How CARS24 started with a small pilot to test LinkedIn creator marketing — and got results good enough to make it a long-term play.
CARS24 is India's largest used car marketplace. They handle everything — inspection, instant payment, paperwork, loans — so buying or selling a used car doesn't feel like a gamble. Most people know the name. The goal with this campaign was to make the brand actually stick in people's minds when it mattered: when they were thinking about buying a car.
LinkedIn was the right place for that. Working professionals in their 20s and 30s — people actively thinking about buying their first car or upgrading — are on it every day. But CARS24's previous attempts at influencer marketing on the platform had been messy, opaque, and hard to measure. They needed a cleaner way in.
They came to anchors to run a pilot — a small, controlled test to see if LinkedIn influencer marketing could actually deliver real brand awareness, with real data to show for it. What happened next turned that pilot into something bigger.
CARS24 had tried influencer marketing before. The frustration wasn't just bad results — it was not knowing why the results were what they were. The whole space felt opaque: data you couldn't verify, creators you couldn't trust, and a process that ate up way more time than it should.
| Problem | What That Looked Like |
|---|---|
| No transparency | Impression counts came from screenshots. Metrics were self-reported. There was no way to know if the numbers were real. |
| Data manipulation | Follower counts and engagement rates are easy to inflate. Picking creators by vanity metrics meant paying for reach that didn't exist. |
| Fixed fees, variable results | Every creator charged the same rate regardless of how their post actually performed. Good posts and bad ones cost the same. |
| Too much manual work | Briefing, follow-ups, approvals, chasing posts — the ops load was heavy. The team spent more time coordinating than thinking. |
| No post-campaign data | After a campaign ended, there was no clean report. Sentiment, brand lift, actual reach — none of it was in one place. |
On top of all this, CARS24 had a specific creator problem: the influencer pool they'd been working with felt stale. They wanted fresh voices — nano and micro creators with smaller but genuinely engaged audiences. The kind of creators who feel real to their followers, not like a brand mouthpiece.
The goal was brand awareness and recall — not leads, not clicks. CARS24 wanted working professionals in their 20s and 30s to associate the brand with buying or selling a used car. The kind of awareness that shows up later, when someone actually needs a car and CARS24 is the first name that comes to mind.
And they wanted to do it through real voices. Not big-name influencers with bloated follower counts — but smaller, niche creators with audiences that actually trust what they post.
CARS24 had one big ask before saying yes: can we actually trust the data? That's a fair question in a space where impressions get faked, follower counts get inflated, and brands have no way to check. anchors answered it directly.
And the second thing they needed was a fresh creator pool. Their existing influencer relationships had run their course. They specifically wanted nano and micro creators — people with 1,000 to 50,000 followers in relevant niches, whose audiences actually pay attention to what they post. anchors had built exactly that network, largely through referrals.
anchors pulls performance data directly from the source. No self-reporting. No inflated numbers. What you see is what the post actually delivered.
A referral-built network of niche creators with tight, engaged audiences. Small follower counts, real reach — the kind of creator that doesn't feel like an ad.
Performance-based pricing means CARS24 paid per real impression delivered — not a flat fee regardless of results.
Briefs, approvals, scheduling — all on-platform. The team didn't need to send a single follow-up message to any creator.
CARS24 set up the campaign directly on the anchors platform — target audience, creator preferences, brief, brand guidelines. Once that was in, the platform took over.
"The team finally had access to all the data for better campaign planning, without chasing influencers."
— Brand Team, CARS24
LinkedIn Ads typically cost ₹200–700 for every thousand impressions. CARS24's campaign on anchors came in at ₹55. That's not a small difference — it's 4–10x cheaper, and every impression was verified. No screenshots, no guesswork.
CARS24 came in to test the waters. The pilot was scoped small — the kind of first campaign you run when you're not sure yet if a channel is worth committing to.
The results made the decision easy. A CPM of ₹55 with verified data and zero ops overhead isn't something you walk away from. The team had clear numbers, a clean process, and a fresh creator pool that actually performed. That's a hard combination to find.
What started as a pilot became a long-term partnership. The value was obvious — not just in the cost efficiency, but in finally having a way to run influencer campaigns that they could actually trust and measure.
Performance-based. Zero manual ops. Real data from day one.
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