How to Build a Strategic Recruitment Marketing Plan That Drives Real ROI

Do you know if your marketing is delivering results? If you don’t know how to measure your marketing, then it’s no wonder people may assume it’s the colouring in department. If you seem to just be doing a lot of stuff rather than driving proactive growth, then it’s time to rethink your strategy. A well-structured, strategic marketing plan is essential for driving sustainable growth and delivering measurable ROI. Yet too often, businesses default to quick fixes rather than strategic solutions. Especially in a period where marketing is expected to do more with less. B2B companies like recruitment agencies should be spending between 2-5% of revenue on marketing yet one Gartner report found that marketing budgets have fallen by 15% year on year. 

Successful recruitment marketing means properly using your marketing efforts to support your business growth objectives. By following a structured approach and adopting performance-based marketing techniques, you can create a data-driven marketing strategy that optimises your resources and delivers real, tangible results.

Step 1: Define Your Business and Growth Goals

Without clear business objectives, your marketing efforts risk becoming unfocused and ineffective. Yet so often, marketers are kept in the dark, not privy to wider business goals, challenges and opportunities. By defining revenue targets, resource needs, and desired growth outcomes you can make sure your marketing is in line with and working for your broader business goals. A strategic marketing plan must directly support these objectives. Only then will your marketing resources be deployed where they’ll have the greatest impact. 

Action Steps: 

• Identify revenue targets, fill rates, and the number of placements, clients, or candidates required to achieve those goals. 
• Break down budget allocation by business line to ensure marketing efforts align with revenue-driving priorities. 
• At Thrive we use our Discovery and Onboarding Questionnaire to uncover leadership priorities and identify marketing gaps and opportunities.

Step 2: Understand the Supply and Demand of Your Business

Knowing where your business has resource gaps, whether that’s candidates, clients, or internal hires, allows you to focus marketing efforts where they’ll have the most impact. This data-driven approach ensures your marketing campaigns are focused on filling the most critical gaps in your business. 

Action Steps: 

• Ask this crucial question: “If your resource needs were a pie chart, how would you carve it up?” 
• Identify the ratio of marketing focus required for candidate attraction, client acquisition, and internal hiring. Recruitment is an industry of supply and demand, so you need to know what your business needs more of, often aligned with market demands and cycles. 
• Prioritise efforts accordingly to support the most critical business growth needs. 

Step 3: Collaborate with Divisional Leaders to Understand Consultant Challenges

Marketing can only deliver meaningful impact if it addresses your consultants’ real-world challenges. Collaboration here is key to building a strategic marketing plan that drives measurable results. 

Action Steps: 

• Engage with divisional leaders to identify common challenges such as attracting niche talent or driving repeat business. 
• Develop a proactive plan aligned with seasonal business cycles rather than relying on reactive requests. 
• Ensure marketing support is built around anticipated needs rather than ad-hoc “help desk” style requests.  

Step 4: Define Your Ideal Candidate and Client Personas

Effective marketing requires clear targeting. Trying to appeal to everyone results in diluted messaging and wasted budget. Saying you do ‘accounting recruitment worldwide’ is not enough for targeted, nuanced business development and marketing. Defining ideal personas is crucial in performance-based marketing, where resources must be channelled toward high-impact opportunities. 

Action Steps: 

• Identify your ideal client and candidate personas. This includes candidate and client demographics, but also hyper segmentation factors like industry nuances, technical skillsets, decision-making behaviour, communication preferences, and career motivations.  
• Focus your strategic marketing plan on the sectors, geographies, professions and points of contact that yield the highest ROI. 
• Prioritise marketing spend in the areas with the greatest growth potential. 

Step 5: Craft Your Commercial Value Proposition

A clear value proposition helps you stand out in a crowded recruitment market and build a strategic marketing plan that resonates with both candidates and clients. 

Action Steps: 

• Develop a concise statement that highlights your unique strengths, such as expertise in niche markets, outstanding candidate experiences, or innovative hiring solutions. 
• Ensure your value proposition is reflected consistently across all marketing channels. 

Step 6: Identify Peak Periods for Support and Campaigns

Recruitment activity often follows seasonal trends, and this can be doubly true for specific industries like retail or healthcare. Planning around these cycles and other possible sources of uncertainty like economic fluctuations can help optimise marketing performance. 

