A Virtual Assistant has become necessary with the emergence of the global pandemic. Many businesses have been forced to send their teams home. This, in turn, has pushed remote working to become the new normal.
Now, more and more businesses located in areas such as Europe, USA and Australia are using Virtual Assistants. They seek these VAs from other parts of the world because of the lower employment costs for remote workers. To that extent, the Philippines has become the world’s number one hotspot for Virtual Assistant jobs. Knowing what Virtual Assistants can do can also give you an idea of why they can help you with your business.
Proper Delegation of Work with Virtual Assistants
The principle behind every successful business is to minimise costs and maximise profits. Apart from the operation and production, one major overhead for most businesses is their staffing cost. However, it is essential to pay the right rate to attract the right people. Businesses shouldn’t be paying somebody to do a job for which they are overqualified.
By building a team of Virtual Assistants, you can delegate the right task to the right person. You will be able to create roles for people, so they are doing what they are best at. You also hire the right people for the roles you need in your business.
What Can A Virtual Assistant Do For You?
Here are tasks that you can delegate to your VAs. Take note that VAs are typically able to handle a multitude of tasks to fit your business needs provided proper training and instruction.
Operations
Calendar Management
VAs with experience in booking networking meetings or workshops and training that you may want to attend fall under calendar management. They can also be tasked to schedule your company meetings and take minutes of the meetings.
Lifestyle Support
While Calendar Management tasks lean towards the business environment, VAs who take care of lifestyle support usually are great coordinators for personal trips, family gatherings and running a multitude of personal online errands. Lifestyle support VAs are seasoned holiday book managers and know how to handle research on trip nuances.
Operational Support on Systems
When a business decides to go remote and starts setting up its online system, VAs with experience in Operational Support are needed for their special skills and knowledge of CRM software. There are a lot of CRMs and these VAs have the technical knowledge and familiarity with an array of software that an online business will need. Another essential task for this VA is setting up and maintaining your business’ cloud storage drive that your remote team will need.
Customer Service
Prospecting Customers
If you are looking for someone to help out with your customer service, have them collect feedback data, and enter new prospects and customer details in your CRM database. Other things they can do are research on Social Media and websites, collect feedback data, and enter new prospects and customer details in your CRM database.
Day to Day Operations
A good VA won’t just be checking emails and making coffee, they’ll be using their knowledge of your business to create systems and processes that can help you work more efficiently, streamline your operations and save you time. That means a good VA will spend some of their time creating or updating the operations manual for your business, following up with suppliers on quotes, creating contracts and agreements with clients and managing issues that come up with clients on a daily basis. Having a VA available for these tasks can make your administrative burden much lighter.
Marketing and Sales
Social Media Management
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a strategy that businesses implement in order to connect with customers and potential customers. The goal of SMM is to increase the number of people who are aware of your business, understand your products or services, and are interested in what you have to offer.
For VAs that will focus on Social media management, they can do the following: increase your Social Media contacts, Set up and manage social media accounts, set up and manage your blog. For content work, they can create a social media content plan, create simple content and graphics for your posts. VAs can even do regular postings for you on your Social Media channels and help you with engagement with your followers.
Event Management and Webinars
Webinars are live events that are being held over the Internet. You can use them to build your list, educate your readers or get your prospects ready for your product launch. Hiring a virtual assistant to handle your event management can save you significant time and money, especially if you are running an online seminar or training program. Here are some of the ways a virtual assistant can help with your online events:
Attendee tracking
A virtual assistant can create an event on your behalf and track who has signed up. This will include details of their payment method, which you can then use to send out reminders about the upcoming event. The assistant can also use this information to help answer any questions they may have about the event.
Manage sign-ups for webinars
Virtual assistants can also manage sign-ups for webinars, which is something that many companies struggle with. They may need you to schedule some time to talk with them directly on Skype, or you might prefer to delegate this task to them. Either way, they will efficiently carry out this task on your behalf.
Online marketing support
Your virtual assistant can help market your online events through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. This is good for increasing awareness of your event and encouraging people to sign up early so as not to miss out.
Email Campaigns
Creating a successful email campaign is a holistic effort that requires a lot of time and expertise. To save yours, consider outsourcing the campaign to a virtual assistant who can take care of the following tasks: create email lists, draft templates and campaigns, send out email blasts, and follow up on leads.
These days you can do almost everything online, including sending emails using tools like MailChimp or Constant Contact. Virtual assistants can easily access these tools and build an email list by adding your contacts from different platforms such as Gmail or LinkedIn. They’ll also use your template to create your newsletter from scratch so you don’t have to spend hours writing it yourself (it’s all about automation!). Then they’ll send it out to your subscribers and track which ones opened and clicked on which links.
If you’re on the lookout for digital marketing solutions or help with social media management, check out Your Virtual Marketing Team to get that extra push on your business digital marketing.
Finance
Specialist Virtual assistants can also help you with financial tasks. They can help you with Bookkeeping, Disbursements, Credit Control, and Internal Control.
Typically, remote bookkeeping depends highly on the use of bookkeeping software like Xero or Quickbooks. These VAs are trained to use this specific software as a way to systemise the business and how the finances are run.
For disbursements, your Virtual Assistant can manage subscriptions and recurring expenses, process your payroll payments, manage both personal and business expenses and manage your payment facilities.
For your business in handling credit control, they can create and issue customer invoices, issue customer statements and follow up on payments for overdue invoices. And for account transactions, they can reconcile the spreadsheet and create financial checklists and processes.
Having a Virtual Assistant is a Time Saver
Hiring a Virtual Assistant can not only be very time-consuming but also costly if mistakes are made. Working with a Virtual Assistant recruitment company can save time and reduce the risks of bad recruitment. There are still many mistakes businesses make when working with a Virtual Assistant. Many business owners don’t understand the difference between having a remote team and a team based in the same building.
At VaVaVoom, we not only recruit and train the very best Virtual Assistants, but we also train and provide ongoing support to our clients.
Key Takeaway
All things considered, in a society where businesses are slowly shifting towards a different dynamic, Virtual Assistants are becoming more and more important. To know more about how you can benefit from a Virtual Assistant, visit VaVaVoom Solutions and book a call with us.