How to Launch a PPC Campaign in a Day (Or Less)

Not enough time to market your business? You’re not alone. Most small businesses don’t have a lot of time to do their marketing. Especially if they’re one-person businesses or solo professionals.

Many small businesses don’t have a lot of money to manage their marketing, either. It’s fairly common for small businesses to invest 4% or less of their revenue into marketing. One survey found that “54% of small businesses invest 4% or more of their revenue in marketing, while roughly 1 in 10 does not invest.”

Despite the pressures they face, small business owners rarely seek out help with their marketing. They tend to outsource very little. A 2019 survey by Clutch found that only a bit over one-third of small businesses outsource anything. Among the businesses that do outsource, they most often outsource “accounting (37%), IT services (37%), and digital marketing (34%) responsibilities.”

The smaller the business is, the less likely it is to outsource: Clutch learned that only 29% of businesses with 50 or fewer employees outsource any work. Compare that to businesses with more than 50 employees, of which 66% outsource at least some work.

So no wonder small business owners feel a crunch. And no wonder they struggle with burnout.

Of course, most ad agencies and marketing consultants who work with small business owners are keenly aware of how time-pressed and budget-minded small business owners are. It can make them challenging clients, but on the upside, small businesses clearly need help with their marketing. Stat.

After all, every small business needs… business. More business. So marketing has to get done. And PPC marketing just happens to be an especially effective and efficient way to do it.

PPC marketing may not be 100% “set it and forget it,” but it certainly requires less time and energy than, say, blogging. PPC marketing is also easy to track and it can be turned on or off at any time. That makes it an attractive way to drive business for small or local companies who do not have a lot of time to fuss with other marketing techniques.

So it shouldn’t be too surprising that about 45% of small businesses use PPC marketing. If that sounds low, consider that only 60% of small businesses have a website. That’s per a 2019 survey, too – it’s not data from 2010. Even in 2019, a substantial portion of small businesses do not have their own website, which speaks to exactly how time-pressured and budget-starved their marketing is.

When you consider that, knowing that 45% of small businesses use PPC is impressive. And among the businesses that do use PPC, most of them use it fairly consistently, which further suggests that it works. Small business owners are way too frugal to spend budget on marketing tactics that don’t deliver.

That all makes a good case for PPC. And yet, just knowing you should be doing something is not enough to get it done. Small businesses need a way to get PPC marketing done with the very small amount of time they have.

So if you can’t find the time to do something yourself, and you can’t afford to (or manage to) outsource it, what do you do?

You find a tool to do the job.

There are plenty of PPC tools around, of course. Dozens, maybe even hundreds of them. But a tool that lets you launch an entire campaign in one day? One that could let a new, one-person shop immediately start driving targeted, trackable and testable traffic to their website in just a few hours?

It is possible. And you can do it. There are actually a couple of ways to launch a PPC campaign in one day.

1. Be a marketing whiz with experience in PPC.

If you’re starting, say, a PPC ad agency, you could get a brand new account and campaign up in a day. You’d know how to do keyword research, find the right audiences, write ads, choose campaign settings, set up bids, and maybe even throw together a few landing pages.

But most people aren’t marketing wizards. They’ll need another solution.

2. Copy a competitor’s campaign.

Some SEO and PPC tools – like SEMRush, SpyFu, and Acquisio – offer the ability to spy on competitor’s PPC campaigns and even to copy those campaigns. The tools will duplicate competitors’ keywords, ads, bids, audiences, campaign settings and all. It takes only a few clicks to launch a campaign if you’ve got your landing pages created and you have access to one of these tools.

That would go a long way to getting your business more business. But it’s got a snag: Just because your competitors are doing something doesn’t mean it’s effective for them. Maybe they’re just wasting money on their PPC accounts. Maybe they don’t know what a negative keyword is, or how to do location targeting so their ads don’t show up in places they can’t serve.

If you don’t want to duplicate those mistakes, you’ll need another option.

3. Use Acquisio’s campaign Launcher to launch a PPC campaign in one day.

With a systematized process and a machine learning algorithm that can crunch a ton of PPC advertising data, it is possible to set up and launch a new local PPC campaign in one day. That campaign can be customized to your industry, your offerings, and your budget, too.

Here’s how the Launcher works:

1. Pick the offerings you want to include in your new local SEM campaign.

2. Review the estimates for click traffic then select your spending level: Conservative, Moderate or Aggressive.

3. Add your business information, set up your ads, and click “launch.”

After you’ve entered a few details like your website address and some ad copy, click launch and your entire local PPC campaign will be created automatically.

The Launcher uses machine learning to pick the keywords based on your vertical, including negative keywords so you won’t waste any of your ad spend. It will set bids and manage the times when your ads show based on when your business is open.

Here’s a visual on how the Launcher picks keywords and structures local campaigns according to those terms’ taxonomies:

So how much time can this save? Hours at least, and maybe days if you aren’t a PPC pro. You won’t have to learn Google Ads or Bing Ads in order to use them if you’ve got this tool. And you won’t have to pay to hire an ad agency or a freelancer to manage the campaigns for you, which also means you won’t be giving up control over your PPC account.

You’ll also avoid having inconsistent campaigns. This is because the Launcher won’t set up campaigns in the quirky way a human would. It has a very specific methodology. It follows that methodology all the time, exactly as it was programmed to do.

Using a tool like this also means you won’t have to take time away from your business to make changes to every ad group every time there’s a small change to your business.

For example, if you decide to extend your business hours until 7 pm during the holiday shopping season, you won’t have to go in and make changes ad group by ad group. The Launcher can change all your ads based on your marketing goals. And if you get stuck, you can call an Acquisio representative and get the help you need.

Conclusion

Clearly, small businesses need to do marketing. But just as clearly, they are time-pressed and budget-starved. Even if they can manage to outsource some of their digital marketing, they need to do so as efficiently as possible, both in terms of time and money.

PPC marketing is a perfect fit for those requirements. Add in that tools exist to allow small businesses to launch a campaign in a day (a well-optimized campaign, even), and PPC gets even better.

So no more excuses, small business owners, about not being able to do more marketing. With the tools available now, PPC marketing has become awfully close to the “set it and forget it,” time-efficient, high ROI marketing small business owners need.

IMAGES

1. Unsplash, SpaceX.
2. Score.org, How Hard Small Business Owners Work.
3. Clutch.co, Small Business SEO: Investments and Benefits in 2018.

4-7. Acquisio, Launcher video.