To attract clients to a logistics company online, you need to be where customers look for a carrier themselves — in search results for their route and on maps — and to answer their enquiry before anyone else does. That takes a page for each route, a business listing on maps, case studies and reviews on the website, and a fast response even at night. And so as not to spend money blindly, it's worth knowing which channel brings in enquiries.
Freight exchanges, tenders and cold calling are also ways to find clients in logistics, but that's a separate topic. Here we look only at online channels.
How to attract clients to a logistics company from search
Customers don't search for "a logistics company" in general. They search for their route: "freight Tashkent to Almaty", "cargo delivery from China to Uzbekistan", "man and van Tashkent". If your website has a single "Transport across the CIS" page, you're unlikely to be found for searches like these.
Search promotion for a logistics company rests on route pages. Each one has its own heading with the route, text about what you carry on that route and in which trucks, and an enquiry button. If customers search in Uzbek, you need pages in Uzbek too, for example for searches like "yuk tashish Toshkent".
Where to start: list the routes you run the most trips on and make a page for each. Then check in your analytics which searches bring people to them, and add new routes.
Choosing the search queries and building a page structure around them is a job for search engine optimisation. What the page itself needs so that visitors go on to send an enquiry is covered in our article on freight company websites.
Your business listing on maps
For transport within the city, maps work like a search engine: people often search for "freight transport" or "van with driver" right in Yandex Maps, 2GIS and Google Maps. For intercity and international transport, the listing works as a check: the company has an address, an office and reviews, so it's real.
What to fill in on the listing:
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Categories and services. Freight transport, removals, loading crews: everything you actually do.
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Description. Briefly: what kind of transport, on which routes and how to send an enquiry.
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Photos. Trucks, the office, loading. Real photos say more about a company than a description does.
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Opening hours and contacts. Phone, Telegram and a link to the website, ideally straight to the page with your routes.
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Reviews. Ask satisfied customers to leave a review, and reply to every one, including the bad ones.
Fill in a listing on every service your customers use, and make sure the address, phone number and opening hours match everywhere. If you have no office for visitors, check each service's rules on how to show your address in that case.
Case studies and customer reviews on the website
A corporate customer often chooses not on the lowest price but on whether they can trust you with their cargo. Before sending an enquiry, they look on the website for the answer to a simple question: have you carried anything similar?
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Case studies. A short story of a job: what was carried, from where to where, what the difficulty was and how it was solved. A few stories like this for your main routes say more than a list of advantages.
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Reviews. With the company name and the person's name, if the customer agrees. A letter of thanks on company letterhead works too.
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Customer logos. Only with their consent; agree in advance on what you can show.
Show case studies where people look for them: on a route page, a story about that particular route. If a customer doesn't want to be named, describe the job without the name: industry, cargo, route.
Add case studies yourself, without a programmer: a recent job on the website shows that the company is working right now.
Response speed: an enquiry shouldn't wait until morning
A customer sends an enquiry at 21:40 and immediately writes to two more carriers. Whoever replies first is more likely to win the job. If your dispatcher only sees the enquiry in the morning, the trip will most likely have gone to someone else.
Three tools help you avoid losing out on speed:
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Telegram notifications. An enquiry from the website doesn't go to an inbox that gets opened once a day but straight to the dispatcher's Telegram, with the route and contact details.
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A Telegram bot. It takes enquiries at any time, asks about the route, cargo and date, and immediately tells the customer that the enquiry has been received and when they'll be contacted.
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CRM. Every enquiry, whether from the website or the bot, goes to a specific dispatcher. If they don't reply in time, the CRM reminds them or their manager.
We went through how to set this up for carriers and freight forwarders in detail in our article on CRM for freight transport.
Which channel brings in enquiries
Without tracking, it's easy to go on paying for a long time for a channel that only seems to work. The minimum worth setting up:
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Goals in Yandex Metrica. Form submissions, clicks on the Telegram button, clicks on the phone number. That way you can see which pages and which sources the enquiries come from.
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Tracking tags in ad links. Each ad has its own link, and the report shows which one brought in the customer.
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The question "How did you hear about us?" The dispatcher asks every new customer and records the answer in the CRM. It's especially useful with calls: if someone dialled the number by hand after seeing it on a truck or a business card, analytics won't show it.
Look not only at the number of enquiries but also at how many of them turned into trips: a channel with fewer enquiries sometimes brings in more customers.
The next step is to connect advertising, the website, the CRM and payments, so that you see not just enquiries but the money from each channel. We explained how this works in our article on end-to-end analytics.
Checklist
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Routes. Does each main route have its own page on the website?
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Search. Does your website come up for "freight" plus your main route?
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Maps. Is the company on Yandex Maps, 2GIS and Google Maps, with photos, opening hours and a link to the website?
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Trust. Are there case studies and reviews from real customers on the website?
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A night-time enquiry. If a customer writes at 23:00, will they know before morning that the enquiry has been received?
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Sources. Do you know where your last ten enquiries came from?
If you want customers to find you on their own, we can help with route pages, map listings and enquiries that don't get lost overnight. See what we do for logistics companies, and an example from this industry: the Renoda Logistics website.