A recent report by NanoGlobals shows that the hiring for virtual assistant services spiked to 41% from 2019 to 2020. And the trend only rose further in 2020 as virtual assistants reported an increase in their overall inbound inquiries.

The image below shows the rise in inbound inquiries for virtual assistants by a whopping 70.2%. It’s not difficult to see why.

Image Source: NanoGlobals

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the small and medium-sized enterprises the hardest, entrepreneurs worldwide outsourced their business operations to cut down costs and stay afloat in the market.

The financial challenges brought on by the COVID-19 are surely one reason for the steady surge in virtual assistant services over the last few years. But financially well-off organizations have also not been mere disinterested onlookers of the phenomenon.

The highly tangible benefits of outsourcing business tasks and hiring virtual assistants have pushed them to adopt the practice on scale to reach their long-term revenue goals.

The fact that the global outsourcing market stood at 92.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 is also quite telling.

If you are an SMB owner looking to make handsome cash, virtual assistant services are undoubtedly a pretty solid option. Let us see how.

In this post, I dwell on the topic at length to help you understand the following:

• What is a virtual assistant
• Benefits of virtual assistant services
• Virtual assistant services to outsource
• How to find the right virtual assistant

The post will equip you with the knowledge to make an informed choice about your business objectives and the options available to meet them head-on.

Let’s dive right in!

A virtual assistant is an individual who acts as a dedicated resource for their client and works remotely to ease off the business owner’s workload.

Kevin Leyes, Chairman of Leyes Enterprises and the CEO of Leyes Media, puts it this way:

Image Source: Forbes

A virtual assistant is an outsourced contractor who diligently handles the assigned tasks and takes full ownership of the project to ultimately help the client focus on the bigger picture.

Don’t find that convincing?

Check out this cool tweet by Rahim Siddiq on the virtual tasks he delegates to save up to 30 hours every week!

Image Source: Twitter

Virtual assistants work both as independent contractors as well as part of the BPO companies. Each of these two setups has its own unique set of benefits and challenges.

For example, hiring an independent virtual assistant is definitely pocket-friendly for bootstrapped startups. But often, they struggle with managing the remote worker and tracking their productive hours for hassle-free payments.

Likewise, a BPO company can efficiently manage the virtual assistants to take worker management off the to-do lists of entrepreneurs. But what acts as the deal-breaker are its exaggerated claims about output and work quality.

It is here amazing outsourcing services and software solutions providers like Office Beacon enter the picture.

They know their clients need seasoned and vetted virtual assistants who have the caliber to get work done. They appoint experienced project managers to match the customers with the perfect fit for their business needs.

When you outsource your back-office tasks to one such company, get ready to experience a host of awesome benefits. There are mainly four types of virtual assistants that assist business owners with different back-office duties. They are:

• Administrative virtual assistants
• Sales virtual assistants
• Customer support virtual assistants
• Marketing virtual assistants
• The next section takes a brief overview of their roles.

1. Administrative virtual assistant
   Administrative virtual assistants command expertise over office management, scheduling, data entry, phone calls, and back-office duties like expensing and bookkeeping. Anything that falls under the purview of management of an office- and that can be overseen remotely- lies within their sphere of responsibility.
2. Sales virtual assistant
   A sales virtual assistant is a contractor that helps you build a more efficient sales process through cold outreach over the phone and email to find new consumers, nurture prospective leads, and close better deals.
3. Customer support virtual assistant
   Virtual assistants in the customer service niche handle calls and emails to offer your clients an overall pleasant experience. They respond to queries, guide customers through sales processes, process requests for refunds, manage CRM, and gather feedback to strengthen the current systems at your organization.
4. Marketing virtual assistant
   A marketing virtual assistant crafts and executes your marketing strategy on all fronts like search, social, and email. They create tailored content for every channel and help you bring your A1 game to the table.

