SEO Title: What is a Virtual Assistant and what's their purpose?
1. Virtual assistant outlined
2. What’s their purpose?
3. Types of Virtual Assistants
4. How can you hire a Virtual Assistant?
5. Best practices of operating with a VA
6. Conclusion
What is a Virtual Assistant?
In short, a Virtual Assistant is a self-employed worker (typically a freelancer or Independent contractor) also known as a virtual office assistant or virtual staff, who works remotely and is usually highly expert at some specific skill set. Typically they help businesses with administrative, marketing, and various other business tasks. They can help with a few specific tasks on a monthly basis or they can also be highly involved with your business and help you with day-to-day business activities.
What’s their purpose?
As the world evolved with advanced technology and blessed many homes with reliable internet, allowing people to work remotely. That’s how virtual assistants came into existence. Their sole purpose is to help businesses with various activities and tasks. The Specific duties of virtual assistants may vary depending on their skills. They can work as an independent contractor or they can work with staffing agencies.
Types of Virtual Assistants
Virtual Social Media Assistant
Social Media is a necessary evil and it's a very powerful harpoon for businesses, specifically small businesses. The owners of small businesses owners spend around 6-12 hours a week on their social media activity. This is necessary but can utilize this time on tasks that are much more important. Hiring in-house staff can be costly But business owners can now save their precious time by hiring Virtual assistants for the job for them allowing them to focus on much more important tasks. So what is a Virtual Social media assistant actually? Well, they help with your day-to-day social media activities like setting up your professional business social media
profiles 9Facebook, LinkedIn, Google +, etc), creating new content, creating a content calendar, scheduling posts for your various social media channels, generating engaging content and ideas, creating performance metrics, reports, keeping eye on your competitor, etc
Virtual Real Estate Assistant
Real estate professionals are one the busiest creatures on the planet, doing all the day-to-day tasks of a real estate tasks can be highly overwhelming, like following up with clients, appointment settings, meetings and calendar management, listing properties online, managing property pictures, cold prospecting, data-scraping, lead generation, and much more. A real estate virtual assistant can help real estate professionals with all these day-to-day tasks and make their lives much easier so they can finally make some for themselves and their families.
Virtual Administrative Assistant
An entrepreneur with a small startup business? Life must be difficult for you, with just 4-6 staff at your disposal you need to do a lot of administrative tasks by yourself right? Getting a dedicated in-house staff to do all this work may not be affordable. Well, a Virtual Administrative Assistant can make your life easier by handling a lot of these tasks like managing contact lists, emails, documents, phone calls, accounting, handling basic HR stuff, bookkeeping, customer management, etc.
Virtual eCommerce Assistant
The eCommerce industry keeps on growing. As the business grows the workload is also growing with it. eCommerce companies need to become more aggressive to outgrow their competitors, as the business itself heavily depends on the internet so do its daily tasks of it, and an eCommerce virtual assistant can also ease the burden of an eCommerce business owner. They can help with a variety of work such as entering eCommerce product data, seamlessly handling transactions, writing SEO-friendly descriptions for products, and 24/7 chat & email support, order processing, product image management, etc. An eCommerce assistant is very proficient in working with Shopify, Woo commerce, Magento, and many other platforms so you don’t have to worry at all they can smoothly run your operations whether you’re selling your product on your website or in a marketplace.
Virtual Data-Entry Assistant
For most entrepreneurs, Data-entry is one of the most troublesome works of all. Studies suggest that doing data entry tasks during stressful times can cause emotional irritation and prevents people from inputting and managing data correctly. Virtually data-entry assistants are the true savior of entrepreneurs, they can save both time & money by helping businesses with compiling preparing, and sorting data for entry. Managing, updating, deleting unnecessary data, generating reports, and entering data on your CRM. Having virtual assistants do these for you will always cost less than hiring an in-house staff to do all these tasks.
Virtual Web Design and Development Assistant
If you’re an entrepreneur you know that very well and a website is the face of the brand, your brand's virtual or internet presence is where all of your clients and customers can visit and ncheck out your business and your products or services. Getting the right website is crucial and hiring a virtual assistant to do that for you is very effective. They work with a lot of clients so most of the time it's much easier for them to understand your requirements. The main advantage here is that VAs can get the same work done much more efficiently and you don’t even need to provide them with a workplace like you’d if you hired an in-house team.
Virtual Designers
Designers help you to bring out your imaginations into reality and virtual designers can make that happen for you. There are various types of virtual assistants in the world of design. From traditional graphics designers to 2D & 3D designers and motion graphics and many more. You can find a Virtual designer to fulfill all your creative needs as per your requirements inexpensively.
Virtual Marketing Assistant
In today’s evolved digital world expanding your marketing efforts in the digital world is a must and a virtual marketing assistant can help you streamline your marketing efforts online. Digital Marketing is a large field with tons of tasks, there are also several types of virtual marketing assistants who can help with several different digital marketing tasks, like doing keyword research, Content marketing, Social media marketing, Paid media campaigns such as media buying and PPC, setting up and running an email marketing campaigns. In addition, they can also help you hire email and chat support virtual assistants.
Virtual Tele-marketing Assistant
Calling all the at a scheduled time following up with lead, doing pure prospecting over the phone can be stressful for businesses, and getting your own in-house telemarketing team can be very expensive. Virtual Telemarketers can make your life easier saving all that money and time and keep bringing more business for you.
How can you hire VAs?
Since you've finally decided to hire VAs there are some things to keep in mind before hiring. The best practice is to break down the process into steps and make it easier. First of all, you have to be firm on which of your business tasks you want to outsource. Create a master to-do list and create a list of all the tasks that need to be done to run your business smoothly. Now you gotta choose the right person for the right. The logistical factors that you should keep in mind are that be sure that they speak your language, check if they’re flexible enough to work within the time zone that they're in, and you also have to make sure that the price range meets your budget. And on a professional level, you also want to ensure they’re trustworthy, reliable, collaborative, well-organized, and communicative. You should also assess their skills and abilities. Ask questions to check their knowledge and check if they’re a good match for your communication style and personality. Lastly, come up with a small sample task, and that way you can make sure if you’re getting what you want.
Best practices of Operating with a VA
It’s vital to create a very impactful work relationship right off the bat. They’ll need all the resources and instructions to get all the assigned tasks done. As you plan to work with a virtual assistant it's best practice to give clear instructions, make no mistake as emails, chats, and online conference is your primary communication channel your instruction can easily get lost in translation. Make sure you come up with an effective communication protocol and give clear-cut instructions with no miscommunication and misunderstandings. Set them up with all the collaboration tools that you use and make sure the workflow runs smoothly. Be very clear with your feedback. If you’re very pleased with their work let them know and motivate them to keep the effort consistent. If things are not up to the mark let them know exactly what you’re expecting, so that they can shift their work efforts to meet your standards.
Conclusion
To conclude if you’re an entrepreneur with a very busy and looking to minimize your budget on operations getting virtual assistants can highly work in your favor because these virtual workers can conquer your routine task with skills and bandwidth that probably even you don’t possess. Freeing so much of your time so can put your efforts into things that’ll grow your business further.
