Digital marketing is an essential method for building brand awareness, increasing conversions, driving sales, and more. The more time you can invest into implementing your strategy, the more you will see results. But what if it’s time that you don’t have?

Why You Should Consider Hiring a Virtual Assistant

Virtual assistants are skilled professionals who work remotely, taking repetitive and time-consuming tasks off your hands. With their help, you’ll be able to attend to the important aspects of your business while they make sure things can keep ticking over in the background.

Unlike an in-house employee, a virtual assistant is not limited by location and can be utilized as much or as little as necessary. Costing up to 90% less than hiring a full-time assistant as you only pay for their productive hours working on your tasks, hiring a VA to supplement your team is one of the most cost-effective and flexible options available to businesses.

See: 7 Ways A Virtual Assistant Can Help You Work Smarter

How a Virtual Assistant Can Help With Digital Marketing

Before we get started, it’s important to bear in mind that virtual assistants are best placed to manage distracting tasks that take up valuable time and stop you from focusing on bigger-picture tasks that drive your business forward. For example, if you are looking for someone to help you overhaul your marketing strategy or devise a new one, a project like that should stay within your remit, or be outsourced to an external consultant.

But removing even a few regular tasks from your day, week, or month can allow you to accomplish so much more. Recent research suggests that delegating just 10% of your workload could grow your business by more than 20%, so with that in mind, let’s dive into the different ways a virtual assistant could help support your digital marketing strategy…

Email Marketing

As an entrepreneur wearing many hats within your company, email marketing might not be at the top of your list of priorities. You might find it hard to justify taking the time to make an e-newsletter when all the other demands of your business are vying for your attention. But that being said, neglecting email marketing could mean you are missing out on a highly effective way to engage with your target audience, clients, or customers.

60% of consumers prefer email as their favorite channel for promotions and updates from businesses, and email has also been found to be 40X more effective than Facebook and Twitter for acquiring customers.

The great news is, there are many ways a virtual assistant can help in this area. For starters, they can help you put together the emails themselves by writing copy, designing visual elements, building the email in platforms such as Mailchimp or SendinBlue, and scheduling them to be sent to your subscribers.

Beyond creating email campaigns, a virtual assistant can also manage your subscriber database by creating segments and removing inactive subscribers. This means increased deliverability, higher engagement, and less likelihood of your emails ending up in the dreaded spam or junk folder. They could also report on stats such as email open rates and click-through rates for you to review. If you aren’t already using email marketing tools, a virtual assistant could research all the different options available to help you find the best one for you and your business.

Social Media Management

Having active social media accounts is essential for any business in today’s world. It can provide cheaper advertising for smaller businesses or limited budgets and can give you the potential to reach a much wider range of customers.

Plus, it's an easy way to stay on top of current events and make sure you're always in the know. But maintaining a consistent, active social media presence can take a lot of time and effort.

We have previously explored the many different ways a virtual assistant can help with your social media in greater depth, but in short, writing copy for your posts, scheduling your posts across platforms, and replying to comments and queries can all be handled by an assistant.

Website Updates

In today’s digital era, it’s likely that your website will be a customer or client’s first impression of your business. So, it’s essential to ensure your website is always up-to-date, no matter what content management system (CMS) you’re using.

By performing regular website maintenance, you might catch issues that you wouldn’t otherwise notice, such as broken links, outdated content, or images that aren’t optimized. But what if you don’t have time to keep your website updated? Or, the time you’re spending on site maintenance is stopping you from focusing on bigger-picture tasks?

The solution is simple: offload this task to a virtual assistant.