Lower operational costs and extra free time are two well-known pros of hiring virtual assistants. There are others:

1. Domain Expertise: A virtual assistant specializes in a particular field and can leverage that industry know-how to help you beat the competition. They have valuable experience from working in different companies and the ability to adapt to changing priorities and work environments quickly.
2. High Productivity and Customer Response Time: When you outsource, you have a few more hours on your hand to take up the tasks you earlier sidelined. It boosts your productivity and allows virtual assistants to cater to your customers promptly. The result is a high customer response time.

3. Increased Efficiency: Closely related to productivity is the chance for better efficiency when your hire remote staffing solutions. You can delegate smaller, less urgent tasks to virtual assistants to devote your hours and energy to core business operations.
4. Scope for Scalability: SMB owners are no strangers to the increase in their workload due to a new client, additional orders to fulfill, or an in-house employee’s unplanned leave. Such situations demand thinking on the feet and swift action from them.

   Yet, they find it impossibly difficult to invest in a lucrative compensation package of a full-time hire due to this occasional increase. Virtual assistants act as perfect extra hands to complete those specific projects within the set time frame without burning a hole in your pocket.

5. Flexibility: A virtual assistant allows you to offer round-the-clock operations online, even after logging out for the day. You can outsource certain tasks to remote workers from different time zones and provide 24-hour services without exceeding your overhead expenses on night differential.

I could go on and on about the plethora of benefits of virtual assistant services, but you get the idea. The next section discusses a number of initiatives you can bring virtual assistants on board for. Stick around!

Now you may be clear about the role of virtual assistants and the value they bring to your life. But how does one decide when is the right time to begin delegating work and which tasks?

Well, that varies widely depending on your bandwidth, business size, and objectives. Hear out what these two entrepreneurs had to say.

Image Source: Huffpost

Image Source: Huffpost

Like Pete Kennedy and Juha Liikala mention, not being able to tackle core tasks and focus on what they enjoy doing are two common reasons SMB owners opt for virtual assistant services. If you too are spending long hours executing and implementing rather than strategizing your business roadmap, it’s a clear signal to take a step back and reassess your priorities.

Here are seven key services for which you can hire virtual assistants and reclaim your lost time.

1. Back-office administration

A virtual administrative assistant can handle the tasks of a marketer, account manager, or project leader to oversee your back-office operations and cut down overhead costs for physical office space and work equipment.

You can outsource these services to a virtual administrative assistant:

• Bookkeeping and payroll duties like calculating hours, adding expenses, and updating salaries
• Reception and phone answering services such as handling incoming calls and leaving voicemails
• Building databases and managing entries related to sales, lead generation, contacts, and CRM activities
• Performing bank-related tasks like transferring funds and paying bills
• Writing and sending invoices to clients
• Creating and presenting weekly reports on sales and deliverables
• Email management like responding to queries and cleaning the spam
• Organizing technical support tickets and taking part in customer support
• Sending out personalized greeting cards, invitations, and thank you notes
• Scheduling client meetings and appointments
• Launching and looking after cloud computing accounts on DropBox, One Drive, and Google Drive
• Converting, merging, and splitting document files
• Creating final documents from handwritten drafts, faxes, and dictations
• Making forms and surveys to collect customer responses and feedback
• Proofreading files
• Generating graphs from spreadsheets

2. Content marketing

A 2021 survey by Orbit Media Studios reveals that while blogging can deliver strong results for businesses, it is getting increasingly competitive. Gone are the days when mediocre content could drive tons of traffic to the website and easily run the sales engine. Now, it is only quality long-form content that can get you the coveted top rank on the Google SERPs.

This is what Brian Dean, the co-founder of Exploding Topics, believes too:

Image Source: Orbit Media Studios

It is why you can’t entrust your content marketing campaigns to amateur writers or professionals with no experience in content. A terrible content strategy and execution is the main reason why most business blogs fail. To earn handsome ROI, you must hire seasoned virtual content marketers.

