The main aims of the campaign were to build on the ‘Go Green by Train’ campaign from CRN Week 2021, link to King Charles’ well-known concerns for the environment and promote train travel as a sustainable form of transport.
The concept was a series of branded graphics showing the environmental savings from London to venues with Royal connections near railway stations on each of Southeast CRP’s lines.
Line Officers each found at least one venue on their line which had a connection to the Coronation. SCRP’s marketing officer contacted the five TOCs covering the region and each of the venues to ask for their support in promoting the campaign on their social media channels. The marketing officer also calculated the environmental savings for each journey by train from a central London terminus to the nearest station on the relevant Community Rail line for each location.
Branded graphics promoted the individual journeys and used the official Coronation logo.
Many of the web and social media posts used that day’s national Coronation news stories to provide topical interest. Each post promoted the individual venues, relevant TOC and tourist body with tagging and mentions. This led to wider pick-up and content sharing with organic growth.
The campaign ran on SCRP’s website and across all Southeast CRP’s social media channels (Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn). It performed best on Twitter with the top performing monthly post about Brighton’s Royal Pavilion with 7,619 impressions.
Overall, the campaign produced 13 Tweets which had more than 13,000 impressions, 291 engagements, 23 retweets, 11 replies and 59 likes.
It won second place in the Most Effective Communications Campaign category at the Community Rail Awards 2024.
“Rail travel is a key mechanism for visitors to Brighton, particularly from London. The Coronation Connections campaign was imaginative and innovative and a great example of partnership working that definitely brought us new visitors.”