Most of what you will find online about recruitment marketing plans is about attracting candidates. I have written this one for owners and directors of recruitment agencies who want to win more clients next year and need a marketing budget they can explain to their fellow directors.
My short answer on budget is 5 to 10 per cent of net fee income. Before you set the figure, though, it is worth working out how many new clients you need, because that number shapes everything else in the plan.
I run Limivex, a marketing firm that works with recruitment agencies, executive search firms and staffing businesses. I have linked every published figure below to its source, and the rest is our own advice.
The full guide for recruitment firms planning next year's marketing
A written reference for setting a plan and a budget. It covers what the UK market is doing now, which channels return and which do not, how to sequence a first quarter, twelve ideas that pay their way, and where AI genuinely helps.
PDF, 19 pages, 3.5 MB. No form, no email required.
Start with the fees you want from new clients
A marketing plan for a recruitment agency should start with a fee target. Take the net fee income you want next year and split it into two parts: the fees you expect from clients you already work with, and the fees you need from clients you have not won yet. Marketing can help with both, but the plan exists to deliver the second figure.
Then work backwards. Look at what a new client is usually worth to you in their first year and divide the gap by that amount to see how many new clients you need. Your own history will tell you how many first meetings it takes to win one client, and from that you can work out how many meetings you need each month.
For example, an agency that wants £300,000 of net fee income from new clients, and whose new clients are worth about £15,000 each in their first year, needs 20 new clients. If roughly one in four of its first meetings has turned into a client in the past, it needs 80 first meetings over the year, or about seven a month. Your figures will be different, but working them out gives everyone in the business a target they can understand, and it shows whether the budget you are about to set is realistic. If you have never recorded how many meetings turn into clients, start counting now and adjust the plan once you have a quarter's figures.
Decide which clients you want to win
A marketing plan cannot reach every company that might hire. Choose the sectors, the types of role and the locations where you already place well, and write down who makes the buying decision in those companies.
That person changes with the kind of recruitment you do. A staffing business that supplies temporary and contract workers usually sells to operations managers and procurement teams, who care about how quickly you fill shifts, compliance and getting onto a preferred supplier list. A permanent recruitment agency sells to hiring managers and in-house talent teams, who want to know that you understand their market and can reach candidates they cannot. An executive search firm sells to chief executives, chairs and investors, who are buying judgement and discretion. Each of these buyers reads different things and trusts different evidence, so the plan should name one main buyer for each part of the business.
Once you know the buyer, build a list of the companies you want to work with. Our guide on how to get clients for a recruitment agency explains how to build and prioritise that list. The marketing plan should then make sure the people on it know who you are before your consultants call them.
Most of those companies will not be looking for a new agency at any given moment. Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute estimates that businesses change providers such as their main bank or law firm about once every five years, so only around 5 per cent of business buyers are in the market in any quarter. Your marketing has to keep you known by the other 95 per cent, so that you are the agency they think of when a role comes up.
Decide what to say and gather the proof
Write down, in a sentence or two, what you want those buyers to know about your agency. Usually that means the market you specialise in, the roles you fill and what makes you better at it than a generalist. Every piece of marketing in the plan should repeat that message in some form.
Then list the evidence you can show for it. For a recruitment agency, the most persuasive proof is specific: placements you have made in the buyer's sector, case studies, testimonials from hiring managers, time to fill and retention figures if you track them, and salary or market data that only your consultants hold. If some of that proof is missing, gathering it belongs in the first quarter of the plan, because the website, LinkedIn and outreach will all depend on it.
How much should a recruitment agency spend on marketing?
I recommend that a recruitment agency spends 5 to 10 per cent of its net fee income on marketing, and that the figure includes the cost of the people doing the work. An agency with £1 million of net fee income would therefore spend between £50,000 and £100,000 a year, or roughly £4,200 to £8,300 a month. An agency with £300,000 of net fee income would spend £15,000 to £30,000 a year. At that level the budget usually covers a well-kept website, regular consultant activity on LinkedIn and emails to past clients, with most of the work done inside the business and some outside help.