They can perform a wide variety of activities, including:

• Ideate blog topics and write unique content
• Discover opportunities for guest blogging and build quality backlinks
• Carry out email marketing to nurture leads and send regular updates to existing customers
• Create press releases and submit them to the news directories
• Design infographics and brochures
• Produce marketing collaterals like eBooks, white papers, and case studies
• Transcribe as well as translate marketing assets into different languages

3. Search engine optimization and digital marketing

It is no use investing in content if your target audience can’t find it. The right digital marketing expert pulls in the necessary plugs to put your content right in front of the readers and increase its visibility. They get more traffic on your site and help boost sales numbers. You can hire a virtual digital expert to:

• Develop, update, and optimize your overall marketing strategy
• Perform competitive keyword research and run regular blog analysis
• Ideate, research, and create landing pages
• Handle sitemap and webmaster submissions
• Work on link building campaigns in collaboration with content marketers
• Monitor content performance in tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console and modify the strategy accordingly
• Identify lucrative opportunities for content promotion and distribution

4. Social media management

Spare a moment to take in the import of these social media stats by Sprout:

• 57% of consumers follow a brand on social media platforms to learn about its products and services
• 47% of clients connect with a social account to get the latest company updates
• 91% of customers visit the brand’ website or app after discovering them on social media
• 89% of them buy from the business, and nearly 85% recommend the business to a family or friend

They all drive home one point: the potential of social media for customer acquisition.

If you are not there and rely only on email and search to get leads, you leave money on the table. Social media is becoming popular with users of all ages and is set to have 4.41 billion users by 2025.

But there’s more. You may feel tempted to get on Facebook and Instagram right away and start putting out content. The truth is, it is no use if there is no underlying strategy governing the effort. Social media, like every other content distribution channel, needs proper research and thought.

Otherwise, you will waste money as well as hurt your business image.
The image below lists out common reasons why a brand’s social efforts fail.

Image Source: Sprout

An expert virtual assistant can help you avoid these pitfalls and earn traction with your audience. Outsource social media management to a qualified marketer and trust them to handle the following:

• Set up social media channels on platforms your target audience is on
• Sketch out detailed profiles in line with your brand and link them to the company website
• Create, edit, and share social media posts using channel-specific features of the platform
• Perform a social media audit to figure out what’s working and what it isn’t to adjust the strategy
• Research competitors to find the keywords they are betting on
• Optimize social media strategy for mobiles
• Discover trending topics of the day and viral hashtags to reach relevant users
• Engage with the audience by responding to their queries and feedback on DMs, comments, and mentions on stories
• Run paid campaigns and promotional activities to hook the customers
• Find exciting games and challenges for the users to take part in
• Partner with influencers to get the word out about the brand’s latest offerings

5. Web development

The purpose of a website is to drive business. If it does nothing to bring you quality leads and prospects to pursue, the chances are it is not built to compete in the fierce online marketplace. A well-designed website offers your customers the best UX and has these attributes:

1. Quick loading time
2. Easy usability
3. Seamless navigation
4. Optimized for search

It is nearly impossible to achieve the above targets without the expertise of a web developer. You can focus on other business areas and hire dedicated assistants to prep up your website for competition by:

• Planning, designing, and developing it
• Offering technical support through coding
• Installing, customizing, and updating plug-ins and themes
• Maintaining its functionality, security, and troubleshooting
• Embedding chat tools, payment gateways, social channels for easy sharing
• Optimizing user interface and cross-browser compatibility
• Adding alt tags and metadata to web pages
• Performing regular audits to identify any security threats
• Backing up information to prevent data loss
• Creating online forms for customer queries and feedback
• Starting affiliate marketing and launching research-backed campaigns
• Monitoring and managing affiliate links

6. Audio and video editing

The explosion of multimedia content on the web has transformed the way customers interact with business websites. The modern-day marketer is no stranger to the trend and actively builds out a content strategy that has audio-video content at the forefront to win handsome returns for your business.

Consider these two statistics.

