TravelEssex app launch

Essex County Council

| Sustainability campaign

1.

Brief

To launch the new sustainable route-planning app from TravelEssex

2.

What Pier did

Pier delivered an integrated campaign with carefully planned audience targeting, as well as creating content for Essex County Council to champion the app on its channels

3.

Impact

Within four months the Essex-only app had received more than 10,000 downloads

Overview

The TravelEssex app is a useful, free resource developed by Essex County Council to encourage more journeys by foot, bike, bus and train. Pier delivered a programme of PR to drive app downloads in Essex. Our campaign included stakeholder relations, content creation, creator partnerships and media relations.

Story

As part of Essex County Council’s Safer, Greener, Healthier approach to travel, the council wanted to help residents plan more journeys by foot, bike, bus and train. It created the TravelEssex app; a free-to-use, sustainable journey planner.

Pier was briefed to create a plan to reach a wide audience across the county, encompassing residents, businesses, public sector and other stakeholders. To ensure we fully understood the landscape, we mapped out the stakeholders, prioritising groups who were more aligned with the app’s sustainability credentials. Creating a comms package for stakeholders including digital assets, copy and angles, we undertook extensive outreach to put our toolkit into the hands of as many interested parties as possible.

On social media we delivered a comprehensive calendar of content and undertook a photoshoot through the county to bring our social angles to life. Using models, we shot in Clacton-on-Sea, Colchester and Chelmsford with bikes, buses and on foot, delivering a suite of content.

Following an extensive media sell-in at launch, which delivered quality earned media coverage across the county, we created a new opportunity to talk about the app through a hard-working partnership with Essex Pride. Recognising Essex Pride would be a well-attended event in Chelmsford city centre, attracting a broad audience demographic from across the county, we put out a call to action to encourage attendees to use the app to plan their journey.

As part of our Essex Pride activation, we also partnered with Essex-based presenter and content creator Helen Scott on a sponsored post to drive Essex Pride attendees to download the app and use it to plan their journey to the event. This content achieved an above industry average engagement rate of 7%.

The campaign achieved quality earned media coverage across the county, including BBC Radio Essex, and an overall campaign media reach of 371K, as well as numerous pieces of content on our stakeholders channels.

Pier’s winning launch campaign helped drive more than 10,000 app downloads in the first four months since launch.

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TravelEssex app launch application

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