Universal Orlando Resort’s (UOR) YouTube channel aims to inspire, educate, and entertain vacationers with compelling and impactful content that they want and need.
When first launched, the channel primarily focused on fan engagement — delivering behind-the-scenes content, exclusive sneak peeks, and funny challenges. While entertaining, these videos did not meet the needs of prospective guests, who we understand have a hard decision to make when deciding on their travel as they research and compare different vacation options. We saw this as an opportunity to showcase the key selling points of our destination and differentiate from our main competition.
Since October 2021, our YouTube channel has reshaped its content offerings, going beyond fan service to become the most trusted, visited, and valuable source of entertainment and information about Universal Orlando.
Our content is threaded with a narrative that supports Universal Orlando’s attractions, rides, restaurants, resort hotels, and experiences to influence guests to seriously consider a Universal vacation. The channel is a hub that hosts easy-to-find and highly relevant content that is informative, but not boring, because a well-informed guest is more likely to visit and recommend Universal to friends and family. Our goal is to engage this audience with highly valuable video content so that they can make an informed decision with confidence and hopefully choose Universal Orlando as their destination of choice — because we believe that planning vacations should be just as fun as taking them.
Our vision and strategy was to build Universal Orlando’s YouTube channel into an inspirational, educational, and entertainment hub, all while operating more like a content media platform than a marketing channel. To do this, we knew we had to create and strategically distribute highly engaging and relevant content at scale that would inspire serious consideration for us as a destination of choice among prospective guests.
With this in mind, we revolutionized the offerings on our YouTube channel, blending emotional storytelling with functional communications priorities to drive deep levels of consideration and intent to visit. Focusing on evergreen topics and serialized content allowed us to maximize our available resources, streamline processes, and increase speed-to-market in pursuit of building a robust archive of content to serve our business and guests for years to come.
Today, this content is fueled by rich consumer insights, journey relevancy, and content trends. More importantly, it’s laced with the company’s personality and voice — showcasing how we are playful, authentic, maverick, and big-hearted.
In the last two years, we have streamlined the strategic, creative, and digital marketing work associated with content creation to foster scalable output with an agile methodology. This approach has empowered us to produce over 50 videos grounded in “edutainment” (education meets entertainment) under the following series offerings:
Ride Guys - Humorous attraction guides giving viewers need-to-know details, immersive queue tours, easter eggs, and a sneak peek at what it feels like to experience the ride.
Dine and Ride - Two hosts go on a culinary quest to showcase the must-eats and must-drinks — from tours of immersive lands to deep dives on restaurant menus.
Checked In - Guided tours of our uniquely themed hotels that provide the differentiating benefits of each in a recognizable travel show format.
Universal Stories - Documentary short films focused on telling real stories of real guests and their unreal vacations across our parks.
This is Universal - Destination overviews of our immersive parks, resort hotels, dining, and events produced in the format of popular, bingeable reality television shows.
Universal Trailers - Cinematic sizzle videos grounded in the true guest experience that inspire intense feelings of anticipation and wonder.
Our channel’s diverse portfolio of content is not only limited to destination education, human stories, and vacation planning videos. It continues to ignite the brand within the cultural zeitgeist and celebrate its most loyal fans — delivering on its commitment to not only prospects, but also returning guests, annual passholders, and parkgoers passionate about Universal fandom and our intellectual properties (i.e. Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, etc.). Highlights of these offerings include 360° and POV videos of popular roller coasters, themed store walkthroughs, as well as highly requested content relating to our marquee event, “Halloween Horror Nights,” and the popular soundtrack to Universal Islands of Adventure.
In addition to optimizing video to connect with guests, the channel leverages the podcast, shorts, and community features to further execute our strategy of connecting, educating, and meeting the needs of our audience.
Universal Orlando’s YouTube channel serves a community of over 293K subscribers and has a rather substantial footprint with over 630.9M total views and 462M minutes watched.
Our single-minded proposition for evolving our offerings to “edutainment" was to create compelling and impactful content that guests would want and need. To measure this, we focused on two major KPIs and set benchmarks for each video: lifetime views at 1,000,000 to inform the “want” and average percentage viewed at 55% to inform the “need” (industry average is 50%). In less than two years, three of our series surpassed both our benchmarks, averaging the following results per episode:
Sentiment has also been outstanding, with a 97.1% Like-to-Dislike rate and comments including:
Planning is underway to capitalize on our success by evolving our YouTube strategy to incorporate the development of our own influencers that embody our brand personality, a shift to video podcasting, and leveraging existing franchises to promote our upcoming theme park, Epic Universe.
