Most logistics companies have two marketing jobs, not one. Shippers need to be won as accounts, and carriers need to be recruited, verified and kept busy. The two groups search differently, respond to different offers, and need different follow-up. This guide shows how to market to both, which channels to use, what to track in the CRM, and how to tell whether the spend is paying.

• Treat shippers and carriers as two funnels. Different search terms, different messages, different landing pages, different pipeline stages. One blended "leads" number hides which side is working.
• Sequence the sides on purpose. If you are building a marketplace or growing a brokerage into new lanes, decide which side you recruit first and in which lanes, rather than advertising to everyone at once.
• Use Google for people already looking, LinkedIn for named job titles and companies. Google Search captures active intent from shippers and carriers. LinkedIn lets you target by job title, company and company size.
• Measure what each side is worth. For carriers: cost per onboarded, active carrier. For shippers: cost per qualified meeting and cost per closed account. Cost per lead is only a diagnostic.
• Put the CRM underneath all of it. Every carrier and shipper should carry its original source and a stage with a date, so you can see which spend produced hauled loads and signed accounts.

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Start by naming which logistics business you are

The right marketing depends on who pays you and who you need to attract. Four common models:

This guide is written for the first, second and fourth models. If you are a carrier, the shipper sections apply to you and you can skip the carrier-recruitment parts.

Two funnels, not one

The shipper funnel

Shippers are business buyers. The person who contacts you may be a logistics manager, a purchasing lead, an operations director or an owner at a smaller company, and a decision often involves more than one person. Expect a quote or lane request, a conversation about service and reliability, sometimes a trial on a few lanes, and then recurring volume.

A workable shipper pipeline:

1. Lead: form, call, quote request or LinkedIn inquiry.
2. Qualified meeting held: a real shipper with freight you can move, in lanes you serve, with a person who influences the decision.
3. Quote or proposal sent.
4. Trial or pilot lanes (if that is how your sales process works).
5. Closed account: signed agreement or recurring volume.

The carrier funnel

Carriers are not customers in the usual sense, but they behave like a pipeline: you acquire them, qualify them, and the supply either shows up or it does not. A lead that never hauls a load for you is not an asset.

A workable carrier pipeline:

1. Lead: a carrier requests onboarding or contact.
2. Verified: authority, insurance and paperwork checked against your requirements.
3. Onboarded: set up in your system and eligible to be offered loads.
4. First load hauled.
5. Active: repeat loads in a defined period.

Because the stages differ, the messages differ. Shippers want reliability, coverage on their lanes and visibility. Carriers want steady loads, fair and prompt payment, and an easy onboarding process. Landing pages that try to speak to both usually speak well to neither.

Why not blend them?

If you total all leads in one report, a flood of carrier sign-ups can make the program look healthy while shipper meetings stay flat, or the reverse. Report each side separately, with its own stages, costs and conversion rates.

Which side first? The marketplace sequencing question

Two-sided platforms face a known chicken-and-egg problem: shippers will not post freight without carriers, and carriers will not onboard without loads. Most of what is written about solving it comes from vendor and practitioner blogs rather than independent research, so treat it as opinion, not proof. The common advice is to pick a defined geography or set of lanes, build supply there first or alongside demand, and expand lane by lane instead of trying to cover the country at once. Sources include practitioner overviews of freight marketplace launches.

What this means for marketing budget, in our view:

• Decide your lanes before you decide your channels. City-level and state-level targeting, landing pages and ad copy all follow from the lanes you can actually serve well.
• Spend where you are short. If you have shipper demand and not enough carriers on a lane, spend on carrier recruitment for that lane. If you have capacity and no freight, spend on shipper acquisition.
• Review the balance monthly. The question is not "how many leads" but "are loads being offered and hauled on the lanes we are advertising?"

