Why We Founded a Southeastern Outdoor Marketing Agency in 2026

May 8
9 min read

Updated: Jun 12

We founded Pine & Marsh in 2026 to be the agency the Southeastern outdoor industry has needed for a long time: a small, owner-operated shop with deep roots in Southern outdoor culture, real craft in creative production, and a serious command of the digital marketing disciplines — SEO, AI-search visibility, websites, email, and local search — that actually drive bookings, leads, and revenue for outdoor businesses today.

That is the short version. The long version takes a few minutes, and we think it is worth your time if you are an operator evaluating whether we might be a fit.

The gap we saw

Southeastern outdoors is not a niche. It is an economy. Hunting and fishing alone generate tens of billions of dollars in annual spending across the region, with hundreds of thousands of jobs tied to guides, outfitters, lodges, sporting facilities, and conservation work. Outdoor recreation consistently accounts for more than 2% of U.S. GDP, and states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina are overrepresented in that figure.

Yet when you look at the websites of the operators who make a living from it, most look the way they did ten years ago. Many do not show up when a prospect asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for a recommendation. Some do not even rank for their own business name on mobile.

We ran a systematic audit of 2,206 outfitters across the eleven states we serve — guides, lodges, plantations, charter captains, and sporting clubs — scoring each operation on ten dimensions of digital health. The results were stark.

The mean digital health score across all 2,206 operators was 5.57 out of 10.
Alabama came in at 4.76 — the lowest in the region. Mississippi sat at 4.85.
South Carolina led the region at 5.92, with 35% of its audited operators reaching the AI high-visibility tier.
Only 17.2% of all operators earned a high AI-visibility classification.
80% of operators run no schema markup beyond CMS defaults.
85% have no dedicated FAQ page — the single biggest predictor of AI-answer visibility.
Only 38.7% send an email newsletter — the most durable owned-audience channel in the category.
12.2% have dedicated FAQ pages. The operators who do are overrepresented in AI answer results by a disproportionate margin.

That audit told us two things. First, the problem is systemic, not individual. This is not a story of a few operators who fell behind; it is the story of an entire industry that was never well-served digitally. Second, the opportunity for early movers is significant. In a market where the average is 5.57 out of 10, an operator who scores an 8 does not blend in—they stand out structurally.

A legacy that is not documented online is aging out of the search layer, one generation at a time.

Why a small, Southeastern-only agency

Our bet is specific: a two-founder agency — one partner who has lived in the outdoors his whole life as a hunter, angler, and gun person, has traveled the country chasing sport, and has spent a career running large-scale live productions; and one partner with nearly a decade of Southeastern digital marketing behind him — can produce work that national agencies and local generalists structurally cannot.

The regional fluency advantage

We do not claim to be pre-existing regional experts on every corner of Southern sporting life, and we are explicit about that. What we bring is the combination of genuine outdoor fluency, senior digital craft, and a disciplined willingness to learn each client's specific ground, sport, and buyer before we produce a word of work on their behalf.

We can be on the property with cameras and a production plan. We can tell the story the way a local would. We can build the technical digital foundation a modern outdoor business needs. And we can do all of it inside the same engagement, with both co-founders personally involved from kickoff through renewal.

Those four things rarely live inside the same shop. National agencies have the digital depth but cannot send a founder to sit at your kitchen table on a Tuesday in March. Local generalists can show up but typically do not know the outdoors at all, and their SEO playbook is still calibrated to 2018. Outdoor-specialist firms tend to be creative-first, with a laptop-only approach to the technical work that actually moves bookings.

Co-founder execution, not handoffs

At most agencies, the people who sell the deal are not the people who do the work. The pitch meeting features the founder. The follow-up features an account manager. The actual deliverables come from a rotating cast of junior producers and freelancers.

When you hire us, you hire Jacob and Thomas. We are co-owners, and that means we are personally and financially responsible for the outcome of your engagement. We own the strategy, the on-property creative direction, and the client relationship from kickoff through renewal. You will never be handed off to someone you did not meet at the pitch.

We know the South — and its outdoors

There is no substitute for regional and cultural fluency. The Southeast is not a homogeneous market. A Grand Prairie waterfowl operation sells differently than a Lowcountry duck club. A Red Hills quail plantation markets to a different buyer than a commercial preserve. A Keys flats skiff is a different product than a Louisiana marsh trip. An Alabama Black Belt whitetail outfit's calendar looks nothing like a Tennessee deer operation's.

We serve eleven states — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, Kentucky, and Arkansas. These are the states where we have the deepest cultural and operational familiarity, and where the industries we serve are concentrated. If you are outside this region, there are good agencies in the Mountain West, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes, and the Northeast who know their territories. We will cheerfully recommend one of them to you.

The new search era: why AI answer engines changed the game

The search landscape is changing faster than most operators realize — and the operators who do not adapt now are building a structural disadvantage that compounds every quarter.

