Effective marketing and messaging can make or break a business. But not all marketing tasks require the bandwidth of full-time team members. Certain tasks like email management and search optimization are time-consuming and important, but you can assign them to a virtual marketing assistant instead.
Wing virtual assistants can complete many different marketing tasks, including social media management, basic content strategy, and graphic design. All Wing VAs speak English and have college degrees, making them excellent candidates for marketing projects.
Before you begin the hiring process to find a digital assistant, find out whether you need to delegate marketing tasks to someone else, and which functions to offload.
Why Marketers Must Offload Some Functions
In the old days, a business could buy a thirty-second ad on one of three TV networks and expect major results. These days an effective marketing strategy involves many different channels, including:
- Social media
- PPC campaigns
- Email marketing
- Onsite SEO
- Blogging
With so many different channels, it can be hard to decide where to invest your time, but one thing is clear: full-time team members should be focused on higher-level tasks like content and brand strategy, and not concerned with smaller ones like drafting tweets and writing blog posts.
That’s why virtual assistants make an excellent choice for lower-level marketing tasks. Wing remote assistants are pre-vetted and trained in basic marketing tasks so they can provide value to your business on day one.
Now that you understand why you should offload some marketing tasks, let’s discuss which specific tasks are good to delegate.
Which Functions Should I Delegate to a virtual marketing assistant?
If you’re hiring a remote assistant, you want to have a plan for which functions they can take over. Some of the best marketing tasks to assign to a virtual assistant include:
- Graphic design
- Lead generation
- Email inbox management
- Social media management
- Content writing and optimization
Marketing is a broad discipline with many different tasks and functions. Each of these tasks is crucial to building an effective marketing campaign because they connect your business with potential customers.
But a skilled remote assistant can execute each of these tasks with proper direction from full-time team members. A good digital assistant will produce professional work on time, leaving your potential customers with a good first impression. Let’s look at how virtual assistants can succeed by doing each of these tasks for your business.
Making Simple Graphics
Graphics are an essential component of effective digital marketing. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and simple graphics and icons on your website and in your digital communications will give your business personality and project professionalism.
While designing using a program like Canva does not take a high degree of artistic skill, it nevertheless requires time. It often takes a few hours to generate a set of icons or develop clear infographics for a blog piece.
Wing virtual marketing assistants learn graphic design using Canva and can hit the ground running to complete these tasks, freeing you up to take on more meaningful marketing tasks.
Generating & Qualifying Leads
Sales is the lifeblood of many businesses, so it stands to reason that generating leads is an incredibly important task. But generating and qualifying leads does not require specific expertise in the product or the business. Someone needs to do the initial work of attracting interested consumers before the team passes them on to qualified salespeople who can close the deal.
Virtual marketing assistants are great at generating and qualifying leads. They start by creating or curating content marketing pieces such as blog posts or listicles with the right calls to action. They can also research prospects whom you can include in your sales and marketing funnels. Once lead generation is in full swing, they can also qualify leads based on the criteria you give them to ensure you’re receiving a consistent stream of good prospects.
Daily Email Marketing Tasks
Managing the flow of emails during the workday can be a major distraction. One study conducted a few years ago revealed that 33% of entrepreneurs agree that email is the biggest distraction while trying to build their business.
Reading and responding to emails, scheduling follow-up appointments and monitoring responses are time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be with the help of a remote assistant.
Wing assistants manage email communications for businesses in a variety of industries. VAs can ensure timely communications and filter through the mountain of emails to only elevate important messages to a full-time team. They can even schedule meetings and manage calendars, too.
Posting to Social Media Platforms
Over 3 billion people used social media in 2020, and researchers estimate that this number will increase to 4.4 billion in 2025. This potential for massive exposure makes social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram excellent channels for marketing a business.
While you can set up a free account on each of these platforms, your business will be investing a lot of sweat equity in building and maintaining your online presence. According to one study, over 40% of small businesses spend at least 6 hours a week on social media. But posting content and answering comments does not require leadership’s attention.
Wing trains all virtual marketing assistants in social media marketing and can execute a strategy according to our client’s needs. Our trained team of remote assistants can execute clients’ content plans for an efficient, cost-effective marketing solution.
Content Writing & Optimization
As the saying goes, content is king on the web. Businesses need a consistent flow of content across various digital platforms to attract customers and make conversions. But do you have time to research, write, and revise content pieces for the web every week? Probably not. A good remote assistant will conduct this research for you, write and revise pieces, and post them to the web.
Wing virtual marketing assistants are also trained in the basics of search optimization so they can optimize blog posts and website copy based on a list of target keywords. This is a relatively simple but highly efficient investment in time and resources.
By optimizing existing content and republishing it, you’ll be cutting down on time spent on your marketing efforts. By doing all of this with the help of a virtual assistant, you’ll save even more time, which you can then invest in your business.
How to Effectively Delegate Tasks to a Virtual Marketing Assistant
Even though many digital assistants learn marketing tasks like social media management and lead generation, they most likely will not know how to do everything on day one. Like any new hire, they will require your support to succeed. You must empower your new team member to think on their feet and work proactively on behalf of your business.
It’s important to have realistic expectations when hiring and onboarding a new remote administrative assistant. In the following sections, we’ll give you a few tips that will help set you up for success with your virtual assistant.
