It’s TikTok time for Canadian dealerships

In a 47-second video, a man wearing a blond wig walks into a Quebec dealership looking for the perfect vehicle. In this unsubtle put-on, “she” rejects several options before finding a Jeep Wrangler with a rearview mirror her to admire herself. Sold! Welcome to the off-the-wall world of TikTok, a popular platform for sharing short-form videos and one that a growing number of dealerships are using as a social media marketing tool.

The blond-wig video was made by TikTok content creator Alexis du Maïs, a French-language social media influencer with 107,400 TikTok followers and 4.5 million likes for all his posts. Although he was hired by Montreal-based HGregoire, a group with 31 dealerships across North America, including 20 in Quebec, the video’s only link to the dealership group is an “@hgregoireauto” in the text of the post.

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Harry Kasparian, chief marketing and product officer at HGregoire, said the company scaled up its TikTok efforts in December to appeal to an oncoming generation of buyers.

“Why? We go where our future customers go,” Kasparian said, adding the group is paying special attention to the psychology of the upcoming generation: “The way they produce and absorb content is quite different from existing channels.”

More than three-quarters of TikTok users are 39 years old or younger, 32.5 per cent are 19 or younger, and 29.5 per cent are in the 20-29 age group, said Ryan Holtz, a social media expert and owner of Edmonton-based Ryan Holtz Marketing.

Since the blond-wig video was posted in mid-April, it received 10,500 likes and 35 comments, mostly from followers who get the joke.

PUSHING CREATIVITY

Not all English-speaking Canadians will get du Maïs’ humour, said Holtz, but that’s fine as the video was targeted for a specific young audience in Quebec.

“It shows that the dealer knows exactly who they’re talking to,” he said. “You have to be empathetic to who you’re messaging.”

While established platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are widely used by dealers, TikTok is the new kid on the block. It’s a platform that retailers are using to push the creative envelope in the never-ending quest to stand out.

Because TikTok is highly visual, it should be integrated into a company’s social media strategy, complementing established staples, said Daniel Tsai, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly Ryerson University.

“TikTok is television on steroids,” he said. “It doesn’t appeal to your 60to 70-year-old guy. It’s for people in their 20s and people in their 30s.”

TikTok was introduced internationally in 2017 by the China-based startup ByteDance Ltd. Since then, the Android and iOS versions of the app have been downloaded more than three billion times around the world. As of the first quarter of 2022, TikTok claimed more 100 million monthly active users in the United States and 23 million in the United Kingdom, according to Wired magazine.

On average, users spend 1 hour and 25 minutes on the app daily, according to TikTok internal data leaked in 2021 to the news media. Statistics compiled in spring 2020 by data and insights company Statista — the most recent data available — indicated that nine per cent of online users in Canada were on TikTok.

TikTok grew rapidly in popularity because it enabled users to produce and post short videos — 20 to 60 seconds typically — in a matter of minutes with any smartphone, Holtz said. As with other social media, it is free to use.

A search of auto dealerships on TikTok will net dozens of videos, ranging from whatwe-drive interviews to vehicle deliveries, customer endorsements and vehicle spotlights. Rarely seen are “buy now” pitches, said Holtz.

SALES PITCHES ARE TABOO

TikTok users “can smell an ad coming from a million clicks away,” he said.

Instead, content focuses on what viewers care about, such as a vehicle’s computing power and sustainability. Sometimes, TikTok users just want to be entertained, Holtz said. There’s no right or wrong approach, but “you have to have fun on TikTok.”

At Medicine Hat Nissan in Alberta, sales associate Taylor Hockley produces and appears in TikTok videos, including one in which she shows off her “ladies” — various vehicles — while lip-syncing to a seductive male voice.

“Taylor has been a great representative for us,” said Sales Manager Jastej Arora. “We’re being very progressive in how we market.”

Hockley pitches ideas, and management ensures that the content stays within the dealership’s community standards of good taste, Arora said. “We’ve seen [dealership] traffic coming in through [Hockley’s TikTok] account.”

BUILD THE BRAND AND A BOND

Tsai said TikTok is most likely to succeed when the vehicle is the type a typical user of the medium might buy — such as an affordable entry-level vehicle.

“If I’m a Mercedes dealer, I might want to stick with more traditional media,” Tsai said. “If I’m selling Kia, then I’m likely to be after a younger audience.”

Kasparian notes that TikTok is a long play; dealers should not expect instant sales results. HGregoire uses it to “focus on brand notoriety and relationship-building” with young people who are either buying their first vehicle or soon will be.

“The goal behind our social media strategy is to build more of an in-depth and meaningful relationship with our end consumer,” Kasparian said. “It’s not necessarily to sell directly or drive customers to the dealership.” Tsai said regular postings — at least weekly — help build audience. But he has one key piece of advice for dealerships.

“Comedy is great, but make sure it works,” he said. “There’s a billion of those videos out there, and only one per cent will go viral.”