ROMEO+JULIET​

The objective​

Increasing ticket sales by targeting a young and engaged audience​

Receiving a Tony Award nomination for Best Revival of a Play, Seaview Production's 2025 Broadway adaptation of ROMEO+JULIET made a huge impact on fans, attracting rave reviews and a high-profile cast, the production enjoyed strong early ticket sales; drawing the youngest audience demographic ever recorded in Broadway history.​

With a younger audience at its core, and a viral TikTok clip of Kit Connor doing a pull-up to kiss Rachel Zegler generating significant buzz early in the show’s lifecycle, the team recognised TikTok as a key platform to engage fans and sustain momentum.​

On TikTok, @romeojulietnyc gained 45.5k followers by posting a variety of organic video content, including behind-the-scenes footage and promotional campaigns led by the stars Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor. The organic content demonstrated a strong understanding of authenticity and audience engagement, helping to build a captivated online community that could later be activated to drive ticket sales.​

Despite a strong start in ticket sales, the show required an additional boost to maximize momentum for it's final performance dates. This is where TikTok proved to be a pivotal channel.​

Working with SINE Digital, a performance marketing agency specializing in the entertainment and sports industry, the team developed a performance-driven TikTok campaign. Creating wide demand with a broad relevant keywords strategy, as well as a narrowed campaign designed to encourage ticket sales to sell out the remaining dates in the final weeks of performance.​

The goal of the campaign was to reach users actively searching for the show on TikTok, using targeted ads to drive traffic to the website, where visitors would then purchase tickets.

The solution

A highly targeted Search Ads Campaign to drive interest and ticket sales

To increase ticket sales for the final weeks of performances, the team launched a TikTok Search campaign for ROMEO+JULIET, using keywords to reach users searching for specific terms.​

Being early adopters of the Search Ads feature on TikTok, SINE began by running both a traffic campaign (with the objective of directing users to the website) and a conversion campaign (with the objective of driving purchases). They targeted a broad range of keywords related to the play, the cast, and general theater-related searches.​

For conversions, the campaign focused on brand-related keywords such as "Romeo and tickets" and the names of the lead actors. The traffic campaign used non-branded keywords like "things to do in NYC" and "Broadway theatre" to attract new users who might not have been aware the show was running or who was starring in it. For both audiences, their TikTok account manager recommended running these keywords as part of a broad search campaign to avoid limiting the potential reach. ​

A variety of content was used in the promotional campaign. Knowing that Kit and Rachel were major draws, the team ensured most of the content featured them, including relaxed behind-the-scenes and interview-style videos, as well as more traditional promotional clips. In addition, a carousel of review cards was used, featuring production shots and an interview with Jack Antonoff, who wrote songs for the show.​

Throughout the campaign, the team worked closely with TikTok, benefiting from the team's expertise. This led to adjusting their conversion goal from "complete purchase" to a higher-funnel conversion goal ("add to cart") to boost conversions and provide the algorithm with more data for optimization.

​The results

Successfully driving sales with a highly-efficient targeted campaign ​

The campaign was a huge success outperforming expectations, leading to a ROAS of 6.71 along with a CTR of 1.46% which was almost 3x higher in the search ads campaign (vs their standard campaign) with a highly efficient CPC at $0.71. ​

ROMEO+JULIET itself had the youngest ticket buying audience in recorded Broadway history, with 14% of ticket purchasers being aged between 18 and 24 compared to the current industry average of 3%. Being able to reach this specific demographic through TikTok Search helped drive sales in the remaining weeks of the campaign, with the production breaking the single performance gross record 3 times across the 20 week campaign.​

Off the back of this success, TikTok Search campaigns have been implemented elsewhere across SINE including various other Broadway shows.​

​

This is a TikTok case study and is solely for informational purposes. Past performance does not guarantee or predict future performance.