Case Study: Freehand Hospitality
How paid, organic, and influencer strategy drove a 4.95x return on paid spend across nine restaurant and bar brands.
Location
Halifax, NS
Industry
Restaurant & Hospitality
Scope of Work
Meta Ads
Google Ads
Organic Instagram Strategy
Influencer & PR Partnerships
justified bigger budgets
Intro
Freehand Hospitality: Building a Full-Funnel Growth Engine for a Nine-Brand Restaurant Portfolio
Freehand Hospitality is a dynamic restaurant and hospitality group operating a collection of upscale, chef-driven dining concepts along the vibrant Queen's Marque waterfront district in Halifax, Nova Scotia: Darya, Cafe Lunette, Bar Sofia, Drift, Toridori, Mystic, Peacock Wine Bar, Salt + Ash, and Fog Company.
Each concept carries its own audience, price point, and voice, and each needed to grow on its own terms rather than under one shared playbook.
Stockall & Co. ran the full media funnel in-house for every brand: paid social, paid search, organic content, and influencer partnerships, from the account's first organic-only reports in September 2024 through the engagement's completion in September 2025.
- A 4.95x return on paid spend, driven by full-funnel strategy across nine restaurant and bar brands
- 9,407 estimated reservations driven across nine brands
- +18,307 net new Instagram followers across the portfolio
- Paid ad spend scaled roughly 7x as results justified bigger budgets
- Three influencer campaigns drove real reservations and follower growth for Darya and Cafe Lunette
Key Results
"Before working with Stockall & Co., we knew our marketing was working somewhere, we just couldn't say where, or how well. Nine brands, three channels, and reporting that told us what we spent but never what it earned us.
Lindsay and her team started by building something we didn't have: a real model for what a click, a follower, or an ad dollar was actually worth to each brand. Full-funnel, brand by brand, month by month.
Over thirteen months, that discipline showed up in the numbers. A blended return of 4.95 times what we spent, and more than 9,400 reservations we can trace back to the work. Paid spend scaled roughly seven times over the engagement, and we only grew it because the return justified it every time.
When you're weighing a marketing invoice against what a table actually brings in, that's the kind of math that makes the decision easy.
Beyond the numbers, we always knew what was running, what was being tested, and why. That kind of visibility is rare, and it's the reason we kept scaling instead of second-guessing.
If you're spending on marketing and still guessing at what it's doing for you, this is what it looks like when someone actually shows you the math."
Stephanie Carver
Sr. Director, Marketing & Communications, The Armour Group Limited
Nine Brands. One Number We Can Actually Trust.
Client Perspective
The Goal
Growth + Real Visibility
Freehand's nine brands share an owner and a marketing team, but not a customer, a price point, or a voice. The goal was to grow guest traffic and reservations across all nine at once, without collapsing them into one generic "restaurant group" brand. Each concept needed its own paid social, search presence, and content strategy, run to the same standard every month.
Just as important, Freehand wanted real visibility into what that spend was producing. Reach and click-through rate are useful signals, but they don't tell an owner whether the marketing is paying for itself.
"We wanted a partner who could finally tell us what our marketing was actually doing for the business, not just likes and impressions. Across nine brands, that meant a clear line from what we spent to what we sold."
Stephanie Carver
Sr. Director, Marketing & Communications, The Armour Group Limited
The Challenge
Growing a nine-brand portfolio each with it's own audience, price-point and voice.
As a nine-brand hospitality portfolio, Freehand faced a problem familiar to independent restaurant groups: each concept runs on its own seasonal demand curve, its own guest base, and its own margin structure, which meant a single campaign template would underperform on at least half the brands at any given time.
The account also started from a standing stop. The first reported month, September 2024, was organic-only, with no paid media running at all. And underneath all of it sat a harder problem: none of Meta, Google, or Instagram natively track reservation revenue for restaurant accounts, since none of these brands take payment through the ad platform itself. Without a way to connect ad spend to actual bookings, Freehand had no way to know which brands, channels, or campaigns were actually driving results.
The Solution
Full-Funnel Media, Brand by Brand
Stockall & Co. built out Meta Ads, Google Ads, organic Instagram strategy, and influencer partnerships for every one of the nine brands, run in-house every month rather than templated across the portfolio.