• Updates: A virtual assistant can check your website for various updates for your CMS, themes, and plugins.
• Backups: Your site needs regular backups just in case something goes wrong with your server, especially if you’re updating your site regularly. To save you time, a virtual assistant could set up daily backups when necessary. They’ll also test to see if the backups will restore properly.
• Image optimization: Each image on your website needs to be high-quality in order for it to render properly on multiple devices, such as desktops, tablets, and smartphones. But this can be a dilemma because, in order for an image to be high-quality, it has to be pretty large. And unfortunately, big images can cause the web pages on your site to load more slowly. A virtual assistant can optimize your images to make sure they don’t slow down your site.
• Functionality enhancements: If you want to add certain features to your website, but don’t have the time, a virtual assistant can step in to make sure your website is working optimally. This might involve improving the user experience with navigation or adding a button to your landing page to guide visitors to schedule a consultation.

Blog Writing

Blog posts are still among the top three pillars of content marketing strategies today. They're a great way to share not only company news but knowledge, tips, and advice your customers or clients would find valuable.

Consistency is key, so if, for example, your content strategy is to publish one blog post per week, writing these posts yourself can take a big chunk out of your day. In my experience, one of three scenarios is likely to happen.

• A) This significant element of your digital marketing strategy falls by the wayside in favor of making sure other critical tasks are completed.
• B) You write and publish the blog post, but must sacrifice other responsibilities.
• C) You work overtime to ensure all tasks are completed, leaving yourself with considerably less time to recharge after work or spend with your family and friends.

No matter which scenario you choose it’s impossible to win, either in the short or long term. But placing this task in the hands of an experienced virtual assistant allows you to regain valuable time so you can stay focused on growing your business and not neglect your life outside of work. From content research to writing, proofreading, and publishing, a virtual assistant can cover all bases.

SEO

When you publish content online, it’s pretty much useless if you don’t optimize it for your audience. That’s why you need SEO.

SEO can boost your business’s credibility and help your site rank higher in the search engines. That’s because Google prioritizes sites that answer a searcher’s question in a way that’s seamless and painless. For example, if your site offers a great user experience that involves an easy-to-navigate site that loads quickly and gives the searcher answers they’re looking for right away, you’re more likely to rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Incorporating keywords is also a factor because it helps Google understand what your content is about. That way, the search engine can determine if your webpage is relevant enough to include in the search results.

In the simplest terms, ranking highly in the SERPs gives you a greater chance of reaching the most people. Results on the first page of a Google search typically receive 90% of traffic, so while there is much to be gained from developing and implementing an SEO strategy for your business, the process can be pretty time-consuming.

But fear not! You can save lots of time with a virtual assistant on your side. Allowing your assistant to perform keyword research can also help you understand what your customers are looking for online. They can also verify your keyword density in your blogs and make sure all your content is optimized.

Google Ads

According to recent findings, for every $1 spent on the Google Ads platform, businesses make up to $2 on average, which makes PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising a highly viable option for many businesses. But the continued popularity of PPC advertising (96% of businesses are spending money on Google Ads) means that competition for the attention of your target audience is fierce.

For your PPC campaigns to stand out from the crowd, they need to be highly relevant and unique. Similar to SEO, your assistant could take care of keyword research within Google Ads to help you create high-quality ads with popular keywords, and write copy that will resonate with your target audience. If you need bespoke images for your ads, an assistant with graphic design experience can make it happen.

Your assistant could also utilize PPC platforms' tracking and data analysis tools to review and adjust your campaigns as needed to ensure you're getting the best return on investment, as well as recording the results of your campaigns to save you time.

What's the Bottom Line?

Hiring a virtual assistant can be a valuable investment to ensure your business never falls behind in this digital world. With the help of a skilled professional, your online presence will always be strong.

Instead of wasting precious time and money trying to find the right candidate yourself, our expert team at Time etc will pair you with the perfect virtual assistant to help you and your business succeed. To ensure that you have a great experience as well as great results, only the top 2% of assistants make it through our rigorous 10-stage application process to join us.

If you want to supercharge your marketing strategy and reap the benefits of more time and energy to spend working on your business instead of in your business, try a virtual assistant for free or speak to our team to build a plan that’s personalized to your exact needs, goals, and budget.