How Delegating Tasks to a Virtual Assistant Can Help Your Business
Running and maintaining a small business is no easy job. With each passing year, the competition gets fiercer, the essential tasks that need to be completed lengthen, and your free time is reduced. However, you also need to maintain your physical and mental well-being. The best way to do this is by having a good work/life balance. If you get burned out, not only could you get physically ill, but it could also cause your business to suffer because you don’t have the energy you need to put into it.
What does this all mean? Simply put, one person can’t carry the entire weight of a business on their shoulders. Sometimes, you may need some help to boost your business to the next level and ensure its growth for years to come.
Many small businesses are now utilizing the help of a virtual professional to lessen their workload and take some pressure off themselves. This lets them focus on more important matters to grow their business more successfully.
Although you may have the mentality of believing that if you complete the task yourself, it will get done properly, it is important to look at the success that virtual assistants (VAs) are bringing to small businesses all over the globe. Not only can hiring a VA provide you with effective and valuable work, but a virtual assistant can also save you quality time and money, so you can invest in more important matters. A virtual assistant can complete tasks assigned by you, your team, or your company’s requirements in a timely manner. Companies that utilize a virtual assistant can save upwards of 78% in costs when compared to hiring a full-time employee. In addition, 80% of businesses are stepping away from conventional workers and are looking to utilize more flexible workers in the coming years.
As our world becomes more digital, so does our ability to change the way we think about and engage in our work. Delegating some of your work tasks outward can give you your life back as you watch your small business flourish.
15 Tasks to Outsource to a Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants are individuals who work remotely on tasks delegated to them by the business they are contracted under. These tasks are numerous and can vary from answering emails, following up with questions and comments, and updating or refining a business webpage to drive in more clientele.
If you are wondering how exactly you can utilize a virtual assistant to outsource tasks, here is a list of the 15 best tasks to delegate to virtual assistants:
1. Digital Marketing Tasks
Marketing is often an area that many small business owners choose to delegate to an experienced virtual assistant. That way, they don’t have to constantly keep up with the changing social trends to gain marketing success. Some tasks your VA can assist with include social media outreach, generating leads and building lists, creating email marketing campaigns, and managing social media accounts.
2. Graphics, Video, and Web Design
Why take the time to learn a brand-new skill when you can save that time by hiring an assistant who already has experience in this unique field? Virtual assistants can help your company design professional graphics, edit videos, and build and maintain web pages to ensure you are always up-to-date with changing trends.
3. SEM and SEO Tasks
If your business is having a hard time obtaining views on your webpage or getting customers into the store, a virtual assistant can help optimize search ranking. By developing your content to better utilize search engine optimization (SEO), your business can appear higher up on search results. Your ads also appear more regularly on social media. Additionally, with search engine marketing (SEM), you can get more traffic to your site, both paid and organic. A virtual assistant who knows how to optimize your site for both SEO and SEM can be invaluable to helping your business grow.
4. General Sales Tasks
Achieving high sales and obtaining new customers is a full-time job in itself. Often, when you are trying to build a business and generate new clients, it is simply too much. A virtual assistant can call new leads, generate lead sheets, and upsell to existing clients daily so that you reach your maximum sales results.
5. General Marketing Tasks
Sometimes the simplest tasks such as replying to and sending emails can be the most time-consuming. A virtual assistant can handle general marketing tasks such as content creation/copywriting, blog maintenance, email marketing, and responding to comments on social media. This frees up your time to focus on what you need to do to grow your company — and better maintain a beneficial work/life balance.
6. Client Onboarding, Support, and Follow-Ups for Lawyers
Legal Virtual assistants can handle much of the busy work in case preparation, such as obtaining all the client’s documentation, checking the information given, completing translations, and following up with clients.
7. Social Media Sales and Outreach
For the best customer service experience, clients like to have quick and helpful responses to their questions and be treated fairly and respectfully. Virtual assistants can ensure potential customers are being targeted through social media. They can also evaluate the analytics to ensure engagement is always going up.
8. General Sales and Customer Service Tasks for Real Estate
Virtual assistants can spend their time finding and contacting potential leads for you. Often this is the most time-consuming process in real estate, so a virtual assistant can save you a lot of time and ultimately bring in more sales.
