Digital marketing, or online marketing, can generate new possibilities and growth opportunities. It exposes your business to most of the world, enlarging your market base and increasing sales possibilities. Moreover, it is a tool marketers should be using as part of their marketing strategy, with a continuous focus on increasing traffic and highlighting brand awareness. Briefly, digital marketing includes utilizing the internet and various digital communication platforms such as Shopify, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn for business-to-business marketing.
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 primarily 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 highlights the importance of an effective and user-friendly website, organic and paid search, good email campaigns, and a robust database.
Where does a virtual assistant fit in?
Outsourcing marketing tasks to a skilled person is essential – as the work can be completed, and you achieve such cost-effectively. 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 essential foundation of your digital marketing plan is your website. You need to ensure that it is visually attractive and 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 ensure the website is optimized and regularly updated. Moreover, content is big business in the digital space. This is because consumers search websites for new content that 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 and 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 sells 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 respond to clients, answer their queries, and deal with complaints quickly and professionally. 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, 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 regularly, ensuring that the content you send out is relevant and that the consumer can 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 will prefer PPC to SEO, making it easier for people to find PPC content rather than SEO content. Thus, Your assistant can help draft eye-catching ads that will drive a consumer to want to click on that buy-now button.