The Challenge
Market-leading budget coach operator megabus chose Red Hot Penny to increase annual revenue and profitability. Their PPC and Biddable Media, Paid Social, Copywriting and Organic Search services were all on-board to implement an integrated digital strategy.
The Solution
When Red Hot Penny and megabus partnered in October 2016, Red Hot Penny implemented a strategy across PPC and Biddable Media, Paid Social, Organic Search, Creative Content and Copywriting to increase the revenue and profitability of the business.
Paid Search account overhaul: First stop, Red Hot Penny took over their paid search efforts, implementing a full account rebuild and introducing paid social services. They carried out granular campaigns, cross negation and large-scale management of search terms to improve its efficiency by 25 per cent in just 6 months. Careful testing for high level and generic terms such as ‘Bus Trip’ meant these were reintroduced to open up the number of campaigns available to megabus.
Getting social: Their paid social campaigns focused on GEO targeting to attract specific customers including students and festival-goers who have a strong presence on Facebook and Instagram. Harnessing the power of social required a complex set of negations to only show for highly relevant traffic and was pivotal to Red Hot Penny’s strategy for growth.
Mega content: Red Hot Penny’s Organic Search and Copywriting teams paired up to help target similar audiences to their paid social strategy. Working on guides to summer festivals in the UK that megabus offer routes to and from, they targeted keywords to help drive traffic to site. These guides offer helpful content positioning megabus as an expert in the field and increasing brand engagement.
Prepare for migration: The Red Hot Penny team were presented with a new challenge in the form of megabus’s site migration. Working closely with megabus’s migration team, Red Hot Penny provide ongoing support to ensure a smooth transition from their old site to a new one.
The Results
Better efficiency and increased revenue: Paid search cost per action was reduced by 25 per cent within 6 months of rebuilding megabus’s account. With an increase in spend of just 11 per cent, Red Hot Penny’s team managed to grow revenue by 92 per cent YoY.
High visibility: megabus saw a 67 per cent increase in organic search visibility YoY across the whole site, with over 600 new keywords ranking on pages 1 and 2 of search results.
Connecting megabus with new audiences: Red Hot Penny’s Creative Content team was brought on board to create shareable quizzes, guides and more, to help megabus on their route to growth.