From Obscure Routes to Booked Flights: Uncovering Niche Influencer Goldmines with Web Data

Our client, a fast-growing budget airline, faced a classic growth paradox. Their business model thrived on opening new, underserved routes to interesting, but not-yet-mainstream, destinations. While opening a route from Berlin to the Azores or London to Cluj-Napoca was operationally sound, marketing it was a nightmare. Standard digital ads had low conversion, and the ROI on previous campaigns with mega-travel influencers for major hubs like Paris or Rome simply wouldn't translate to these niche markets. They were spending a fortune for beautiful photos that didn't move the needle on ticket sales for these specific routes.

The core challenge was one of authenticity and precision. How could they reach the specific German hiking community that would be thrilled by the Azores' volcanic trails, or the British digital nomad community that would see Cluj-Napoca as their next affordable base? Their marketing team was bogged down in a manual, time-consuming process of searching hashtags like #azoreshiking, yielding a mix of low-quality accounts and hyper-expensive creators who were wrong for the brand. They needed a scalable way to find the 'goldilocks' influencers: big enough to have an impact, niche enough to be credible, and with an audience that was genuinely convertible.

This is where our team at Iceberg Data came in. We proposed a radical shift in strategy: stop chasing follower counts and start hunting for thematic relevance and audience intent . We designed a comprehensive data collection and analysis project to build a targeted influencer pipeline for them.

Our process was forensic. We deployed our web scraping infrastructure to gather public data from over 500,000 profiles across Instagram, TikTok, and influential travel blogs. We didn't just look at bios. Our NLP models ingested and analyzed millions of words from post captions and, crucially, full video transcripts. For the Azores route, we weren't just searching for 'Azores'; we were looking for contextual phrases like 'my favorite hiking gear,' 'stunning volcanic landscapes,' and 'off-the-beaten-path trails.' For Cluj-Napoca, we searched for 'best European cities for remote work,' 'affordable cost of living,' and 'brutalist architecture tours.' This allowed us to find influencers who were already passionate about the *exact experiences* the destinations offered, even if they hadn't visited yet.

The breakthrough moment came when we analyzed the engagement data. We built a 'True Engagement Rate' score that heavily weighted thoughtful comments over simple likes and used sentiment analysis to identify influencers with genuinely active and positive communities. This immediately filtered out accounts with inflated follower counts and low-quality engagement. We cross-referenced this with data on which competitor airlines these influencers had mentioned, giving our client a clear view of the competitive landscape and potential partnership opportunities.

The final output wasn't just a list of names. It was a ranked and scored dashboard of high-potential partners. For each influencer, we provided their True Engagement Rate, a Niche Relevance Score, and even a suggested campaign angle based on their most popular content. We identified a Berlin-based photographer with only 30,000 followers but whose stunning drone footage of rugged landscapes consistently garnered a 10% engagement rate—a perfect fit for the Azores. We found a UK-based tech blogger who wrote about digital nomadism and had an audience that perfectly matched our client's target demographic for the Cluj-Napoca route.

The client reallocated 30% of their existing influencer budget away from a single mega-influencer and instead activated 50 of these hyper-targeted micro-influencers. Each was given a unique tracking link to measure click-throughs to the booking page. The results were astounding. Within six months, influencer-attributed bookings for these new routes had climbed by 45% . More importantly, the average load factor on these previously risky routes increased by 12 percentage points , turning them into profitable assets for the airline. This project proved that in modern travel marketing, the most powerful voice isn't always the loudest; it's the most trusted. And with the right data, you can find those trusted voices at scale.