If you don’t know what a virtual assistant is by now then you haven’t been reading our posts. To help you, get a quick introduction by watching this video:
Mads Singers on what is a virtual assistant, and what tasks can be delegated to them
“If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you’re putting yourself out of business.” Lee Kuan Yew
And the reality is that many of your competitors are using virtual assistants − not just your peers, but large international companies like Unilever, that very proudly boasts about their cost-savings and increased efficiency. The question is: Why aren’t you?
The reality is that you just can’t do it all. You think you can, but you just can’t. If you hire a remote assistant to help with your lead generation, marketing, bookkeeping, or SEO, they will be able to do all this just as well as you, but save you much time, and therefore money. Remember that you yourself are an expensive staff member. Your talents, time, and energy should be spent where you gain the maximum return on your time – which is the core function of your business.
We understand that startups by their nature do not have endless pots of money to throw around. This means that a startup owner should be very careful of where and how they invest or spend each dime. Such also gives you a slight edge – you can from the start be more strategic; going forward, you will spend your funds wisely.
This goes to the gist of this article – you can have a secret helper, the virtual assistant.
A virtual assistant goes by many different names, from remote worker, to freelance agent or consultant; nevertheless, these workers are the game-changer for many a business.
Enhance your team’s skills with a virtual assistant
Some of the basic tasks a virtual assistant (or VA) can assist with are the time-consuming and mundane tasks such as:
- Email management – Being a startup, funding is one of your key priorities, but you also need to sell your product or service. The last thing you want to do is to miss is an email which could be a potential investment or marketing opportunity. Therefore, hire a VA to manage your emails so that you can respond to the most important emails soonest.
- Lead generation – A virtual assistant can help with market research, and gathering of contact details of potential clients, which you need to grow your business. This is a time-consuming and detailed process the assistant needs to follow. However, they are skilled at such; and it will take them much less time to do it than you will manage.
- Digital marketing – If you aren’t making use of social commerce then you are losing out. However, your remote assistant can help set up your social media accounts, developing content for your social media pages. This is very important, as you begin targeting the upper echelons of the marketing funnel. As you are only at the beginning, most of your potential clients will be located in this space.
- Note – there are different types of virtual assistant. Some are generalists who can help with various tasks, whereas others are skilled in certain specific areas such as graphic design, website development, transcription services, or they can assist with particular sectors − virtual assistants for legal institutions, or virtual assistants for real-estate agencies.
Grow a strong customer base
Starting out, you need to make sure your customer service is spot on. Customer service can help your business by producing loyal customers, increasing profits and conversions, enhancing your public image, and therefore your brand value, and boosting customer recommendations, which in turn can help to increase your sales.
Offering proper customer service through dedicated support, having client queries addressed promptly; and dealing with complaints super-fast, all can help you stand out from your competition.
Your virtual assistant will help with any/all of these tasks: reports and analytics, scheduling social media content, scheduling email or newspaper templates, bookkeeping and accounting, sending responses to existing consumer queries, and organizing your calendar.