Delegate These 8 Virtual Assistant Tasks to Reclaim Your Time

Liam Martin hit home when he shared what business owners don’t get about virtual assistants. In his words, “when clients ask me about virtual assistants or remote staff, the first thing I get them to understand is what they as clients are good or not good at doing. This is often quite difficult for entrepreneurs, as they’ve usually been doing everything in their business themselves.” 

Sounds familiar? Read on as we share a list of (eight) virtual assistant tasks you can outsource today to leverage domain expertise while focusing on the business core. You will leave this post with a better understanding of how to delegate effectively and find virtual assistants. Let’s go! 

No non-core task is a bigger time sink than accounting and bookkeeping. When they should be focused on finding product-market fit or growing sales, startup founders get routinely stuck reconciling expenses and statements.

You can learn bookkeeping basics to save money. But not only a few transactions can complicate accounting but any errors can prove very costly. Expert general assistants help you avoid that and ensure compliance with the latest laws.

You may have a great website, with stunning visuals and copy. But if it’s not optimized, it won’t rank and bring leads. Google is the world’s favorite search engine and gets over 270mm US unique visitors.

With a monopoly spanning geographies, Google offers businesses a tremendous opportunity to reach more people worldwide and expand their customer base. A search engine optimization expert performs a host of services like white-hat, black-hat, gray-hat, on-page, off-page, technical, international, and local SEO to ensure your website performs.  

Check out what Liam Carnahan has to say about SEO and what it takes to drive results!

Image Source: LinkedIn

Thomas Watson Jr, the second president of IBM, put it best when he said, “good design is good business.” But many skilled designers fail to tie design with business objectives. A strong web design helps you build a solid brand identity and win customer trust.

Be it online or at a brick and mortar, quality product images and videos are necessary to drive people to action. Best designers use the latest software and editing techniques to create visual assets for your needs.

Marketing exists to make sales easier. And content - whether written or visual - plays a key role in generating leads and nurturing them through the sales cycle. If you share long-form content or post on social media without understanding the modern marketing landscape, you risk losing your target audience to others and denting revenue.

But expert marketers perform thorough research, create a strategy, and set success metrics to track the impact on the bottom line.

Think a combo of creatives and copy is enough to grab eyeballs on social? It’s not. Unless you perform painstaking research to brainstorm ideas that may appeal to customers and support business goals, social media management is best left to virtual assistants.

They find the right channels and formats and follow algorithm best practices to ensure your content works. Tired of misconceptions around Duolingo’s s social media presence, Zaria Parvez, the brand’s Global Social Media Manager, offered some great insights into what social management is really like!

Image Source: LinkedIn

Let’s take another example. You may own a restaurant in California and need people to visit. Striking photos on Instagram and funny TikToks may incite visitors to check you out. But the same strategy won’t work for a B2B SaaS selling a tool to manage employee databases.

And which may need to post thought leadership content via carousels on LinkedIn to reach HR leaders. Similarly, employer branding and establishing credibility are two different business goals that need vastly different efforts. 

In saturated markets, exceptional customer service can prove to be a differentiating factor. Buyers have higher expectations from customer service than they did a few years ago, and more than half of them recommend a brand with great customer service to friends.

A tepid response to their concerns can invite resentment and cause churn. Skilled virtual sales staffing helps you offer quality support and avoid the following aspects of a bad customer experience!

Source: Zendesk

Irrespective of industry, digital platforms like websites and apps are necessary to take your business online and can have a massive impact on its success. In a digital-first world, people prefer visiting a business website before converting into customers.

But having these platforms doesn’t generate results if they are not sleek and designed keeping user experience in mind. Seasoned software staff uses top technology to build high-performing platforms for your firm.  

Many advocate for email over in-person meetings or phone calls for business communication. While helpful, it has led to “email overload,” with executives reporting feeling bogged down by the number of emails they receive every day.

I can’t find anything in my inbox and I could spend my whole day responding to incoming emails are common refrain. But you can reclaim control over your email and stop it from hampering your productivity by working with a personal assistant. They organize emails, clear spam, send follow-ups, and flag important ones. 

Delegation leads to a win-win situation since you can focus on the ‘core’ while tapping into expertise for secondary business functions. Yet, many leaders don’t delegate properly or at all.

Founders either lack the delegation skills or the time to explain tasks, follow up, take questions, or offer feedback. But that’s a clear sign you must delegate something out of your schedule. Consider these four tips:

• Identify projects to outsource and define their scope in advance to avoid scope creep.
• Fix OKRs and KPIs for virtual assistants to help them understand what success means.
• Delegate to the right talent. Checks skills and experience before assigning tasks to a VA.
• Build trust. Set clear deadlines and avoid micro-managing your virtual assistant. 

Note that successful delegation isn’t just about what comes before going hands-off. What comes after you cede control is as important. To ensure projects and tasks remain on track, remember to set a schedule for checking in and conducting a mutual review to identify hits and misses. 

Entrepreneurs get so immersed in daily operations they mistake needing help with busy work. If you are working in your business more than on your business, spending time on routine tasks, struggling to maintain a work-life balance, or missing opportunities to scale your offerings - consider hiring a virtual assistant. They help you reclaim time and focus on growth levers.   

Image Source: Huffpost

But remember hiring a bad fit can do more harm than good for your business. Unless you have assessed needs, spotted skill gaps, and developed elaborate SOPs before hiring independent talent, communicating and collaborating with them may be challenging.

Likewise, if your job description is not built keeping virtual assistant cost and virtual assistant skills in mind, you may have to sift through countless irrelevant applications before finding the right person for the job. 

A clear idea of why to hire a virtual assistant helps you create a solid virtual assistant job description and choose the right platform for sourcing talent. Depending on the business model and maturity, you can choose freelance marketplaces to hire workers. Or, you can partner with a virtual assistant provider to save on hiring, training, office upkeep, and managing contractors. 

Independent talent brings incredible value to the table. They can perform many common virtual assistant tasks and help business owners unlock their full potential. SPEAK WITH US today to learn how Office Beacon’s virtual staffing solutions empower busy founders and executives to accomplish more in less time, hit deadlines, focus on what matters, and crush business goals.