When Arnab Majumdar launched Peersway in 2016, he began with a simple test: would college students with 500 followers post branded content for a small fee? That experiment grew into a platform that connects brands with nano-influencers, introducing a fresh approach to social media marketing.

The Power of Peer Recommendations

The platform’s strategy centers on smaller creators who drive genuine engagement. “When making buying decisions, you often lean on your friends’ experiences,” Arnab notes. “You ask them, ‘Hey, did this work for you, or what are you using for this purpose?'”

He illustrates this with a practical example: “When you’re traveling, and random people that you don’t even know, they’re talking about a Netflix show… if that keeps happening every other day, then you think, ‘Okay, maybe I should check out this Netflix show.’ That is the gap.” 

“Constantly being exposed through your peer network to new services and products will eventually convince you to give that a shot,” he clarifies.

The platform’s growth potential stems from its focus on accessibility. “If you’re going to build a network, it has to be scalable,” Arnab emphasizes. “You won’t have millions of mega influencers, but you would have millions of these smaller nano influencers. So you can build a very strong network.”

A Two-Pronged Business Strategy

Peersway’s business model adapted as social media marketing matured. “We started as an agency where we would do everything end to end,” Arnab explains. 

“Our clients would come to us and say, ‘Hey, we need this many people.’ We would send a price quote that doing this campaign will cost you $5,000 to $10,000. We would take the money; we would pay out the influencers. Whatever remains is our earning.”

Marketing agencies handling comprehensive campaigns comprise their primary client base. “About 70% of our clients are marketing and PR companies and 30% of them would be brand direct,” Arnab notes. “What happens is if it’s a big company, they are working with their own PR firm or the marketing agency doing 360-degree marketing—they’re doing TV ads, radio, jingle, paid media… But for the influencer marketing piece, they would come to us.”

The platform excels at managing large-scale campaigns. “Managing five influencers is okay [but] managing 50 influencers becomes very difficult,” Arnab explains. “That’s where a company specializing in nanos has an advantage because we have structured the platform and our processes to run these large-scale campaigns.”

2020’s e-commerce surge prompted new opportunities. “We started getting interest from these e-commerce brands who wanted to do marketing, but they did not have the budget to hire a marketing agency,” Arnab recalls. “We thought we already have this infrastructure, this platform which we are using to launch our own campaigns, manage our own processes. Why don’t we spin it off as a platform for these smaller brands?”

This led to their self-service platform, offering brands a free first campaign. “Going forward, for every campaign, we charge $50 every time they launch a campaign,” Arnab states. “These are smaller brands; they are very price-sensitive. They want to use the product first and see if it’s useful.”

The model benefits emerging brands through product-based compensation. “These smaller brands can come in, pay out these influences in terms of products, get content in return, and get access to a platform for $50 a project,” Arnab explains. “If they are going to run marketing campaigns only certain times of the year—holiday season, spring, summer, or back to school—they can activate it and then just pay for it at the time.”

The system functions as a recruitment platform for influencer campaigns. “It’s easy for you because you already have 20 applications,” Arnab notes. “[If you] need to work with three people, find the top three, approve them, and move forward.”

Maintaining High Standards

Peersway’s success relies on thorough vetting processes. “When somebody gets to be part of the roster or the network, they create an account on our website,” Arnab explains. “Once they have created an account, we would do a manual review because, at the end of the day, we are working with these humans sharing stories.”

The evaluation process examines multiple factors. “We look at the content itself. How frequently are they creating content?” he details. “[Are] they dropping one piece of content a month? Then you know that this person is not a good fit because if they’re creating one piece of content and they’re going to publish branded content, then the followers are not going to watch that.”

Engagement quality receives scrutiny. “It’s not about how many likes and how many comments. It’s about the comments themselves,” Arnab emphasizes. “Is it just emojis? Then you know it’s fake. Are they saying, ‘Hey, I haven’t seen Ben for a while; we should catch up for coffee?’ Then you know that these are real community people connecting on a personal level.”

Beyond Metrics: The Human Element

While analytics inform decisions, Arnab advocates considering the emotional impact. “If it had been up to me, I would have looked at how many impressions or views the content got. For me, that is the biggest metric,” he says. “Sometimes, people focus on data too much, but sometimes data is just half of the story or maybe not even half of the story.”

He highlights content’s emotional resonance: “Humor is such an underrated thing when it comes to social media marketing. When we run campaigns, I still remember some images and videos from campaigns, but not all of them. And those are the ones who are unique. These styles of storytelling are important.”

This philosophy leads to surprising outcomes. “We were working with this client. Of the 20 people, one drove more sales than the remaining 19. And that one person also wasn’t the first choice of the brand,” Arnab reveals. “They were like, ‘Okay, this person has a different style of creating content. Let’s work with them.’ That person ended up delivering more sales than the remaining 19 of them in the group.”

Innovation and Industry Impact

Peersway aims to streamline campaign management through automation. “About 60 to 70% of the time you spend in an influencer campaign is managing a campaign,” Arnab explains. “Once the brand has approved the influencer, the shipping address will be needed to ship the products. 

“Once the product arrives, the influencer has a certain amount of time to create content; then the content comes back for review, it’s reviewed, then it’s posted, then the performance is gathered,” he adds.

This structured process presents optimization opportunities. “There is a lot of time wasted where the brand might forget to ship the products. The back-and-forth kills a lot of time,” Arnab notes. “If you can automate that process, you’ll make the process so much more efficient.”

The company targets specialized market segments. “Brands that focus on dietary restrictions don’t find many related influences structured,” Arnab explains. “If you could bring structure to that industry that you have the largest network of gluten-free or plant-based influencers… that is one vertical that I think in the coming years will be very significant.”

Representation remains a key focus. “The next thing is finding BIPOC influences,” Arnab emphasizes. “You would notice that a lot of the money and the projects are not going to BIPOC influencers now because it’s difficult to find them.”

This challenge presents opportunities, particularly in Canada. “Canada is a very multicultural society,” Arnab notes. “Brands want to run these multicultural campaigns targeting certain demographics, so we’re trying to make that easier.”

Looking ahead, Arnab sees nano influencers becoming essential for brands. “I think they’re going to be very important going forward because the way data and information are being spread, these nano influencers would all become small media agencies,” he predicts. “If I need to discover a local restaurant, chances are I will discover it through an influencer I follow who has shared how amazing the food is.”

He stresses that community relationships take time to develop. “It’s difficult for new providers and platforms because the community is not built in a day,” Arnab explains. “Somebody might be very good in tech; they can build a fantastic platform and add AI, but human relationships take time to build.”

Arnab believes success depends on firsthand platform experience. “One of the things that I feel that the industry would benefit a lot is if the people managing influencer campaigns are themselves influencers,” he asserts. 

The entrepreneur believes people who are not influencers write “the crappiest brief” for campaigns, adding that they are micromanaging when it comes to the content and review process.

“This industry is about humans. It’s about human relationships and human stories,” Arnab notes. “You need to be compassionate to that person, to that influencer. You need to relate to that. If you cannot, success would be difficult.”