How Hiring a Virtual Assistant Can Boost Your Online Marketing
Online digital marketing is such a broad and all-encompassing field, which is why a digital marketing virtual assistant comes in handy when implementing a digital marketing strategy. The tasks involved in planning, implementing, assessing, and reconditioning a digital marketing strategy require hours and hours of hard work — not to mention years of training and practice. However, despite the time and effort needed for digital marketing, it remains one of the most beneficial ways to gain more leads and customers. This is why businesses of all shapes and sizes should definitely have a digital marketing strategy of some sort.
Unfortunately, creating and implementing a solid digital marketing plan isn’t so easy. It’s not really something you, a business owner or executive, can do yourself because you’ll risk burning yourself out just trying to keep up with your social media profiles, analyzing Google ad placements, writing blog articles, and so much more. On the other hand, hiring an in-house digital marketing team can be expensive and will take a huge toll on your budget. Even outsourcing your digital marketing to an agency gets pricey, especially if you wish 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 virtual marketing assistant.
Tasks a Digital Marketing Virtual Assistant Can Help You With
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 virtual assistants to do a wide range of tasks. Some of the common things you can use a virtual assistant for include website design and development, graphic design, and of course, digital marketing.
There are many ways a virtual assistant can help your business when it comes to digital marketing. This is because digital marketing itself has so many branches that require so 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:
1. 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 ensures that your website doesn’t get penalized, and your rankings for your preferred keywords are always good.
2. 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.
3. Social Media Marketing
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.
4. 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
Content distribution is a cost-effective online marketing strategy that lets you distribute existing content across various channels like social media to ensure that your quality content doesn’t get wasted. It is time-consuming to create new content, so reusing or repurposing old ones is 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 and 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 on a regular basis, so it is easy to build a community with a captive audience. 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. You can also use it 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 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 enhance 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.
5. 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.
A company can utilize video content in a variety of ways. 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 VA to make sure that your channel always has fresh, relevant content.
-
Website Video Content
Of course, you’re going to need a VA to 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.
6. 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 VA 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 Marketing Virtual Assistant
When hiring a virtual marketing assistant, you need to test each candidate’s skill level very 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.
If you’re finding it hard to find a trustworthy virtual assistant 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 VA 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 your 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 than hiring a full-time employee or outsourcing work to a digital marketing agency.
Indeed, digital marketers are always in demand, which makes finding skilled ones difficult. However, digital marketing virtual assistants are still rather easy to find because you can find them from all over the world. The most efficient way to hire offshore digital marketing VAs is through digital staffing agencies like 20four7VA. With how easy it is to find a VA when you partner with a trusted virtual staffing company, there’s no excuse not to invest in hiring one.
It’s crucial 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, 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, but you need to have 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 Business Growth Session from our team and get a free quote today!