As a business owner, it's a fair bet that you've got more on your plate than you can handle on your own. That said, if you're not the one talking and sharing and posting about how great your business is online, who is?
That's why one of the best hires you can make while you're building your business is a virtual marketing assistant. Slightly more specialized than a general virtual assistant, this person is here to help you make sure you have your bases covered when it comes to staying on top of your marketing with research, SEO, sales assistance, and more.
Below, we've detailed 35 of the most useful things a virtual marketing assistant can help you with in your business.
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 social media virtual 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 be on social media constantly. The same goes for Instagram. 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. The app allows you to easily optimize posts and schedule multiple repins simultaneously.
If you've already written a piece, there's no reason 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 scheduling.
Additionally, make sure they have a basic understanding of how the backend of these pieces of software works. Once you know how, adding a newsletter to Mailchimp is not hard, but figuring out the difference 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.
Most SEO tasks amount to a lot of data entry. In other words, it's not something you need to be doing. In many cases, it's better to outsource backlink building. If you work within a program like Hubspot, they list SEO items that aren't finished yet, so you can easily identify what needs to be fixed. Similarly, SEO Yoast for WordPress is a helpful plugin to ensure you're doing as much as possible 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.
Generating new leads is surprisingly simple to delegate to a capable virtual assistant. In case you're not using one, we created a list of the 8 best email scraping tools for sales prospecting for your reference.
Now, regarding 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.
Organizing your files in Dropbox or Google Drive
Running reports on Salesforce
Monitoring Google Analytics
Taking notes during meetings
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.
Managing customer experience is a crucial task. However, many tasks can be passed off without your customers feeling like anything has changed or become 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.
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.