Technicians should prepare for their close-ups

Move over Facebook, YouTube and Instagram — there’s an upstart fixed-ops marketing tool in town with a goofy name that belies its serious promotional potential: TikTok.

Once the primary province of home videos showing preteens and teens bustin’ a move or lip-syncing to the hit song du jour in their bedrooms and basement rec rooms, TikTok now is coming at viewers from decidedly different venues — service bays at auto dealerships nationwide.

“TikTok officially has become a thing for fixed ops marketing,” says Gail Rubinstein, founder and CEO of Retail Resilient.

The Florida-based consulting and training firm teaches car dealers how to use social media for marketing.

“If you type ‘automotive’ in the search engine for TikTok, the top 10 videos are service related, not sales,” she told Fixed Ops Journal. “We know this because we monitor TikTok on a regular basis.”

There are several compelling reasons to leap aboard the TikTok bandwagon. One is sheer size and scope; the social-media platform reportedly has more than 1 billion active monthly users worldwide with more than 138 million of them in the United States.

Furthermore, it’s easy to use — and it’s free. And if those reasons aren’t persuasive enough, consider the average TikTok user spends about 90 minutes a day poring through the short videos — typically 5 to 15 seconds or so long — that are its mainstays, she says.

“Think about how many 3- to 5-second videos you can watch in 90 minutes,” Rubinstein says. “You can go down a serious rabbit hole watching TikTok content.”

Moreover, TikTok no longer is the sole domain of tweens and teens. Rubinstein says before the pandemic, 75 percent of TikTok viewers were 10 to 19 years old. Now 75 percent of viewers are between ages 25 and 55.

“I think one of the most interesting parts of this is how the age demographic completely changed during COVID as dealers started creating more video content because customers weren’t coming to their stores,” she says. “Before the pandemic, this wouldn’t have been a good way to brand yourself or gain business.

“I can’t say when TikTok took off as marketing tool for fixed ops,” Rubinstein continues. “But we first noticed the trend around January and February.”

It’s easy to imagine dealers dismissing TikTok videos as mindless and silly fodder for the masses — eye candy with little nutritional value. But Rubinstein says dealers do so at their own peril.

“Sure, they’re silly,” she concedes. “But these videos definitely forge a connection … people respond to that kind of content.”

“TikTok videos can really raise brand awareness among high- and medium-funnel customers,” Rubinstein explains. “You can compare it to the old commercials that car dealers who were real characters used to make — kind of goofy and creative. You build both engagements and brand awareness.”

Rubinstein says comedy is critical when it comes to effective content. Technicians doing silly things while perhaps showing the reality of their jobs and what they do on a daily basis are effective themes.

For example, one viral video showed a female technician moving heavy tires around in a dealership service department.

“Many viewers commented that they’d totally get their car serviced by that technician,” she says.

Other examples includes videos of technicians singing a currently popular song, a brief appearance by the technician with the dirtiest hands in the service department, a few words from the service adviser who sells the most repairs or a technician with a goofy personality talking viewers through the first steps of a repair.

But there’s no need to show the entire repair, she cautions. TikTok videos are the antithesis of a YouTube instructional video. Short and sweet are the operative words.

“It’s really an almost-anything-goes platform,” Rubinstein told Fixed Ops Journal. “The important thing is to do something that releases people’s authentic personalities. Customers buy things from people they like.”

Moreover, customers must like, trust, respect and believe in a product or service in order to do business. So any content a technician or a dealership can produce that cultivates those four factors likely will be successful, she says.

In addition, TikTok videos are an effective way to lift the curtain and provide people with glimpses of what goes on in a service department.

“It’s a great way to increase transparency,” she notes. “Most people don’t get to see how vehicles get fixed. It’s like a very short reality show.”

While content on TikTok may seem frivolous, dealers must be serious about it to make it work. Rubinstein says some dealers hire a full-time employee to both create video content for a dealership TikTok account and also book business.

Booking business can be accomplished by turning commenters — people who remark online about TikTok videos — into customers. This is done by responding to them in the comments section that accompanies each video. The content manager could, for example, thank a commenter for their response then ask if they need their vehicle serviced, Rubinstein says.

“It’s a free and organic way to boost business,” she says. “But you need someone to manage that process for your dealership, as well as handle the dealership’s TikTok account.”

In other cases, technicians can make videos and post them on their individual TikTok accounts. But in that scenario, the technicians have to contact customers to book business because the access to them is available only through the technician’s individual TikTok account, Rubinstein points out.

“Some technicians don’t mind that because they think it’s cool,” she explains. “On the other hand, sometimes it’s hard because they’re busy turning wrenches.”

Dealers also can use a paid campaign that’s managed by companies such as Rubinstein’s Retail Resilient. Here’s how it works: When TikTok’s algorithms identify viewers that are in the market for, say, an oil change or a tire rotation, it serves them an ad in their TikTok news feed that includes video content, plus a link to a dealership’s website booking tool.

Dealers who opt for this service pay TikTok for a pay-per-view program that costs anywhere from 5 to 10 cents per 3-second video view, Rubinstein explains.

When Rubinstein asked attendees at a recent Digital Dealer seminar how many of them were using paid TikTok campaigns, only one person out of about 100 people in the audience raised their hand.

“People have no idea what they’re missing out on,” she says. “The dealers using TikTok know there’s a shift occurring in the marketplace and they want to dominate their markets before it becomes too prevalent.”