Document Overview
What's In This Document — and Why It Was Built.
This proposal was built in response to the April strategy sessions with Dean and Yuval. Every question that came up across both meetings is addressed somewhere in these five sections. Here's how it's organized.
01
Traditional Pricing — The Rate Card
HTM's standard service pricing across all industries. Three tiers for every service line — from a single social media channel to full-funnel paid media. This is the baseline every client engagement is built from. Orchard Group's partner discount (25%) applies on top of these rates.
View Section 01 →
02
Forsyth Park Weddings — Pre-Launch Go-to-Market Strategy
A two-phase plan for launching Forsyth Park Weddings before a single booking is taken — including a waitlist landing page, six content pillars, social media launch, and awareness-only Meta ads. Covers what a pre-launch marketing investment looks like at each phase with full budget detail.
View Section 02 →
03
Wedding Inc. Market Validation — The 30-Day Test
A lean validation campaign to test demand from venue owners before scaling the management model. Covers five channels — landing page, team video, social media, Meta ads (lead gen objective), and a two-touch direct mail sequence to 100 independently owned venues across the Southeast.
View Section 03 →
04
Volume Pricing — Portfolio Scale Economics
Per-venue wholesale pricing as the Wedding Inc. management portfolio grows. Three venue categories — New, Underperforming, and Optimizing — each with a recommended package and two discount tiers (25% for venues 1–5, 35% for venues 6–10), both calibrated to maintain a 60% margin as shared infrastructure amortizes across the portfolio.
View Section 04 →
05
Why High Tide Marketing — The Partnership Case
Who you're actually working with, how HTM is structured, geographic footprint, full-service capabilities, and why an integrated marketing team produces better results than managing multiple vendors across different channels.
View Section 05 →
Your Venue Portfolio
Three Venues. Three Different Starting Points. One Consistent Partner.
Each venue in the portfolio is at a different stage of its marketing journey — and the strategy for each reflects where it actually is, not a templated approach applied across all three.
Active
Chateau Elan Winery & Resort — Chateau 1800
Savannah, GA
#1 in local Instagram followers in the Savannah wedding venue market — more social momentum than any direct competitor.
Paid social not yet running. 400–500 monthly site visitors are available as a warm retargeting audience. This traffic is being left unconverted.
SEO gaps identified. $10K+/month in unoptimized keyword value based on the audit. Quick wins exist — several terms sitting at position 7 that can move to top 5 with targeted content.
TikTok: Only 2 wedding venues are active in the local market. Chateau has a first-mover opportunity on the platform with its existing photo and video assets.
Pricing: Section 01 →
Active
Chapel by the Sea
Tybee Island, GA
10,500 Instagram followers — strong existing audience. Engagement has dropped to 1.3% as content posting decreased, which is suppressing organic reach algorithmically.
The Knot drives 20% of leads. WeddingWire drives 10%. Profile optimization and review velocity improvements can increase ranking and visibility on both platforms without increasing spend.
Review response time is currently averaging 48 hours. Wedding platform algorithms reward sub-2-hour responses. Faster response time alone improves listing rank.
Retargeting opportunity — the same 400–500 monthly visitors as Chateau. Warm audience, no current retargeting infrastructure in place.
Pricing: Section 01 →
Pre-Launch
Forsyth Park Weddings
Savannah, GA — New Acquisition
Starting from zero — no website, no domain authority, no social accounts, no reviews, no ad account history. The pre-launch period is the most valuable marketing asset the venue has.
Forsyth Park is Savannah's most photographed landmark. No venue in the current market is owning that story. This positioning advantage disappears the moment a competitor claims it first.
The pre-launch strategy builds a warm, retargetable audience before the calendar opens — so the venue isn't starting cold on opening day with zero followers and no lead pipeline.
90%+ of the target audience is out of state. Destination wedding positioning is the content angle — Savannah itself is as much the product as the venue.
Full Strategy: Section 02 →
Platform Expertise & Case Study Building
Building Wedding Venue Marketing Expertise — Across Every Channel That Matters.
Wedding venue marketing operates on platforms and with audience behaviors that are completely different from general business marketing. HTM is building deep, hands-on expertise across every channel specific to this industry — using Orchard Group's venues as the proving ground, and turning that experience into case studies that power the Wedding Inc. management model.
Why this matters to Orchard Group: As HTM builds expertise on wedding-specific platforms and channels through your venues, that expertise compounds. The playbook gets sharper, the onboarding gets faster, and the results per venue improve. You're not just a client — you're the proving ground for a marketing infrastructure that scales directly with the Wedding Inc. management model. That alignment means HTM's best work goes here first.
Engagement Roadmap
What This Engagement Grows Into — Phase by Phase.
This isn't a one-time project. It's a partnership that scales with Orchard Group's ambitions — from two active venues today to a fully operational venue management company across the Southeast.
Now — Phase 1
Current Venues
Chateau 1800 + Chapel by the Sea
Fix the foundational gaps — rebuild content consistency, activate retargeting on existing traffic, optimize WeddingWire and The Knot profiles, address the $10K+/month SEO gap. Build the case study data that proves the model.
→ Section 01
Active — Phase 2
Forsyth Park Launch
Forsyth Park Weddings
Two-phase pre-launch strategy — waitlist landing page, social launch, awareness Meta ads, six content pillars from a single monthly shoot. Build the audience before the calendar opens so opening day isn't a cold start.
→ Section 02
Validation — Phase 3
Wedding Inc. Brand
Management Company Identity
30-day validation campaign to test demand from venue owners before scaling. Landing page, team video, social media, lead gen Meta ads, and direct mail to 100 independently owned venues. Cost-per-lead determines next steps.
