This is the jet age where everything seems to have moved from physical to digital. And marketing and advertising are no exceptions. That said, digital marketing has become more popular than ever before; people are hearing the term “digital marketing” and creating job descriptions for a “Digital Marketer” or “Digital Marketing Specialist” and business people everywhere are hopping on the bandwagon.
No matter the products and services you provide, you need digital marketing. You need to be able to market your products and/or services using the technology at hand, mainly the Internet and mobile devices. As things are now, you either advertise your business online or get run out of business by smarter competitors who opted to incorporate digital marketing into their business model.
If you want high-level social media work done, you really need to hire a Social Media Specialist. There are some social media tasks that, if well-articulated and well-defined, can be carried out by your Virtual Assistant.
Let’s take a look at 20 social media and digital marketing tasks your trusty Virtual Assistant can do:
One of the key metrics of social media is post engagement. It is, however, probably more derailing than managing your inbox, as it can happen at any time of the day and can take you away from more strategic big-ticket activity.
Well, who better to be on standby to respond to your online community than your Virtual Assistant?
Put together a basic question and answer process with some guidelines around response times and brand voice, and set your Virtual Assistant free to engage with your online community.
Every potential customer that comments on your posts is looking for affirmation from your brand. If you build those positive responses, you can grow your brand online in no time. Reviews and positive comments can potentially be seen by their friends, which is a great way to get your customers to do your advertising for you.
High response rates show that you listen to your audience, which in turn, encourages them to engage with your brand more and share their experience online.
As your content library grows, it will require some organising. Your Virtual Assistant can work their magic within DropBox, Google Drive, Teamwork, and keep your files in a meaningful order, with advanced features such as tagging, enabling easy searching.
Your Virtual Assistant can also arrange your digital media based on your social content calendar to make it easier when scheduling posts for the day, week, or month. Remember, your content marketing strategy includes the means to sort, categorize, and manage your digital assets.
There is an abundance of social media platforms out there. From the last count, there are well over 100, with the larger platforms such as Hootsuite and Buffer making much of the noise. Setting aside just 2 to 3 hours every quarter for research into new platforms may just provide that golden nugget that you need to streamline your social media efforts.
One of the biggest disputes in digital marketing is whether you should be on every platform or not. In order to make a significant impact online, you have to be willing to change your content to fit every social media platform out there. Keep in mind that works on Facebook may not work on Instagram, or Twitter, or LinkedIn. However, some elements of your content will.
This is why you need someone to be on top of the trends to make it easier for you to figure out your core message and then replicate it across all your platforms, while tweaking the content to fit your respective audiences.
You may have social media staff that are carrying out ongoing social media activity for you. If these activities are housed in a task or project management cloud system such as Teamwork, your Virtual Assistant can deep dive into the system daily and ensure that deliverables are taking place on time and under budget.
It only takes anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to do this, depending on how big or small or business is. Your Virtual Assistant can take care of following up daily.
Social listening involves tracking real-time conversations about your brand or other topics of interest, such as industry competition. There is software that can manage a large portion of this, but there is the need for human oversight to sift through the findings and make meaningful decisions/reports to social media managers.
Learning what people are saying about your brand or industry is a huge part of building an effective social media strategy. Focused listening will tell you which social networks your audience is most actively using and the general sentiment about your brands, products, competitors, or industry.
If you have your Google Ads, Facebook Ads, email marketing, or other marketing channels managed by an agency, these relationships require allotted time for follow-ups, quality assurance, invoice checking, etc.
Introduce your Virtual Assistant to your agency or digital service provider, list the scope for the type of interaction that will take place, set these as task lists for your Virtual Assistant, and see the time savings begin to add up as they help you collaborate with partner agencies!
From your website hosting to your CRM subscription, you probably have a myriad of subscriptions that need to be catalogued and paid. Additionally, you also need to keep track of user management.
This can be very time-consuming and very damaging if not closely managed, specifically when it comes to user access management. When there are security risks involved, it’s best to have a trusted helping hand to make sure that people aren’t accidentally poking around somewhere they shouldn’t.
While your Virtual Assistant may not be an editor or a writer, it certainly helps when someone else reviews a writer’s work as we may often be blind to our own mistakes.
When creating task lists for writing blog posts or any form of content, remember to place an additional editing step that someone such as your Virtual Assistant can carry out on your behalf.
Let it be known if your Virtual Assistant needs to follow any writing and spelling conventions. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to share content with typographical errors that could have easily been avoided had your Virtual Assistant proofread your content.
These days, with simple content management systems such as WordPress, landing pages can easily be updated with a few simple clicks. We certainly do not suggest that your Virtual Assistant engages in wholesale changes to your site (building new pages or attempting HTML), but when it comes to simple content or images changes on the fly, hand them over to your Virtual Assistant.
Be sure to manage user access so that if you would like to view changes prior to publishing, you can do so.
Keeping your paid media marketing on track is important. If you have outsourced the function, then you can often find that while campaigns are set up, they are rarely closely monitored to ensure that they actually perform.
