What to Outsource to a Virtual Assistant?
Any organization thrives when all the administrative, marketing, and miscellaneous tasks are handled properly without any interruption. However, handling multiple tasks can be daunting and draining your efforts and energy. To avoid such incidents, you can now delegate those overwhelming tasks to a virtual assistant.
These remote professionals will help you manage your organizational tasks to relieve you from time-consuming and repetitive tasks. Therefore, you will be able to manage your business more efficiently without increasing your office capacity and within your budget.
In this article, we will talk about who can benefit from hiring a VA, what tasks they will handle for you, and how you can effectively collaborate with them. Let’s discuss:
What's Inside
Who Can Benefit from Hiring a Virtual Assistant?
In general, virtual assistants are seasoned professionals who possess different skills to handle day-to-day office tasks from a remote location. This allows you to get the best possible work done cost-effectively within tight deadlines.
Therefore, if you are a business owner who is struggling to keep track of your organizational tasks, no matter what business niche, you could get advantages from hiring a virtual assistant.
Here’s a common outline of what virtual assistant you should hire depending on your business industry and needs:
| Industry | Type of Virtual Assistant | Tasks They Handle |
| All industries | General Virtual Assistant | Scheduling appointments, managing patient records, handling emails |
| Technology | IT Support VA Project Management VA | Troubleshooting technical issues, managing software updates, providing tech support, coordinating projects, tracking progress, managing timelines |
| Finance | Bookkeeping VA Customer Service VA | Managing invoices, tracking expenses, preparing financial reports, Handling customer inquiries, managing client accounts, providing support |
| Travel and Tourism | Travel Planning VA Customer Service VA | Booking flights and accommodations, creating itineraries, managing travel arrangements, handling customer inquiries, resolving issues, providing travel information |
| Fashion and Beauty | E-commerce VA | Managing an online store, processing orders, handling customer inquiries |
| Food and Beverage | Marketing VA | Creating marketing campaigns, managing social media, promoting events |
| Education and Training | Content Creation VA | Developing educational materials, creating online courses, managing content |
What are the Key Tasks You Can Outsource to a VA?
When you are ready to outsource your business tasks to a virtual assistant, you need to consider the following things:
- Is the task repetitive?
- How time-consuming are the tasks?
- If you conduct the task by yourself, is it worth the ROI?
- Can you standardize the task?
- How easily can you onboard and teach a new employee/ person/ service to handle the task?
So, if the tasks are highly repeatable, time-consuming, and distract you from conducting high ROI tasks, you should delegate them to a capable professional. Additionally, if you can standardize the task, you can quickly onboard a virtual assistant and start concentrating on your core business tasks.
We have seen at most 85% better productivity when employees work remotely. Therefore, you should think of outsourcing tasks if you need immediate support. In our professional opinion, you should delegate the following tasks to a general virtual assistant:
Administrative Tasks
As mentioned in the earlier section, no matter what industry your business falls under, you need to conduct a huge list of administrative tasks. While these tasks have a huge volume and are very important to keep your business organized, they do not bring much ROI. Therefore, you should delegate your administrative tasks as soon as possible to someone capable of handling them.
The crucial administrative support a virtual assistant will offer are:
- Scheduling and calendar management
- Email management
- Customer support
- Data entry
Scheduling & Calendar Management
While you cannot go by even a day scheduling and managing calendars, it takes a lot of time and effort from you. Therefore, you should have a virtual assistant who is capable of scheduling client meetings and personal appointments, sending meeting reminders, resolving scheduling conflicts, and taking care of all business travel arrangements.
Email Management
As a business owner, your inbox never seems to be empty. Within your log-out and log-in time, hundreds of emails might need your immediate attention. While you cannot but keep consistent communication with your clients, audience, and business partners, it takes out a significant chunk of your time daily.
To avoid such incidents, you should let your virtual assistant handle email communication. These professionals are proficient in managing your inbox by sorting, filtering, and responding to routine emails. In addition, they will segment all emails, clean the spam ones, and create new emails with proper tone and professionalism to help your business.
Customer Support
Your business is highly dependent upon your customers for survival and growth. Easy-going, natural, and effective communication is crucial for this. However, some days, you might have hundreds of queries that keep you away from your core business activities.
To avoid such incidents, delegate your customer support tasks to a virtual assistant service. Once you onboard a professional, they will respond to your customers via email or chat, process and fulfill their orders, and even handle basic customer service issues.
Data Entry & Research
Among many of the administrative tasks, data entry and research are the most repetitive, time-consuming, and tiring. While you cannot but conduct this task, doing this yourself is not worth the time and money as it doesn’t bring much ROI to your business.
A professional data entry and analysis service can be your best friend here. With the help of seasoned data entry professionals, you can delegate transcribing and formatting tasks. In addition, these professionals will help you with market research, competitor analysis, and trend analysis, as well as generate the best leads for your organization.
Marketing Tasks
You may have the best products or services available in your niche’s business industry. However, your customers will not know about them without proper marketing campaigns. On the other hand, designing marketing campaigns to execute them effectively requires significant time, effort, and expertise.
When you outsource your marketing va, you immediately gain access to seasoned experts. This relieves you from vigorous efforts and frees up your time to take care of other fires around your organization.
