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Virtual Assistance
What VAs Can Do to Promote Your Brand Online
Let’s face it, when you’re running a small business by yourself, things can get hectic and overwhelming pretty quick. Businessmen and women, entrepreneurs, and small business owners typically start their journey with well-laid out plans and daring goals for their business venture. But if it’s that easy, then everyone would be running their own company.
With the highly competitive nature of running a business, it takes just a few left turns to quickly get bogged down by miniscule tasks that take a considerable amount of time to accomplish—time that should be spent on the more crucial aspects of the business. In this digital age, conventional personal assistants are being replaced by what is referred to as virtual assistants or VAs.
What is a virtual assistant?
Virtual assistants are what you might consider as telecommuting employees or remote workers. Most VAs work from home, making good use of the internet, email services, the telephone, and other online tools that facilitate the process involved with whatever task they are assigned to do.
Virtual assistants make good use of the internet, digital tools, and their own experiences and skill sets as they work from home, helping you manage your business.
With the right hire, the pick of the litter, virtual assistants can actually do so much more for your business besides organizing and answering emails or scheduling appointments. With the right skill set, they can help manage websites, create and develop content, manage social media, organize events, and even help out with your marketing efforts by promoting your products/services and your brand.
The main advantages of hiring a virtual assistant
If you’re still on the fence as to whether hiring a virtual assistant is the right fit for your business, here are a few key benefits you should consider to help you come up with a more informed decision:
Hiring a virtual assistant will help you . . .
1. free up your daily workload so you can be free to tackle other more important aspects of your business. As much as we like to control every aspect of our lives, including our business, there comes a point where we will have to relinquish some of that control, whether we like it or not, and rely on our colleagues and/or partners to finish the job for us.
This is what virtual assistants are meant to do, to help carry the load, so you can focus on other things besides time-consuming paperwork and other administrative tasks. Having more time for leisure, with family and friends, may also help you gain a different perspective as to how you should manage your growing business.
2. gain access to specific skill sets and expertise that would otherwise be impossible or costly through traditional means. Bigger companies have deep pockets. They have the resources to hire experts to help improve the business. Small businesses don’t typically have the capabilities or the financial means to employ specialists and experts.
Instead, what SMBs and solo entrepreneurs can do is tap into the BPO market to find virtual assistants that can provide the right skill sets, expertise, and experiences to help their business for a fraction of the cost. The key is finding the right VA who caters to a specific niche that your organization can actually use.
3. alter your mindset so you can focus more on a strategic way of thinking. If running a business were a game, it would be akin to the game of chess (not Monopoly), especially if you are operating in a highly competitive environment. To gain an advantage over the competitors, an entrepreneur has to learn to think three, four, even five steps ahead, just like in chess.
And the best way to get into this strategic way of thinking is to drop all non-critical tasks and assign them to a fully capable virtual assistant. Your to-do list should comprise only of the most crucial and most relevant aspects of your business.
How virtual assistants can help with your marketing efforts
Regardless of the industry you operate in or cater to, virtual assistants have a significant role to play in the marketing process of your business. A virtual assistant can serve as a brand ambassador given the right tasks, tools, and training.
Nowadays, when people say the word marketing, they actually mean digital marketing, given that most of the marketing today actually occurs in the digital world. And as digital marketing becomes increasingly vital to any business, so is the need for a good virtual assistant.
Digital marketing involves new technology combined with online-based platforms and tools. And from a personnel standpoint, it requires a variety of skill sets and expertise, from social media management to content creation and development. These are some of the vital areas of digital marketing that a good virtual assistant may be able to assist you with.
- Content marketing
Content marketing is one of the main pillars of digital marketing. Developing and maintaining high-quality content that serves a real purpose for your target audience is very important. And having a virtual assistant with a background in content writing, SEO, and maybe a little experience in web development might just be the help that you’re looking for to propel your business to the next level.
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is a pioneering strategy in the world of digital marketing. The process will enable you to optimize your business website for search engines so people can easily find you on the web.
SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. Content development is the creative side of a good digital marketing strategy, SEO the technical one. And there are virtual assistants out there who have ample experience and skills to effectively handle your SEO needs for you.
More established and bigger organizations may opt to hire an actual SEO company, but this option requires serious investment. If you’re a small business, you may not have the resources to acquire the services of a SEO firm. The more cost-effective solution is to hire a suitable virtual assistant.
- Social media marketing
Social media is one of the latest components of digital marketing that industry experts and specialists are utilizing these days. With social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter dominating the digital realm, it has become more vital for businesses across multiple industries to focus on these channels to improve brand awareness, gain followers, develop brand trust, and reach as many potential customers as possible.
Representing your brand on social media, posting relevant content, and engaging with followers and other influencers is the ideal job for a virtual assistant with ample experience in this particular realm. Keep in mind that uploading content, liking, sharing, and replying to comments on social media posts are time-consuming tasks that can easily consume half of your day. This is why it’s a perfect task for VAs.
- Email marketing
If social media marketing is one of the newest branches of digital marketing, email marketing is arguably one of the oldest and still commonly used to this day. Here is where a virtual assistant’s experience in content development may cross over to email marketing.
You see, email marketing is more than just sending and responding to emails. It involves a lot of strategizing, creating engaging content that people will actually want to open and read. By having a VA that can create high-quality content for your subscribers, you’ve already covered half the battle.
Conclusion
A good virtual assistant can offer many different expertise and skill sets that are useful to an organization. The key is finding the right individual with the right skills to assist you in other important aspects of your business.
Obviously, upon working with a VA for the first time, you will want to assign them tasks that are easy and straightforward just to see how they handle it. Over time, you can slowly give them more complex assignments that match their particular skill sets and experiences. Eventually as time passes and trust continues to develop between both parties, sharing workloads (relinquishing control) will become that much easier.
To make sure that you get the most out of your VA, maximize your investment, the first step is to identify which aspects of your business you need help with. Then you find a reputable service provider or VA firm that caters to your specific need.
