Aaron Tian

Growth Marketer & Startup Consultant

Flightdrop: Building a Free Influencer Marketing Campaign

As a travel start-up, Flightdrop needed to break into a saturated market and drive app installs on a limited budget. So we started an influencer referral campaign, which reached over 120K people, generated 8850 likes, 337 unique comments, and 1000+ new app downloads. All for free. Read on below to see how we did it.

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Step 1: Setup

The CEO and I started with the idea of Flightdrop Ambassadors, people who would help us break into the large and diverse online travel community. To earn their loyalty and trust, we created a simple referral program: Ambassadors invite friends to download Flightdrop by sharing their unique referral link. Once they reach 150 downloads, we award them a free flight. We built this system into the app and began educating users with these two blog posts: A n intro to the program, and our guide to earning more referrals.

Step Two: Outreach

The next step was actually getting people on board. As a startup, we didn’t have as much name recognition as our competitors, so we needed to make up for it with personality. I sent out nearly 200 personalized pitches in a week via email and Instagram DMs and followed up on every single one (see here for proof).

Step Three: Staying Proactive

Guiding our influencers to post and getting their audience to download was a bigger challenge than expected. I averaged 6-8 emails exchanged with each influencer before achieving a post, and used these posts as opportunities to leverage the community for feedback on our app. It also shined a light on a host of other in-app problems and bugs, another reason why this intermediate and lean stage of growth was crucial to the new app's development.

Step Four: Review

After two weeks of heavily promoting this campaign, it was time assess the results: This program alone reached over 120K people, generated 8850 likes, 337 unique comments, and 1000+ app downloads. Best of all, we ran it all without spending a cent. See our Instagram review document here (click to the second tab "Published Instagram Parters" at the bottom).