I’ll be honest.
A more appropriate title here would be – “What Can’t Virtual Assistants Do For You?”
As mentioned earlier, there’s a host of things you can outsource to them.
It’s far too many to list down here, so we’re just going to cover the most common virtual assistant work by VAs.
1) Administrative Work
You can hire virtual assistants to be…
*cue drumroll*
Assistants.
They can take over all the business duties that a typical administrative assistant does.
That entails:
- Diary management – Scheduling meetings and appointments
- Answering phone calls
- Basic data entry
- Organizing your to-do list and calendar
- Booking travel arrangements
Basically anything that an administrative assistant usually does.
The only difference here is that an executive assistant doesn’t have a desk in front of your office.
Apart from that – it’s pretty much the same thing as a typical administrative assistant.
2) Personal Tasks
You can always hire a VA to help out with tasks in your personal life as well.
Here are a few examples:
- Organizing your personal to-do list and calendar
- Booking travel arrangements for weekend trips or vacations.
- Helping you make purchases – gifts, books, stationary, hardware and perhaps even clothes!
As a lot of these tasks don’t need to be done by someone in-person, they can easily be outsourced to a VA instead.
3) Content Creation
Content writing has propelled itself to the top of the digital marketing ladder in recent years.
There’s a reason why large corporations put out blog posts often. It helps boost their search engine optimization and drive traffic to their website.
Having someone oversee this process can be a great digital marketing decision on your part.
If you have a blog that puts out new blog posts on a regular basis, you will:
- Have more people finding it on search engines
- Have more of them clicking on it and visiting your website
- Have more conversions as a result
The problem is, content creation isn’t easy. In addition to writing, there are a bunch of specific tasks like research, finding and editing images, uploading articles to your blog and so on.
That’s why it’s a good idea to outsource your blog posts to a virtual assistant. You can either outsource the ancillary tasks like images or uploads or the entire process.
For example, an increasing number of agents and brokers are using virtual assistants for their real estate marketing activities – including content creation, organizing open houses, social media and so on.
Outsourcing it to only one person ensures that each piece of content has a personal touch and doesn’t dip in quality.
4) Managing Finances
There’s this general assumption among small business owners that VAs can do your taxes for you.
In an ideal world, yes they could.
But in reality, at the end of the day, they can’t do any actual accounting for you.
What they can do though, is help manage your finances.
They can maintain budgets, make purchases, and keep track of your expenses to make your finances as transparent as possible.
The result?
Avoid the last-minute rush once tax season comes around!
5) Social Media Management
Social media is a very important weapon in your marketing plan.
It’s where many of your potential customers are going to notice and engage with you. However, most companies appear distant and disconnected with their potential customers – your social media presence can change this.
If you don’t have the bandwidth to handle social media accounts why not outsource it to a VA?
They’ll be in charge of these specific tasks:
- Creating content to share on your social media accounts
- Scheduling posts
- Engaging with your followers
- Analyzing statistics and reports
It’s important to have someone experienced here as managing a company’s social media presence is complex. Your social media accounts need to be able to connect with people while staying relevant.
That’s why a lot of businesses turn to virtual professionals to handle macro level social media tasks.
They can keep track of what’s going viral, monitor interactions and analyze statistics to see what converts best.
You can say goodbye to worrying about why things like Tide Pods are going viral.
6) Research
Research is a core part of any company’s growth strategy.
Without some sound insights, you’ll never know how to grow.
However, a business owner can’t spend hours on research while still trying to run a small business.
When it comes to research, you need a dedicated person who’s natural language is data crunching.
They should be able to:
- Keep track of competitors’ products and services
- Analyze consumer trends
- Find formats for press releases
- Screen applications for an affiliate program
That’s a lot of research!
That’s why assigning it to someone in your team who already has other duties isn’t a great idea.
It’ll most likely be overwhelming for those team members.
That’s why small business and even large corporations are turning to VAs for research.
As they don’t have any other duties – they can stay focused on solely gathering and analyzing data to help your company.
7) Customer Service
Customer Service was one of the first fields to incorporate VAs en masse.
Why?
Think about it.
Your customers aren’t interacting with you in person, so you don’t need an in-house customer executive either.
Also, as most customer service interactions are largely centered on addressing concerns that can be answered easily from a manual, you don’t need a high level of expertise here. Of course, if your VAs can’t handle an issue, it can always be escalated to a full-time employee.
Your VAs just have to spend a decent amount of time going over what it is that you offer and they’ll be prepared to answer any questions about it.
It’s the perfect fit!
What if you want your VAs to have limited access to your customers’ information?
Use a Co-browsing software like Talkative which sets up a secure way to see your customers’ screens rather than a less secure approach like screen-sharing.
8) Email Management
We’ve all been there.
Opened our inbox to see an army of unopened emails staring at you.
You feel like the Millenium Falcon staring at the giant Death Star.
Responding to all those emails can be Herculean task. But it has to be done – if you just leave this repetitive work as it is, you’d be in trouble.
That’s why a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs outsource this to VAs now:
- They can sift through all your mail to weed out any spam that’s crept in
- They can answer job inquiries, general questions and follow-ups
- They can organize and filter your inbox
- They can carry out email marketing campaigns and manage email lists
The result?
Your email channel is still fully functional – without you having to do anything about it.