Channels that fit logistics

Google Search

Google Search is usually the first place to test, because both sides search for what they need. Shippers search for services, lanes and quotes. Carriers search for loads, freight partners and onboarding. Practical rules:

• Separate campaigns for shippers and carriers. Their keywords, budgets and landing pages differ, and mixing them muddies both the data and the messaging.
• Match the page to the lane or service. Cargobot's program, described below, used landing pages as narrow as city-specific and state-specific to keep them relevant.
• Use negative keywords. Job seekers, drivers looking for employment, freight-rate curiosity searches and services you do not offer will otherwise consume budget. Google's own help notes that negative keywords exclude search terms so ads reach relevant searches, that negatives do not cover close variants automatically, and that too many negatives can reduce reach. Review search terms regularly.
• Track calls and forms with source. Call tracking tied to the CRM shows which keywords bring real shippers and carriers.
• Send results back. Feed qualified and closed stages from the CRM into Google Ads where you can, so bidding learns from real outcomes. Google recommends choosing a qualified lead or converted lead as the goal for lead generation, and notes it keeps the click ID for only 90 days, which matters if your sales cycle is longer.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a fit when you know who you want to reach. According to LinkedIn's help center, you can target by job title, job function and seniority, company, company industry and company size, and build Matched Audiences from a list of companies or contacts or from website and ad engagement. The minimum audience size to run an ad set is 300 member accounts, so very narrow account lists need widening.

Where it fits logistics:

• Shipper decision-makers by title and company size, for example logistics and supply chain managers at companies in the industries and size range you want. Cargobot's program used this approach.
• Named-account campaigns where you have a target list of shippers in the lanes you want. See our posts on account-based marketing and who it is not for.
• Retargeting website visitors who looked at lanes or services but did not ask for a quote.

In our experience LinkedIn costs more per click than Google, so it works best with a tight audience and a clear offer. LinkedIn is less natural for recruiting individual owner-operators, so carriers are usually better reached through search and Meta.

Meta and retargeting for carriers

Cargobot's program used Facebook video and image ads to educate carrier and shipper audiences, plus separate remarketing messages for each. Video that shows how onboarding works, how payment works and what the load flow looks like removes the questions that stop carriers from signing up. Judge it the same way as any carrier channel: cost per onboarded, active carrier, not cost per sign-up.

Content, SEO and AEO

Both sides research before they call. Useful content for logistics:

• For shippers: lane and service pages, how your process works, what happens after you tender a load, how you handle problems, and answers to the questions shippers ask when comparing providers.
• For carriers: how onboarding works, what documents you require, how and when you pay, what lanes and loads you offer, and the answers to the common questions carriers have before they sign.
• Educational resources. Cargobot built video and podcast education for carriers and shippers as a knowledge base on its platform.

Organize it into topic clusters so search engines and AI tools can find the whole set (topic clusters, authority content systems). Put the direct answer near the top of each page. We do not promise placement in AI answers, because those tools do not publish ranking rules. Clear, consistent pages are what we can control.

Referrals and outbound

Industry guides for freight brokers commonly lead with referrals, direct outreach and load board or database research as ways to find shippers. For example, DAT's guide on finding shippers as a freight broker covers these methods. Outbound and referrals work alongside paid and organic, not instead of them. The ads and content make the outbound message more credible, because the prospect can look you up and find substance, a point we make in Inbound vs. Outbound. One rule applies to either: if you email prospects, the FTC says CAN-SPAM makes no exception for business-to-business email, requires a valid postal address, and requires opt-outs to be honored within 10 business days. Have counsel review your outreach practices.

Verification and trust belong in the funnel

Freight is a trust business, and part of the carrier funnel is verification. Under FMCSA rules, a USDOT number identifies a company's operations, and for-hire carriers hauling regulated freight for others in interstate commerce generally also need operating authority (an MC number), with limited exemptions and exceptions for private carriers. FMCSA explains who needs operating authority on its site, and it is updating its registration system, so check current requirements there. Freight brokers must also maintain $75,000 in financial security, through a surety bond or trust fund, according to FMCSA's broker registration guidance.

