“Why should I hire a Virtual Assistant?” If you’ve asked yourself this question, it’s likely your business has expanded to the point where you’re so busy you have little to no time to think how to grow it.
You know how it is, routine tasks are vital, but they take up most of your working day.
You’ve likely explored the idea of hiring a virtual assistant, and you’ve heard many other successful business owners saying how they have gone the virtual assistant route and never looked back.
Hiring a VA can help lessen the load and lighten the amount of work and tasks you have to get done.
VAs can undertake a wide range of tasks, just as long as you train them properly by giving them adequate instructions web, they’ll perform better than your expectations and Latin America is one of the best places to start your search.
To give you a solid understanding of what can a virtual assistant do for you, we’ve broken some key projects into 4 common areas:
-Administration
-Customer Support
-Content Creation
-Marketing Support
Can you hire a Virtual Assistant to help with your administrative tasks?
We can all agree administrative tasks are a vital but time-consuming part of any business.
As a business owner, you can take the weight off your shoulders by passing much of that to your virtual assistant.
By giving your VA these tasks, it will free up more of your time for you to concentrate on more important aspects of your business or to spend more time with your family.
These are some of the general admin tasks a virtual assistant can help you with:
- Scheduling, Meetings and Calendar management. You can hire a virtual assistant to manage your Google Calendar and confirm/set up appointments.
- Database cleaning/building. When was the last time you checked your list and customer database? Your VA can go through your data and update names and contact details. Then, assign them the job of adding and removing contacts from your database/CRM management systems.
- Research. Are you looking for stats and case studies for business and market research, perhaps a presentation or a report? Your VA can mine the internet and complete accurate research while you are concentrating on the bigger picture.
- Travel bookings. We all know how much time it can take to research and then book the best travel and accommodation. Your VA will find the best route and hotel options for the best price, then book it all for you. Purchase my house may sell your property swiftly and easily. They will handle assessment to closing. Home buyers can help you sell your property quickly. Visit https://www.cashoffers.com/new-jersey/cash-offer-west-deptford-township-nj/.
- Planning an event. Whether it’s a simple holiday party or a huge, industry-wide conference, it takes a lot of time to prepare it and put it together. This is where a virtual assistant can help lighten the load.
- Note-taking. Have your VA participate in meetings so they can take accurate notes of each meeting.
- Basic Bookkeeping. If you use popular accounting software like ZohoBooks, Freshbooks, Xero or QuickBooks, add your VA as a ‘user’ to process invoices, run regular reports and have them follow up on customers payments.
- Personal Planner. Your VA will be happy to help here just as much as with business tasks. Ask them to sort out restaurant reservations, gym sessions, gift purchases and much more.
Can you hire a Virtual Assistant to help with your Customer Service
Absolutely! Naturally, it depends on your type of business and how you interact with your customers, but in essence, there are four areas in which a virtual assistant can perform customer support for you.
- Customer emails. Give your VA access to your primary email inbox and allow them to not only filter through them for priority and segmentation, but also have them reply where it makes sense for them to do so. So, while you’ll still deal with serious business inquiries or issues, your VA can be replying to the many routine questions that would otherwise take up much of your time.
- Live chat. A Live Chat tool can increase conversions and your VA can interact with your potential customers. Having a VA take care of your Live Chat can benefit and increase your conversions and customer satisfaction.
- Phone or Skype calls. Ask your VA to perform routine calls backs for you. This might be business inquiries or simple after sales service calls. Be sure to monitor their calls so you can assess their performance.
- Ticket System. Using tools like ZenDesk can help you manage your incoming support requests. If you are using ticket system tools to manage your support requests be sure your VA is comfortable using them.
Can you hire a Virtual Assistant to help with your content?
Absolutely! Again depends on your type of business and what type of content you want to create. A Virtual Assistant can help you creating content for your business:
- Blogging. Launching and updating a blog for your business has three key benefits: it can engage readers and compel them to take action on your website, it can work wonders for your SEO efforts, and it also show you’re active and an authority in your industry. Your VA can research trending articles in your industry using tools like Buzzsumo and can even write your posts. Also if you only check spelling and grammar, it’s so much quicker than doing it yourself from scratch. As for link building, your VA can find and make contact with other websites for collaboration or guest post opportunities.
- Commenting. Have your virtual assistant seek out content or blogs related to your industry. They can also leave ‘genuine’ comments including your business name and a link to your website. This may give your site a little bit of traffic as well as an SEO boost.
