It is natural for business owners to find avenues on how they can simplify their work yet at the same time achieve maximum business success the best way possible. As years pass by, human kind has been successful in creating tools, gadgets, software, robots with artificial intelligence that’s main purpose is to close the gap between where we are and the tasks we wish to accomplish. These are imperative to mention breakthroughs which allow us to continuously accomplish our duties swiftly and with less manual labor.
Same goes with business management. We have identified methods that enhances your productivity level, maximizes your time management, and increases your business success rate. You can achieve all these in a cost efficient manner and will definitely not break your bank.
If you are ready to find out, scroll down a bit to know the proven and effective technique that we offer and that is being used by different successful companies worldwide.
What is a Virtual Assistant?
A service that is widely used by businesses across the globe is called Virtual Assistants. It is a service provided by freelancers that relieves you business owners from basic repetitive groundwork of your business. Hence, Virtual Assistants provide you time to focus on important matters and resolve pressing issues in the other key areas of your company.
In other words, you delegate tasks to your Virtual Assistant who is your extra set of hands as it hastens the time duration of the work that has to be done with minimum supervision needed.
However, hiring a Virtual Assistant does not mean that your VA should cover all the things for you. Your Virtual Assistant works best if she/he has a premise to work on or a specific set of obligations to follow. Check out our guide on how you can recruit a Virtual Assistant in What Is A Virtual Assistant and How To Hire One?
For decades of providing powerful business solution to different businesses, we have identified 25 tasks and services that your Virtual Assistant can provide you. Take note that this list is only a portion of what freelancers can do for you. Refer to our take on 10 Things To Outsource To A Virtual Assistant to see top 10 core functions of VAs.
These 25 tasks are subdivided in to 8 key categories to achieve balance in personal and business responsibilities.
-Personal Virtual Assistant
-Financial Virtual Assistant
-Marketing and Creatives Virtual Assistant
-Administrative Virtual Assistant
-Content Optimization Virtual Assistant
-Social Media Management Virtual Assistant
-Project Management Virtual Assistant
-Ecommerce Virtual Assistant
Now that we have gotten that out of our way, we can start with our first category:
Personal Virtual Assistant – the role of this kind of Virtual Assistant is to ensure that your personal responsibilities are done and your personal commitments are met. Sometimes, your personal responsibilities and business duties overlap that causes confusion, failure to accomplish tasks, and time mismanagement. To avoid these, your Personal Virtual Assistant is here to help you keep everything on track.
1. Grocery Shopping – check this off your things to do by simply delegating this to your VA. This can be easily accomplished through deliveries.
2. Scheduling of appointment – we do not want overlapping of commitments.
3. Online shopping/delivery – if you are in need of a new dress or a gift for your friend’s birthday, your VA got that covered too.
4. Hotel and flight booking – taking on a vacation will be a breeze as you have your Virtual Assistant to book you hotel accommodating and plane tickets without any hassle.
Finance Virtual Assistant – if the finance department is one of your weak points, do not fret as we have qualified and trustworthy Finance Virtual Assistant to help you manage your funds dedicated for investment, operating expenses, or even replenishment of supplies. Pro tip! Hire someone with a strong background in finance to keep your financial habits healthy.
5. Bookkeeping – making sure your expenses and transactions are all recorded can be a tedious work to do. Your Virtual Assistant is accountable for the account passwords and documentation of all your financial undertakings and business agreements that involve money.
6. Finance Adviser – if you need help in properly dispensing your cash flow, your Virtual Assistant is on your side to help you.
7. Distribution of Payroll – your team must be compensated for the services they provide. Allow your Virtual Assistant to calculate total working hours, deduct days of absence, and deposit each of your staff’s salary without you breaking a sweat.
Creative Virtual Assistant – this will allow you to create methods and publicity materials that will effectively penetrate your market and promote your products and services accordingly. Your Creative Virtual Assistant is responsible for creating strategic plans on how to increase your market engagement and cover bigger scale of audience.
8. Create strategic marketing campaigns – it is vital to hire a Marketing Virtual Assistant who has knowledge in proven marketing frameworks to build and execute strategic marketing campaigns. You can delegate this task to your VA to achieve utmost positive output.
9. Graphic Design – marketing campaigns entail powerful marketing materials. It would be a great help if your VA has skills in graphic design to compliment your marketing efforts in different online and offline platforms.
10. Photo and Video Editing - to make a even more solid impression towards your target audience, enhance your advertising materials through a polished and well made photos and videos. Achieve this with the support of your VA with skills on photo and video editing.
Administrative Virtual Assistant – whether you are a big or small company, it is imperative to have a person who is assigned to perform tasks that will help you to accomplish groundwork. Your Administrative Virtual Assistant is responsible in ensuring that the clerical work is covered.