For marketing, this does three things:

• Make verification a visible, simple step in carrier onboarding, with a list of what you check.
• Say what you verify on shipper-facing pages in plain terms, without claims you cannot back up.
• Count a carrier only when it passes verification, so your cost per onboarded carrier reflects usable capacity. Your own requirements may be stricter than FMCSA's.

This is operations and marketing guidance, not legal or compliance advice. Check current FMCSA rules and your insurer's and counsel's requirements.

Speed and follow-up on both sides

A shipper asking for a quote and a carrier asking about loads are both comparing options and neither waits long. Whatever your hours are, decide what happens when someone contacts you outside them. Practical steps:

• Instant confirmation by text or email when a form or quote request arrives, with the next step.
• Missed-call text-back so a missed call starts a conversation.
• AI first response that answers common questions, collects lane, volume and equipment details, and books a call or alerts the right person. It should gather information and schedule, not quote rates or make commitments. Automated texts and AI voice calls to cell phones generally need prior express written consent under FCC rules, business numbers included, so put consent language on your forms and have counsel review it.
• Follow-up sequences for shippers who requested a quote and went quiet, and for carriers who started onboarding and stalled, with a stop when they respond.
• A named owner for every shipper meeting and a clear handoff from marketing to sales.

Our post on follow-up and the lead scoring guide cover the basics. AI Products + Automation is the service for the first-response layer.

Set up the CRM for two pipelines

You need one CRM, two pipelines and a source on every record.

• Shippers: a deal pipeline with the stages above, deal value or estimated annual volume, lanes, decision-makers and stage dates.
• Carriers: a separate pipeline or object with verification status, equipment, lanes, onboarded date, first load date and last load date. Pull load activity in from your transportation or operations system, because marketing cannot see hauled loads without it.
• Original source, locked, on both so it is not overwritten when someone returns through another channel.
• A required reason when a shipper deal is lost or a carrier drops out of onboarding.

Our CRM implementation guide, pipeline stage framework and closed-loop reporting posts walk through the setup. For connecting the CRM to a transportation management system or other tools, see CRM Migration + Integrations.

What to measure, with a worked example

Formulas in words:

• Cost per onboarded carrier = carrier-side spend divided by carriers that passed verification and were onboarded.
• Cost per active carrier = carrier-side spend divided by carriers that hauled at least one load in the period you define.
• Cost per qualified shipper meeting = shipper-side spend divided by qualified meetings held.
• Cost per closed shipper account = shipper-side spend divided by accounts that signed or started recurring volume.

These numbers are made up to show the math. They are not benchmarks.

Read it this way: the carrier side looks cheap per lead at $30 but costs $250 for each carrier that actually hauls. The shipper side looks expensive per lead at $300, but the right comparison is $7,000 per closed account against what an account is worth in gross profit over the period you care about. If a closed account brings $30,000 of gross profit in its first year, that is a healthy return. If it brings $6,000, it is not. Use your own margin and payback period, not a number from a blog.

Shipper sales cycles can be long, so match spend to a period that fits your own cycle or track by the quarter the lead was created. Our B2B cost per qualified meeting and closed deal guide covers the calculation and a tracking template in depth.

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Proof: Cargobot

Cargobot is a platform that connects shippers and carriers without the use of a broker. It came to GoRizen with a one-page website, no paid advertising, no lead tracking process, and new business coming from cold calls and cold emails.

The program combined Google, LinkedIn and Facebook campaigns, with separate remarketing messages for carriers and shippers; city-specific and state-specific landing pages; call and conversion tracking; the HubSpot CRM with automated workflows and sales sequences; SEO and blog content; and video and podcast education for carriers and shippers. Reporting covered cost per lead and cost per acquisition against quarterly goals.