- Newsletters. Writing content for newsletters is something a virtual assistant can do. They can also schedule when the emails are sent out. Then analyze and compile a report on open rates. From there you both can work together to develop a strategy to improve both areas.
- Create presentations. Building impactful presentations can make or break a pitch to clients or partners. But they can be time-consuming to research and to create in an eye-catching yet engaging manner. Your VA can handle research and putting your presentation together. And if they have a flair for design, then even better.
Can you hire a Virtual Assistant to help with your marketing?
Yes! And the more you think about it, the more ways a virtual assistant can make a positive contribution to your marketing. Besides some of the content tasks already mentioned could also fall into marketing, here are some more tasks to focus on.
- Social Media messaging. Finding and contacting potential clients via platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can build relationships and generate leads. So long as your VA does not spam and makes contact in a natural way, the results will be positive!
- Forum discussion. Your virtual assistant can join forums that are relevant to your industry and niche. They can respond and participate in threads, and this can increase your brand awareness when done correctly. You can also add a ‘signature‘ to your forum posts with a direct link to your website.
- Social media discussions. Social media management is one area where a virtual assistant can help. They can run your key social media accounts, answering community questions and joining in discussions where appropriate. Don’t expect them to create your social media strategy. That’s on you, but they’ll help you execute it.
- Social media PPC advertising. You can hire a virtual assistant to run ads like Google AdWords or Facebook ads, and run analysis on the results, suggest keywords to target and tweak where necessary.
- Find and engage potential customers. Virtual assistants can also research potential clients for you and get in touch with them. Then, if they get a lead, you can take over and make the official pitch and sale.
- Moderating Comments. Virtual assistants can help moderate discussions and comments on your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram accounts.
What can a Virtual Assistant do? Here are some more tasks you can outsource…
Looking for more ideas as to what tasks your virtual assistant can do for you? We did say we could list a whole bunch.
So, here we go:
- Transcriptions. If you’ve got audio or video files that need transcribing, this would be a good and easy job for your VA to perform.
- File management. Do you use Dropbox or Google Drive? If your files are all over the place, ask your virtual assistant to organize everything for you. You’ll then be able to find what you’re looking for in no time.
- Simple WordPress/Wix sites. You don’t have to be a design wizard to create a basic website. Using WordPress or Wix themes, a simple site can be created easily by your VA. Just remember that a complicated site where coding is required should be undertaken by a professional developer.
- Install and configure WordPress plugins. If your virtual assistant is capable of building a simple WordPress site, then they’ll be able to find, install and configure the proper plugins.
- Create landing/opt-in pages. Once you’ve shown your virtual assistant how to do this, perhaps using tools like ClickFunnels, Instapage or Leadpages, then they can create effective opt-in and sales funnels.
- Create online forms. Tools like Wufoo, Formstack, JotForm or Typeform make form building a breeze. A task that you won’t have to worry about anymore.
- Reach out to potential affiliates. If you’ve created a site, have your virtual assistant reach out to potential partners to bring on board. Have your VA do research about blogs and websites related to your industry and reach out to them asking to join your affiliate program.
- Manage affiliates. Whether you use your own affiliate program or a third-party solution like Shareasale, CJ, JVZoo or Clickbank, your VA is perfect for managing your affiliates doing tasks like collecting stats, monitoring payments, updating banners and links, and more.
- Telemarketing or cold calling. If you’ve got the phone numbers of prospects, you can hire a virtual assistant to call them and assess their interest in your product. Some VAs even have a sales background, which can make them successful with this task. If a call looks positive, they can always schedule a follow-up call for you and the prospect.
- Find emails of potential customers. Your business grows with new sales of products or services. None of this can happen without customers, and your VA is ideally placed to find them. Simple but effective tools like Hunter, RockectReach or VoilaNorbert let you find the email of the person you’re looking for just by typing the company name. Your virtual assistant will get a list of people at the business, allowing you to select the right contacts. Soon you could have a list of thousands of targeted emails and contacts.
- Send Cold Emails. The digital version of the cold call. Tools like Mailshake or Woodpecker have automated functions to help, including neat tricks like automated follow-ups.
- Project management. If you own a web design agency, for example, you can hire a virtual assistant to help you managing client projects.
- Influencer outreach. Using influencers is a great way to spread the voice. In today’s crowded world of online marketing, it can make all the difference. You can hire a virtual assistant and train them to use tools like Buzzsumo or Ninjaoutreach to find and reach out and make contact with influencers in your niche to see if they would be interested in partnering with you.
