Want to grow your business, but need help finding the time and resources to hire people to take care of different marketing tasks? Well, you’re not alone — if you’re a small business or a startup with a limited budget, hiring full-time employees may not be an option if you’re bootstrapped, don’t have the budget to pay salaries and benefits, and are missing office space. Hiring multiple employees for specific tasks can be time-consuming and inefficient even if you can afford to do it.
What is a marketing virtual assistant?
A marketing virtual assistant is essentially a marketing professional, but they work virtually and help your business grow through various marketing activities.
Marketing virtual assistants can help you with many of the tasks that need to be done in order to establish your brand and grow your business. The fact that they work virtually means that they can often at a fraction of the cost of a full-time employee and with much more flexibility.
They work remotely and you can hire them on an hourly, per-project, or contractual basis to do tasks like content writing and creation, SEO, market research, design, social media management, and strategy creation, and a lot more.
Here are 20 examples of tasks you can outsource to a virtual assistant. Some tasks have common elements, and VAs could do more than one effectively:
- Social media management: Creating and maintaining a strong social media presence is crucial for online business growth. Different platforms have different audiences and algorithms — a virtual assistant can use tools like Hootsuite to regulate content, schedule posts, grow your audience, and manage online campaigns for you.
- Content creation: Businesses with dedicated blogs and videos see better traffic and conversion rates. A virtual assistant can write and edit blogs, articles, and social media posts, create graphics, and organize, create, and distribute content based on your target audience. For example, a company focused on education may hire people to write blogs that review colleges and the programs they offer.
- SEO optimization: Improving your website’s visibility on search pages and making sure it's among the first few results can go a long way to increasing traffic and growing your business (even directly increasing sales). A marketing virtual assistant can do this by identifying relevant keyword searches and optimizing meta titles, descriptions, tags, and image alt text to address search queries better. For example, a business selling tableware should have keywords like “mugs,” “plates,” etc optimized to see more traffic.
- Email marketing: A marketing virtual assistant can perform tasks that help your business reach and engage with its audience through email campaigns. These can be conducted via platforms like MailChimp, HubSpot, etc to set up mailing lists, share newsletters, promotional campaigns, invitations to events, automated messages, and more. Based on the company’s database, you can send targeted campaigns to different demographics, repeat customers, etc.
- Outreach Management: Outreach through webinars and podcasts is a great way to promote your business and increase product visibility. An assistant can help by identifying the target audience, conducting outreach through email and social media, identifying and inviting speakers, scheduling a suitable date and time that works for guests and the audience, prepare content (talking points, presentation slides, data, etc), and finally analyze how well the podcast or webinar performed.
- Digital advertising/Performance marketing: A marketing virtual assistant can plan, execute, and optimize online advertisements to sell a product/service better. They do this by identifying audiences to receive targeted ads, finding keywords that have a high number of searches and few results, and writing engaging copy for ads (like “Limited time offer,” etc), among other strategies.
- Data analysis and reporting: Want to launch a new product or service and wondering what the risk-to-reward ratio could be? A marketing virtual assistant can collect data that includes website analytics, social media insights, and third-party research reports and use tools like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and even programs like Python and R to analyze trends, find patterns, and check correlations between datasets. They can then present the analyzed data through reports, and visualize results using different charts. For example, an assistant may create a presentation to highlight data insights and recommend marketing strategies that align with business goals. They’ll even utilize tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics to report on the efficiency of marketing campaigns and engagement strategies.
- Influencer management: A marketing assistant can research and find influencers who align with the company’s goals. For example, a fashion company that sells new-age clothes can connect with young influencers who have a significant following among that demographic. VAs can conduct outreach and connect with influencers, negotiate contracts with them, outline deliverables, and draft content for them to promote on their pages.
- Project management: The key to a successful business is ensuring tasks are completed on time and executed efficiently. A marketing virtual assistant can help create a project plan, design the workflow, assign team members deliverables, define targets, manage timelines, create a communication schedule, and conduct post-launch evaluations to ensure everything runs smoothly.
