By Bianca Frank, Creative Director · Bianca Frank Design, Anchorage
Originally published July 2025. Fully rewritten and updated October 2026.
Most small business owners in Alaska are doing some digital marketing: a Facebook page someone updates when they remember, a website from a few years ago, maybe an ad that ran once. What almost none of them have is a plan that says what each piece is for, when it runs, and how they’ll know it worked. Without that, every channel feels like a chore and none of them feels like it’s working.
This guide is the plan. It fits on one page, it’s built around the way an Alaska year actually goes, and it’s the same structure we use with clients from Kodiak to Fairbanks.
In short:
- Your plan is one page: goal, audience, three channels at most, a monthly budget, and three to five numbers you’ll check.
- Each channel has one job. Your website converts, Google gets you found, social keeps you remembered, email brings people back, ads buy attention you can’t earn yet.
- Plan around the months your customers actually buy, and do the setup work in your slow months. The calendar below walks through a typical Alaska year.
- Measure five things monthly and ignore the rest. Vanity numbers are how businesses convince themselves something’s working when it isn’t.
- The first three months are setup, the next three are learning, and the payoff starts after that. Most people quit at month four.
The one-page plan
You don’t need a deck. Our clients who get results work from a single page that answers five questions:
- What does success look like in twelve months? Not “more customers.” A number: twenty qualified inquiries a month, fifteen new patients a quarter, a booked summer by March.
- Who exactly are you trying to reach? Two or three kinds of people, described plainly. “Homeowners in Eagle River with houses built before 1990.” “HR managers at Anchorage employers with fifty-plus staff.”
- Which three channels, and what is each one for? More than three and nothing gets done well. The next section helps you pick.
- What’s the monthly budget, in dollars and in hours? Hours matter more than dollars for most small businesses; the plan fails when nobody has time to run it.
- Which three to five numbers will you check each month? Chosen now, before anything launches, so you can’t move the goalposts later.
Write it, print it, put it where you’ll see it. Everything below is how to fill in the blanks.
What each channel is actually for
The mistake most guides make is listing every channel as if you should use all of them. Each one has a job; pick the ones whose job you need done.
- Your website converts. Everything else sends people here, and here is where they call, book or fill out a form. If the site doesn’t do that well, spending on any other channel is pouring water into a cracked bucket. Fix this first.
- Google gets you found. Search and your Google Business Profile are where people go when they already need what you sell. This is the highest-intent traffic there is, and for most Alaska service businesses it’s the channel that pays the bills. It’s slow to build and durable once built.
- Social keeps you remembered. Facebook and Instagram rarely bring in a stranger who needs a roofer today. What they do is keep you in front of people who’ve met you, so you’re the name that comes up at the dinner table. One channel, done consistently, beats three done sporadically.
- Email brings people back. The cheapest channel by far, and the most neglected. A monthly note to past customers and leads outperforms almost any ad for a business with repeat or referral work.
- Ads buy attention you can’t earn yet. Google Ads or boosted posts make sense for a new business with no search presence, a seasonal push, or a specific offer with a deadline. They stop working the day you stop paying, which is why they’re a supplement, not a plan.
- Print and the old-school channels still work here. Alaska is small and local. A sponsorship banner at the hockey rink, a booth at the State Fair, a mailer to a specific neighborhood, your truck. These reach people who never see your Facebook page, and they’re cheap relative to the trust they build.
For a year-round lakefront wedding and event venue we worked with, the channel map was clear once the audiences were named: couples find venues through search and Instagram, corporate planners through search and referrals. So the website was built with separate paths for weddings, corporate events and community celebrations, transparent packages and pricing, and an availability inquiry that works in every season. Search did the finding; the site did the converting. Social was there to keep the venue in front of people who’d already toured it.
The Alaska marketing calendar
This is how we plan a year with clients, by the seasons that move money for most Alaska businesses. Yours may differ; the point is to name your own windows and prepare for them ahead of time.
January to March: the quiet build. Daylight is short, many customers are hunkered down, and most service businesses are slower. This is when you do the work that pays off later: fix the website, write the service pages, set up tracking, plan the year’s content, ask last year’s customers for reviews. Tourism and lodging businesses are the exception; this is their booking season and their site has to be ready by New Year’s.
April to May: break-up and the restart. The ground thaws, people emerge, and the home and property services season opens. Landscapers, builders, cleaners, painters and anyone else whose work depends on the ground should have their spring campaigns live by late March, before the first warm weekend, because that’s when every homeowner in Anchorage remembers the gutters.
June to August: the rush. For most Alaska businesses this is peak season and there’s no time to market, which is exactly why the content was made in February. Social runs on a schedule set in advance; email goes out once a month on autopilot; the only live work is capturing reviews and photos from the season for next year. Resist launching anything new in July.