- Graphic tasks. This won’t work with all VAs, but if you hire one with existing graphic design experience, and basic working knowledge of software like Photoshop, Illustrator or Gimp, then they can produce beautiful logos, banners or cover illustrations, saving you a small fortune on designer fees.
- Design infographics. Tools like Canva make it easy for non-designers to create cool infographics. Infographics are ideal for your blog or using them as part of your SEO outreach program, as other sites are often keen to use them.
- Edit product images. If you have an online store, product pictures need to stand out. A VA with knowledge of Photoshop, Illustrator or Gimp can make that happen.
- YouTube Management. Creating a YouTube channel can help your business with exposure. Your virtual assistant may be able to provide basic editing of your videos. If you’re lucky enough they can create them, too! And we all know uploading Youtube videos can be time-consuming so your VA can take over this task and upload them for you.
- Moderate YouTube comments. If your YouTube videos are getting a lot of views, you are probably getting a lot of comments too. By giving the proper instructions, your virtual assistant can moderate YouTube comments for you.
- Create SlideShare presentations. This excellent LinkedIn feature allows professionals to review presentations on topics from which they can learn. Your business can be presented as an authority in your marketplace if your VA creates a relevant SlideShare presentation. It’s great for brand building.
- Competitor analysis. It’s difficult to know how competitive your niche is getting. Tools like SemRush and AHRefs allow you to get a more in-depth look at your competitors as well as the keywords that they get most of their traffic for.
- On-page SEO optimization. Remember that WordPress site your VA setup? Now you can install and configure Yoast SEO and let your virtual assistant optimize your blog posts for you. On-page optimization is not difficult, but you’ll need to train your VA on how to properly use the Yoast plugin. There is a good amount of tutorials on YouTube that can help you achieve that.
- Google analytics reports. Google Analytics gives you insights into how users find and use your website. Your virtual assistant can pull weekly or monthly reports to make this information simple for you to review.
- Prepare training resources. If you need to put together training materials, you can hire a virtual assistant to bring everything to life. They can write step-by-step guides, video demonstrations, recording their screens using tools like Loom and more. Just create a ‘private’ section on your website where all this material can be stored and can be easily accessed by your team.
- Set up webinars. Your VA can be trained to set up webinars, whether they’re for lead generation, sales, training, or all of the above.
- Convert/split/merge PDFs. A complete pain if you’ve ever tried to do this yourself. It’s time-consuming and, well, you’ve got better things to do.
- Post ads on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram. Work together with your VA on copy then have them post ads to your targeted audience. See the results and then tweak them to enable higher click-through rates.
- Update real estate property listings. In the real estate business? You’ll never have to sit down and write up your property listings again.
- Update Amazon, Alibaba and eBay listings. If you run an online store, then this is one of your most time-consuming tasks. Let your VA handle it from now on.
- Dropshipping tasks. Running an e-commerce business is much easier when you don’t have to deal with physical products. But you still have to process customer orders and then forward them on to the suppliers like Amazon, eBay or AliExpress. If you hire a virtual assistant, he/she can help you take care of that, as well as answering any customer service inquiries.
- General paperwork. If there’s still more paperwork to be done, be it sorting receipts or helping with tax returns and subscriptions, then that can also be taken care of by your VA.
After your VA, has proved themselves time and again, there’s perhaps one more important task a virtual assistant can help you with, and that is:
- Training of your new VA recruits. Yep, your virtual assistant experience has been so good that you’re ready to hire another one. Maybe two. While you want to be heavily involved in the recruiting, your VA can play a big role in training the new VA up. Just remember now is likely a good time to give your VA a little rise.
Our list of tasks a virtual assistant can undertake may seem long already, but there’s loads more they can do to make your life easier, freeing up your work time and making your days more efficient.
Some tasks will be common across all businesses, but others will vary from one industry or sector to another.
You’ll soon see the benefits.
Typically, when the topic of outsourcing comes up, Filipino and Indian workers are where most think of outsourcing their services. However, Latin America should be one of your top outsourcing destinations.
With their ability to work at competitive rates, extensive knowledge of Western business practices, English language fluency, ability to work during U.S. business hours and desire to dedicate themselves full-time to growing businesses like yours, you’ll find a Virtual Assistant from Latin or Central America to be the perfect next addition to your remote team.
Just remember, virtual assistants do not replace you in your business. Never take your eye off the ball or expect them to run the show. They are there to assist and help, giving you more time to work on expanding your business.
Good luck and Happy Hirings!