A 2021 report by Wyzowl reveals around 86% of marketing professionals use video as a marketing tool, and podcasting will surpass $2 billion by 2023.

It is not difficult to gauge the potential of these two collaterals for marketing. You may not be hands-on with the best software and equipment to churn out multimedia content, and the most definitive of ‘how-to’ guides barely scratch the surface of what it takes to produce videos that stay with your target audience.

A skilled virtual assistant can manage that exceptionally well and much more. You can outsource your multimedia content needs to avail professional audio and video editing services and expect the virtual assistant to:

• Research and create visual content that brings in hard cash
• Edit multimedia files to insert graphics and music
• Remove background noise and improve volume levels
• Adjust footage segments and produce rough cuts
• Record and set up podcasts and embed them onto web pages
• Upload the final versions to popular audio and video streaming platforms like YouTube, Spotify, DailyMotion, and Vimeo

Image Source: Cincospa

7. Miscellaneous

Not sure who to ask to take notes during Zoom meetings with clients? Or to send you that much-needed cup of cappuccino when running late to the office? Hire a personal virtual assistant. They understand it’s not business as usual every time and can run errands like:

• Jot down minutes of meetings and create detailed documents for future reference
• Transcribe voicemail, videos, audio recordings, and podcasts
• Research data, fact check, and create solid PowerPoint presentations
• Buy office equipment online
• Book venues for meetings and parties
• Hire a cleaning service
• Gather documents for the tax season
• Set up an online project management system
• Brief team members on the progress of projects and deadlines
• Send thank you and gift cards to clients on special occasions
• Contact customer service for bank-related work and tech support
• Perform thorough background checks
• Make customized welcome and goodbye packages for in-house staff members and clients
• Find subject matter experts and guest speakers to take part in chat shows, podcasts, and webinars
• Analyze quarterly growth performance and offer feedback to meet revenue goals for business
  Manage customer refunds
• Generate scripts for customer service requests
• Collect overdue payments from clients

But before you get ready to outsource these tasks, keep the following pointers in mind to ensure you hire the right fit for your business needs.

The foundation for a collaborative relationship between virtual assistants and their clients rests on a couple of factors such as clear-cut workflow, duties, and minutiae of reporting. You need to sort them out before hiring for virtual assistant services to save yourself unnecessary troubles down the line.

As this image shows, you can effectively delegate tasks to a virtual assistant by outlining the following at the outset:

1. Tasks and goals
2. Work standards
3. Deadlines
4. Schedule for updates
5. Feedback opportunities

Once these are clear, you have better chances of finding a virtual assistant who shares your values and is aligned on the key performance metrics and business priorities. Make sure they meet the key behavioral competencies and have incredible time management and communication skills.

As you search around for the perfect resource, keep these tips in mind:

• Do not rely on just one virtual assistant. Keep a backup ready
• Introduce them to your preferred method of accomplishing things before assigning them duties
• Increase the workload of your virtual assistants only gradually
• Divide up tasks as per their priority on the to-do list
• Be explicit with work instructions for virtual assistant services
• Set up a separate email address to track correspondence for virtual staff
• Always send constructive feedback and be polite
• Maintain dedicated cloud storage to transfer and store files
• Use the latest productivity tools for a smooth and streamlined workflow

Let us take a few FAQs about virtual assistant services before wrapping up this post.

The pandemic has all but made clear that the future of work is remote. Tie in that fact with the benefits and booming hiring trend for virtual assistants, and it is evident SMB owners will rely heavily on virtual assistant services to cut down overhead costs and skyrocket their ROI in the coming years.

Get ready to jump on the bandwagon and delegate work to virtual assistants to devote yourself to finding business opportunities and scaling new heights. Use the tips shared in this post to find the perfect fit for your needs and take back your precious time.

What are some of the business tasks you plan to outsource? Head to the comments section and let us know!