9. General Admin Support for Real Estate
Organizational tasks are great to delegate to a virtual assistant. They can make appointments for you and manage your calendar. In addition, they can manage your digital files and create and set up necessary contract agreements.
10. Transaction Coordinator Tasks for Real Estate
Virtual Assistants can also work with real estate businesses to update listings, schedule walkthroughs and closings, and handle sales transactions effectively.
11. General Property Management and Admin Support
Property managers often utilize the help of a virtual assistant to help them keep track of upcoming appointments. They can also organize digital files, create property listings, create management agreements, and manage photography and reports.
12. Tenant Management
Having multiple tenants can often be too much to handle in addition to everything else that must be completed. Money can get lost, and property managers can get taken advantage of. Virtual assistants can keep track of tenants by following up with any delinquencies, sending rent reminders, processing invoices and cash applications, and creating letter templates.
13. Maintenance Management
Maintenance tasks can often be difficult to manage, but an assistant can ensure these tasks are done by continuing to follow up with the process and tracking a working timeline. They can collect insurance information and create work orders/invoices for repairs as well.
14. General Healthcare and Admin Support
For small healthcare businesses, virtual assistants can assist in administrative tasks such as collecting patient information and obtaining documents, financial bookkeeping, interpreting/translation services, filing insurance claims, and keeping an organized calendar and efficient data.
15. Case Preparation and Management
In preparation for a legal case, a legal virtual assistant can help ensure client files are organized and well put together to increase efficiency.
What a Virtual Assistant Cannot Do
Before hiring a virtual assistant, consider what services you will be needing your assistant for. Remember that virtual assistants will not ever be in the office. They will meet the staff online – during onboarding meetings – and maybe come to a couple of office events. Virtual assistants help the great engine of your teamwork to grow your business by taking care of many tasks. In addition, they should not be expected to make any big decisions for the company if they are not at an advanced skill level.
At Virtual Latinos, we offer virtual assistants ranging in all skill levels, from entry-level to expert level. Depending on what you will use your virtual assistant for, it is important to consider what level they are at. For example, if you need help redesigning an entire website for your business and launching a new digital outreach program to gain more clientele, then you want to choose an assistant with an expert level in web design and SEO tasks. However, if you primarily need help with tasks like answering emails and making phone calls, then an entry-level or mid-level virtual assistant may be perfect for the position and save you quite a bit of money.
Next Steps to Hire a Virtual Assistant
To get started with the process of working with a virtual assistant, you will have to register your business. Decide how many hours you want your virtual assistant to do per week and what tasks you wish to delegate to them. Knowing the tasks you will delegate helps determine whether you require an entry-level, mid-level, or senior-level virtual assistant.
When you hire through an agency, you will not have to worry about managing the payments to your virtual assistant. Instead, you will just pay the agency the amount per month saving you time and effort. An agency has greater access to pre-vetted, qualified virtual assistants to meet your needs and means you spend less time vetting prospective virtual assistants yourself.
If you choose to hire directly, you will be responsible for the hiring process from beginning to end including the interview process and managing the payment schedule. Your time is valuable, and it may be in your best interest to seek a virtual assistant through an agency.
Why Choose Virtual Latinos
At Virtual Latinos, all of our assistants are bilingual in Spanish/Portuguese and English. They live and work in countries such as Honduras, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Belize. Most of our assistants are college graduates with several years of real work experience. They are all excited and motivated to work for you, performing their assigned tasks with the highest caliber of work.
In comparison to virtual agencies in the U.S. or Canada, Virtual Latinos are 40-75% less expensive, even though we are providing the same quality of work. Also, our virtual assistants are operating in the same time zone as the companies they are working for. This eliminates potential issues that could arise due to differences in time zones, such as when working with virtual assistants from the Philippines.
After you register your business, tell us more about your company — specifically, what your needs are and what you are hoping to accomplish by hiring a virtual assistant.
From there, our team does the work for you by finding the top three to four assistants for your needs. It is up to you to interview the VAs and choose the one you would like to start the process.
If you are interested in hiring a virtual assistant to save yourself time and money in the workplace, then Virtual Latinos is here to help. Contact us to get started or fill out an application today.
