A Complete Guide for Hiring a Virtual Marketing Assistant
A virtual marketing assistant is an online marketing professional who provides marketing and administrative support to clients remotely.
There are many benefits of hiring a virtual marketing assistant, including: saving time and money, increased efficiency, and expanded capabilities.
Below are some of the top reasons why hiring a virtual marketing assistant can help your business boost sales and grow.
In this guide, we answer those questions and more to help you decide if a virtual marketing assistant will be worth it for your business or not.
Today’s small business owner needs to wear many hats. Not only do you need to take care of your business, but you have to run it as well. In addition, marketing can seem like a mysterious skill that others know how to do but you don’t.
The idea of hiring a marketing assistant may seem overwhelming or even unnecessary if you have enough on your plate already, but once you learn more about what they can do for your business, there’s no going back! But before we go deep into the concept of VMA let’s understand first What Is a Virtual Marketing Assistant?
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What Is a Virtual Marketing Assistant?
A virtual marketing assistant is an assistant who provides marketing support to a business from a remote location. This can be done through various means such as social media, email marketing, or even telemarketing.
The main benefit of hiring a virtual marketing assistant is that it helps businesses to save on costs. A virtual marketing assistant typically charges less than a full-time employee, and businesses only need to pay for the hours they work. This helps businesses to get the same level of support as they would from a full-time employee, but without the added expense.
The Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Marketing Assistant
There are many benefits to hiring a virtual marketing assistant. Perhaps the most obvious benefit is that a virtual marketing assistant can help you boost your sales. This is because a virtual marketing assistant can help you with a wide range of marketing tasks, including social media, email marketing, and SEO.
A virtual marketing assistant can also help you save time and money. Time is money, after all, and hiring a virtual marketing assistant can help you free up some of your precious time so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. In addition, hiring a virtual marketing assistant is often much cheaper than hiring a full-time in-house marketer.
So if you’re looking to increase your sales and save time and money, hiring a virtual marketing assistant is a great option!
So, why hire a virtual marketing assistant?
A virtual marketing assistant has the flexibility of helping you grow your business no matter where they are located. Whether they’re at home or in another country, there are many advantages of hiring someone who works remotely.
Here are the top five reasons to hire a virtual marketing assistant:
1. Lower training and operating cost
Hiring someone in-house to help with your day-to-day tasks, like responding to e-mails, social media management, or online research, can be hard. Even worse if you’re trying to hire multiple people for your business.
With monthly expenses like salary, taxes, training, equipment and many more things that you spend your money on make it even harder to focus on the marketing of your business. Having a virtual marketing assistant can help you get more work done with less resources while paying only when needed.
For instance, it is easier to hire a virtual assistant at $15 per hour than hiring someone at $50k per year.
You can always hire multiple VA’s if it is really necessary.
A VMA may help with customer service, social media management, email management, organizing schedules and events—just to name a few things. And because their role is so fluid depending on what type of business you have and what it needs, there are many advantages associated with hiring a VA instead of employees.
You can keep costs down by not having to cover overhead for traditional employees, you get complete transparency with most VAs, since they operate remotely—meaning no more worrying if your employee is actually working when he says he will!
All of these factors combine to make having a virtual assistant one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for my small business!
2. They know all the business tools
The best VAs know how to use tools like Google Analytics, Google AdWords and LinkedIn Ads Manager without much oversight from their employer.
They are fluent in most social media platforms as well as blogging platforms like WordPress and HubSpot CMS, MS Office, marketing software and online tools (Web Analytics, Google Adwords, CRM tools, etc).
A virtual marketing assistant can help with virtually anything that needs to be done online. As long as it’s not physical labor (like moving furniture) they can be extremely helpful in growing your small business!
3. A VMA has a Similar mindset
A virtual marketing assistant has a similar mindset to entrepreneurs like you and me. They value flexibility, autonomy and work-life balance over higher pay.
It is easier to get along with them than normal employees who are likely to demand more benefits or expect promotions if they did a good job.
If they know that you are looking at other VAs in case their performance is not up to your expectation, it will keep them on their toes, which is usually enough motivation for VA’s to do their job well.
4. Frees Up Time For you to be more productive
Depending on what your company needs help with, hiring a virtual assistant can save you time by letting you focus on other aspects of running your business.
As an entrepreneur, every second counts!
Hiring a virtual marketing assistant who will take care of some of your less important but still essential tasks allows you to focus on growing your business.
