Marketing isn’t an overhead. So why are you treating it like one?

There's a telling moment in most recruitment board meetings. When P&L performance comes up, marketing spend gets lumped in with office costs, software licences, and administrative expenses - necessary evils, not revenue drivers.  

When costs need cutting, marketing goes first.

When someone asks what marketing actually delivered, the room goes quiet.

Most recruitment businesses don't believe that marketing generates business. They maintain marketing functions because their competitors do or they have a vague sense that “brand presence” matters. Marketing often becomes a service function, fulfilling the whims of consultants - a brochure here, a post there - without clear objectives or measurable impact.  Unlike business development (BD) or delivery, marketing is rarely run with defined targets and ruthless accountability.

What we’re left with is marketing that consumes budget without creating pipeline. A cost centre with no way to defend itself when the cuts come. 

The illusion of busy

Most recruitment marketing runs on activity metrics. Posts published, blogs written, campaigns sent, events attended. Teams report impressions, clicks, engagement rates. None of it is connected to anything the business actually cares about.

“Let’s post more on social media” is a common catch cry. The response should be: where, why and for whom?

If you’re building a brand, give it a clear voice and direction. If you’re generating business, create content that speaks to people with hiring authority and a reason to engage.Without this focus, you create a comfortable illusion. Marketing stays busy and the pipeline stays static. 

More is not more unless it's targeted and measured. 

Content, events, and digital presence can absolutely generate business. The problem is when those tasks are executed without clear commercial objectives, target audience definition, or conversion strategies that don’t connect to the pipeline, it's treated as overhead. When you can't show contribution to revenue, you lose credibility with the people who decide where money goes. 

The content nobody uses

Marketing produces generic content about "hiring trends" and "talent challenges”. Consultants need account-specific intelligence, competitor insights, something that helps them open a door with a specific prospect. The two have almost nothing to do with each other.

So BD ignores marketing. Marketing complains BD doesn't use their assets. 

Where we’ve seen this change is when messaging is aligned to the value the business actually creates, not generic thought-leadership but content that consultants can use in real conversations. When that happens, you can reduce spend, focus on what really works, and watch conversion rates climb. But this means that marketing and BD need to plan together, with shared ownership of results.

Most recruitment businesses keep them separate and with different objectives, different metrics, even different meetings. Marketing optimises for engagement and BD optimises for pipeline. Neither is accountable to the other.

Faith-based marketing 

The reality is most recruitment businesses can't accurately measure the commercial impact of marketing.  Without proper measurement infrastructure, marketing can't demonstrate that a particular campaign generated specific opportunities that converted to placements. They can't prove that content programs are nurturing prospects who eventually become clients.  This means marketing operates on faith, not evidence. Boards invest in marketing hoping it helps, but cut it when they need to save - and they never really know what they lost.  

Attribution is tough, but you must put agreed metrics in place to allow marketing to tell the story of their ROI. 

What revenue-generating marketing looks like

Making this shift isn’t overly complicated. Stop measuring activity and engagement. Start measuring pipeline contribution, opportunity influence, revenue attribution. 

Measure how marketing actually affects deals, not just awareness.

Align marketing with BD targets, and get specific. Create integrated plans around specific accounts, specific conversations and specific opportunities that marketing is designed to advance. Segment marketing efforts by target account tier, creating different strategies for high-value prospects versus general market awareness. Marketing and BD plan together, execute together and report together -  using measurement frameworks that connect marketing activities to commercial outcomes. This means tracking how content engagement, event attendance, and digital interaction influence deal progression and closure rates.

The skills and systems gap

There’s a reason that this doesn’t happen very often. Many recruitment marketing teams come from agency backgrounds or corporate communications. They have limited understanding of B2B pipeline or sales enablement.

And often the tech isn’t there either. Marketing automation platforms don’t talk to the CRM systems, making it impossible to connect marketing touches to opportunity progression. For example, you can’t connect a webinar attendee to an opportunity six months later. 

Without proper tools and skills, even well-intentioned marketing efforts can't demonstrate the commercial impact that would justify investment.

Fixing this means investment - in people who understand demand generation and pipeline marketing, and in technology that enables measurement and optimisation.

The big decision you’re avoiding

Do you believe that marketing can generate revenue? If the answer is yes, then you have to start running your business accordingly. 

This means marketing leaders reporting commercial metrics alongside sales and operations leaders. It means planning together, not in parallel.  It means ruthless prioritisation of activities based on revenue contribution, not creative preference or industry best practice.

Most recruitment businesses won't do this. They will keep marketing as a support function, blame it when operations teams underperform, and cut it when budgets tighten.

But the ones that make the shift don't just get better marketing ROI. They get a function that can defend its budget, a team that earns credibility with the board, and a genuine edge over competitors still treating marketing as overhead.