The Saudi Shortcut: How Balady+ Out-Navigates the Global Giants
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Earning User Confidence in a Crowded Navigation Market
Turns out, the fastest route isn’t always the one your uncle swears by.
Balady+ is Saudi Arabia’s locally built navigation app that understands its people’s needs better than anyone else, because it was made by Saudis, for Saudis.
The app entered a market dominated by global navigation platforms, where competing on data alone wasn’t enough. To earn real adoption, the brand needed to prove its local relevance, cultural intuition, and ability to solve navigation pain points others often overlook.
But consumers don’t talk about “the future of local navigation." They talk about whether an app makes their daily life easier, whether they trust it, and whether it understands the realities of moving around Saudi Arabia.
The real challenge was turning a new navigation app into something people felt confident using in their everyday routes.
Build User Confidence and Drive Early Adoption
Beyond downloads, the campaign’s goal was to drive product usage, gather early feedback, highlight its unique value, and build a community of early adopters who’d help shape what comes next.
The Route We Took
We knew competing with global navigation giants wasn’t about having more data, but rather about achieving better local relevance.
To start, Balady+ positioned itself as a next-generation local map, building its presence by leaning into everyday Saudi humor and relatable navigation moments, delivering on its promise of a navigation app that truly understands Saudi life.
Our role was to validate and amplify that promise through a creator-first approach, integrating the brand’s mission into people’s conversations.
However, a regular consumer won’t go around saying, “I use this app because it represents the future of local navigation.” Instead, they talk about whether it’s useful, whether they trust it, and whether it makes their daily life easier.
That’s why we needed an influencer premise: a human-sounding belief that creators could express naturally, and audiences could genuinely adopt.
Since Balady+ is still a startup, it couldn’t claim overnight superiority or pretend to be Google Maps. Instead, it had to compete where it truly had an edge: local intuition, cultural understanding, and solving the pains global platforms overlook.
And when a product consistently meets local needs, even in its early stages, people naturally develop confidence in its direction; not because it’s perfect today, but because it’s clearly on the right track.
That’s exactly how we arrived at our influence premise: “I am confident in where it’s going.” A single, clear belief we want creators to express and audiences to internalize.
Creator Selection
Before selecting creators, we first mapped the communities most affected by navigation pain points: daily commuters, foodies & socialites, travelers, techies, and working professionals.
Despite their different lifestyles, these groups share a common mental state: being on time and feeling in control matters. They frequently get frustrated by the gaps in global navigation apps: from getting lost on the way to meetings, to reaching restaurants with incorrect locations, to struggling with frequent road changes during trips.
However, the creator universe of such communities is vast.
So how did we narrow it down to a specific pool of creators?
The Technology Behind it All
With the help of our proprietary technology, we identified our target creators to determine their potential impact, role, and audience behavior. applying the following essential criteria:
- Performance Strength: We set a minimum benchmark of iScore 6/10, ensuring creators selected were performing above average. The iScore is an AI-powered performance rating that automatically analyzes a creator’s viewership and engagement rates in comparison to others within the same category, helping us identify creators who constantly delivers content that genuinely influences audiences.
- Audience Fit: we prioritized Saudi creators whose audience profiles aligns closely with the key segments within our target communities.
- Content Fit: We evaluated content quality, consistency, and scalability, prioritizing creators whose style and posting behavior naturally aligned with navigation moments and local movement use cases.
In the end, this framework led us to a refined pool of 21 Saudi creators, the strongest fit to bring the Balady+ story to life.
Content Roll-Out
To ensure every piece of content served a clear role within the customer journey, the campaign rolled out across carefully planned phases.
Phase 1:
Before and during Hajj, we collaborated with neighborhood-focused accounts in Makkah to highlight Balady+’s standout 3D navigation feature, a capability that proved invaluable for pilgrims and locals navigating the city’s busiest season.
Phase 2:
As the campaign expanded, mega and macro creators took the lead in building awareness and relatability.
Frequent travelers leaned into lane-level accuracy and airport navigation, demonstrating how Balady+ guides you through exits, terminals, and constantly changing roads with precision.
Tech creators adopted a testing and review approach, testing the app themselves and sharing honest feedback on UI, responsiveness, and real-time accuracy - building trust through proof, not claims.
Comedy and lifestyle creators highlighted everyday navigation pain points, missing turns, unexpected speed bumps, confusing detours, or getting lost in new areas, then showed how Balady+ solves them through speed alerts, live road updates, and accurate rerouting, turning frustration into comedic moments with a clear payoff.
As momentum grew, mid- and micro creators amplified conversions, driving recommendations through tight, trusted communities.
Each creator owned the feature that fit their world and audience, keeping the campaign real, native, and unscripted.
We also activated TikTok Anchors across organic content, a capability we have access to as an official TikTok partner. Anchors appear as in-video CTA buttons directly on the creator’s video, giving viewers a frictionless way to take action.
Since the campaign ran in Saudi Arabia, where TikTok is a key driver of discovery and decision-making, Anchors helped us convert interest faster by replacing the usual “link in bio” flow with a direct-tap CTA, simplifying the download path and boosting conversions.
All content was created organically, with the potential to boost top-performing videos directly from creators’ pages, a tactic designed to drive amplification for the content that people loved.
In parallel, we needed the brand page to stay active and publish its own content, so we brought in a UGC creator to produce a series of six short-form videos during a trip across Abha and Al-Baha, capturing local tourism through spontaneous, real-life storytelling and feeding the brand page with fresh, consistent content.
Phase 3: The Courage to Sponsor Live Content
Recognizing the rapid growth and cultural momentum of JACO, KSA’s leading live-streaming platform, Balady+ was among the first advertisers to activate creators on JACO and connect directly with audiences in real-time.
Creators hosted interactive live sessions sharing their plans of local travel and diving into personal “road-struggles” stories. They naturally integrated Balady+ into their storytelling, engaged directly with audiences, answered questions, and demoed the app’s features live on stream.
To maximize impact, JACO triggered push notifications during the livestreams, prompting viewers to download the app and explore it for themselves.
This approach allowed us to leverage a 2-way conversation, gathering real-time feedback while exposing Balady+ to diverse user segments.
Some viewers already had the app and shared what worked for them. Others downloaded it during the live and immediately flagged points of confusion or friction.
That mix of instant reactions helped the brand prioritize what truly mattered and accelerate improvements based on real user behavior, not assumptions.
This wasn’t transactional creator content, but a community-driven creator strategy that builds trust and brings to life the brand’s eagerness to listen, not just talk.
