Why research is the foundation of every marketing strategy

Daniel Evans

Blogs

Every recruitment marketing strategy that’s actually working starts with research. Real conversations with real clients and candidates.

Mark Pearce has spent over 24 years in recruitment, most of it in Australia, and is now building the marketing function at MPI Recruitment from scratch. Here’s how he doing it differently than most.

The mindset shift that won eight tenders out of eleven

Early in his career, doing business development, Mark noticed something: the recruiters who won weren’t the ones with the slickest pitch. They were the ones who’d worked out what the client needed before they said a word about what they were selling.

“It’s not just a case of picking up a phone and trying to pitch a product,” he told me. “If you don’t know what that person wants or what problems they have, you cannot sell to them.”

He started applying that properly, and in one year his team tendered for eleven contracts and won eight of them “because we knew who we were talking to, what they wanted, and what mattered most to them.” The product hadn’t changed. What changed was that he now knew the person sitting across the table well enough to explain how that same product solved their exact problem.

Mapping two markets, then finding where they overlap

When Mark set out to understand MPI’s market, he didn’t start by looking for a positioning line. He started by mapping two audiences separately, on their own terms: roughly 290,000 mining professionals on the candidate side, and around 1,100 client businesses who’d actually used a recruitment agency in the past year on the other. Two research exercises, two different sets of questions, run in parallel.

Clients and candidates pick up the phone for entirely different reasons, and collapsing them into one picture too early loses the detail in both. A client is thinking about what’s happening across their market and what their competitors are up to. A candidate is asking whether now is the right time to move, and what they stand to gain from it.

It was only once he’d understood each properly that a pattern showed up: what clients wanted from an agency and what candidates wanted turned out to be closer than he’d expected. That overlap became MPI’s positioning — not guessed at in a boardroom, but built from where two separate sets of research actually met.

Five weeks before a single post went out

So when Mark joined MPI, research came first before a single campaign, before a single post. “Market research was the first starting point, to understand everything, in order to put the strategy together,” he said.

That meant working out what data MPI already had, what was missing, and then getting on the phone to recent clients. It took five to six weeks before the patterns started to emerge: the real total addressable market, the segments, and where the biggest gap in the funnel sat.

That became the spine of MPI’s first twelve-month strategy, not three to five years, because “markets move quickly, projects stall, recessions happen. You’ve got to be flexible enough to adjust.” The instinct the whole way through, he admitted, was to skip straight past the research and get something out the door. “Marketers are magpies, we’re attracted to the next shiny thing.” It would have been easy to launch a few posts in week one just to look busy. Holding his nerve through five or six weeks of research, with a new employer watching, was harder than the research itself.

The weekly committee that shares the weight

Research gave Mark a strategy. It didn’t give him leadership’s trust on its own, that came from a structure he built alongside it. MPI runs a weekly “marketing committee”: the CEO, the MD, the GM and Mark, all in the room together, sharing ownership of the plan rather than leaving one marketer to carry it and hope leadership notices it’s working.

“It’s good having four sets of eyes over it, rather than one person being left on their own,” he said. “I’ve heard of marketers being lone marketers, and that’s a lonely place to be.” The buy-in started before he’d even taken the job. The final interview stage was built around how he’d approach the role if he joined and it’s carried through since. “They said, ‘we want to support you, but we also want to learn from you,’ and that’s rare. I learn from them too.”

It’s also how the numbers get reported. Leadership doesn’t hear about campaigns delivered, they hear about the numbers that actually move revenue: traffic, registrations, pipeline. If what marketing reports can’t be tied to money, Mark’s view is that leadership will never fully trust the plan, no matter how sound the strategy behind it is.

How to really get the words your marketing needs

The research told Mark what to say. Getting the exact words, the phrases that actually land with clients and candidates, took a second layer: recording the conversations, and listening back properly.

He keeps the calls unscripted on purpose. Over-preparedness gets you short, safe answers. The gems, he says, come on the listen-back, because nobody catches everything live or types fast enough to keep up. A client will say something offhand “other agencies don’t do X, you did it this way, that’s what made the difference” and that’s the line that ends up in the copy, almost word for word. It’s specific, it’s recognisable to every other client who’s been in the same position, and it’s far more useful than anything written from a brief.

“When you talk in the client’s or the candidate’s language, they connect with it,” Mark says. The research tells you what to say. The interviews tell you how to say it and that’s the part AI can’t do for you. It can give you an answer, but it can’t give you the specific, unscripted thing a client says when they think back to why they picked you over the other five options they had.

What are the 95% waiting for?

Even with the right message, most of the market isn’t ready to act on it. Mark works from the 95/5 rule: at any one time, only around 5% of your market is in active buying mode. “What are the 95% doing? You’ve got to keep building those mental cues and get the brand awareness out there.”

You can’t make someone ready to buy before they’re ready. What you can do is make sure your name is the one that comes to mind when they are, which is why MPI’s first twelve months were built as a deliberate brand-awareness play rather than a lead-generation sprint. That takes patience most businesses aren’t set up for, and it’s exactly the discipline the marketing committee and the twelve-month strategy exist to protect.

The results are now starting to show. Website traffic and engagement has more than doubled. Candidate registrations and first-time applications are climbing month on month. MPI is coming up in conversations it wasn’t part of before, including a company that found them through a simple Google search and worked its way through the site unprompted. None of that came from doing more. It came from knowing where to point the effort, and having the research to back the decision when it mattered.

How to approach this in your business

You need ten conversations and the discipline to actually listen to them.

Pick your last ten clients. Recent ones from the last two or three months.
Get someone else to set the call up, framed as a general catch-up rather than a research interview. It changes how honestly people answer.
Don’t send the questions ahead. It’s too easy to prepare a short, safe answer.
Ask why they chose your business, or why they nearly chose someone else and let them finish their sentences without jumping in.
Record it if you can. You won’t catch everything live, and the best lines usually come on the listen-back.
Look for the pattern across all ten calls, not just the one great quote. The pattern is the strategy.
Treat negative feedback as the most useful feedback you’ll get. It’s rare, and it tells you exactly where to improve.

None of this needs a research budget or a marketing department. It needs curiosity about the people you’re actually trying to reach, and the discipline to ask before you assume.