You could use an extra set of hands to help you when you are getting busier more than ever because your business in growing rapidly day by day. That’s when you hear about using a virtual assistant. In this post, we will be talking some important things that you must know about hiring a virtual assistant for your business.
What are virtual assistants/employees?
Virtual assistants/employees are highly skilled professionals who offer business solution services online/offsite. This can consist of individuals (working from home) or a team/company working offsite, means they are not physically present in your office but they work remotely. They specialize in providing a huge list of services such as Social Media Management, Social Media Marketing, Internet Marketing, Accounting/Bookkeeping, Software development, Search Engine Optimization, Website Designing/Development/Management, Customer Service, Sales, Order Processing, Invoice Creation, Email Marketing, Email Handling, Data Entry, Lead Generation and name a few.
What can you outsource to a virtual assistant?
Now that you have a clear understanding of what a virtual assistant is, let’s talk about what kind of tasks/work you can assign to your virtual assistant.
Admin Support
Businesses need a good admin support assistant. Your virtual assistant can take care of your company’s emails, scheduling appointments, data entry, transcription, bookkeeping and managing business correspondence. You could also ask them to take care of other projects that you do not wish to handle. You would be happy to know that a majority of virtual assistants are experts with MS Office application and they are pretty computer friendly, which makes them the masters of their domain.
Online Research
Your virtual assistant could be the best person for the research related jobs. As mentioned earlier they are pretty good at applications and computers, they will make sure the data collected is accurate and presentable. They are Microsoft Excel experts and will make your database look clear and understandable. Before sending any online research tasks to your virtual assistant, make sure you send them clear instructions about the job.
Travel Research
Since virtual assistants are well educated about growing number of travel research tools on the web, they could be the best resource for booking flights, finding hotels and planning out itineraries both business and pleasure. Once you have your virtual assistant on your travel planning task, just sit back and relax, he/she will take care of everything that needs to be figured out in order to make your trip hassle free, they can also deal with the trouble of navigating time zones when booking or searching international travel options.
Social Media Management
Maintaining social media posts and other social media activities are really time-consuming, especially for those who think “Time is Money”. Every business needs to have a social media plan in order to increase awareness among people about your business. At this time, your virtual assistant is the best asset you can use to pay attention to maintaining social media postings (Content provided by you) and other social media activities including marketing and you can use your time for other revenue generating projects. A virtual employee can take care of your Facebook business page, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media platforms that you use, he/she can monitor and engage users and can help you build your network.
Online Marketing
Since they are available virtually, virtual employees/assistants could help you generate a great business with the help of internet marketing. They can take care of all the areas of internet/digital marketing. This would include Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Email Campaigns, assisting with any marketing campaigns and tracking their success, blog posting (content provided by you), scrapping your email addresses to make sure the list of emails you have is error-free and much more.
Website Development
They are all experts in the areas of the services they provide. Web development is one of the tasks that you can outsource to your Virtual Assistant. You will find a lot of online portals where many virtual assistants specialize in web design and management using online tools like WordPress, Magento etc. They are also great with creating templates manually and code a whole new website for your business.
Customer Service
The majority of happy customers is the key to every successful business. Customer service plays an important role in the success of any business and for a busy entrepreneur, customer service is a great task to outsource to your virtual employee. You can forward your calls and emails to your virtual employee and they will take care of any incoming inquiries. Companies such as Ring Central have made transferring calls very easy to any desired location, which is a great option for any small business. In addition to that, your virtual employee can also handle any follow-up calls if needed.
Basically, your virtual assistant can handle all the administrative tasks which do not require physical presence.