Transport North East

The committee brings together the region’s two Combined Authorities (North of Tyne Combined Authority covering Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland, and the North East Combined Authority covering Durham, Gateshead, Sunderland and South Tyneside) which have transport powers for the region.

The focus is to implement a vision of a green, healthy, dynamic and thriving North East region. The aim for Transport North East is to deliver a modern, robust transport system region-wide and promote greener, more sustainable travel. The services that Transport North East include are the Tyne Tunnel, Nexus – which operates the Tyne and Wear Metro, the Shields Ferry, bus stations and shelters along with the North East Rail Management Unit.

Initially Transport North East required a brand new website, brand identity and social media strategy to help launch their vision of implementing game-changing transport schemes and initiatives for the North East, to improve the experience for thousands of passengers travelling across the North East.

The challenge was to build a website from scratch that aligned with the professionalism and ethos of Transport North East. This required creating a brand identity to ensure all marketing collateral was cohesive, this included the website, social media, print advertising, business cards and video content. 

Transport North East needed a marketing and creative agency that would be in regular communication to help implement creative digital content, professionally host the website as well as ensuring the marketing collateral produced is all of a high quality.

We began by listening to the client to ensure we properly understood their brand requirements. With this information it allowed us to build a comprehensive set of brand guidelines that portrayed the style that Transport North East envisioned. With the brand in place we were able to build their website to the specifications required, using the guidelines and our knowledge of their objectives as reference points. Along with building and launching the website, we also currently host and maintain the website, to ensure the site is optimised for maximum impact.

With the brand guidelines in place, we were also tasked with producing internal documentation and external marketing collateral which included print advertising and research documents. 

Another project that required our support was the regional wide campaign, Big Bus Conversation. As part of the campaign they wanted the general public to video themselves talking about what they want from the bus service in the North East. To generate engagement and videos, we promoted the videos on Facebook via advertising, this in turn drove traffic to the website and provided valuable feedback for Transport North East.

Since the launch of the website in November 2020 up until June 2023, the website has achieved 70,343 users, 96,470 sessions and 174,514 page views. The demographics of the website indicate that the traffic is coming from Newcastle and London. The top channels that drive traffic to the website are social media at 31%, organic search at 29% and direct traffic at 24%. The top pages that receive the most traffic over the two and half year time period is the homepage with 22,385 views, Transport Plan with 20,552 views and the Tyne Tunnel with 4,998 views. 

These website statistics demonstrate how the website development and backend support has allowed the website to grow dramatically over the past three years. From January 2022 to June 2023 the site users increased 11.4%, while in the same period the organic search traffic increased 38% and the direct traffic increased by 22%.

With regards to our social media support we helped Transport North East with a number of paid campaigns on Facebook to help drive traffic to particular areas of their website. Here are some of the statistics behind the paid Facebook social media campaigns that we developed.