If you thought getting on the first page of Google search results and high organic traffic was the single most factor crucial for driving business growth online, consider these social media statistics:

• Nearly 45% of buyers liked posts from company or brand social handles, hinting at the value of social media for customer engagement
• 43% of people in the US follow a company or brand on social media to keep up to date about their latest offerings and services
• About 32% of consumers leave a review of a product or service on social channels, making them a gold mine for collecting feedback and customer research and improving services
• 23% of customers shared brand or company-related content on their profiles, introducing the business to their social media network and boosting its reach

Social media is fast proving to be a game-changer in the way people engage with their favorite brands. It is no longer a channel where they hang out just for fun. Rather, it is becoming a medium for them to engage with businesses on a daily basis, read reviews, and check out their customer support before buying from them.

If you are not social, the chances are you are missing the opportunity to engage with your customers qualitatively as well as to drive them to your website (more on that below) and boost its ranking on Google search result pages.

This post discusses the benefits of having a social media for small businesses and offers practical tips on designing a social marketing strategy for success. You will leave this page with a clear insight into the types of visual content that work best for social and the tools for designing them.

Key takeaways:

• Social media helps boost brand awareness and drive website traffic
• Build a marketing strategy tailored for each social channel
• Share different types of visual content on different channels
• Use free tools like Canva and Vimeo for creating unique visual content

Amy Jo Martin summed up the beauty and power of social when she said:

“It’s a dialogue, not a monologue, and some people don’t understand that. Social media is more like a telephone than a television.”

What she means is social media is not an echo chamber for singular posting. Instead, it is a two-way street that fosters diverse opinions and promotes meaningful conversations between users.

For businesses, that’s a crucial insight for tapping into the potential of social for winning over people through appealing content and converting them into loyal brand ambassadors.

More so when 58% of the world’s population now uses social media, and 59% of marketers consider it to be a “very important” part of their overall marketing strategy.

But if you do not tailor your social channels to the needs of your target audiences, you will lose out on the following benefits of social media:

1. Builds Brand Awareness

Research by Sprout Social reveals that going forward, buyers would prefer to learn about brands via social media and buy directly from them. It is a golden time period and opportunity for small businesses to use social media and reach prospective buyers.

In fact, 65% of consumers have already directly bought through social media, and social commerce sales will cross $53 billion by 2023, nearly double the number of $28 billion in 2020.

Most small businesses compete against big giants on search results and fail to rank at the top positions of Google pages but social media offers them an alternative route to get in front of their target audience. They can sign up for business profiles and start optimizing them to reach their customers.

Social channels like Instagram are a popular choice for small eCommerce stores to reach prospective customers and build their base. This image shows how Letterfolk does it through a creative and relatable approach toward home decor on its handle!

It’s one among many examples of small businesses using social media right.

Image Source: Instagram

2. Drives Website Traffic

Google uses many factors to rank a website, and social signals are one of them. While social media presence may not directly impact your position on search listings, it certainly influences the content of your search results. Social media profiles are often #1 on Google for brand names. If you are not social, you are probably losing that real estate to someone else.

Image Source: Google

See how our social profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube come up for our brand name on Google? A solid social media presence strengthens your rank on the result pages and lets users explore your brand at leisure, giving them the resources they need to make an informed choice.

3. Positions as a Thought Leader 

Every social media channel has a different purpose and audience. While Instagram caters to people looking for a light time on the internet, platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter are geared towards audiences looking for useful information from industry leaders to gain skills and advance in their careers.

They help business owners (especially in the B2B space) share expert opinions on the latest breakthroughs in their niche, amass followers, and unlock opportunities for lucrative partnerships. Twitter and LinkedIn work best for businesses in the industries like SaaS and technology, to take two examples.

They allow you to share lesser-known tidbits from your professional life and show people the formula to replicate the same success, in turn earning you a personal brand and better visibility for your business. Check out how Ryan Law, VP of Content at Animalz, does this on Twitter!

