10 Startup Tasks You Can Outsource To A Virtual Assistant
Starting and running a business isn’t a one-person job unless that person is an all-powerful entrepreneur. They are superheroes, or at least they think they are, but being a micromanager can only get you so far.
If you are in the same boat, no matter how hard you try to multitask, the chances are that something always slips through the cracks. You might not realize that help is available and is quite affordable. No, you don’t have to hire full-time employees (that’s a Pandora’s box you aren’t prepared to open), but why not try virtual assistants?
Outsourcing to assistants specializing in startup tasks can help you let go of time-consuming responsibilities and focus on your core business efforts. Their ability to prioritize workload can pay off for your business in the long term. When you are ready to let go of the steering while for a bit, a virtual assistant can take charge of the situation but on your terms.
What Is A Virtual Assistant (VA)?
Virtual assistants are self-employed workers, i.e., independent contractors or freelancers, who can do all kinds of marketing, business, and administrative tasks for businesses. When you let these pros handle startup-related tasks, you get the time to focus on your growth and business goals.
Virtual assistant services like Wing Assistant provide a highly vetted, fully managed VA service, so you know you are hiring qualified, proficient VAs for your startup. The company combines expertise and knowledge with robust AI-powered software to entirely revolutionize your experience of delegating business processes and tasks to your dedicated VA.
Ready to hire? Find out how to hire the right team.
What Can VAs Do For Owners, Solopreneurs, And Startups?
The virtual assistant market is expected to grow by 50.9 billion dollars internationally by 2028. The evolution of the cutting-edge VA market is mainly because of AI-based technologies and digital transformation.
Services like Wing Assistant not only connect you with a highly qualified VA with skills in your desired areas, but they also provide a focused platform and technical resources to train your VA, assign tasks, and explain workflows.
Here are some vital startup tasks that you can outsource to a virtual assistant:
VAs Can Help You With Brand Positioning
You shouldn’t overlook brand positioning and customer relationships to help grow your startup. Using virtual assistant services can help you position your brand to resonate with the customers.
VAs can also help you create ideal customer profiles and define your specific brand tone and elements (logo, design, colors, visuals, etc.). Virtual assistants can also help you follow clients’ requirements and guidelines, evaluate brand issues, and competitors, and document the best practices.
Your VAs can help you maintain your brand position and image it in your niche’s mind.
VAs Can Handle Market Trends Monitoring
Your VA can monitor market trends within your sector and niche by gauging page insights and analyzing what topics get more visitors.
You can task your VAs to perform market research by assessing, studying, and investigating. This can save you adequate hours, providing you with a fresher mind revising and determining new ways to leverage the collected data in a rewarding way.
Trained VAs can observe market behavior, recognize developments related to your startup, and utilize social listening tools to gauge audience expectations and specifications from your brand.
Your VA Can Provide Product Development Support
Virtual assistants can help you with media and information, case studies, to technical or academic articles. VAs with the right and adequate technical background/skills can ensure proper documentation for the product’s functional requirements and clarify the customers’ needs regarding the project’s scale and tech stack while addressing and resolving their technical issues.
Customers demand timely and respectful responses to their queries from your helpdesk. Virtual assistants can help users dispense premium and exceptional quality service, providing a tremendous after-sales experience. Also, VAs can help to improve product knowledge, with minimal linguistic misunderstandings and call waiting for queues, etc.
Your VA Can Help With The Recruitment Cycle
More businesses, especially startups, turn to VA services to accelerate recruiting activities to facilitate the internal hiring process. Remote assistants can help you with a lot of the leg work, getting potential candidates through the talent pipeline.
Your VA can help you with the recruitment cycle and screen out the potential candidates who aren’t a good fit for your company or organization. Your assistant can collate applicant documents such as portfolios and resumes, provide clients with collected documents, and send negotiation or offer emails to candidates.
VAs Provide Calendar And Inbox Management
Employees spend countless hours a week on low-impact activities. For example, it’s easy for office workers to waste an entire morning scrolling through their inboxes and replying to or reading emails.
Managing and responding to emails can be a problematic distraction. And not being able to reply to the essential emails in time can result in you missing out on viable business opportunities. This is where a virtual email assistant comes in handy.
It’s an excellent solution for entrepreneurs who want to save time and stay on top of customer communications. Dedicated VAs can help you prioritize business imperatives and manage schedules and technology needs. You can have specialized email management VAs to help you handle your inbox. They can reply, filter, and send all email communication. You can decide how to categorize which emails and folders your VA manages.
Your VA can also notify you of urgent and vital emails. This helps you have a clutter-free inbox while enhancing your customer service specs as your VA replies to all customer queries ASAP.
VAs Can Help You With Content Creation
Dedicated VAs for content generation can help produce valuable content with the right keywords for your audience. Content writing and blogging are brilliant ways to entice web visitors.
VAs can help you with your marketing endeavors by positioning you as an authority in your field and demonstrating that your offerings can resolve their problems.
