How do you market the first major theme park to open in Orlando in the age of social media? It's a daunting task for even the most seasoned marketers, but the Universal Orlando Social Media team was ready for it. This was the big one - the whole churro, if you will. Our goal was to educate, inspire, and drive anticipation to visit Universal Epic Universal untilizing every social media paltform and content time at our disposal.
Five Amazing Worlds. One Amazing Theme Park.
Come, the Portals are open!
In 2024, our focus was introducing fans to the different Worlds of Universal Epic Universe. We just scratched the surface that year by introducing what would represented in the Worlds. In 2025, our goal was to educate our fans beyond the Portals and into the details of each of these Worlds. To both educate and entertain, we knew we had to provide unique, first looks, build anticipation, explain offerings by showing and not telling, and help guests rehearse and plan their own Epic vacations.
There were several ways that we accomplished this.
To show the scope of each World, we did drone fly throughs to give an idea of scale – providing fans a unique look they would not otherwise get to see.
To show detail of each World and experience, we developed point of view videos. Some of these videos show close-ups of characters or details of a queue. Other POV videos showcase ride throughs of different attractions. The idea here being to help the guests rehearse their vacation and get an opportunity to experience just a taste of what the park has to offer.
For some of the photography the social team captured, the images we shared were some of the first images ever seen of experiences from around the park. We posted exclusive photos that no one had seen before; social had the honor of being the channel to share those moments. The first look photos resulted in explosive engagement numbers. People wanted more and more and anticipation to visit continued to build.
Because there was so much rich storytelling to do, the team was allowed the creative freedom to try different ways to tell different stories. This led to unique videos, creative editing, custom music, text on screen, and other features.
Content was also not limited just to the park. We also created content about the three nearby owned resorts. To talk about the complete vacation experience, we had to include those unique offerings as well.
Examples of these content types and more can be found in the attached links.
The results were astounding. Always challenged for time, the social media team was able to create an incredible amount of content full social-first, rich storytelling. Every social media channel was full of content that inspired and engaged our audiences in ways we had never seen before – making it our most popular and engaging content to date.
The deeper dives into each world and first looks into various attractions and experiences drove our engagement to new heights. Our social shares were through the roof and brought new fans into our owned social media channels. We had several pieces of content go viral and many of our content partners collaborate with us. We've never seen so much excitement on our channels before.
In addition, our team got to utilize super fans and smaller content creators. The experience not only saw great content generated by these content creators, but we were able to give them an awesome experience and first look into the park. In a word, we made new friends.
