Victory Liner: A Heritage Brand with Digital Success

What It’s About

When one thinks about land travel—specifically travelling by bus—one of the top names in commuter bus travel Filipinos turn to is Victory Liner.

The heritage bus company is nearly 80 years old! They have tirelessly served to shuttle Filipinos in and around North Luzon for almost eight decades, and have connected generations upon generations of families along the way.

One would think that such a legacy would be enough to endure on its own. But brand experts have also said that heritage brands need to innovate, or else be left behind.

That is why Victory Liner is not shying away from impressing their digital footprint. In a world saturated with digital content about many different things, establishing their legacy in the online space was the no-brainer strategy to keep interest in the brand—and, consequently, in seeing the beauty of North Luzon through travel—alive.

TikTok, with its explosive growth in the Philippines, was the platform that Victory Liner turned to, to connect with potential customers and stakeholders in a creative and impactful way.

Why It Matters

More travel brands can take a page from Victory Liner’s TikTok success. 

Victory Liner only started developing their reels in April of 2023, and they’ve already garnered hundreds of thousands to millions of views on many of their videos!

The main goal of the reels is to highlight the unique features and benefits of Victory Liner’s bus services and terminals. The comfort from renovated terminals, the convenient ticketing, the extensive routes, and the basic safety measures are all content that many Filipinos look forward to, simply because there are so many Pinoys looking to explore more of their own backyard! The videos help inform potential travelers, general commuters, and even business owners looking for logistics services, about considerations they might not be aware of.

Most of all, this campaign to raise awareness around the Victory Liner brand helps reinvigorate the desire of many Filipinos to explore more places, see the beauty of the country, and be moved enough by the impact of it to help contribute to its preservation.

This, more than anything, is what Victory Liner wants to instill.

VLI’s TikTok Campaign Execution & Success

Campaign Execution

Victory Liner was already enjoying a solid public relations strategy thanks to NGP-IMC, and so decided to avail the digital marketing services to build their digital footprint, too.

The objectives were clear:

• The brand wanted to boost its awareness to a wider, younger, more dynamic audience especially amid increased demand for local travel. The ideal scenario was to help make Victory Liner the go-to and top-of-mind brand for bus passengers. 
• The brand also wanted to innovate and uphold its legacy in the digital age to stay ahead of competitors through innovative content.

We executed the digital campaign using the following strategies:

• We started off with topic mapping and content plotting, focusing initially on ‘re–introducing’ the brand to TikTok.
• High-quality reels posted consistently helped set-up and establish Victory Liner brand presence on TikTok. To make it more organized, we established an initial frequency: 4 reels developed and posted per month, with 90 seconds each. We tested that frequency out for the first couple of months, and refined it along the way.
• We also tested a variety of content buckets and treatments, turning to TikTok for inspiration on what viewers were currently entertained by.
• We harped on their marketing initiatives for time-sensitive content such as launches, announcements, fare promos, terminal openings, travel schedule changes, and more.
• We also created and repurposed evergreen content highlighting their key services (passenger buses, rent a bus, drop & go, etc), as well as humanized and compelling stories showcasing the company’s key resources and stakeholders (drivers, customer reps, stewardesses, ISO certified maintenance processes, etc)

Campaign Success

You may just want to check out Victory Liner’s TikTok page and Facebook page for yourself!

Across platforms, they have over 1.3M followers, almost 1.1M likes, garnering half a million to up to 3 million views for some of their videos—all in a year!

Some of our favorites were:

• Our first organically viral content featuring Victory Liner’s pet friendly buses. Pet-loving commuters and travellers were made aware about LTFRB’s guidelines for pets in public transport, these fur parents were also reminded that Victory Liner could cater to their furbabies!

• Victory Liner’s successful launch of their first sleeper bus—the Royal Class Bus garnered 13M views on Facebook and 1M views on TikTok (and counting) for a whopping 14 million views. Watch the reel below:

Best of all the content we produced for the brand continue to be highly engaging. Much of community interactions include inquiries about their branches, routes, and schedules.

Some also take time to provide positive feedback! And we love Victory Liner for not shying away from this feedback, either. The company itself has mentioned that they see the value of getting reviews content creators, influencers, and regular riders as a way to further show their potential passengers why Victory Liner has been such a long-standing name in the local travel game.

Key Insights

What have we learned from this ongoing campaign?

It’s that your brand needs video. This format is (currently) still king!

And your video or reel content strategy should hinge on these three key tactics:

• Variety

Brands should be able to test different content ideas, topics, and treatment. Yes, this includes experimenting with trending sounds, fun filters, and other tweaks and features available for this content format. 

This is so you understand what content impacts your audiences best. Which topics should you keep or scrap? 

Additionally, with influencer partnerships, you can expand that variety. Let the content creators’ storytelling abilities shine!

Pro tip for brands and agencies looking into influencers: Help them out by giving them enough flexibility on the content for your brand. Give them the do’s and don’ts, but don’t micromanage. After all, content that is organic and authentic to the creator’s style still works best for TikTok and Reels formats. You need not worry about developing highly-produced, “commercial-like” scripts and scenes.

With variety of content, Victory Liner was able to see which content worked well for them. They amplified those well-performing content with paid strategies and boosting. Finally, because of the seamless way NGP applied integrated marketing to the brand’s PR and digital campaigns, we were also able to develop PR-driven content that worked pretty well in rallying advocates for the brand!

• Consistency 

Create content as frequently as possible, and put it out as fast as your brand can. Think  about it, but don’t overthink it! 

Since April 2023 until 2024,  we were able to publish at least 1 Victory Liner reel per week and that served to introduce the brand to TikTok better.

Some brands may need to post more content more or less frequently depending on their objectives. In Victory Liner’s case, a consistent frequency helped it reach a wider audience while maintaining the community they built within other social media platforms. 

To help brands be consistent, there should be a level of agility for your content creators so they can maximize your activities and marketing initiatives.

•  Awareness 

Listen close and keep abreast of all the trends within your chosen social media platform. There are a lot of opportunities your brand can take, be it an up-and-coming soundbyte or a newly entertaining reel format. 

If you feel like you’re plateauing, use TikTok as your alternative “search engine”. Know what your audiences and potential customers are looking for. What’s trending within the perimeter of their interests? Digging deep and staying aware of these trends will help your brand create more relevant and engaging content that will capture audience attention better.

Tell, Share, and Connect Your Story (on TikTok!), the NGP Way

You see how we connected the Victory Liner heritage story from 80 years ago to the digital age? Very tactical, very mindful, and very integrated!

We can help you Connect Your Story, too. It is truly in our DNA. Work with NGP-IMC today and we’ll make it happen!