What Virtual Assistants Do and How to Hire One (2022)
Are you in the market to employ virtual assistants?
In this article, we’ll discuss all you should learn about virtual assistants – the tasks they perform, what you can expect them to do when to employ them and what jobs you can assign to them, what they’ll cost you as well as how to manage them and much more.
Are you considering being a virtual assistant for yourself? Then, we’ve got you covered!
What is the role of a virtual assistant?
Virtual assistants provide various services for entrepreneurs and businesses located in remote locations. From online marketing tasks, scheduling appointments, managing events, and personal chores. It is possible to make virtual assistants do nearly everything.
What Virtual Assistant Really Is ?
Virtual assistants are a person who offers various services to businesses or entrepreneurs from remote area.
There are many things that virtual assistants can accomplish, such as:
Management of social media
Event management
Controlling appointments, calendars, and email messages
Making reports
Personal tasks such as the booking of hotels and restaurants
Simple tasks in digital marketing
It’s an endless list!
In reality (pardon the pun), they can do almost everything.
Consider them like what Jarvis represents in the eyes of Iron Man.
They’re not in person, but they’re still an integral aspect of your company.
If you’re interested in all the tasks that VAs can perform, here are the 98 jobs that are outsourced to VAs.
We won’t go through each one here. We’ll go over the major ones later.
Why do you require a VA to begin with in the first
3 Reasons Why You Should Hire A Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants are all the rage nowadays. A growing number of customers are turning their attention to virtual assistants, and it seems like they’ll be around for the long haul. Here’s why it’s important to hire one for yourself.
1. Make More Effective Use of Your Employees
Imagine a middle- or senior-level employee had to decide between the following two options:
- Actively the development of growth strategies
- Making routine reports every day
What are their options?
Most likely, they’d go the first option.
Why?
It’s interesting and seems more crucial.
However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take care of these everyday things like finances and emails. Your company would fail without this tedious, repetitive task.
So, how can you ensure that your internal team is happy while also completing the routine tasks?
Virtual assistants.
They can take care of the majority of the mundane tasks that are easily accomplished from a distance.
What did you get?
A full-time employee (especially the ones who are experienced or skilled) can focus on pressing issues that require action in person at the office.
2. Lower Costs
One of the major reasons businesses and entrepreneurs outsource work is that it’s less expensive.
Salary Costs Savings
Instead of employing an employee on a full-time basis to do a small task or task, you can contract the task to someone who charges an hourly fee.
However, the pay cut isn’t the only way to save money by using virtual professionals.
Reduced Training Costs
Business owners can save money on the cost of training.
Usually, businesses must educate their employees in their tasks and duties once they’ve passed an interview process.
It takes time and money that many companies aren’t able to pay for.
With VAs, however, small-scale business owners can employ professionals who know their subject matter.
So, a business owner doesn’t need to waste time or money on training to start their business from the beginning.
3. It conserves time
Another reason that small-business owners choose VAs is because it saves them lots of time.
We all are aware of the fact how important time can be in business, especially in the field of business.
Let’s take an example. For instance, suppose you run a small-sized business without an HR department.
Your employees shouldn’t have to spend time posting job advertisements and conducting preliminary resume screening or organizing interviews – all of it on an interview procedure for level one.
Why not take a break from all this and have an expert handle particular projects instead?
- Virtual assistants are the best way to get virtual assistance. Here’s what you’ll receive:
- There are verified experts you can engage with within minutes.
- They’re efficient because you don’t need to devote time to training them.
- Since they’re able to focus only on the task they’re hired to perform; They’ll get the job completed faster than someone who is juggling many tasks.
What Can Virtual Assistants Do?
I’ll be truthful.
The more appropriate title could be “What Do Virtual Assistants Can’t They Do for You?”
As I mentioned, there’s an array of tasks they can help you outsource.
There are too many of them to mention here, so we’re going to look at the most frequently used VA work done by virtual assistants.
1) Administrative Duties
You can also hire virtual assistants to serve as…
*cue drumroll*
Assistants.
They are able to take on all the tasks in business that the typical administrative assistant handles.
This is:
- Meeting management for diary entries Meetings and appointments are scheduled.