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5. Increase Efficiency
As a business owner, you probably have your hands full. With only 24 hours in a day, it can be difficult to keep up with everything on your plate.
While some entrepreneurs thrive on their full plates and find ways to successfully manage it all, others understand that there are certain tasks they would rather not spend their time doing—or don’t know how to do well. These tasks include things like updating social media accounts regularly or keeping track of sales leads.
That’s where virtual marketing assistants come in. You can increase efficiency by outsourcing these marketing tasks to virtual marketing assistants. A VMA can help free up more of your time and help you increase your efficiency as a business owner by taking over these noncore marketing tasks.
For instance, you can get your social media tasks done by a VMA, such as posting content on Facebook pages and scheduling posts across other platforms.
You might be thinking that all of these are easy enough to do yourself but when it comes to getting things done in bulk, hiring someone for them makes more sense. It does not matter if it is in writing or typing in links manually into Instagram or Twitter. If you have someone else who can do these things better than you, then why not let them handle that? You only need to focus on your core tasks instead of wasting time doing everything yourself.
How Do I Know if I Need One?
There are many ways you can realize if you need a digital marketing assistant. If you don’t need 24/7 support, but need someone to handle some basic marketing tasks, perhaps you only need part-time help. If you need help with web content, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing and social media marketing consider getting someone who specializes in that field.
For specialized jobs like design work or writing articles, look for an expert. Use your business goals as your guide when choosing what services to outsource. Once you know what tasks you want to outsource, it’s easier to find a company or freelancer who can do it for you at an affordable rate.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Virtual Marketing Assistant?
Most freelancers will charge per hour, although some may charge per project or task. The average marketing virtual assistant hourly rate is $15-40, but rates will vary depending on what level of marketing the assistant is familiar with, industry experience, and more. The above virtual marketing assistant rates may also fluctuate depending on your hiring needs.
They might charge you a per-project basis as well if the hourly price doesn’t suit your needs. You can expect around $400-$2500 per project depending on the project. This flat rate will depend on the complexity and severity of the job and the assistant’s experience level.
My tips:
Hiring a virtual marketing assistant for your small business can be a big step. You want to make sure you’re spending your money wisely so you get exactly what you need from someone with experience in your niche.
Use these tips to help determine how much it will cost to hire a virtual marketing assistant for your business.
Asking yourself, Why should I hire a virtual marketing assistant before engaging one can help you determine if it makes sense for your business.
There are several advantages to hiring an online marketing assistant.
First, VMA’s are affordable. A quality virtual marketing assistant costs much less than their in-office counterparts.
Second, hiring an online marketing assistant allows you to connect with someone who knows what they’re doing rather than trying to learn on your own.
A big part of working with anyone is communicating clearly. If you don’t explain your expectations in detail, then you’ll end up frustrated when they do things their way instead of yours. If possible, work with an assistant who has experience with what type of jobs or tasks they will be doing.
What Tasks Can a Virtual Marketing Assistant Help With?
There are many different tasks that a Virtual Marketing Assistant can help with. From developing marketing strategies to creating and executing marketing plans, a Virtual Marketing Assistant can take on a wide range of responsibilities.
Some other tasks that a Virtual Marketing Assistant may be asked to do include: managing social media accounts, creating and editing content, conducting market research, and analyzing data. Basically, if it has to do with marketing, a Virtual Marketing Assistant can do it. And because they are remote, they can do it for a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time employee.
VMAs are usually hired to perform basic marketing tasks, such as responding to emails, B2B Data Enrichment, managing social media accounts, lead generation, creating content for websites, writing reports or proposals. Since VA’s are typically hired remotely, these tasks can be performed anywhere in the world at any time. Some companies even have their virtual assistants work during off-peak hours when their service rates are reduced. This way they get more bang for their buck!
Since they are independent contractors, you don’t need to worry about providing any benefits or issuing paychecks!
Of course, while these individuals do perform tasks related to your marketing strategy, they aren’t limited to just that. In fact, some VAs have many different skills that can be useful in almost any business setting.
There are many ways in which virtual marketing assistants can assist you in growing your business. Here’s an overview of what they do:
1. Social media marketing
If you need assistance with social media marketing campaigns, then hiring a virtual assistant can be incredibly helpful. They can run contests, schedule posts, analyze social media data, and even review your social media analytics reports.
