Below, we've detailed 35 of the most useful things a virtual marketing assistant can help you with in your business.
35 useful things a virtual marketing assistant can do
Social Media Tasks
- Schedule Facebook Group updates
- Schedule your Instagram posts
- Scheduling tweets in bulk for published blog posts
- Upload your Pins to Pinterest
- Interacting on Instagram
- Managing a Facebook group
- Interacting on Twitter
If your virtual executive assistant speaks English as a second language, you may not want them creating your content. (Sometimes, things get lost in cultural translation, even if they are brilliant and their spelling is perfect.) However, they can absolutely help you schedule all of your social media updates.
Give your assistant access to Hootsuite or Buffer to manage your social media updates. If you're more visual (and a heavy Instagram user), something like Planoly may make more sense.
When it comes to social media interaction tasks, you can have your marketing assistant retweet influencers and tweets linked to hashtags you want to be associated with. This kind of interaction keeps you visible without you having to constantly be on social media. The same goes for Instagram. If you want to expand your following, you need to be highly visible to current and potential new followers.
Hot Tip: If Pinterest is an important platform for you, consider Tailwind. You cna easily optimize posts within the app, as well as schedule multiple repins at the same time.
Formatting and Scheduling Tasks
- Format and schedule your WordPress blog posts
- Repost your articles on LinkedIn
- Uploading and scheduling email newsletters
If you've written a piece already, there's no reason for you to waste time formatting all of your various pieces of content. Create a simple style guide to help your marketing assistant nail your style every step of the way, and let them handle getting everything where it needs to go and scheduled.
Additionally, make sure they have a basic understanding of how the backend of these pieces of software work. It's not hard to add a newsletter to Mailchimp once you know how, but the first time you try to figure out the different between a campaign and an automation can be a real pain.
A great way to give an assistant a virtual walkthrough of a task is to use Loom to record a brief screencast as you describe what needs to happen.
SEO Tasks
- Keyword research
- Perform a content audit
- Add image alt text
- Optimizing Youtube Videos
- Creating backlinks and linkbuilding
Most SEO tasks amount to a lot of data entry. In other words, it's not something you need to be doing. If you work within a program like Hubspot, they list SEO items that aren't finished yet so you can easily identify what needs fixed. Similarly, SEO Yoast for WordPress is a helpful plugin to make sure you're doing as much as you can to ensure your site's content is working hard for you.
Confirm your list of keywords, create meta descriptions, and gather your links, then pass them off to be whipped into SEO perfection.
Prospecting and Outreach Tasks
- Find new leads with an email scraping tool
- Sending mass outreach emails
- Updating your CRM
- Setting appointments up
- Linkedin prospecting and outreach
Generating new leads is something that is surprisingly simple to delegate to a capable virtual assistant. We created a list of the 8 best email scraping tools for sales prospecting for your reference, in case you're not using one already.
Now, when it comes to your CRM, that can wind up being so much data entry that it makes your eyes bleed. Instead, record voice memos or forward important information that needs to make it into Salesforce (etc)and send them to your assistant to be added as necessary.
Recordkeeping Tasks
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Organizing your files in Dropbox or Google Drive
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Running reports on Salesforce
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Monitoring Google Analytics
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Taking notes during meetings
- Creating transcripts of important calls
Jotting down something quick is one thing, but too many of us get bogged down in day-to-day recordkeeping that amounts to a lot of data entry. Pass these important, but easily ousourced tasks off, and watch your schedule instantly free up.
Client Facing Tasks
- Handling client followup
- Managing client feedback
- Sending holiday cards to former and current clients
- Handling refunds
Managing customer experience is a crucial task. However, there are many tasks that can be passed off without your customers feeling like anything has changed or grown less personal.
Also, don't forget about the customer's you've already served this year. Having your assistant keep up on your CRM has bonus perks, like giving them insight into who should be receiving gifts, cards, and other individualized attention.
Generally Important Tasks
- Handling tech support as necessary for all marketing software
- Create forms and surveys to collect data
- Upload videos to Youtube
- Adding affiliate links to posts
- Research projects for articles
- Light project management
There is so much activity that happens in a business on a given day, and the marketing activities happen to be one that you can't hold back on. By investing in a virtual marketing assistant now, you're guaranteeing you have enough time to focus on growing your business later.