→ Section 03
Scale — Phase 4
Volume Pricing
Portfolio of Managed Venues
As the management model scales, per-venue marketing costs drop. A standardized onboarding playbook, shared infrastructure, and volume pricing tiers mean that venues 5, 10, and 20 cost significantly less to market than venue 1.
→ Section 04 (coming)
From Our Conversations
Every Question From the April Meetings — Answered.
The questions below came directly from the April 14 strategy session and the April 20 audit presentation. Each answer references where in this document you can find the full detail.
QWe ran paid social before and the lead quality was terrible. Why would we do it again?
The previous campaign was running with a lead generation objective — asking cold audiences to fill out a form and book a tour. That almost never works in the venue market. Couples don't convert from a cold ad; they convert after multiple touchpoints over weeks or months.
What's proposed here is completely different: awareness and retargeting, not direct lead gen. Awareness ads build the retargeting pool. Retargeting ads follow the 400–500 people already visiting your site — people who are already warm — until they're ready to take action. The metric tracked is not cost-per-lead; it's reach, frequency, and retargeting pool size. When they're ready to book a tour, your venue is the one they remember.
QWhat are we actually leaving on the table with SEO right now?
The audit identified $10,000+/month in keyword value that isn't being captured. The clearest example: "Wedding venue Effingham County" is currently ranking at position 7. Moving that to top 5 adds meaningful organic traffic with no additional spend. There are multiple terms like this across both venues — low-competition, high-intent local searches where you're close but not there yet.
Beyond the quick wins, the bigger SEO gap is content. Both venues are significantly underproducing blog content and local landing pages compared to what the Wave tier covers (8 posts/month, 5 geo-targeted local landing pages). That content compounds over time — it's the one channel where what you build in month 3 keeps delivering in month 18.
QWe spend about 40% of our budget on Wedding Pro. Is that the right allocation?
The Knot and WeddingWire are generating 30% of your leads — that's a real return. The question isn't whether to be on those platforms; it's whether you're getting full value from what you're already paying.
Two things drive ranking on those platforms: response time and review velocity. Your current average response time is 48 hours. The algorithm rewards responses under 2 hours — faster response time alone improves listing position without changing spend. On reviews: splitting review requests 50/50 between Google and the wedding platforms builds authority on both simultaneously instead of concentrating in one place. Both are free improvements that compound the return on what you're already paying for.
Covered in the venue portfolio analysis above
QWhat does a percentage-based marketing budget look like for our venues?
Industry standard for event venue marketing is 5–15% of gross revenue, with most growing venues sitting between 8–12%. For a venue doing $1M/year in bookings, that's $80,000–$120,000 in annual marketing spend — $6,700–$10,000/month. For venues doing $500K, it's $40,000–$60,000/year — $3,300–$5,000/month.
The packages in this document are built below that midpoint intentionally. With the 25% Orchard Group partner discount applied, the all-in retainer for a venue running social, Meta ads, and SEO sits well under what a typical marketing budget allocation would call for — with room to add ad spend on top.
QHow does Wedding Inc. get marketed as its own brand — separate from the venues?
Wedding Inc. needs its own digital identity that speaks entirely to venue owners, not couples. That means a separate landing page (not the venue sites), separate social accounts with content written for operators — industry data, operational insights, behind-the-scenes of what management looks like — and a lead generation ad campaign targeting venue owner job titles and small business owner audiences in the Southeast.
The entire Section 03 of this document is dedicated to this. The 30-day validation campaign is designed to answer the one question that needs answering before significant capital goes in: is there real inbound interest from venue owners, and at what cost per qualified lead?
QHow do we actually reach venue owners who might want to join the management model?
Three channels, run simultaneously: a landing page that speaks directly to the venue owner's pain points (response overload, underbooked weekends, operational exhaustion), Meta ads targeting venue owner and event manager job titles across Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, and a two-touch direct mail sequence to 100 independently owned venues filtered for signs of underperformance — thin social, low review counts, sparse listing content.
The handwritten note is Touch 1. It creates curiosity without a pitch. The QR mailer a week later gives them the action to take. At $600 total for the mail sequence, the cost of two serious conversations from that channel alone is negligible compared to a single management agreement.
QWho competes with Wedding Inc.? How is this different from Venue RX or Common Sense Events?
Venue RX and Common Sense Events are management consulting firms — they advise venue owners on operations, staffing, and systems. They don't run the marketing. Wedding Inc. is a different model entirely: it's a managed-marketing-as-a-service offer, where Orchard Group provides the marketing infrastructure, the brand, and the operations playbook in exchange for a revenue share or management fee.
The positioning angle for venue owners is: they get a co-brand under the Wedding Inc. umbrella, access to a marketing team they could never hire themselves, and the credibility of being part of a managed portfolio — without giving up ownership. The competitors don't offer that.
QWhat does marketing look like for a venue we bring under the management model?
The short answer: a standardized 30-day onboarding playbook followed by per-venue packages from Section 01 at volume-discounted rates. Every new venue gets the same infrastructure rollout — accounts set up, brand audit, content calendar, ad account structure, The Knot and WeddingWire profile optimization, and a baseline SEO pass — in a consistent sequence that gets faster and cheaper with every venue added.
The full volume pricing structure — what changes at venue 5, venue 10, and beyond — is being built in Section 04 once the validation campaign results come in. The economics of scale here are significant: the creative infrastructure, the ad account learnings, and the content systems built for venues 1–3 directly reduce the cost and time to onboard venue 4 and beyond.