Results: 12x revenue growth over an 8-year partnership. In the first four months, the program generated 600+ carrier leads and 15+ shipper leads, and by year three Cargobot had more than 15,000 carriers in its database. The tactics described on the case study page date from the early years of the engagement, and platforms have changed since; the partnership has continued.

More results are on the Case Studies page and in the B2B Growth Hub. For plans, see pricing; plan prices do not include ad spend, which is billed separately. Paid Ads Management and SEO + AEO are the two engines most logistics companies start with.

Where to start

1. Name your model and your lanes. Which side do you need most, and where?
2. Split your numbers by side. Last 90 days of leads, qualified meetings and closed accounts for shippers; sign-ups, verified, onboarded and active for carriers.
3. Time your response. Submit your own quote and onboarding forms and call your main line after hours. See what happens and how long it takes.
4. Separate the campaigns and landing pages for shippers and carriers.
5. Set up the two pipelines with a source and stage dates on every record.

Then fix the side with the biggest gap between leads and results first.

Work with GoRizen

GoRizen builds the whole system for B2B companies: paid ads, SEO + AEO, website, CRM, speed-to-lead AI and follow-up, with reporting on qualified meetings and closed deals.

• Get Your Growth Systems Diagnostic: https://growth.gorizen.com/?mode=general
• Book a Growth Plan Call: https://www.gorizen.com/contact-the-rizen-inbound-marketing-team
• Explore the B2B Growth Hub: https://www.gorizen.com/growth-hub-b2b

Logistics and Freight Marketing FAQ

How do freight brokers and logistics companies get more shipper customers?

Most combine referrals and direct outreach with a few measurable channels: Google Search for shippers already looking, LinkedIn for named job titles and companies, and content that answers shipper questions. Whatever you use, track each shipper from first contact to closed account in a CRM so you know which channel produced accounts, not just inquiries.

How do I get more carriers to sign up with my brokerage or platform?

Recruit by lane. Run separate campaigns and landing pages for carriers on the lanes where you are short on capacity, explain onboarding, documents and payment plainly, and use short video to answer the common questions. Measure cost per onboarded, active carrier, not cost per sign-up.

Should I focus on shippers or carriers first?

It depends on which side is limiting you on the lanes you sell. Marketplace advice commonly suggests choosing a defined set of lanes and expanding lane by lane. If you have freight and not enough capacity, recruit carriers for those lanes. If you have capacity and no freight, acquire shippers.

Is LinkedIn or Google better for B2B logistics marketing?

Start with Google if shippers and carriers already search for what you offer, because those clicks show active intent. Add LinkedIn when you need to reach specific job titles, company sizes or named accounts before they search. In our experience LinkedIn costs more per click, so it works best with a tight audience and a clear offer.

What should I track to know if logistics marketing is working?

For shippers, track cost per qualified meeting and cost per closed account. For carriers, track cost per onboarded carrier and cost per active carrier. Keep cost per lead as a diagnostic only, and report the two sides separately with their own stages.

What is a good cost per lead or cost per acquisition in freight?

There is no reliable universal number. Published figures come mostly from vendors and define leads and acquisitions in different ways. Work backward from your own margin per account, your close rate and how much capacity a carrier adds for you.

How long does logistics marketing take to produce results?

It depends on the channel and your sales cycle. Paid campaigns can generate inquiries within weeks, and in Cargobot's case the program produced 600+ carrier leads and 15+ shipper leads in the first four months. Closed shipper accounts lag by at least one sales cycle, and SEO typically takes longer to build.

Do I need a CRM to market a freight or logistics company?

Yes, if you want to know what works. Without a CRM that records source and stage for each shipper and carrier, you can see leads but not which spend produced hauled loads or signed accounts. Set up two pipelines, one for shippers and one for carriers.

Let's Grow Faster Together

If you cannot yet say what an onboarded carrier or a closed shipper account costs you by channel, the gap is usually in the CRM and the handoff between marketing and operations, not in the ads. We will walk through your numbers and show what it would take to report both sides every month.

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