Image Source: Twitter

The image below shows thought leadership content helping Ashley Faus build her brand on LinkedIn. Read her take on content marketing to understand why fellow marketers look up to her to fix the content operations at their workplaces.

Image Source: LinkedIn

4. Helps Delivery Quality Consumer Support 

Zendesk’s 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report revealed that nearly three out of five consumers consider good customer service vital for brand loyalty. And fast responses hold a big share among factors that constitute excellent customer support.

Instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp help businesses chat with their customers directly and send speedy replies to their queries and concerns.

Image Source: WhatsApp

Take this rising eCommerce store, for example. SafeCup is a menstruation products seller that not only responds to its users’ DMs fast but also uses the WhatsApp stories features to update them about the latest products and running discounts. The bottom line?

It is always in sight and never out of the mind of its customers.

 5. Makes Reputation Management Easy 

Social media empowers buyers in a major way. They no longer have to endlessly wait to hear a response from official communication channels when they can publicly air grievances on their social profiles and hold businesses accountable.

Small businesses may not find themselves in the center of big storms that involve the likes of Uber. But a bad customer experience does hold the potential to dent their business image within a tight-knit group and snowball into a major crisis if not handled timely and well.

But as mentioned earlier, social media is a platform that facilitates dialogue. It lets you respond to complaints privately on DMs as well as offers the option to reply to comments and give potential customers your side of the story.

That lets users judge the brand authenticity and goes a long way in instilling trust in your company.

Social media holds incredible value for boosting sales and the bottom line for small businesses. The only catch is that it’s not easy as it sounds, and anyone that says otherwise is out of touch with reality. Social media is both a crowded and competitive space.

Unless you enter the ring with a research-backed strategy, it will fall through.

Next, I discuss the best tips on social media marketing for small businesses to help them hit the ground running.

Small businesses went social almost a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic struck and made it inevitable. But their reasons for doing so remain pervasively relevant. In an article for the Guardian, Anthony Lloyd, owner of Fallowfields Hotel in East London, said he turned to social media because “we had to cut marketing costs and win new business” and that joining Twitter helped with both.

He noted:

“I’d never used it before and it took me several months to see any results, but within 18 months I had 1000 followers and bookings were up, generating￡150,000 of new business.”

Image Source: Guardian

In another account, David Hickey, owner of a private dental clinic, talked about his presence on Facebook and Twitter and how linking both feeds to the website kept the practice consistently high in dentistry-related searches in the local area. But the clinic owed its real success to YouTube videos.

Hickey revealed:

“It allows potential new clients to see previous clients and their experiences, and to see me before they pick up the phone, which has made a huge difference for those who are nervous or fearful. Trust is a large part of my business and the videos of me on the website are a start to building trust.”

Social media marketing success stories for small businesses like these are rare. For the most part, business owners fail to reap the benefits of social media either because of a lack of time to devise a strategy or expertise in the area. They do not think of social as a customer acquisition channel and feel disappointed when it fails to drive ROI.

To use social media effectively, you must:

• Design a plan: The first step is determining the objectives from your social profiles. Do you want to use them to boost brand awareness or build your personal brand by posting thought leadership content? Or perhaps you wish to serve them as portals for providing quality customer support?

  Different objectives demand different approaches to social media marketing. Be clear about your needs, set concrete goals, and perform competitive research to understand the current best practices. Once that’s in order, begin collecting data on your target audience.

• Research target audience: Intel on prospective buyers makes social media marketing a lot easier. Find your audience’s social media habits and build a buyer persona that can be customized further to micro-target users depending on demographics.

  Consider the fact that adults over the age of 65 are Facebook’s rapidly growing audience segment and might be worth targeting for small businesses selling physio and ortho products, for instance.

• Choose the right social media platforms: As discussed above, all social media networks have specific use cases. Combine them with the idiosyncrasies of your target audience on these sites and you get a virtual network that’s forever evolving.

  While LinkedIn had emerged as a platform for finding jobs, it’s now a channel for personal branding and outreach also.