Let’s face it, social media is a full-time job. But what if you don’t have someone in-house to handle it? A virtual marketing assistant (VMA) can take over your social media management to help free up your time.
You can even assign them tasks like responding to mentions and comments, schedule posts across different social media platforms, ads management, etc. They might not be able to do everything you need, but they will certainly save you time while getting your name out there more effectively than ever before.
2. Content creation for blogs, landing pages and social media updates
In order to get your message out there, it’s important to have fresh content. Having a VMA on board to help create content will not only help you increase your visibility online but also help you boost traffic. Be sure that they have a good understanding of SEO best practices to ensure that any content they produce will drive more traffic back to your site.
A VMA can help your business with writing blog posts, articles or even just basic copywriting tasks.
3. Web Research, Reports and Lead Generation
A VMA can help you with web research, gathering b2b data points to support your b2b lead generation campaigns. Gather data from research, analyze the information and maintain a database for reference.
It may seem like a basic task that you could do yourself in one afternoon, but when you’re in charge of multiple business functions on top of your job responsibilities then it can be tough to find time to get all of your work done.
If you need help gathering data for your marketing efforts or any other projects you have going on, then hiring someone to help is not only valuable but will also save you valuable time that you could spend working on different areas of your business instead of performing administrative tasks.
4. Follow-up Calls and emails
Follow-up calls and emails prove invaluable when it comes to securing new business; however, conducting follow up calls or emails can be burdensome if you’re already heavily invested in your day job.
With standard follow ups reported at four times per month, every hour spent conducting them could eat into roughly 8 hours of billable time within any given month. Hiring a VMA to handle such tasks can help you save time and effort so that you can focus on more important tasks.
5. SEO
A virtual assistant can help you in SEO-related jobs. There are many tools that marketing assistants can use to improve your visibility online, like keyword research and competitive analysis.
This is useful for people running e-commerce sites or any other businesses that rely on search traffic. They’ll also be able to do things like creating monthly reports on how well your website is performing or provide suggestions on how to improve its rankings.
6. Email Outreach
If you need help with email outreach, then hiring a virtual assistant can be helpful. They can look through your contact list to find people that might be interested in receiving your newsletter or other types of promotional content. They’ll also help keep your contact list up-to-date so that you always have it when you need it.
7. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
If you’re thinking about buying using paid advertisements such as Google Ads and Bing Ads that appear on search engine results pages (or SERPs), then hiring a VMA might be useful. They can help you create relevant content that includes relevant keywords and will also help you implement SEO techniques like keyword optimization and link building.
A virtual marketing assistant will set up your campaigns, run them on behalf of you remotely and help you generate leads.
How to Find the Right Virtual Marketing Assistant for Your Business
When you’re ready to take the plunge and hire a virtual marketing assistant, there are a few things you should keep in mind to make sure you find the right person for the job.
First, you need to be clear about what your business’s needs are. Do you need someone to help with social media? With creating marketing materials? With developing and executing a marketing strategy? Once you know what your needs are, you can start to look for someone who has experience in those specific areas.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that not all virtual assistants are created equal. Some may have more experience than others, or may specialize in certain types of marketing. When you’re looking for a virtual assistant, make sure to read their reviews and testimonials to get an idea of their skill level and what others have thought of their work.
Finally, once you’ve found a few potential virtual assistants, be sure to have a trial period to see if they’re a good fit for your business. This will give you a chance to see if they’re able to meet your needs and do the job well before committing to hiring them long-term.
How to Get Started With a Virtual Marketing Assistant
The good news is that it’s not hard to get started with a virtual marketing assistant. You can find a reputable virtual assistant service provider by doing a simple search online.
Once you’ve found a provider, the next step is to sign up for an account and create a job posting. In your job posting, be sure to include all of the details of the project, including any deadlines, deliverables, and budget.
Once you’ve created your job posting, virtual assistants will start applying for the job. You can then review the applicants and choose the one you think will be the best fit for your needs.
Once you’ve chosen your virtual marketing assistant, it’s time to get started on your project. Be sure to communicate your expectations clearly and give them any feedback along the way. With a little bit of effort, you’ll soon have a successful marketing campaign that wouldn’t have been possible without a virtual assistant.
Wrapping up:
Overall, hiring a Virtual Marketing Assistant can be a great way to get help with your marketing without breaking the bank. You can get quality assistance without having to sacrifice your bottom line.
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