- Answering phone calls
- Basic data entry
- Making your list of things to do and your calendar
- Travel arrangements for booking
- It’s basically anything that is normally done by an administrative assistant.
The only difference is that executive assistants don’t have a desk right in the office’s front.
Other than that, it’s pretty much exactly similar to a typical administrative assistant.
2) Personal Assignments
It is possible to hire a VA to assist you with your private life, too.
Here are some examples:
Your personal to-do-list and your calendar
Reservation of transport arrangements to go on weekend getaways or holidays.
Assisting you in making purchases – books, gifts, stationery, stationery, hardware, and, perhaps, even clothes!
Since a majority of these tasks do not need to be handled by someone in person, they could easily be assigned to the services of a VA instead.
3) Content Development
Content writing has taken it up the ladder of digital marketing in recent times.
There’s a reason that large companies publish blog posts regularly. This helps improve the search engine rankings and increase visitors to their websites.
A person who can supervise this process is an excellent decision in digital marketing for you.
If you run a blog that publishes new blog posts regularly, You will:
- Are more people finding it through search engines
- Get more clicks on it and navigate to your site
- Get more conversions because of it
The issue is that the process of creating content isn’t straightforward. Alongside writing, there are many other tasks, such as research in finding and editing images as well as uploading articles on your blog and the list goes on.
This is why it’s a great option to contract your blog’s content to virtual assistants. You can outsource additional tasks, such as images or uploads, or even the whole process.
In particular, an increasing number of brokers and agents are using virtual assistants in the marketing of real estate tasks such as the creation of content, coordinating open houses, using social media, and more.
The outsourcing of the content to a single person guarantees that every piece of content gets an individual touch and isn’t sluggish in quality.
4) Financial Management
There’s a common belief for small-sized entrepreneurs that VAs will help you with your taxes.
In a perfect world, they would.
In reality, at the end of their day, they won’t perform any real accounting for you.
What they can offer, however, is to help you to manage your money.
They can keep track of budgets, buy items and track your expenses in order to keep your finances as clear as is possible.
What did you get?
Beware of the rush at the last minute once the tax season arrives!
5) Social Media Management
Social media is a vital tool for your marketing plan.
It’s where your potential customers will begin to be able to see and interact with your brand. But, the majority of companies seem distant and disengaged from their customers’ potential – their social media profiles could alter this.
In the event that you do not have the resources to manage social media accounts, Why not delegate them to a VA?
They’ll be responsible for the following specific duties:
Making content for sharing via your social media accounts
Posts to be scheduled
Connecting to your fans
Reports and statistics analysis
It’s essential to have someone who is experienced in managing your business’s social media presence can be difficult. Social media accounts have to be able to connect with the people you want to connect with while remaining relevant.
This is why many companies turn to virtual experts to manage macro-level social media projects.
They can track the trending topics, monitor interactions, and look at the data to find out what is converting the best.
6) Conducts research
Research is an integral part of any company’s growth plan.
If you don’t have some solid insights without sound knowledge, you’ll never be able to develop.
But, a business owner isn’t able to spend many hours doing research while trying to manage a smaller company.
When it comes to conducting research, you require a dedicated person whose natural language includes data crunching.
They should be able:
- Monitor the products and services of your competitors.
- Analyze consumer trends
- Find the formats of press releases.
- Screening applications for affiliate program
That’s quite a bit of research!
It’s the reason why assigning it to a member of your team with other responsibilities isn’t a good idea.
It’s most likely to be overwhelming for the team members.
Small businesses and even big corporations are looking to VAs for research.
Since they do not have other obligations – they’ll focus on collecting and analyzing data to assist your business.
7) Customer Support
Customer Service was among the first areas to be incorporated in VAs in large.
Why?
Consider it.
Customers aren’t talking to you personally, so you don’t require an internal customer service executive.
In addition, since the majority of contact with customers is focused on solving issues that are easily answered by referring to the manual, you don’t require much expertise in this area. However, if your customer service representatives aren’t able to manage an issue, you can always be transferred to a full-time employee.
Your VAs need to spend some time describing the services you’re offering and be ready to address any questions you may have about it.
It’s a perfect size!
What happens if you wish your VAs to be granted limited access to your customer’s data?