  See where your buyers hang out on social and adapt your social marketing strategy to their behavior and the quirks of those particular platforms.

  Do not market on Instagram if your target audience is on Twitter, and ditch Facebook if LinkedIn is their favorite social hang out.

• Nurture relationships: To be on social media is not enough if you are not investing time and energy in building meaningful relationships with your audience. If you post inconsistently or do not reply to their questions over DMs or never respond to the brand mentions on their handles, they will lose interest over time.

  Relationships, be they in reel or in real life, need effort.

• Follow trends: Social is a dynamic place, where nothing lasts long. The algorithms governing the reach of content on these networks are constantly shifting as are users’ social media habits.

  A large part of what reaches audiences is trending content. When marketing on social, follow trends to stay relevant and capture attention. And that would require your marketing strategy to be flexible.

• Track performance: Successful social media marketing is about posting quality content and measuring its impact and reach. You may be winning with photos on Instagram but taking a totally wrong approach toward videos as visual content on LinkedIn.

  The key here is tracking data using social media tools like Buffer and Sprout Social and adjusting your content strategy as per analytics.

Let us look at the types of visual content suited for different social media sites

You may have heard the phrase ‘content is king’ to describe the importance of content marketing for business. But content without context is a perfect recipe for disaster. Each channel has its unsaid rules determining the creation and distribution of content.

If you do not follow them, you will lose the game.

While visual content works best on social is common knowledge, many are unaware of its different types and what best practices to follow when using them:

1. Images

They need no intros. Photos are a fantastic content marketing asset for almost every social network. Professional graphic designers can create images as per your requirement. It is least time-consuming  form of content to make and complements text-heavy content on organic as well as social. Stick to these best practices when including them in your posts:

• Refrain from stock images and instead create original design with the help of a graphic design virtual assistants  to win traction among your target audience
• Play around with colors to bring vibrancy to your profile but do not go overboard and ensure they align with your brand
• Use contextual images that add value to your posts and always be relevant

Take a cue from Safecup’s Insta profile. See how the posts focus on a women-first theme while closely sticking to their branding?

Image Source: Instagram

2. Data-Based Visuals 

These are infographics, charts, and graphs suitable for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can seek help from a graphic design virtual assistant to curate such visuals. When used and promoted right, they help drive inbound leads to your website and establish you as a thought leader in the industry.

Some best practices to implement:

• Choose a suitable format that complements your data and audience. For example, if the data involves large numbers and shifts over time, a graph may be better suited than a pie chart illustration which works best for visualizing data in a specific moment of time.
• Use contrasting colors to show data in an easily understandable way and prevent confusion about the represented entities.
• Ensure your visuals can be stand-alone and do not need additional context to help your audience understand them.

Find inspiration from this infographic on India’s top export destinations for 2020-21 by Finshots.

Image Source: LinkedIn

3. Videos

Wyzowl’s 2022 State of Video Marketing Report revealed that 86% of marketers considered videos to be effective for generating leads, and an astonishing 94% of them agreed that videos helped increase user understanding of their product or service.

It is unsurprising then videos form a big chunk of the content marketing budget at enterprise companies. But financial constraints often hinder small businesses from leveraging their potential for ROI.

You don’t need to spend a huge amount of money to see results from videos in your social media marketing strategy. Today, video formats like animation, voice-over, testimonials, and reels make it possible for small businesses to recreate similar success as big companies.

Notice the formats that have traction on social sites where your audience is, and follow these tips:

• Think of the purpose behind creating a video first and the action you want the user to take after watching it. Use that objective to decide upon the content and how to present it for maximum reach.

  If it’s to drive brand awareness, check what’s trending on Instagram reels and insert relevant hashtags to make it go viral.

  Similarly, if your target audience is on LinkedIn and the purpose is highlighting brand success, use a crisp client testimonial to push users to visit your website.

