Spearheading a business as an aspiring mogul involves juggling different tasks, all of which play their own part in keeping your operations running smoothly. While careful planning and a determined mind can help establish your business from the ground up, the progress can be slow due to administrative tasks creating a bottleneck in your productivity funnel.
Start-up entrepreneurs, executives, and would-be leaders from different industries often have a mountain of admin work to accomplish before they can focus on high-priority initiatives. If you’re one of those business owners who have too many non-critical tasks eating a significant chunk of your time, then outsourcing a virtual assistant may be the right power move for you.
Hiring Virtual Assistants – What Can They Do to Optimize Your Workflow?
The concept of hiring a third-party professional to handle your tasks seems counterintuitive, especially for small businesses without enough funding to build a team. But outsourcing often comes at an affordable cost, one that can triple your results since virtual assistants can provide value to your daily output.
The key to making the most of your virtual assistant’s services is to allocate tasks that keep you from working on what impacts your bottom line. With that in mind, some important responsibilities your virtual assistant can manage include the following:
1. Administrative Tasks
Administrative tasks can keep you busy and glued to your desk for hours, leaving you with mundane responsibilities instead of addressing important matters for your business. The admin work varies on your business, but they all have the common trait of hogging your attention.
Ignoring these tasks can wreak havoc on your operations in the long run, so it’s best to let an expert virtual assistant handle them so you can improve your workflow’s efficiency behind the scenes. Here are some important tasks that virtual assistants may be required to do:
- Calendar management;
- Email management;
- File management;
- Following up with customers and clients;
- Booking appointments;
- Creating, sending, and receiving invoices to customers;
- Reviewing the accuracy of invoices and monitoring payment accounts;
2. Social Media Management
Establishing a social media presence is a cornerstone of surviving today’s digitally-driven landscape. Without any socials, your business is at high risk of getting left behind the virtual race as most competitors increase their visibility online.
But social media won’t do your marketing funnel any favors if you do the post-it-and-leave-it approach – instead, you need to nurture your platform by making deeper connections with your target audience.
Seeing as you need to spark relevant conversations and engage your customers, a virtual assistant can take over your account and fulfill the following tasks:
- Communicate with your audience by responding to comments, addressing concerns, and engaging in interesting conversations;
- Organizing social media campaigns from plotting what to post, when is the optimal time to post them, and which social media channel would generate the most results;
- Watch out for minor errors to avoid confusing customers;
- Watch out for trends and make fresh suggestions;
3. Customer Service
Successful businesses not only use innovative techniques to solidify their position in the industry – a big part of establishing your presence is to provide excellent customer service. After all, it’s the people that act like the lifeblood of every venture, so it makes sense to focus your efforts on creating a positive customer experience to strengthen your reputation.
One negative comment can shake even a household name’s foundation, especially when customers prove a brand’s disregard for the customer’s happiness. That’s why staying on top of your customers’ concerns is essential, but supporting them can also be time-consuming.
Virtual assistants can provide support at a moment’s notice and ensure your customer remains happy with your business. Even poor feedback can be turned into a positive comeback for your brand with the right customer support, so having a virtual assistant to extend your courtesy can improve your overall reputation.
4. Support Marketing Strategy
Different marketing channels have distinct functions – from increasing brand awareness, boosting conversion rate, improving customer engagement, and other critical roles that ultimately impact your marketing pipeline.
Managing different channels and marketing tasks can often feel like a balancing act, but you need to divide your attention and ensure each one is working for your goals. After all, you need to ensure the efforts you make produce enough ROI.
While you handle the strategy-building process, your virtual assistant can take the following content marketing tasks off your plate:
- Repurpose content;
- Assess and plan content calendar;
- Edit visual content;
- Research content ideas;
- Promote campaigns;
- Schedule and upload content on social media;
- Blast emails;
- Study key metrics to improve content strategy;
With a virtual assistant filling the gaps in your marketing arsenal, you can maximize your strategy by tracking your performance and ensuring they produce positive results.
5. Research
The secret to growing is to expand your knowledge and make better strategic plans to improve your pipelines. You can’t wait for brilliance to strike to make the necessary changes in your strategies; that’s why research is integral to fine-tuning your process. Unfortunately, researching trends, consumer behavior, competitors, and other important data can also take up most of your day.
Virtual assistants can provide you with valuable insights regarding several topics, metrics, and trends by conducting the following research:
- Data Mining – this involves gathering potential clients and talents to build your contact database;
- Market Research – this involves assessing competitor performance, brand analysis, audience research, and product research to enhance your strategy;
- Content Sourcing – this involves exploring fresh and relevant content ideas to produce compelling content and boost user engagement.
The Bottom Line: How Virtual Assistants Can Help Catapult Your Business Forward
Virtual assistants are like the wind beneath your wings — by dealing with non-priority tasks, they can help take your business to greater heights since they give you more time to focus on important areas in your daily operations. Their role in your team may be minor, but they can make big changes to your overall productivity and play a major part in growing your business.
Where Can I Find a Reliable Virtual Assistant?
Growing your online business means you need more experienced hands to help propel it forward, but hiring more in-house employees can be too costly. If your plate is full of responsibilities and you need a seasoned expert to boost your productivity, check out CrewBloom!
CrewBloom is one of the leading outsourcing companies in the Philippines. Our platform connects top-tier professionals with remote sales and support roles. We can introduce you to the best virtual assistants in your field, so you can delegate tasks accordingly and reach your goals faster without breaking the bank.
Check out our list of premium sales and roster support talent ready to elevate your business operations today!
