The Smartican-Uber tie up

As I was sitting at the Smartican office on a fine Saturday morning waiting for the other members of the Marketing Crew to trickle in, one of the new hires entered the room grinning from ear to ear. She told us that she had just taken a free ride in a fancy car from her house in West Delhi all the way to the office. On asking her we were told that Uber was giving discount promo codes to all first time Uber users. Excited much, we all downloaded the Uber app right there and then. Well who doesn’t like a freebie? During the next one week, the Smartican employees must have taken at least 20 Uber rides in total. We then realised that every Smartican user should also be the beneficiary of the privilege Uber was providing.

Smartican is a social media platform for content discovery and distribution with powerful search & filtering functionality. Since its inception, Smartican’s marketing efforts have been aimed at expanding its rapidly growing user-base as well as bringing in businesses and brands on to the portal. In the past few months, Smartican has partnered with companies like UrbanClap, eBay, Airbnb, and Instabounce, etc.

After contacting the concerned person handling Marketing & Partnerships for Uber at New Delhi through LinkedIn, we fixed up a meeting. Before we knew it, the deal was closed and we had received a common promo code for our existing user-base as well as 20,000 unique promo codes for our new users. For a user-base like ours, which is growing exponentially, these 20,000 codes finished within a month and our users were more than happy with this freebie. Through this agreement, Smartican used the Uber codes as an incentive to grow its user-base and Uber gained access to half a million new potential Uber riders across the country. Through Smartican, Uber is now leveraging the ever increasing social media user-base and targeting social media to spread its message.

In the coming few weeks and months, Smartican will be creating all types of video content for Uber. These videos will be focused on promoting women Uber drivers, promoting college students as Uber drivers, as well as promoting UberPool in India. Smartican will also be helping Uber expand into the tier - II cities of India, starting with Guwahati, as Smartican has a wide user-base as well as local reach in a lot of the rural cities in India.

We at Smartican have learnt the importance of partnering and being associated with other companies especially start-ups as these are the companies which will take India forward in the future. Riding solo isn’t the way to go, as together we can surmount all kinds of challenges which may have not been possible alone. Smartican is evolving the way people use social media and Uber is evolving the way the world moves. Together, Smartican and Uber hope to go a long way. Ride with Uber and share your Uber experience on Smartican!