11. Email Management – an avenue to communicate with your partners and clients is through email. It is important to immediately revert back to emails to show you value the correspondent. Allow your Admin VA to respond to email queries and address raised simple concerns without you having to intervene.
12. Answering calls – with the equal amount of urgency you should give to email management, answering calls shall receive the same. You Virtual Assistant will be answering incoming calls and make outgoing calls in behalf of you. This way, you can refrain from answering repetitive queries and focus on your core responsibilities.
13. HR management – there will be human resources queries that will arise along the way. Delegate to your HR VA activities such as recruitment, interview, addressing employee concerns. Your Virtual Assistant is here to make sure that these are well taken cared off.
14. Presentations – making powerful impressions can be time consuming and stressing. As part of admin work, assign this task to your VA to ensure that your presentation materials are well prepped and ready ahead of time.
Content Optimization Virtual Assistant – you need specific and effective skills and tools to ensure that your web content is optimized and manifests positive customer experience. If this is not within your realm, your Content Optimization Virtual Assistant is definitely a must have.
15. Content Writing – it is critical to ensure that you enhance your web content. You can achieve this through effective content writing which is one of the services your Virtual Assistant can provide for you. Your content writer must have the eye to ensure that your web articles or blogs are engaging and has a powerful impact towards the reader. It must have the ability to call for an action.
16. SEO – another key service to make sure that your web pages and contents are kept relative to search engine users. Search Engine Optimization is one of the tools that business owners spend money the most as this technique adds information and methods how to make your web page land in the top ranking search engine result page. With the tools and analysis skills of your VA, you can increase and maintain your brand’s presence among your target market.
17. Web development – if you are not familiar with web development and coding, you really have to hire a VA who is capable of doing so. It is a complex procedure yet significant to have a website the has high performance and drives audience to engage. Not only should it provide data about your company but it must also contain engaging materials, friendly interface, and easy navigation to control customer bounce rate.
Social Media Management Virtual Assistant – it is typical for companies nowadays to utilize social media in order to reach a bigger size of audience. Another purpose of engaging in social media platforms is to regularly update their market and create brand awareness. Hence, it is vital to recruit a Virtual Assistant who is tech savvy and capable of implementing different social media activities to strengthen audience engagement.
18. Social Media Campaigns – most companies are now using social media platform to conduct social media campaigns. This is because of the continuous growth in the number of users of these websites/apps hence giving you the opportunity to tap more audiences. This is similar to marketing campaigns; the only difference is this type of activity is centric to social media users.
19. Strategic plans to increase audience engagement – aside from implementing social media campaigns, a service your Virtual Assistant that offers is to conduct strategies how to effectively implement activities that will boost your brand awareness in the online world and make effective plans that will generate you customers.
20. Answering online queries – apart from email queries, a faster route for the people to reach different businesses is through social media accounts. It is important for businesses to provide immediate responses to the customer’s queries to avoid wasting the intent of the customer to engage with you.
Business Development – as a business owner, you should look for other avenues to compliment your main business that will also generate income at the same time. As more clients fill up your pipeline, you will be needing assistance from your staff to make sure that all projects lined up are attended accordingly.
21. Project management – your Virtual Assistant will be your point person in to ensure that your projects are taken cared off. It is vital to have a point person spearheading and managing your projects to make sure that commitments are delivered on time. Furthermore, your Project Manager Virtual Assistant is responsible to update and report to you any form of development, progress, and concerns that may arise.
Ecommerce – through the years, there has a been an immense rise in the ecommerce industry. It has been a helpful platform for entrepreneurs to launch their products through the use of ecommerce. Hence, management of your ecommerce website is as vital as managing a physical store.
22. Take and upload photos and description – this simple task can be handled by your Virtual Assistant for you. It is important to take good and upload clear photos of your products as if it is like seeing the item physically. If your VA is also familiar with basic photo editing, it would be helpful to enhance photos to make a more lasting impression.
23. Address customers – there will be customers who will be needing your assistance with your products or services. It is important to not waste time and provide immediate response to show value towards the correspondent; at the same time, this is an opportunity for your business to gain a new customer.
24. Manage transactions – allow your VA to do the legwork for you by delegating to them the task of managing transactions. If your business involves multiple logistics processes and banking procedures, your Virtual Assistant can do that for you in a few clicks.
25. Handle customer feedback – feedbacks are essential for any business to grow. Hence, it is significant for your business to have a point person who handles customer feedback. The presence of your Virtual Assistant would be a great support in ensuring that comments and feedbacks are provided with solutions and quick responses to show that you acknowledge the message.
With these 25 services provided by your Virtual Assistants, you can now offload work from your shoulders and allow well skilled Virtual Assistants to do these things for you. This way, you can manage and maximize your time properly.