Make Them Aware of Task and Project Goals
Whether it’s posting to social media, designing a banner for an email, or scheduling a meeting, every marketing task has an objective. You can empower your virtual assistant by letting him or her know what the task’s goal is before even beginning the work.
Letting your VA know the goals of every task will help them prioritize which of the many tasks to do first and will give them a clear motivation for succeeding. The same goes for overall goals for a larger-scale project.
Wing assistants undergo a rigorous 4-to-6-week training program to effectively manage many projects at once. All VAs maintain confidentiality in client interactions, so you can rest assured that the information you share is only for the benefit of your virtual assistant. What’s more, Wing virtual marketing assistants have a team backing them up, which allows for consistent service in the event of a change in personnel.
Provide Detailed Workflows for Your VA to Follow
If you know how you would like the project carried out, inform your VA at the beginning of the assignment. If you can, provide detailed workflow information—giving deadlines, deliverables, and steps to completion will go a long way to ensuring success.
If you are unsure what information will be useful for a virtual marketing assistant, feel free to ask them or their supervisor for examples of what might be useful. A skilled operations manager oversees each team of Wing virtual assistants and is available to assist you with anything that might help the project go smoother.
Give Them the Resources They Need to Perform Their Role
Part of success on any project is proper preparation. The best practice is to share any useful resources you have with a VA before they begin the task. Resources that may help a remote assistant succeed at their task may include:
- Research
- Contacts
- Stylebooks
- Online tutorials
- Reference Guides
If you have a few minutes, you can even write up a quick brief for the project that includes everything we’ve discussed: goals, workflows, and resources, all in one place.
Though a project brief may take some upfront investment of time, it will keep you and your virtual marketing assistant from having to redo work because of a miscommunication.
Provide Extensive and Actionable Feedback
Feedback is critical to establishing a strong and durable working relationship. Once a VA has completed a task, be sure to schedule a brief check-in to review the work and provide actionable feedback.
Actionable feedback includes any constructive suggestions that the VA can act on the next time they do the task. For instance, you might recommend only publishing social media posts at a certain time or ask that remote assistants use a particular language in email communications. This type of feedback is invaluable because VAs can act upon it, as opposed to just saying “do this better next time.”
If tasks are ongoing, such as email inbox management, set up a time to review the VA’s work and share feedback. This is most helpful at the beginning of your time working together so that you can correct an initial confusion or misunderstanding.
Finding the Right Virtual Marketing Assistant
These days, there are a few options for finding the right remote marketing assistant. Whether you conduct the search on your own, register on a hiring marketplace, or hire a managed VA service, you should be aware of the benefits and drawbacks of each approach. Understanding the pros and cons of each possibility can help you save time and avoid frustration.
Hiring a Virtual Marketing Assistant Yourself
The main benefit to hiring an assistant yourself is cost savings. Of the three options for finding assistants, conducting your own search will have the lowest upfront costs.
Though the monetary cost may be lower when hiring your own assistant, it does involve a big investment in time. Hiring a VA yourself involves networking, screening applicants, interviewing candidates, training, and facilitating HR benefits.
Though it may seem like a savvy business approach to do all these tasks yourself and save money, beware that you may have to do the process more than once if a candidate backs out or quits for unforeseen circumstances. For this reason, many experts consider hiring an assistant yourself to be a risky option.
Hiring an Assistant through a Marketplace
Hiring marketplaces include websites like Freelancer, Upwork, and Fiverr. The communities on these platforms vet candidates through reviews. While a hiring marketplace provides a constant stream of talent, be aware that these contractors may not be reliable. Since businesses and contractors are constantly posting and bidding on projects through the platform, your VA could leave your project at any moment to join something that pays at a higher rate.
If your business has a strong online presence on Upwork or Fiverr, you may not have trouble finding additional quality candidates. But this process takes time and if you are seeking a marketing assistant to help with building marketing efforts, it is quicker and easier to invest in a method that prescreens qualified marketing assistants for you.
Hiring a Managed Virtual Marketing Assistant
Hiring a managed service firm gives you access to qualified, pre-vetted remote marketing administrative assistants who can help boost your bandwidth. Because these services do most of the upfront work of screening potential VAs, training them, and overseeing their work, the price tag is a little higher.
Some businesses opt not to use a managed VA service because it costs more. That’s not the case with Wing. You can hire our full-time content marketing assistants for the affordable price of $999 per month. At this price point, you’ll get a dependable, college-educated remote assistant working in tandem with a team. This kind of reliability is worth the upfront investment and will save you time in the long run.
Wing Virtual Assistants Are A Great Investment in Marketing Your Business
As we noted before, full-time staff can and should devote their bandwidth to marketing strategy. But a virtual marketing assistant can be a game-changer for a small business. Though many of the tasks are repetitive, a VA is a great way to free up bandwidth to devote to higher-level revenue-generating activities.
Wing VAs offer general support at $899 a month, and content marketing support at $999 a month. Our trained, managed, and dedicated assistants can take on a variety of marketing tasks and support entrepreneurs of all stripes. Schedule a call to find out how we can help you today!
Dan Eder writes frequently about digital marketing trends, SaaS, and e-commerce. He has previously worked as a content writer at an SEO agency for tech companies, an e-commerce specialist at a Fortune 500 company, and a journalist for several educational outlets. Read more from him at www.daneder.com.