- Customer support: A marketing virtual assistant can interact with customers and address any issues they may face with a product, respond to inquiries, manage feedback on social media platforms, troubleshoot technical problems they may face, track shipments, and much more. Hiring a VA for this role can significantly free up time that can be used to grow the business and devise new expansion strategies.
- Affiliate marketing management: A robust affiliate management strategy can drive traffic and sales for your business. An assistant hired for this role can identify and conduct outreach with selected affiliates within the industry; for example, they might reach out to fashion bloggers or content creators if you run a clothing company. A VA can draft affiliate program guidelines for you, onboard affiliates and train them, familiarize them with the product(s), and give them promotional material (social media graphics, product images, etc) to use. Introducing a reward scheme can also incentivize affiliates to sell/promote our product more.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising: Optimizing PPC advertising through Google Ads, Bing, and other platforms can help drive sales and grow your business. An assistant in charge of this can set up campaigns that include engaging copy and relevant keywords, target relevant audiences, and conduct A/B testing to see what works better. They will also analyze click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost-per-click to suggest budget-friendly strategies, and draft reports with insights and recommendations.
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO): This is an important task to make your website more effective and convert visitors into customers. An assistant can do this by analyzing website data, testing different strategies, and optimizing user experience. For example, to optimize a call-to-action (CTA), an assistant may use different website copy, change button placement, or adjust text size and font to see if it attracts more customers.
- Sales funnel management: You can hire a VA skilled at converting leads into customers. They will identify potential leads (if you have a content writing company, they would search social media and LinkedIn for businesses that need help writing blogs, articles, or website copy), reach out to businesses to learn more about their needs, track their interest and send follow-up messages and additional information. An assistant will update a customer relationship management (CRM) system to keep track of all leads and draft reports to identify trends and patterns and measure effectiveness.
- Monitor return on investment (ROI): Monitoring ROI is a necessary task to measure how effective campaigns and strategies are and to achieve sustainable growth. VAs will collect and analyze data from Google Analytics, social media platforms, MailChimp, and other sources to see which delivers the highest ROI. They will also identify trends — certain advertisements may lead to higher sales or note that one audience segment responds positively to particular messaging. This data can then be used to streamline marketing strategies, ensuring, your money is spent effectively.
- A/B testing and optimization: An assistant sets up two visions of a website page, email template, advertisement, etc., and tests which one performs better. For example, they may create two different subject lines for an email to see which is opened more, identify audiences to receive different promotional material to test which works better and try using different CTA buttons. VAs will track metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and other statistics to measure which performs better and give you a final recommendation.
- Web development: An assistant can help build, maintain, and upgrade your website. They use platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and Wix to register a domain name and do basic configurations, customize the website layout and design, configure and install plugin apps for additional features, and troubleshoot any technical errors that arise.
- Graphic design: A good graphic designer standardizes a business’s brand, makes it easily recognizable, and supports marketing efforts. A VA can create graphics for posts on social media channels, infographics that engagingly present key data, design email templates, and design marketing collateral like flyers, brochures, etc. A good graphic designer would have a solid foundation in software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
- Video production: An assistant can take charge of the many stages of video production, from planning and storyboarding to scripting, editing, and finally distribution. A VA will brainstorm and present ideas for you to choose from, outline a scene and dialogue, use software like Adobe Premier Pro to edit and polish the final version, and also oversee the distribution on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, etc. They will also record audience feedback and use this to inform future video strategies.
- Market research: For your business to be successful, you need to understand the market landscape. This includes knowing who your competitors are, the size of the industry, who owns what, identifying your target audience, tracking industry trends, and understanding what consumers want. Experienced marketing virtual assistantsVAs specialize in analyzing competitors to understand their strategies, conducting customer surveys and recording feedback to identify preferences and pain points, conducting SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analyses to assess your place in the market, and other critical tasks to help you make strategic decisions.
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