Use net fee income, not turnover
Most published benchmarks express marketing spend as a percentage of revenue, and for a recruitment agency that can produce a very misleading number. When you supply temporary or contract workers, your turnover includes their pay, which you pass straight on to them. Net fee income, sometimes called gross profit, is what remains after those payments, and it is the money your business earns.
The gap between the two can be very large. In its results for the year to June 2026, Hays reported turnover of £6.4 billion and net fees of £906 million, so its net fees were about 14 per cent of its turnover. If a business with that mix set its marketing budget at the general benchmark of 7.8 per cent of turnover, it would spend more than half of everything it earned on marketing. A firm that only places permanent candidates does not have this problem, because its turnover and its net fee income are almost the same.
Marketing spend benchmarks as a percentage of revenue
I have not found a reliable published figure for how much UK recruitment agencies spend on marketing. The numbers that circulate online cannot be traced back to a study. The best general benchmarks come from surveys of marketing leaders in other industries:
- Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey put marketing budgets at 7.8 per cent of company revenue. Most of the 401 organisations it surveyed were large companies in North America, the UK and Europe.
- The CMO Survey's 2026 report, which covers US companies, found that B2B services firms spent about 10 per cent of revenue on marketing and companies with revenue under $10 million spent about 13 per cent.
Neither survey looks at recruitment agencies, and both measure spend against revenue, so they are useful as context but not as a target. My 5 to 10 per cent range comes from the budgets we see working for recruitment and search firms. It sits below those figures because it applies to net fee income, and because consultants in a recruitment agency do much of the business development that marketing teams do in other industries.
When to spend more or less on marketing
Stay near 5 per cent if most of your fees come from long-standing clients and your aim is to keep your name in front of them. Spend 10 per cent or more in a year when you are opening a new desk, moving into a new sector or region, rebuilding your website or rebranding, or marketing the firm properly for the first time. A newer agency with a small fee base may need a higher percentage to fund the basics.
The market also makes a difference. The KPMG and REC Report on Jobs published in October 2026 found that permanent placements had risen for a second month running, and although the rise was marginal, it was the strongest in four years. UK marketers in general are spending more too. The IPA Bellwether report for the third quarter of 2026 recorded the strongest upward revision to marketing budgets in nine quarters. If hiring keeps recovering, I expect competition for clients' attention to rise with it, which is a good reason to be visible early in the year.
Whatever figure you choose, spend it steadily through the year so that you stay visible to the companies on your list.
How to split your marketing budget
We usually divide a recruitment agency's marketing budget into three parts. The percentages below are where we tend to start, and they should move to fit the year you are planning.
| Part of the budget | What it pays for | Typical share |
|---|---|---|
| Ongoing work | The people who plan and produce the monthly work: content, consultant LinkedIn, client emails, SEO and outreach support | 60 to 70 per cent |
| Foundations | Your website, case studies, brand, CRM data and the tools that track enquiries | 15 to 25 per cent |
| Tests | Paid search, paid social, events or sponsorships, each given a budget and an end date | 10 to 15 per cent |
The largest share goes on people because most of the marketing that wins recruitment clients is work someone has to do every month. In my experience, advertising alone rarely produces a new client for a recruitment agency. In a year when you rebuild your website, the foundations share will rise. Our guide to how much a recruitment website costs explains how to budget for a rebuild and the running costs that follow.
Balance long-term work against short-term work as well. In their study of B2B marketing for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, Les Binet and Peter Field found that the most effective B2B advertising and communications budgets gave around 46 per cent to building the brand and 54 per cent to activity aimed at immediate sales. They describe the ratio as a guide and not a rule. For a recruitment agency, building the brand means becoming known in your niche through published market insight, a regular presence on LinkedIn and a website with proof. Activity aimed at immediate sales means outreach, campaigns to past clients and anything tied to a role that is open now. From what I see, many agencies spend almost all of their budget on the second kind.
