How a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant Can Boost Business
Online digital marketing is such a broad and all-encompassing term and that is why a digital marketing virtual assistant (VA) comes in handy when it comes to the many tasks it involves. A strategy requires hours and hours of hard work — not to mention years of training and practice. However, despite the time and effort needed, it still remains one of the most beneficial ways to gain more leads and customers. This is why businesses need to invest in one.
Unfortunately, creating and implementing a solid digital marketing plan isn’t so easy. It’s not really something business owners can do themselves because you’ll risk burning yourself out just trying to keep up with your social media profiles, analyzing Google ad placements, writing your blog articles and so much more. On the other hand, hiring an in-house digital marketing team can be expensive and will definitely take a huge toll on your budget. Even outsourcing your digital marketing to an agency gets pricey, especially if you want to hire one with a proven track record.
So, what other option do you have? How can you ensure that your online marketing tasks are taken care of without putting a major strain on your budget?
Here’s an excellent solution: hire a digital marketing virtual assistant.
Tasks a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant Can Do
How can a virtual assistant help your business when it comes to digital marketing? Contrary to what many entrepreneurs think, virtual assistant services aren’t limited to administrative tasks or customer service. These days, it’s easy to hire specialist VAs to do a wide range of tasks. Some of the common things a digital marketing virtual assistant can do include website design and development, graphic design, and of course, digital marketing.
However, creating a plan isn’t easy as digital marketing requires many different skill sets. It’s not as simple as paying for ads on Google or Facebook; there are a dozen and one ways to push your brand forward and grow your audience online.
Here are some of the most common tasks that you can outsource to a digital marketing virtual assistant:
-
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is one of the most popular digital marketing tactics simply because it can get you to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) with zero to minimal spending. In fact, all the spending you’ll need is the hourly rate for your SEO specialist VA.
Since SEO is a constantly changing science, your SEO digital marketing virtual assistant will be in charge of making sure that your tactics are in line with current trends. This is to ensure that your website doesn’t get penalized and your rankings for your preferred keywords are always good.
-
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Some people think that SEO and SEM can be assigned to just one person or virtual assistant, but the skills involved in these specializations are quite different. Unlike in SEO, SEM involves paying for advertisement spots by bidding on keywords. In this way, SEM is more like traditional advertising than any other form of digital marketing.
With SEM, you can have a sure spot on SERPs and be in full control of the content you’re showing in your ads. A good SEM digital marketing virtual assistant should know which keywords to place your money in, what types of content work for paid ads, and when to run your business campaigns to ensure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck. It’s their responsibility to keep track of your spending and send you regular reports to make sure that you’re staying within budget.
-
Social Media Marketing
With the massive reach of social media these days, it’s not surprising to see almost all platforms being utilized for digital marketing. When you market your products and services on social media, you open your doors to the possibility of reaching millions of potential customers with each post. Of course, in order to convert these views into sales, you need high-quality content to compliment your marketing efforts.
A social media marketing VA can help you craft highly appealing posts, schedule them to ensure regular activity on your pages, and engage with your followers. They are basically in charge of social media management and creating and overseeing any current marketing campaign.
-
Content Marketing
There are many sides to content marketing. Mostly, it’s because there are many different types of content (articles, web content, infographics, images, video, etc.) that makes it difficult to group everything into just a single form of marketing. Here are some of the most common ones:
-
Website Blog Management
A blog manager helps you ensure that your company blog always has fresh content that targets relevant and trending topics. They can also be in charge of uploading content or blog posts, managing your tags and categories, monitoring blog comments, generating a blog calendar, and reporting on traffic and engagement.
-
Content Writing
A content writer virtual assistant can do keyword research to help with search engine optimization, write your blog articles, website content, video scripts, social media posts, and so on.
-
Content Distribution
To ensure that your quality content doesn’t get wasted, content distribution is a cost-effective online marketing strategy that lets you distribute existing content across various channels like social media. It is time-consuming to create new content, so reusing old ones are great for a marketing campaign.
-
Copywriting
Copywriting involves content that gears towards sales, so copywriters are excellent for marketing collateral, social media, and other digital paid ads, and so on.
-
PR
Getting your company mentioned on other channels can be very beneficial. Your content marketing virtual assistant can also handle PR pieces and reach out to various media outlets to get more coverage.
-
Infographics
More people are likely to read content if it features images. Infographics are a great way to simplify complex topics and other details in a clear and compelling way. Engaging infographics often have an easy-to-follow flow of information, concise text, and are overall easy on the eyes. A digital marketing virtual assistant who is great at graphic design and marketing content would be a great person to have in your team.
-
Podcast
An audience turns to a podcast when they’re too busy to watch a video and that is why podcasting is popular not only to multi-taskers. Millions of people consume online radio regularly, so building a community with a captive audience is easy. You can hire a digital marketing assistant to help with research, find new guests, prepare for interviews, or simply provide you with support in general.
