Digital marketing, or online marketing, can generate new possibilities and growth opportunities. It allows your business to be exposed to most of the world, therefore enlarging your potential market base, and increasing sales possibilities. Moreover, it is a tool that marketers should be using as part of their marketing strategy, with a continuous focus on increasing traffic, as well as highlighting brand awareness. Briefly, digital marketing includes using the internet and various digital communication platforms such as Shopify, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and for business-to-business marketing, LinkedIn.
Digital marketing is essential for any modern business
The overall marketing budget for most companies has decreased, with the 2021 Gartner State of Marketing Report indicating a drop to 6.4%, from 11% the year before. This was mostly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it had also been a trend before the pandemic – the move to digital. In fact, the same report (the 2021 Gartner State of Marketing Report) mentions that 72.7% of the marketing budget is on average being spent on digital channels, which includes owned, paid, and earned digital platforms. As such, this is highlighting the importance of an effective and user-friendly website, organic and paid search, good email campaigns, and a strong database.
Where does a virtual assistant fit in?
Outsourcing marketing tasks to a skilled person is important – as the work can be completed, and you achieve such on a cost-effective basis. If you hire a digital marketing virtual assistant you can also free yourself and focus on your core work, unless you prefer dealing with mundane and grueling tasks. Moreover, there are a myriad of functions a virtual assistant can help you with.
What tasks can an internet marketing virtual assistant do for me?
Briefly, a digital marketing virtual assistant or internet marketing virtual assistant can help with these tasks:
- Website management
An important foundation of your digital marketing plan is your website. You need to ensure that it is not just visually attractive, but also user-friendly. This means that it needs to be mobile-friendly − it must load quickly, have no broken links, and if there is an eCommerce component, the buying and checkout process should be easy for the consumer. A virtual assistant can help with ensuring that the website is optimized, and regularly updated. Moreover, content is big business in the digital space. This is since consumers go to websites in search of new content which engages them. If the info is not relevant, the consumer will look somewhere else. - Content management
As mentioned, a critical part of digital, and your digital marketing campaign, is content. This includes the production of blogs, as well as ensuring the content is polished (meaning perfectly edited and without any grammatical errors). A virtual assistant can help with drafting and editing their articles, which can take up a great deal of your valuable time, if you do this yourself. Alternatively, you can have your virtual assistant edit your work or the work of your marketing manager to ensure that what you post is perfect. - Social media management
You can’t speak of digital marketing and ignore social media, which is a vital component of this field. With the introduction of social commerce (the combination of social media and eCommerce), social media used to sell directly to the consumer. Your digital marketing virtual assistant can help to build a strong and engaging social media calendar that tailors the content to the various social media platforms and their target audiences. Additionally, your remote assistant can help to post and schedule the content on the many platforms − this is time-consuming. This task will keep your brand exposure in the public eye, as your customers can communicate with you directly from their handsets, and via their favorite Apps. - Offering great customer support
Keeping your clients happy is not always easy. One bad review can damage your brand: in fact, dissatisfied clients are 91% more inclined to skip your business next time around. They will tell 9 – 15 of their friends about their experience, thus spreading the effect. However, a positive experience only ensures a 42% chance of the client doing repeat business; satisfied clients often do not tell friends about their positive experience. As such, it’s a good idea to ensure that your customer service is not just good, but truly impressive. This is where your virtual assistant can help to respond to clients, answering their queries, and dealing with complaints in a speedy and professional manner. This will limit any damage caused by caustic comments. You can even convert that unhappy client to a regular customer. - Email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is a good way of keeping your customers informed, and promoting your brand in an economical manner. Moreover, email marketing comes with a very high return on investment; with 77% of consumers preferring emails above other forms of communication. Your digital marketing virtual assistant can draft the copy and set up your emails, and then schedule these to go out at the right time. Your assistant can also clean the database by removing or correcting incorrect email addresses. - Conduct SEO research
Your website, and your social media channels should be optimized to reach a wider audience. SEO or Search engine optimization is a much-needed task to undertake on a regular basis, ensuring that the content that you send out is relevant, and that the consumer will be able to find it when they use a search engine such as Google or Bing. Your virtual assistant can help to do the tiresome tasks of keyword research and optimizing your blogs, website, and even your social media pages. - PPC campaigns
PPC campaigns have their place, although you should first sort out your SEO as SEO leads to higher click-through rates than a PPC campaign can achieve. Also, SEO costs much less than running a PPC campaign. However, if you want people to find you on a search engine like Google, their channels are going to prefer PPC to SEO, so make it easier for people to find PPC content, rather than SEO content. Your assistant can thus help to draft eye-catching ads that will drive a consumer to want to click on that buy-now button.