Action Steps: 

• Map out key hiring periods, seasonal demand shifts, and major campaign opportunities. 
• Develop an annual marketing calendar that aligns content and campaigns with these cycles. 
• Create tailored strategies for each campaign to ensure consistency and impact. 

Step 7: Choose the Right Marketing Channels

The right channels ensure your content reaches the right audience. Added to this, studies have found that strategic marketing models that activate multiple touchpoints are proven to improve marketing strategy outcomes. 

Action Steps: 

• Identify where your ideal candidates and clients spend their time, whether that’s LinkedIn, Google, their email, TikTok, or industry-specific platforms. 
• Develop a multi-channel strategy that blends organic and paid media for maximum reach. 
• Use CRM data to segment audiences and tailor messaging for greater impact.

Step 8: Build a Content Strategy

Content plays a pivotal role in performance-based marketing, keeping your audience engaged throughout their journey. Consistent, value-driven content helps you build trust and maintain brand awareness.

Action Steps: 

• Map content to each stage of the recruitment funnel:  
• Awareness: Blog posts, thought leadership, and employee stories. 
• Consideration: Webinars, client success stories, and video content. 
• Decision: Targeted email sequences, job ads, and recruiter outreach. 
• Repurpose content to maximise reach and impact, aiming for the rule of 5, to get the most out of your content assets. 

Step 9: Identify CRM Wellness and Data Potential

A clean and organised CRM system is vital for effective marketing. Without it, you risk poor data quality, missed opportunities, inefficient communication, redundant spend on job boards and premium sourcing tools, and ultimately, reduced ROI from your marketing efforts.

Action Steps: 

• Conduct a CRM wellness audit to assess data quality, completeness, and segmentation potential. 
• Cleanse outdated records and implement best practices for ongoing data management. 
• Use CRM insights to inform personalised campaigns, nurture sequences, and re-engagement strategies.  

Step 10: Implement Automation and CRM Workflows

Automation keeps your marketing efforts efficient and consistent. Integrating automation into key areas of your strategic marketing models help streamline communication and improve engagement. 

Action Steps: 

• Develop automated workflows for lead nurturing, candidate follow-ups, and client re-engagement. 
• Implement triggers and alerts to improve operational and business development best practice. 
• Set reminders for recruiters to follow up at key points in the hiring process. 

Step 11: Measure, Analyse, and Optimise

Performance-based marketing is built on data. The benefits of data-driven marketing lie in its ability to continuously improve results. Tracking results enables ongoing optimisation. 

Action Steps: 

• Regularly review metrics such as marketing channel effectiveness, cost-per-hire, and conversion rates. 
• Use insights to refine campaign strategies, messaging, and channel focus. 
• Embrace A/B testing to identify what resonates best with your audience.  

Step 12: Build Your 12-Month Marketing Plan

A structured strategic marketing plan drives ensures all marketing activity is purposeful and aligned to business objectives, improving marketing consistency and accountability. 

Action Steps: 

• Develop a 12-month marketing plan that outlines:  
• Key campaigns and projects. 
• Ongoing activity like social media and content. 
• Specific KPIs to measure success. 

Step 13: Share Your Plan with the Business

Transparency drives buy-in and ensures collaboration. A well-communicated strategic marketing plan ensures marketing becomes a proactive, revenue-driving function. You can only achieve this will the full buy-in, not only of leadership, but of consultants as well. 

Action Steps: 

• Present your marketing plan to leadership and consultants. 
• Highlight key campaign dates so sales teams can align their efforts. 
• Demonstrate how marketing will proactively support business growth. 

Are you an in-house recruitment marketer? We’ve created a guide tailored to help you navigate these steps and put your strategic marketing plan into action. 

Download the Recruitment Reinvented: Recruitment Marketing Guide here. 

Turn Strategy into Results 

A successful recruitment marketing plan isn’t built overnight. It requires careful planning, collaboration, and ongoing optimisation. By adopting a performance-based marketing approach, you can ensure your marketing spend delivers measurable ROI. 

Thrive’s proprietary methodology, that includes everything from in-depth discovery to CRM wellness audits, is designed to help recruitment businesses build data-driven marketing strategies that fuel sustainable growth. 

If you’re ready to transform your marketing strategy and achieve real business growth, Thrive can help. Let’s chat.