In general, your remote assistant service will handle the following marketing tasks for you:
- Social media management
- Content creation
- Email marketing
- Sales support
Social Media Management
Social media has been a very efficient platform for interacting directly with your customers. However, keeping an organized and professional social media page can be complicated and daunting when you are responsible for multiple other tasks.
Appointing a professional service can resolve this problem for you. Remote marketing professionals will post effective and trendy content to your social media platforms (Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, etc.), engage with followers by responding to comments and DMs, and run social media ads to reach out to new audiences.
Content Creation
Content creation is one of the crucial marketing tasks that most businesses struggle with. Marketing content needs to be the perfect blend of professionalism, creativity, and information. Therefore, you will need to put significant time into creating content, researching it, and making it effective for your customer base.
To help you with this task, your remote professional will research and draft informative and eye-catching content. They will write articles that help your audience utilize your product or service properly. Most importantly, these professionals will help create images, videos, and social media captions to get the maximum attention from your business’s target audience.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest outbound marketing strategies, and it still works. If you want to generate better ROI from your email campaigns, first, you will need to strategically plan one, then manage a large volume of email lists, and keep track of the whole campaign to see how it is performing and where you need to adjust.
With the help of a virtual assistant service, this task becomes very straightforward. A professional service provider not only plans, manages, executes, and tracks your email campaigns but also helps you automate the whole process to reduce hassles in the future.
Sales Support
The sales department of your organization can be compared to the heart of your body. All the money flow comes from this department which makes each task of your sales team more complicated than the other. Thus, it is very clever to get some extra help from professionals.
So, if you are looking to increase your sales capacity without investing in additional office space, you can start delegating sales support tasks to a remote assistant. These assistants will help you generate, qualify, and nurture leads. Additionally, they will help you schedule sales calls at the most effective time to bring a better conversion rate to your organization.
Miscellaneous Tasks
In addition to administrative and marketing tasks, you can also appoint virtual assistants to help with your day-to-day tasks that you cannot overlook yet don’t have enough time to conduct. By delegating tasks to a personal virtual assistant, both your professional and personal life get organized.
You can expect the following tasks to be handled by a personal virtual assistant:
- Errands and appointments
- Organization
- Travel planning
Errands and Appointments
As a business owner, you have to conduct a series of tasks on a daily basis. This can easily distract you from your personal life, leading you to miss important appointments and events.
A remote professional can help you keep track of missing appointments and deadlines. They will mark your calendar with important events, appointments, and grocery shopping frequency and send required notifications to remind you of those tasks.
Organization
A cluttered workspace can be why you struggle to reach your optimum potential. You might lose track of your important documents and other things. For most professionals, it is a struggle to find the time to organize their office and workspace.
Your virtual assistant will help you declutter your workspace while digitizing all your paper files. This will help you find things more easily and make your tasks more efficient.
Travel Planning
No matter what size business you operate, you might need to travel to different corners of your home and abroad. This can bring complexity to your schedule as there are lots of preparations and bookings that need to be done beforehand.
When you hire a remote professional, they will assist you with your travel planning. They will do their research and book flights and accommodations that are convenient for your overall business.
However, if you hire a specialized virtual assistant, they will handle some of these general tasks in addition to the expert work they offer. You will have to get a specific contract signed detailing all the responsibilities you are delegating to your designated professional.
Recommendations for Effective Collaboration with Virtual Assistants
Expert virtual assistants can be the solution to all the professional challenges that you are currently facing. However, not all remote professionals possess the same skills and expertise. Therefore, as an employer, you need to delicately onboard the most suitable candidate and manage them.
Here are our recommendations on how you should effectively collaborate with your virtual assistant:
- Clearly communicate with your VA. Make sure they know what tasks you expect them to handle on what deadline. Check-in with them regularly and use collaboration tools like Slack, Trello, etc., to keep track of their work.
- Provide them detailed instructions on how to handle day-to-day tasks that are easier for you to understand and analyze. You should have standard operating procedures (SOPs) in place, and your VA should be familiar with them.
- You need to onboard a remote professional on whom you can place your trust. They will be handling important documents for your organization, and you should be able to trust their decisions and the improvements they make.
- Offer them training sessions to gain the necessary skills to handle your organizational work if necessary. You should also encourage them to develop their skills while working for you so that you can get the best from them.
- Be flexible when working with a remote expert whenever you can. This will motivate them to put their best work into your organization and adapt to your organizational culture.
- Take time to learn about your VA’s interests, strengths, and working styles. This will create a positive working environment and foster a culture of collaboration.
Remember, your remote assistant is an important part of your organization, and you depend on each other. So, make sure to be understanding of their needs and comfort so they can understand your requirements and put in their expertise exactly where you need.
Final Words
Similar to the human body, an organization depends on several different tasks to survive and grow properly. However, conducting all those small tasks by yourself is often not an option. Virtual assistants can handle all those tasks for you while you manage the core business activities.
So, if you feel a remote professional can be your solution to overwhelming tasks, contact platforms like YesAssistant. We will help you with every step of hiring your VA and give you the flexibility to gain a work-life balance.
Whether you are struggling with administrative tasks or any other specialized tasks, you can choose from our wide range of professionals and keep your organization running smoothly and efficiently.
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