How Virtual Assistant is connected to Friends

Are you looking to hire a virtual assistant ? or

Are you thinking of becoming one yourself ?

In this article we will talk about both the above topics in detail.

Here’s what we’ll cover. Use the links below to jump to the section of your choice.

• • • • What Is A Virtual Assistant?
      • Why You Need A Virtual Assistant
      • What Tasks Can Virtual Assistants Do For You?
      • Where to Find Virtual Assistants?

Let’s get started !

What is a Virtual Assistant?

A virtual assistant is person who provides various services to entrepreneurs or businesses from a remote location. There are a host of things that virtual assistants can do, including:

• • • • Social media management
      • Event management
      • Managing calendars, appointments and emails
      • Preparing reports
      • Personal tasks like booking hotels and restaurants
      • Simple digital marketing tasks

It’s a never ending list!

In fact (pardon the pun here) they can do virtually anything. Think of them as what Jarvis is to Iron Man. They’re not there in person – but they’re still a vital part of your business. If you’re curious about all the different tasks they can do, that you can outsource to VAs. We’re not going to go over each of those here, but we’ll touch upon the main ones later.

But why do you need a VA in the first place?

Why You Need A Virtual Assistant – 3 Great Reasons

 Virtual assistants are everywhere these days. More and more people are turning to them and it looks like they’re here to stay. Here’s why you should hire one yourself.

1. Better Use of Your Employees

Say a mid-level or senior-level employee had to choose between these two options:

1. 1. 1. Playing an active role in spearheading growth strategies
      2. Preparing routine reports on a daily basis

What would they choose?

Chances are, they’d opt for option #1

Why?

It’s more interesting and seems more important. But that doesn’t mean you can neglect these mundane tasks like emails and finances. Your business would crumble without this boring repetitive work. So how do you keep your in-house team happy but still get the mundane tasks done?

With virtual assistants.

They can take up most of these mundane tasks that can be done remotely.

The result?

A full-time employee (especially those you are more senior or talented) can stay focused on more pressing matters that need to be done in-person at your office.

2. Reduced Costs

One of the main reasons why entrepreneurs and businesses outsource work is that it costs less.

    Saving Salary Cost

Instead of hiring a full-time employee for a small job, you could choose to outsource it to someone at an hourly rate.

Lower pay isn’t the only way you can save money with virtual professionals though.

    Saving Training Cost

A business owner can also save a lot when it comes to training costs. Usually, companies have to train their in-house team on tasks and duties after they’ve cleared the hiring process. All this costs time and money – that most companies can’t afford. With VAs though, small business owners can hire professionals who already experts in their field.

This way, a business owner doesn’t have to waste time and money training them – they can get started right away.

3. Saves Time

Another reason why small business owners turn to VAs is that it saves them a LOT of time. We all know that time is money – especially in business. For example, let’s say you are a small business with no HR team. Your employees shouldn’t spend hours posting job advertisements, doing preliminary resume screening, organizing an interview process – all on a hiring process for someone at entry-level position. Why not skip all this and get a professional to work on specific tasks instead?

With virtual assistants, this is what you’ll get:

• • • You’ll have verified experts that you can hire in no time
    • They’re time savers as you don’t have to waste time training them
    • As they can stay focused only on tasks you’ve hired them for, they’ll get the work done quicker than someone juggling multiple demands

It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

What Can Virtual Assistants Do?

I’ll be honest.

A more appropriate title here would be – “What Can’t Virtual Assistants Do For You?” As mentioned earlier, there’s a host of things you can outsource to them. It’s far too many to list down here, so we’re just going to cover the most common virtual assistant work by VAs.

1) Administrative Work

You can hire virtual assistants to be…

*cue drumroll*

  Assistants.

They can take over all the business duties that a typical administrative assistant does.

That entails:

• • • • • Diary management – Scheduling meetings and appointments
        • Answering phone calls
        • Basic data entry
        • Organizing your to-do list and calendar
        • Booking travel arrangements

Basically anything that an administrative assistant usually does. The only difference here is that an executive assistant doesn’t have a desk in front of your office. Apart from that – it’s pretty much the same thing as a typical administrative assistant.

2) Personal Tasks

You can always hire a VA to help out with tasks in your personal life as well. Here are a few examples:

• • • Organizing your personal to-do list and calendar
    • Booking travel arrangements for weekend trips or vacations.
    • Helping you make purchases – gifts, books, stationary, hardware and perhaps even clothes!

As a lot of these tasks don’t need to be done by someone in-person, they can easily be outsourced to a VA instead.

