Discover Universal Podcast, Universal Destinations and Experiences' first-ever podcast was built to educate and entertain vacationers with compelling and impactful content that they want and need to plan their next trip to the parks.
Since February 2022, the Discover Universal podcast has gone beyond planning and fan service to become the most trusted, visited, and valuable source of audio-first information for both Universal Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood.
With the inception of the podcast, the focus was primarily on planning content with exclusive interviews and information for guests who are too busy to deep dive into planning their vacation and could use a podcast to mulit-task; like commuting, doing chores, etc. Our objective for the first few episodes was to provide planning tools for guests in the mid-funnel of marketing decisions, looking for as much information as possible about their next trip.
While planning is a key objective for driving new guests, these podcasts did not meet the needs of our fans, who wanted to dive deeper into our content. We saw this as an opportunity to showcase the key selling points of our destination and differentiate from our main competition.
One of the ways we hooked into our fans was through our Halloween Horror Nights reveal podcast episodes and the original series Haunted Tales, quickly becoming fan favorites. Haunted Tales immersed listeners in the eerie atmosphere and exhilarating scares that make these seasonal events a standout feature at both Universal Orlando.
The strategy behind the podcast was to launch the brands first-ever podcast for Universal Destinations and Experiences, focused on planning content for guests who are too busy to research everything they need to know before coming to the parks. We embarked on an audio journey to give busy moms, dads, friends, couples, planning their next trip to the parks who can easily download some audio content and listen along as they do mindless tasks around the house, commute around town or from a local market, flying on their way to the parks, etc.
We started executing by reaching out to our Entertainment partners and asking them to assist in facilitating auditions to find top notch candidates to host the podcast. This is where we found our two incredible hosts, David and Kari, who were both not only Team Members at the park, but also huge fans ready to talk about everything the destination has to offer.
We then tapped into our audio engineering team that assists with events and other offerings around the parks as well as utilized infastructure already available to us with the Radio Broadcast Center inside Universal Studios Florida — a working radio studio with equipment prepped and ready to go with an incredible view of Hollywood Boulevard and all the guests and atmosphere entertainment just outside the window.
We started our episodes focused on foundational content like "Guide to Universal Studios Florida" and "Guide to Islands of Adventure." Then, we strategically started to pivot into episodes that peeled back the curtain like "Remembering JAWS" and focusing on Halloween Horror Nights reveals as well as Haunted Tales.
We continue to leverage and focus on insights and metrics to determine goals and the needs of our guests. We know that with our brand-new park Universal Epic Universe and more new offerings on the horizon, we are going in the direction of giving casual guests and fans alike the opportunity to not only listen, but to also watch the podcast as we pivot to video and start to have conversations on the future of Universal Destinations and Experiences.
While some of our challenges have been speed to market within the business, our strategy moving forward is to react to news and information coming from our internal partners and peeling back the curtian while inviting guests in on the conversation on what's to come.
We are very excited for what the future holds with our audio focused podcast transitioning to video to allow guests to decide which medium is best for them.
When the podcast originally launched, the goal was to get the podcast up and running before establishing KPIs officially. We focused on slowly growing our audience over time and within the second year of the podcast, we went from hovering around 2K downloads a day to exceeding over 10K downloads from a single Haunted Tales episode in one month.
Top 5 Episodes:
1. Halloween Horror Nights Haunted Tales - Dr. Oddfellow's Collection of Horrow - 18K downloads
2. Guide to Universal Studios Florida - 15K downloads
3. Halloween Horror Nights Full Reveal - 12K downloads
4. Guide to Islands of Adventure - 11k downloads
5. Halloween Horror Nights Haunted Tales - Blood Moon Dark Offerings - 11K downloads
Another main metric we tracked over time was retention rate of our episodes, averaging 85% retention rate among 65 published podcast episodes.