September to October: the PFD window and the pivot. The Permanent Fund Dividend lands in early October and for a few weeks Alaskans spend. Retail, restaurants, tourism operators selling next year, anyone with a larger-ticket purchase: have an offer ready in September and visible in the first two weeks of October. It’s also the pivot point for seasonal businesses: snow removal starts marketing while the lawn crews are still mowing.
November to December: the holidays and the dark. Retail and food businesses have their second peak. Everyone else has a decision: go dark until January, or use the quiet to stay visible with a few well-made posts and the year-end email. Going dark costs more than people think; by the time you come back in March, Google and your customers have both moved on.
The point isn’t that every business follows this exactly. It’s that your plan should name the two or three windows that matter most to you and put most of the year’s effort in front of them, not during them.
Measuring it without drowning in data
Pick three to five numbers that match the goal on your one-page plan, and check them on the first of each month. For most Alaska service businesses that’s some version of:
- Phone calls and form submissions from the website
- Visitors from Google search (Search Console shows this free)
- New reviews on your Google Business Profile
- One social number that reflects real interest (messages or link clicks, not likes)
- Email opens or replies, if you send one
Ignore everything else. Followers, impressions and page views go up and down for reasons that have nothing to do with revenue, and watching them is how businesses convince themselves something is working when it isn’t. If the five numbers aren’t moving after three months, change one thing and watch another three.
What this looks like in practice
A local service provider in Anchorage came to us with no plan at all: a Facebook page and a box of outdated postcards. Together we named who they were trying to reach (first-time homebuyers and the real estate agents who refer them), built a simple WordPress site with a clear message, set up analytics and a content calendar keyed to the seasons above, and ran one small social campaign during their slow season. Six months later, qualified inquiries, meaning actual phone calls and emails from the right kind of customer, were up 40 percent. Nothing in that plan was clever. All of it was on one page.
The same discipline works for an organization as well as a business. When Alaska Health Fair, a nonprofit that has run community health clinics across the state since 1980, approached its fortieth year, the marketing problem was coherence: a refreshed brand had to show up the same way on the website, the folder a client carries through a blood draw, the brochure and the flyer. One brand, applied the same way on every piece, is what lets a small team market consistently without a marketing department. The plan on one page works for a nonprofit for the same reason it works for a plumber.
When advertising makes sense
Paid ads are the channel people reach for first and should usually reach for last. They’re right for three situations: a new business with no search presence yet and no time to build one; a seasonal window where you need to be seen in a specific two weeks (PFD, spring break-up, a holiday); and a specific offer with a deadline. In those cases, a modest Google Ads or boosted-post budget aimed at a tightly defined local audience works. Outside those cases, the same money put into the website, search and reviews keeps paying after the campaign ends. Ads stop the day the card declines.
Frequently asked questions
What should a small business digital marketing plan include? A twelve-month goal with a number, two or three named audiences, at most three channels with a stated job each, a monthly budget in dollars and hours, and three to five metrics checked monthly. One page.
Which digital marketing channel is best for a small business in Alaska? For most service businesses, Google (search plus your Google Business Profile) and a website that converts. Social keeps existing customers engaged; email brings them back; ads fill short-term gaps. Pick by the job you need done, not by what’s popular.
How do I get more traffic to my website? Search brings the most valuable traffic: service pages written around what people actually search, a maintained Google Business Profile, and steady reviews. Social and email bring people back; ads buy a short-term boost. Traffic without a site that converts is wasted, so fix the site first.
Should a small business use Google Ads? For a new business with no search presence, a seasonal push, or a deadline offer, yes, with a tight local audience and a modest budget. As a permanent substitute for search and reviews, no; it stops working when the spending stops.
How long before digital marketing shows results? The first three months are setup and consistency, the next three are testing and learning, and the compounding starts after that. Most businesses that “tried it and it didn’t work” stopped in month four.
Start with the page
If you’d rather not build the plan alone, that’s most of the businesses we work with; almost none have an in-house marketing team. Send us your one-page draft, even a rough one, and we’ll tell you where it’s strong, where it’s missing a season, and which of our content and social media services would fill the gaps without taking over your week. The Alaska Small Business Development Center’s free workshops are a good companion to all of this and we point clients there often.
Bianca Frank is the founder and Creative Director of Bianca Frank Design, an Anchorage agency that has designed brands and websites for Alaska businesses since 2007. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design and leads a small in-house team covering branding, web design, SEO and content strategy, with recent work for clients including Nalaquq LLC, the Native Village of Barrow, Solstice Psychiatry and Alaska Geographic. BFD was named one of Anchorage’s best web designers by Three Best Rated (2025) and received UpCity’s Local Excellence and Best of Alaska awards (2022, 2023).