Starting in 2024 and accelerating through 2025 and 2026, Google's AI Overviews began surfacing AI-generated answers at the top of results for commercial-intent queries. In many searches, the AI answer occupies the entire first screen. Users read it and never click. In parallel, tens of millions of people have adopted ChatGPT and Perplexity as their first-stop research interface. They open a chat window, ask a natural-language question, read the answer, and click through only the two or three sources cited.

The structural piece — the part that is genuinely different from previous search shifts — is that once an answer engine forms a pattern of citing the same few sources for a category of question, it keeps citing them. Absence from the short list becomes structural unless the underlying drivers are addressed. Those drivers — entity clarity, citation frequency, structured data, topical authority, content depth — take months, not days, to shift.

The Myrtlewood cautionary case

An operator we track in our research — Myrtlewood, a multi-program lodge that had traded on referrals and word of mouth for years — carried zero structured content, and no digital-entity work when we evaluated them. When we ran their domain through our AI-visibility analysis, their operation surfaced in exactly zero AI-answer results for the fifteen core queries a serious buyer would use to find them. Their competitors, some with inferior products, were appearing in two, three, and four of those answers. Not because their business declined. Because the search layer had moved on without them.

The Black's Camp success model

Black's Camp on Santee-Cooper in South Carolina offers the instructive contrast. By building structured, specific, citation-worthy content around the Santee-Cooper fishery — facts about species, seasons, guide-to-guest ratios, water conditions, techniques — they built what we call an AI moat. AI answer engines consistently surface them when a buyer asks about Santee-Cooper striped bass or trophy crappie, because they have published the most specific, most verifiable, most citation-ready content on the subject. That is not luck. That is a documented content strategy executed over time.

We only sell services that produce real outcomes

The marketing industry has a culture problem. A large share of work delivered by traditional agencies is busywork — activity optimized to look like marketing without moving a business metric. Every service we sell is engineered to produce one or more of a short list of outcomes: bookings, leads, phone calls, revenue, margin, or client-owned brand assets. If a service does not produce one of those, we do not sell it — even if the client asks for it.

Proof that the playbook works

Pine & Marsh is a brand-new company, but the digital playbook we are running is not. Before launching the outdoor agency, Thomas and Jacob co-founded Crest & Cove Creative — a specialist marketing firm serving the short-term-rental industry. We built it as a deliberate proof-of-concept for the same pillar-and-cluster content strategy, AI-first SEO approach, and founder-executed delivery model we are applying to outdoor clients.

Crest & Cove hit roughly 10,000 Google Search Console impressions on its core keyword cluster inside the first 50 days of launch — a meaningful early signal of topical authority in a category where we had no previous brand equity. The outdoor market is, by our reading, an even larger gap than short-term rentals.

Who this is for

If you operate a business in one of the ten industries we serve — fly fishing, waterfowl, whitetail, turkey, upland and quail, dove, wild hog, sporting clays, saltwater and offshore, or a multi-program sporting lodge — inside one of the eleven states we cover, and you are looking for a partner who will know your sport, your region, and your business at a level no generalist agency can match, we should talk.

We do not expect to sign every prospect we meet. We will listen carefully, ask questions, tell you what we think honestly, and either recommend ourselves or recommend someone else. If the fit is right, we will build something that lasts.

Frequently asked questions

What makes Pine & Marsh different from a national marketing agency?

National agencies have digital depth but no regional fluency — they cannot send a founder to sit at your kitchen table on a Tuesday in March. We combine genuine outdoor cultural knowledge, senior-level creative production, and a serious command of modern digital marketing inside one small shop. Both co-founders are personally involved in every engagement, from kickoff through renewal.

How long before I see results?

Meaningful search visibility typically builds over a 6- to 12-month window. AI-answer-engine citation can surface faster for specific, highly specific content. Booking-inquiry volume from organic search usually shows its first meaningful increase at the 4- to 6-month mark. Email and CRM programs that rebook past guests can deliver results within the first 90 days.

What states do you serve?

Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, Kentucky, and Arkansas. Eleven states, deliberately chosen. If you are outside this territory, we will decline the engagement and recommend a regional agency we trust in your area.

What industries do you work in?

Fly fishing, waterfowl, whitetail, turkey, upland and quail, dove, wild hog, sporting clays, saltwater and offshore, and multi-program sporting lodges. Ten verticals, deliberately chosen. If your operation falls outside these ten, we will say so honestly and recommend a better fit.

Can you help an operation that has never invested in digital marketing?

Yes — often those are the most rewarding engagements we take, because there is the most ground to gain. Our audit baseline showed a mean digital health score of 5.57 out of 10 across 2,206 Southeastern outfitters. That means the average operator is leaving significant visibility on the table. Starting from a low baseline with a strong foundation is often faster to meaningful results than trying to repair a poorly-built existing presence.

About the authors

Jacob Mishalanie is a co-founder of Pine & Marsh and a lifelong outdoorsman, gun enthusiast, and nationally traveled hunter and angler. His career covers large-scale live production and on-property creative direction across the Southeast.

Thomas Garner is co-founder of Pine & Marsh and a Southeastern digital marketing operator with nearly a decade of experience in analytics, SEO, and AI search for outdoor and tourism businesses across the eleven states the agency serves.