How to choose a marketing agency for a logistics company

Specialist or generalist?

A generalist agency can run ads. What it cannot do on day one is write about consolidation, customs clearance or CargoWise without you explaining it first. You pay for that learning curve in the first three months. A specialist arrives knowing your buyers, your systems and your vocabulary.

The trade off is that specialists are fewer, and some are small. Judge them on depth of experience, not headcount.

Ten questions to ask before you sign

1. Which logistics or freight tech companies have you worked with, and can I speak to one?
2. What exactly will you do in the first 30, 60 and 90 days?
3. What do you measure: traffic, leads, or enquiries that turn into quotes?
4. How do enquiries reach our CRM, and who follows them up?
5. Who works on our account day to day, and how senior are they?
6. Can we see live reporting, or only a monthly PDF?
7. Which channels would you not run for us, and why?
8. How do you work with our systems: CargoWise, our TMS, WhatsApp?
9. Who owns the ad accounts, content and data if we leave?
10. What is the notice period?

Red flags

• Guaranteed rankings or a guaranteed number of leads.
• Reporting built on impressions, followers and clicks.
• A long lock in contract before anything is proven.
• Ad and analytics accounts set up in the agency's name instead of yours.
• Senior people in the pitch, junior people you never met doing the work.
• No questions about your lanes, margins or sales process.

What it should cost

For a small or mid size forwarder, a serious retainer usually lands between $2,500 and $8,000 per month including management. Below that, you usually get one channel done thinly. Media spend for paid campaigns sits on top. Price it against the gross profit from one new regular shipper, not against revenue. Our freight forwarder marketing budget guide has benchmarks by company size.

How to judge the first 90 days

• Month one: tracking, CRM linkage, website fixes and first campaigns live.
• Month two: first enquiries from paid and outbound, each with a clear source.
• Month three: cost per enquiry known, the best channel doubled, the weakest one cut, early movement in search.

If you reach month three with no tracked enquiries and no clear explanation, that tells you what you need to know.

Agency or in house?

One in house hire rarely covers strategy, content, ads, design, web and outbound. An agency gives you a team for roughly the cost of one senior hire. In house wins once you have a proven engine and enough volume to keep several specialists busy. Many forwarders do both: one in house marketer who owns the plan, and an agency that executes it.