Stagecoach Manchester’s Get on the Buzz campaign

Objective

• To listen and engage with young people in Greater Manchester
• Find out their views on issues relevant to bus services
• To be seen to be responsive
• To act on the intelligence received

Target Audience

• Young people of Greater Manchester aged between 16 – 25 years of age
• Students, young professionals, unemployed and young parents

Strategy

• Have a presence on key social media channels to meet, interact and engage with the target audience to obtain a valuable insight into why people in this age group don’t use the bus and why others do
• Discuss topics such as ticket prices, new technology and barriers such as anti-social behaviour
• Social media was the recommended approach as no other form of traditional marketing channels would be able to reach out and engage in this way with 16 – 25 year olds
• Key social media channels were established and populated with content, competitions, giveaways and news to drive the audience onto the campaign website
• Competition to become the ‘Face of Stagecoach Manchester’ ran alongside

Implementation

• Get on the Buzz campaign was born –branded to appeal to the target audience rather than immediately being identified as a Stagecoach Manchester campaign
• Built a NING platform to host all competition details and provided access for people to load up their own video entries
• Acquired www.getonthebuzz.co.uk as a domain name
• Set up supporting social media channels to engage with target audience and push through to www.getonthebuzz.co.uk –YouTube and Twitter
• Twitter was identified as the key channel to obtain feedback on the weekly topics
• Campaign started by seeding out relevant content to the identified audience group – tweets and status updates such as new music videos, gig reviews, celebrity spots in the city
• The weekly discussion topics followed and when the engagement gathered pace the ‘Face of’ competition was launched via a video message on the site and seeding on all of the campaign channels
• Submitted entries were also distributed to other social media channels and loaded up on the YouTube channel for people to view
• A series of social media only competitions and special offers were scheduled

Juice was aware that Stagecoach Manchester is a predominant brand in the city so to engage with a younger audience the campaign name needed to appeal to them and not be immediately recognised as being run by a large organisation

Rather than simply seeding out promotions, ticket offers and news, Juice gave 16-25 year olds a platform for them to express their own views of the bus service – and in essence become champions of the service (‘Face of’ competition) – using a relatively niche social media platform (NING)

Results

Stagecoach Manchester now has an insight into how much this audience would be willing to pay for a weekly ticket, barriers to them using the bus, how to tackle anti-social behaviour and the types of incentives that would appeal to 16-25 year olds.