Utilize a co-browsing application such as Talkative that provides the security of seeing the screens of your customers instead of screen-sharing, which is less secure than screen sharing.
8) Email Maintenance
We’ve all been there.
We opened our inbox and saw an army of emails that have not been opened at you.
You’re feeling exactly like Millenium Falcon staring at the massive Death Star.
Answering all the emails can be a Herculean task. It must be completed – if you leave this routine task unfinished, then you’ll end up in danger.
This is the reason why a lot of companies and entrepreneurs are outsourcing this task to VAs today:
- They’re able to sort through all your emails to remove any unwanted mail that’s gotten into your inbox.
- They can assist with job-related inquiries, general questions, follow-up questions, and more
- They can help organize and filter your inbox
- They are able to conduct email marketing campaigns and handle emails on lists.
What did you get?
Your email address is functioning without needing to change anything about it.
Where Can I Find a Virtual Assistant?
At this moment, it’s obvious that having virtual team members could help you.
They can increase your productivity, get mundane tasks off your plate, Manage travel arrangements. The list is endless.
Let’s move on into the process of hiring. What is the best way to find virtual assistants?
What is the process of interviewing like?
This presents a unique problem since you’ll never have a chance to meet them.
Since they’re remote workers, there’s always a level of risk that comes with them.
- How can I be sure they’ll be diligent?
- How can I confirm the authenticity of their account?
- Are they reliable?
These are all valid concerns.
The first step is to find virtual experts from reliable sources.
Another option is to use a tracking tool such as Time Doctor to ensure they are working on time.
The process of selecting candidates should be effective enough to filter out those who aren’t suitable candidates. Look over the list of traits to be looking for in a VA.
However, let’s look at the places you can locate them.
From Freelance Marketplaces
Imagine a marketplace for freelancers as an NBA draft, but without the excitement.
There are many options, and you pick one that interests you.
It’s as easy as that.
What happens is:
- You place a job advertisement on a marketplace for freelancers
- Freelancers are able to respond to the advertisement if the job description is something that interests them.
- Then, you can sort through the responses to choose an assistant virtual to suit your needs.
There are some challenges, however.
- It is essential to be precise in your job description. It’s not unusual for disputes to be fought about what the job requirements were after payday.
- In most cases, there are hundreds of comments to each post. Although this can provide you with the chance to have a huge pool of talent picked from, it is not easy to filter through.
- Since there isn’t a real process of screening for interviews and evaluating applicants, you could be able to find a large number of fake applicants to look through the form of a virtual staff searcher.
The way to go is to stay clear of the most popular freelancing websites and instead focus on those that are more trustworthy.
Here are some examples:
1). Smashing Magazine
Smashing Magazine is one of the most prestigious marketplaces for design today.
So it is safe to say that only the top freelancers will be included here.
The downside is that it’s $75 to create the listing if that cost does not deter you from pursuing an ideal match with your remote group within a matter of minutes.
2). Upwork
First of all, there’s a rigorous screening process for every freelancer who joins Upwork. The purpose of this screening is to weed out fake candidates.
The second is that freelancers can submit bids for virtual assistant jobs in exchange for more or less than the amount stated. This
frightens people who aren’t dedicated to the job.
In the end, you’ll be able to select a smaller number of qualified candidates to select from.
There are many inactive profiles, and it could be a bit tedious, but it’s an important move in the right direction to help grow your business.
How Virtual UX provides Best Virtual Assistance services to Different Businesses.
Virtual UX Company is a leading provider of Virtual Assistance services. We have been providing high-quality and affordable Virtual Assistance Services to our clients for many years.
We have a team of professional virtual assistants who can help you with any task, whether it’s personal or business-related.
We are committed to providing the best virtual assistance services to our clients at an affordable price.
Still not satisfied?
Do you want to know the details about us and what we offer to you? Look over our reviews of satisfied clients, and don’t forget to look at our incredible team that makes everything simple for customers. It’s important for us to consider the needs of the customer first. By establishing trust with our clients, we can be the best for them and aid them in reaching their objectives. We’re sure that if you choose us, you’re going to enjoy the best customer experience.
So please don’t be late and book a meeting with us right now.
