Freelance & Oak City Crew · 2015–2024
Small budgets, sharp results: freelance growth work for DTC, nonprofits and college sports
The same playbook, run on budgets as small as $2K a month.
In short: Freelance growth marketing case studies from Chris Hetzler: a DTC brand’s CPA cut from $57 to $44, a nonprofit’s CPC down 36% with awareness up 7,000%, and a college football remarketing program with CTR +93% and a first-ever sell-out season.
KickDry: DTC footwear-care brand (2024)
Ran a lookback across every ad type, shifted budget to the most efficient formats, launched new creative and scheduled Cyber Monday ahead of time. In the following half-month, CPA fell from $57 to $44, value per conversion rose 16%, and ROAS improved 51% month over month.
Kiss the Ground: regenerative-agriculture nonprofit (2024)
Aligned optimization to the actions that predicted partnerships (partner inquiries and checkout starts), relabeled the B2B campaign around partnerships, and pushed video bids to find the floor at under a cent per view. In two weeks: CPC −36%, CPM −38%, web visits +31%, partnership clicks +338%, and awareness impressions up roughly 7,000%.
Campbell University Football (Oak City Crew)
Built Facebook, YouTube and display remarketing in a tight North Carolina radius. Retargeted audiences beat cold audiences with CTR +93%, conversion rate +146% and CPC −25%, and the program reached its first sell-out season.
Nonprofit and local services
- Secured and managed a $10K-per-month Google Ad Grant for a wildlife rescue nonprofit, which drove regular donations.
- Cut cost per appointment ~20% a year across every location of an auto services franchise.
- Built a campaign ROI calculator for a home-services client so they could translate clicks and calls into jobs and profit.
The lesson: Small budgets punish vanity metrics fastest. Pick the conversion that actually predicts revenue and optimize only to that.
What people said
“Chris has been a tremendous asset to Campbell Athletics and myself personally as we have grown our ticket sales and attendance.”
More work
$2M budget → $10M pipeline at Avalara
ROI-based reallocation, a net-new channel and dashboards that tied spend to pipeline.
Red Hat6sense ABM across Red Hat’s BDR org
Intent data that reaches the right BDR pod at the right moment, presented to 1,000 marketers.
ChicknLegsFocusing DTC paid media on new customers
Separated captured demand from created demand, then built the budget around growth.