For example, virtual assistants can help research the best times to tweet different types of content, similarly if blog posts are more consumable at a particular time.
Many times, your audience may not necessarily search for your brand online.
However, your website can pop up while looking for something pertinent to your business.
A virtual assistant for content creation can adequately understand your business, and generate and publish resonating content to help you establish your brand as an authority/expert in your field.
This demonstrates to your customers that you’re knowledgeable in your domain, making your brand more trustworthy.
An experienced virtual assistant can develop search-optimized, long-form content, ensure appealing website design leveraging client guidelines and builders, and perform standard website maintenance.
VAs Can Become Social Media Managers
Setting up a VA as an editor or admin of your social media handles can help you keep up with your official brand pages and address followers’ questions regarding your service or product.
56.9% of new businesses have a dedicated team for marketing. And the most common use of marketing is via social media. Many startup entrepreneurs believe that having a social media manager makes their company’s online marketing efforts very effective.
Social media marketing can take your venture to new heights if leveraged correctly. Various recent trends have emerged to make your SMM campaign a lead booster.
Since around 45% of the global population uses digital media, it is imperative that you shouldn’t overlook this aspect of your business. However, social media demands ample research, analysis, monitoring, and creativity, which deserve dedicated resources.
VAs for managing your official brand pages on social media can also look after your digital calendar and frequently update its content, reflecting the company’s messaging and branding.
For example, a virtual assistant can update your social media pages during the holidays or weekends, answer customer queries, participate in community discussions, and post relevant content.
Similarly, the virtual assistant can leverage platforms like Hootsuite to schedule tweets and posts and moderate comments on the side if required. Beauty brand Clinique uses Facebook advertising campaigns to introduce its new product lines to global audiences.
A virtual assistant with expertise in social media management can be vital to scaling your business faster and bigger while helping you fulfill your duties as a CEO.
So, along with focusing on building your brand value, harnessing social media to collate customer feedback and addressing customer issues is also paramount.
Your VA Can Assist You With Lead Generation
Generating quality leads and keeping in touch with them is a job that requires proper dedication, time, and attention. Despite the various present-day channels of communication (SMS, e-mail, social media, call), it’s crucial to have a social media presence to build a good rapport with clients.
A survey reports that 48% of companies stated that prospects demanded: “long cycles” of nurturing with various influencers involved in the lead generation process. These long cycles include many cold calls, with the primary objective to filter out quality leads from less valuable ones.
The sheer workload in the lead generation process can burden the sales teams even if they are highly productive and motivated, distracting them from core tasks. Virtual assistance can help relieve a significant load off their shoulders.
Harnessing your startup’s resources with a competent individual at the appropriate place and time can make a considerable difference.
Another productive task you can delegate to VAs is garnering quality leads from rich-data sources. Virtual assistants can gather emails for prospective leads, clients, and partners, significantly helping you expand your business’ reach.
You can reach out to potential clients and leverage leads generation tools to tap new markets and audiences for the brand.
VAs Can Coordinate Your Trips
A VA travel expert can be great in helping you coordinate your trips. Free yourself from calling and scouting for good deals on plane tickets, accommodations, things to do, and more.
You can ask a VA to conduct research regarding the place and manage your travel-related refunds, ticketing, reschedule, exchanges, hotel accommodation, note essential locations, and any trip changes. Travel itinerary preparation and other arrangements.
Your VA Can Do Simple Graphic Design
Brands are more about how people perceive them, and good visual branding is what people think about when someone mentions a brand name.
In this visually-saturated market, it’s not sufficient to merely advertise a brilliant service or product. As customers take their buying cues from pop-culture influencers and social media, your brand’s visual representation carries a lot of significance.
The colors, fonts, and logo you use make the first impression on your intended audience and the ways they’ll remember you and recognize you while forming brand-specific opinions.
A virtual assistant for graphic design can provide you with collaterals such as infographics, posters, videos, etc. VAs can create brand-specific visual elements and marketing materials, align typography and imagery with your brand, and coordinate with your startup’s internal marketing team.
Visual design is crucial in online marketing. Many platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, prioritize visually engaging content as compared to plain text. So, including an image in your posts can significantly impact the number of people your post reaches.
A virtual assistant skilled in graphic design knows the best ways to translate your branding into a graphical representation, efficiently executing your message.
Start Up the Right Way with a Virtual Assistant
Startup owners are always busy juggling several tasks and projects. For a lot of them, multitasking isn’t too much of a problem. After all, they’re mostly go-getters who aren’t afraid to get in the trenches and work with details. Eventually, though, business owners need to take a longer view of their company.
When you’re a startup owner looking to grow your business, you can’t spend too much time on tedious tasks. At some point, you’d need to offload to an assistant. Virtual assistants can boost your marketing, help with administration, source products, qualify leads, set appointments, and even sort through possible employees if you plan to hire. With the right VA, you can streamline your operations, make your in-house employees more productive, and boost your overall growth.