To close the visibility gap, Stockall & Co. also built a custom attribution model to estimate return for every brand, every month, so results could be measured against paid spend rather than guessed at.
Organic Instagram
Google Ads
Meta Ads
Channel
Est. ROAS
3.73x
16.61x
n/a (no media spend)
Return by Channel
Paid Media: Scaling Because It Worked
Over 13 months, September 2024 through September 2025, Stockall & Co. generated 28.2 million impressions and 442,386 clicks across the portfolio's paid media.
Freehand's Facebook and Instagram ad spend scaled roughly 7x from the account's first reported month to its peak in July 2025. Reach scaled right alongside it, from 192,574 people reached in October 2024 to 1,492,751 at peak, without click-through rate collapsing under the added scale.
That's the signal that matters most to a prospective client: the budget grew because the results justified it, not despite the results.
Paid Performance by Brand
Cafe Lunette
Darya
Salt + Ash
Brand
Months
13
13
12
Peacock Wine Bar
Bar Sofia
Toridori
12
13
12
Fog Company
Mystic
Drift
13
7
10
Impressions
4,317,330
4,072,070
5,144,452
3,027,890
3,236,289
3,318,906
1,259,799
1,360,834
2,455,391
Clicks
Avg. CTR
69,084
67,804
81,351
44,842
40,061
34,824
24,550
28,431
51,439
6.75%
8.22%
7.04%
4.93%
6.32%
3.32%
3.69%
7.86%
8.58%
Organic Growth
Alongside paid media, Stockall & Co. ran monthly organic Instagram strategy for every Freehand brand: content planning, posting cadence, and community growth.
Across the portfolio, that work added 18,307 net new followers over the engagement.
Organic Growth by Brand
Mystic
Cafe Lunette
Darya
Brand
Months
13
13
6
Peacock Wine Bar
Toridori
Salt + Ash
13
12
9
Fog Company
Drift
Bar Sofia
13
13
11
Follower Growth
+2,481
+2,874
+3,590
+1,751
+1,881
+2,191
+1,094
+1,182
+1,263
Avg. Engagement
1.46%/post
0.73%/post
1.26%/post
0.56%/post
0.69%/post
0.49%/post
0.44%/post
0.38%/post
0.27%/post
Influencer & PR: local creators, real results
Three influencer campaigns for Darya and Cafe Lunette turned local creator partnerships into measurable reservation and follower growth.
Darya — Mimosa Brunch
- Weekly brunch reservations grew from 5 to 100
- +923 new followers
(Winter 2025 Launch)
Darya — Patio + Mimosa Brunch
- Reservation growth driven by organic social
- 77,149 accounts reached
- +1,037 new followers
(Summer 2025 Launch)
Cafe Lunette — Flutes & Frites Happy Hour
- 44,159 accounts reached
- +833 new followers
(Winter 2025 Launch)
Results & Impact
Across 13 months, Freehand's nine brands went from a standing stop, organic content only, no paid media running, to a full-funnel program generating a 4.95x return on every paid dollar spent. Marketing-attributed performance climbed steadily from the account's first month, before paid media had launched, through a peak in July 2025, and held strong through the engagement's final four months.
None of that came from one channel doing the work. Meta drove the largest share of paid results, Google converted at the highest rate of any channel once it joined the mix, and organic content drove meaningful reservation activity with no media spend behind it at all. Three influencer campaigns added real reservation growth and a lasting local following on top of that.
"Seeing a return of nearly five times what we spent changed how we think about marketing. It's not a cost we hope pays off anymore, it's a number we can plan around."
Stephanie Carver
Sr. Director, Marketing & Communications, The Armour Group Limited
Takeaways
Freehand's story isn't about any single tactic. It's about running nine different brands to the same standard, every month, and building a way to prove what that work was actually worth. That combination, full-funnel execution plus honest attribution, is what let a modest hospitality marketing budget scale sevenfold on the strength of its own results.
As Freehand's brands continue to grow, the attribution model built here gives ownership a way to see, brand by brand and channel by channel, where the next dollar of marketing spend will do the most.
"Stockall & Co. treats every one of our brands like it's the only one they manage. That kind of attention is rare, and it shows in the results."
Stephanie Carver
Sr. Director, Marketing & Communications, The Armour Group Limited