-
eBooks
An eBook is a great way to strengthen your brand because writing one or two showcases your business expertise on the subject. It can also be used to build an email marketing list as potential clients are more likely to provide their contact information in return for the valuable information in your eBook. A digital marketing virtual assistant can help you get started on keyword research and finding the right topics.
-
User-generated Content
Nothing makes an audience feel heard, acknowledged, and appreciated than by utilizing user-generated content. Featuring tweets, testimonials, and reviews from customers will likely lure the interest of similar potential customers.
-
Testimonials
A digital marketing virtual assistant can help you find and collect testimonials from satisfied customers and market influencers.
-
White Papers
A digital marketing virtual assistant can help you plan your digital marketing strategy by creating white papers that provide useful information about your business.
-
Quizzes
Engaging content such as quizzes and other types of interactive content may be useful for your digital marketing campaign.
-
Video Marketing
Video marketing can be under the umbrella of content marketing, but since it uses an entirely different form of content, you will likely need to hire a video marketing virtual assistant for your video marketing efforts.
This type of content can be used in a variety of ways and its value lies in effectively using visual elements to explain products, services, or information. Additionally, videos are great for SEO, so topics relevant and popular to your niche would do well in video format.
Here are some of the most common tasks that video marketing virtual assistants take care of:
-
Social Media Videos
Videos on social media are being viewed more and more as time goes by, and social media platforms are responding in kind by making video content much more accessible and arguably more prominent. To keep up, you need to mix up your usual graphics and text posts with some video content as well.
-
Youtube Channel Management
Did you know that Youtube is the second most popular search engine in the world? Just imagine how many viewers and potential customers you can reach by having a well-managed Youtube channel. You can hire a virtual assistant to make sure that your channel always has fresh, relevant content.
-
Website Video Content
Of course, you’re going to need a VA to actually create all the video content you’re going to be uploading on your website, social media, and more. A VA with professional experience in video content creation and video editing can help you out with this.
-
Webinars
Webinars are great for building a loyal following, so you might want to consider setting one up for your company as well.
-
Email Marketing
To this day, email marketing remains an effective form of digital marketing. Highly targeted and engaging emails can generate a conversion rate higher than any other digital marketing strategy, so make sure you’re doing email marketing for your company. An email marketing specialist virtual assistant can help you build email sequences to foster engagement, find the best opportunities for email campaigns and promotions, and monitor your email marketing results in order to improve.
How to Find a Reliable Digital Marketing VA
When hiring a virtual marketing assistant, you need to test their skill level more thoroughly. Soft skills like excellent communication and time management skills are important, but your priority is to find someone with the right set of skills and can surely deliver the results you’re looking for. If you’re finding it hard to find a trustworthy VA from the usual venues like social media pages and online job boards, you might want to consider using a virtual staffing agency instead.
A virtual staffing company usually already pre-screens their VAs, so you can be sure that the candidate you’re hiring has the basic skills needed for the job. Some companies like 20four7VA also provide additional training as needed. A virtual staffing agency also helps make the hiring, HR, and payroll process so much easier for you. This way, you only need to worry about the results you’re getting from your VA while the agency takes care of everything else.
Benefits of Hiring a Digital Marketing VA
Did you know that digital marketing virtual assistants are basically digital marketers themselves? Hiring a digital marketing VA is a digital marketer’s secret weapon when it comes to saving time and money for your digital marketing campaigns.
Since they already have the basic set of skills needed for digital marketing, you can expect them to be more than capable of taking care of digital marketing duties for you. Having a digital marketing VA to take care of your digital efforts is faster and more cost-efficient.
It’s true that digital marketers are always in demand, which makes finding them difficult. However, digital marketing virtual assistants are still rather easy to find because they usually have the basic skills to perform digital marketing tasks. You can also find digital marketing VAs through digital staffing agencies, so there’s really no excuse not to invest in hiring one.
The key is to hire the right digital marketing VA for your digital campaigns. You must choose someone with the right set of skills and personality that fits into your team. It may take some time to find the perfect digital marketing VA for your digital efforts, but digital marketing becomes simpler and less laborious once you do.
By hiring a digital marketing virtual assistant, you’re already on your way to improving your digital presence without having too much stress in the meantime. If you’re still not convinced of digital marketing VAs’ capabilities, why not give one a try for digital marketing campaigns that don’t require the use of your time? You might just get hooked once you see how fast digital marketing can be with a digital marketing VA.
Final Thoughts
Hiring a digital marketing virtual assistant will be incredibly helpful in implementing, monitoring, and making adjustments to your digital marketing strategy. However, it would help if you had a solid strategy in place, to begin with. You can hire an in-office digital marketing manager to oversee the entire process or hire a digital marketing manager VA to do this for you as well. Keep in mind that since a digital marketing manager VA should have a special set of skills, including soft skills such as leadership and organizational skills, you need to be more thorough and selective when hiring one.
Ready to hire the digital marketing virtual assistant you need? Request a FREE Business Growth Session from our team today!
Next: 30 Tasks You Can Outsource to a Virtual Marketing Assistant