3) Content Creation

Content writing has propelled itself to the top of the digital marketing ladder in recent years. There’s a reason why large corporations put out blog posts often. It helps boost their search engine optimization and drive traffic to their website. Having someone oversee this process can be a great digital marketing decision on your part. If you have a blog that puts out new blog posts on a regular basis, you will:

• • • • Have more people finding it on search engines
      • Have more of them clicking on it and visiting your website
      • Have more conversions as a result

The problem is, content creation isn’t easy. In addition to writing, there are a bunch of specific tasks like research, finding and editing images, uploading articles to your blog and so on.

That’s why it’s a good idea to outsource your blog posts to a virtual assistant. You can either outsource the ancillary tasks like images or uploads or the entire process. For example, an increasing number of agents and brokers are using virtual assistants for their real estate marketing activities – including content creation, organizing open houses, social media and so on. Outsourcing it to only one person ensures that each piece of content has a personal touch and doesn’t dip in quality.

4) Managing Finances

There’s this general assumption among small business owners that VAs can do your taxes for you.

In an ideal world, yes they could.

But in reality, at the end of the day, they can’t do any actual accounting for you.

What they can do though, is help manage your finances.

They can maintain budgets, make purchases, and keep track of your expenses to make your finances as transparent as possible.

The result?

Avoid the last-minute rush once tax season comes around!

5) Social Media Management

Social media is a very important weapon in your marketing plan.

It’s where many of your potential customers are going to notice and engage with you. However, most companies appear distant and disconnected with their potential customers – your social media presence can change this.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to handle social media accounts why not outsource it to a VA?

They’ll be in charge of these specific tasks:

• • • Creating content to share on your social media accounts
    • Scheduling posts
    • Engaging with your followers
    • Analyzing statistics and reports

It’s important to have someone experienced here as managing a company’s social media presence is complex. Your social media accounts need to be able to connect with people while staying relevant.

That’s why a lot of businesses turn to virtual professionals to handle macro level social media tasks. They can keep track of what’s going viral, monitor interactions and analyze statistics to see what converts best.

6) Research

Research is a core part of any company’s growth strategy. Without some sound insights, you’ll never know how to grow. However, a business owner can’t spend hours on research while still trying to run a small business. When it comes to research, you need a dedicated person who’s natural language is data crunching.

They should be able to:

• • • Keep track of competitors’ products and services
    • Analyze consumer trends
    • Find formats for press releases
    • Screen applications for an affiliate program

That’s a lot of research!

That’s why assigning it to someone in your team who already has other duties isn’t a great idea. It’ll most likely be overwhelming for those team members. That’s why small business and even large corporations are turning to VAs for research. As they don’t have any other duties – they can stay focused on solely gathering and analyzing data to help your company.

7) Customer Service

Customer Service was one of the first fields to incorporate VAs en masse.

Why?

Think about it.

Your customers aren’t interacting with you in person, so you don’t need an in-house customer executive either. Also, as most customer service interactions are largely centered on addressing concerns that can be answered easily from a manual, you don’t need a high level of expertise here. Of course, if your VAs can’t handle an issue, it can always be escalated to a full-time employee. Your VAs just have to spend a decent amount of time going over what it is that you offer and they’ll be prepared to answer any questions about it.

It’s the perfect fit!

What if you want your VAs to have limited access to your customers’ information? Use a Co-browsing software like Talkative which sets up a secure way to see your customers’ screens rather than a less secure approach like screen-sharing.

8) E-Mail Management

We’ve all been there.

Opened our inbox to see an army of unopened emails staring at you. You feel like the Millennium Falcon staring at the giant Death Star. Responding to all those emails can be Herculean task. But it has to be done – if you just leave this repetitive work as it is, you’d be in trouble. That’s why a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs outsource this to VAs now:

• • • • They can sift through all your mail to weed out any spam that’s crept in
      • They can answer job inquiries, general questions and follow-ups
      • They can organize and filter your inbox
      • They can carry out email marketing campaigns and manage email lists

The result?

Your email channel is still fully functional – without you having to do anything about it.

Where to Find Virtual Assistants

At this point, it’s clear that having these virtual team members can be of great assistance to you. They can boost your productivity, take routine stuff off your hands, manage travel arrangements – the list goes on. Now let’s get to the hiring process – How do you hire a virtual assistant? What’s the interview process like? This poses a unique challenge because you’re never going to be face-to-face with them. As they’re remote workers, there’s always an element of risk associated with them.

• • • How will I know they’ll be working diligently?
    • How do I verify their credentials?
    • Are they trustworthy?

These are all valid questions.

The first solution is to get virtual professionals from reputed sources. The second solution is to use a time tracking tool like a2a Business Link to ensure they are working diligently. Your selection process should also be good enough to weed out unsuitable candidates. Check out this list of qualities to look for in a Virtual Assistant.