Which channels to put in the plan
To win clients, start with the channels most likely to lead to a meeting and add the slower ones as the budget allows:
- Emails and calls to past and lapsed clients, who already know your work
- Researched outreach to the companies on your target list
- Consultants' LinkedIn profiles and posts, written for the clients they want to reach
- A website that states who you place and for whom, with case studies to prove it
- Market commentary and salary information that only your consultants could produce
- SEO for the searches hiring managers make when they look for a specialist agency
Our guide to digital marketing for recruitment agencies covers each channel in detail, and there are separate guides to SEO and social media. The plan only needs to record which channels you will use, how often, and who is responsible for each.
Who should run your marketing: in-house, agency or fractional CMO
A salary, an agency retainer and a fractional CMO each buy a different amount of work for the same budget.
The first option is to hire a marketer. Robert Half's 2027 salary guide puts most UK marketing manager salaries between £38,250 and £54,000, before employer National Insurance and pension. At £1 million of net fee income, a 5 per cent budget of £50,000 would not cover the full cost of employing one, and even at 10 per cent a hire would take most of the budget before you pay for the website, tools or advertising.
The second option is an agency or an outsourced team. You get several specialists for the same money, but someone inside the business still has to brief them and decide what matters most.
The third is a fractional CMO with a team behind them, where a senior marketer leads the plan for a few days a month and the team delivers the work. Our guide to fractional CMO costs in the UK explains what the market charges, and our comparison of outsourced and in-house marketing sets out the full costs of each option.
Whichever you choose, make one person responsible for the plan and for reporting on it each quarter. The plan should also say who replies to enquiries that come in through the website or LinkedIn, and how quickly. Those enquiries usually need a consultant's answer, and a prospective client who waits days for a reply may well go to another agency.
How to measure whether your marketing wins clients
Measure marketing by the clients and fees it helps you win. Impressions, followers and website visits can show whether the work is reaching people, but they do not tell you whether it is paying for itself. For most agencies, these four measures are enough:
- First meetings with companies on your target list, and how each one started
- New briefs from companies you had not worked with before
- Net fee income from new clients in their first year
- Marketing cost per new client
To make these figures reliable, add a source field to your CRM and ask every new client how they first heard of you. Many clients will name more than one route, such as a LinkedIn post followed by a call from a consultant, so record every route they mention. Then calculate the cost per new client using only the clients where marketing played a part, so that clients won purely through a consultant's own network do not flatter the result.
Compare that cost with what a new client is worth in their first year. If you spend £60,000 and marketing played a part in winning 20 new clients worth £15,000 each, each of those clients cost £3,000 to win and brought in five times that amount in their first year.
Review the plan every quarter. Stop any test that has produced nothing by its end date and move the money to work that is producing meetings. Judge content, SEO and LinkedIn over a longer period, because they take months to build. A LinkedIn survey published with the Binet and Field report found that only 4 per cent of B2B marketers measure the effect of their marketing beyond six months, so most firms judge long-term work over a period too short to show its results.
Recruitment agency marketing plan template
You can use this structure for your own plan. Most agencies can fill it in on one or two pages, and a short plan is easier to keep up to date.
| Section | What to write |
|---|---|
| Fee target | Net fee income you want next year, and how much of it should come from new clients |
| Clients | The sectors, roles and locations you are targeting, the main buyer in each, and the size of your target list |
| Message and proof | What you want those buyers to know about you, and the case studies, placements and data that prove it |
| Budget | The total as a percentage of net fee income, split into ongoing work, foundations and tests |
| Channels | The channels you will use, how often, and who is responsible for each |
| People | Who owns the plan, who does the work in-house or externally, and who replies to enquiries |
| Measures | First meetings, new briefs, new client fees and cost per new client, with quarterly review dates |
If you would like help putting your plan together, or someone to run it with you, our fractional CMO service is built for recruitment and search firms.
