry strategy.
Why It’s a Problem:
The effects of a poor marketing strategy often show up in weak engagement. If your audience doesn’t feel like you “get” them, they won’t click, read, or apply. And worse, your best candidates may never even know you exist. Here’s a real recruitment scenario where a lack of audience matters: “We’re launching accounting recruitment in the US.” Sounds ambitious, but what kind of accounting? What level? What industries, sectors or company sizes? In what locations? Without specificity, your messaging will get lost, and your impact will be negligible.
The Fix:
Define your audience. Properly. For clients this means identifying your most likely buyers, the verticals and locations where you can compete, the roles where you have candidate supply, and the profit margins that make sense for your business. For candidates build detailed profiles based on data, insights from your recruiters, and behavioural patterns. What problems are they facing? What channels do they use? What content do they consume? Once you’ve got those candidate and client personas, you’ll know how to plan a marketing strategy that speaks directly to them. One that is audience-first, insight-led, and outcome-focused.
Underusing Your CRM
The Red Flag:
Your CRM is a glorified storage unit. Candidate records are out of date. Your team isn’t using the data to guide outreach or campaign targeting. Instead, consultants rely on LinkedIn or job boards for every search. Marketing isn’t using the database for campaigns, lead nurturing, or segmentation.
Why It’s a Problem:
A poorly leveraged CRM is one of the costliest effects of a poor marketing strategy, because it leads to a vicious cycle of wasted spend and missed opportunities. You’re sitting on gold and doing nothing with it. And instead of using your existing candidate and client relationships, you’re chasing net new. According to Hubspot, poor data quality is the second biggest challenge preventing you from understanding your audience.
The Fix:
Stop thinking of your CRM as storage. Start thinking of it as a growth engine. It’s your most valuable asset, so use it! Start with a CRM audit. Clean the data. Segment your database. Then build automated email journeys, nurture campaigns, and retargeting strategies based on user behaviour. A great strategic marketing plan will use CRM insights to personalise messaging, identify warm leads, and prioritise outreach. And if marketing and recruitment teams are aligned, both can use this data to improve conversion across the funnel.
Turning Warning Signs into Winning Strategies
Let’s recap the five red flags that suggest you’re working with a weak marketing strategy:
- Inconsistent messaging and branding
- Lack of clear goals and KPIs
- Over-reliance on tactics
- No defined audience
- Underused CRM
Each of these is an opportunity in disguise. If you recognise one, or all, of these issues in your own agency, it’s not too late. The fix lies in clarity, alignment, and a firm understanding of how to plan a marketing strategy that delivers results.
And what should that marketing strategy look like?
It should be built on data. It should be aligned with your business goals. It should move candidates and clients through a funnel, not just flood them with noise. It should prioritise the metrics that matter and use the tools you already have (like your CRM) to do more with less.
The effects of a poor marketing strategy can show up quietly at first. Unread emails, inconsistent engagement, stalled growth. But they become louder over time. And if you’re not careful, they can derail your progress entirely.
If any of these red flags sound familiar, it’s time to take control. Let’s build something that doesn’t just tick the marketing box but that supports your revenue and recruitment goals in a meaningful, measurable way.
Ready to rethink your strategy? Let’s chat. Thrive builds employer and commercial brand strategies that deliver results.