As the CEO, you are busy and have a myriad of other tasks that you need to do, so you will likely to forget to keep an eye on it. This will only take your Virtual Assistant 20 to 30 minutes daily (or 3 times a week,), but it could be the difference between your business achieving its growth goals versus falling flat.
Give your Virtual Assistant simple guidelines such as:
- If lead conversion volume dips below X, tell me
- If lead cost goes above X, tell me
- If one campaign start performing above expectations, increase the spend by X per day
The demand for video is slowly climbing and you’ll see that it’s hard to go out for an evening without having someone shove their phone in your face with a video from YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, or other video sharing platform.
Not to be confused with the simple promo video, an interactive video is more deliberate and immersive. There is a growing list of tools that makes the creation of fun and engaging interactive video, not only affordable, but also accessible to even the most techno-phobic among us.
As a CEO, you will have great ideas for interactive videos to place on your website, but you might not have the time or special skills to translate these ideas into a great video. That’s where your Virtual Assistant comes in.
Give your Virtual Assistant a brain dump document of what you want to achieve with the video, outlining the goals, look, and feel. This will take some work, with a lot of back and forth to really drill down how the video will progress. Choose a video editing platform like Rapt and Verse and produce the video.
Managing all of your marketing metrics can be a daunting task and can also be time-consuming. Even if you are using a cloud dashboard such as KlipFolio or have most of your metrics housed within your marketing SaaS product (e.g. Hubspot, Salesforce), the data still requires some cleaning and consolidating.
Digital marketing campaigns generate a lot of data, from high-level revenue reporting down to program and channel-specific metrics. This data is a prerequisite for measuring ROI and campaign effectiveness, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand.
Your Virtual Assistant can customize your marketing dashboard in myriad ways, so that it can be used in a manner that makes the most sense for internal or client use.
Some competitor research can be quite extensive, strategic, and time-intensive. However, there are some elements of competitor research that are simply research tasks that can be completed on a regular basis by your Virtual Assistant.
Some examples of variables that your Virtual Assistant could be keeping updated in a spreadsheet for you include:
- Price fluctuations
- Service/product roll-outs
- Announcements
- Blog posts
- Events
- New team members (Recruits)
Logging into your Content Management System (CMS), such as WordPress, and updating content on the fly is often forgotten about. Providing your Virtual Assistant access to your WordPress account (or other CMS) will allow them to go in and make content changes.
Keep in mind to limit it to simple changes only, leaving the complex stuff for the developers. A smart Virtual Assistant can definitely learn to make front-end changes to a website hosted in WordPress, especially if you’re using a builder theme like Avada.
This is not to be confused with the interactive video; a short promo video for social and web posting is only a few seconds to a few minutes long.
Empower your Virtual Assistant with cool video creation software such as Slidely. With a concise brief, your Virtual Assistant can play around for hours creating engaging short videos for landing pages, social posts, and more. These systems can sometimes be tedious to master, so why burn your time when you have an amazing Virtual Assistant who can get it done for you?
While your Virtual Assistant may not be a designer, there are many great software programs that have easy-to-edit templates for creating downloadable infographics that you can add to your website and blog or post on social media.
Some online platforms that you can use are Canva and Infogram. Given a meaningful brief, your Virtual Assistant may be able to come up with some great designs that will save you hours of your time.
You might have a small remote marketing team that delivers marketing initiatives for you on a weekly or monthly basis. These marketing initiatives may include blogging, paid ads campaigns, social media campaigns, email marketing, and more.
If you do not have a marketing manager, either yourself or someone will need to coordinate activities to ensure that all tasks are completed on time. If the tasks are set up within a cloud task management system such as Teamwork, your Virtual Assistant can follow up on tasks, ask to see tangible output before showing you, proofread work as it is drafted, and more.
If you own and operate an online store, then managing the product list, shopping cart, updating cart items, handling orders, and other related tasks can take a lot of time. Not to mention that these tasks come in at any time of day, resulting in major distraction from core activities.
Train your Virtual Assistant on how to manage your site and store, whether it be using Shopify, WooCommerce, or any other format. Create short how-to-guides in video format for ease of training.
If you haven’t set up shop yet, but are planning to, your Virtual Assistant can also do research on which platform will best suit your goals and set it up for you.
When your customers order from your online store, there are usually 5 to 15 tasks that need to take place over a set period of time from the moment the order takes place. While some are automated, many can be performed by your Virtual Assistant, given the appropriate training and process guidelines.
Tasks involved could include:
- Answering support phone lines
- Answering customer inquiries
- Processing refunds
- Processing returns
While your Virtual Assistant may not have the training or skills to create or deploy your marketing strategy, given a well-formed template, they can certainly produce meaningful marketing reports for you.
Provide your assistant access to all of these platforms: such as your HubSpot account, Google Analytics, Facebook Business Manager, etc., and ask them to collate reports for you to include, such as:
- Cost per lead
- Cost per sale
- Marketing spend month-to-date
- Return on ad spend
- Return on investment
- Top performing campaigns
- Social media metrics
- Top performing ads
- Top performing products/services
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This is Part 5 (of 8) of 101 Ways to Utilise Your Virtual Assistant, the best resource for startup and small business owners looking to scale their business online and maximise virtual support.
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