• Take a story-telling approach with a clear beginning, middle, and end to make them engaging.
  Use captions in your videos for people with hearing disabilities and make it easy for others to watch them on mute if they like.
• Add clear CTAs on the basis of the content and the objective behind the videos to help people take the next action after they finish watching them.
• Monitor the videos formats receiving the most likes, shares, and comments. Do more of them and stop producing content that’s not gaining traction despite your best efforts.

The next section introduces you to the best free tools for creating visual content for social media marketing. Let’s dig in.

The market is saturated with options for producing visual content. But most of them require either paid memberships for creating high-quality assets or are too complex for a design novice.

To help you save time and effort, I picked two freemiums tools that are user-friendly and worth exploring:

1. Canva

It is a popular choice among individuals and small teams scaling their social media operations. Canva has an impressive library of professionally designed layouts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others. You can get free access to over 100 templates and create incredible graphics within minutes.

Follow these steps outlined in the image below and get going!

Image Source: Canva

2. Vimeo

Vimeo is a video services provider that delivers high-definition videos across many devices. Though not entirely free, it is one of the best video-making and editing tools, offering a basic plan to help you explore the best of the video world. Vimeo lets you create stunning videos for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

Choose from a wide range of free professional templates for any occasion and make your videos in seconds.

This image details how:

Image Source: Vimeo

Donning multiple hats and working on several fronts, small business owners don’t have the time to plan or start social marketing activities. Social often takes a backseat in their to-do lists despite its high potential for business growth. The way out is to hire a social media marketing remote assistant like graphic design virtual assistant or a remote copywriter who can ease their workload and manage social media effectively. Contact us to pair you with the perfect talent today.

The term business process outsourcing (BPO) dates back to the 1970s and has an interesting history. What began as a mechanism for businesses to efficiently manage their call operations is now a multibillion industry that spans IT, manufacturing, and back-office functions like human resources, payroll, and accounting, among others.

Madhavan Narayanan had stirred a little Twitter debate with this cheeky tweet on the history of offshore outsourcing in the US, but the general consensus remains that it began towards the end of the twentieth century.

It was the time when manufacturing companies began hiring external firms to handle non-core business operations and bring efficiency to their processes.

Image Source: Twitter

The BPO market today has a net worth of over $232.32 billion and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.5% in the near future. The financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is definitely one reason behind the prediction, as companies will continue to offshore non-essential tasks to cut down overhead.

But it alone doesn’t account for the changing stance of business owners towards outsourcing and virtual assistant services.

BPO is no longer a mere tactic to drive organizational efficiency. Instead, it’s a “competitive, strategic marketplace tool” that allows companies to boost their response times and develop new products and services quickly.

Mostly linked to the cost benefits of hiring remote workers from developing countries earlier, it is now emerging as an alliance wherein the BPO provider helps its client achieve targets that were impossible earlier.

This post brings you an in-depth analysis of offshore outsourcing. It prepares you to outsource non-core tasks to focus on your competitive advantage by highlighting the benefits and risks associated with offshore BPO.

Get ready to dive into the world of outsourcing to make an informed choice about your business operations.

Before that, here are the key takeaways:

• Offshore outsourcing is a business model in which a company entrusts its operations to a third-party vendor with centers in another country due to lower tax rates, lenient environmental regulations, lax labor laws, and easy availability of resources.
• Companies outsource to reduce operating costs, optimize resources, and achieve efficiency. They delegate back-office tasks to virtual assistants to focus on the strategic planning side of the business and cement a solid brand image in the domestic and foreign markets.
• The rise of automation and change in consumer behavior in recent years are two factors shifting the BPO economy. They will push more US-based businesses to explore the outsourcing market in developing countries to support their functions and keep customers happy.

It refers to the practice of delegating operational or supporting processes like manufacturing and accounting by a company to an external service provider to reduce costs and time to market. Offshore outsourcing allows you to access the expertise of a global talent pool and focus on the core aspects and strategic side of your business.

Offshoring is often used interchangeably with outsourcing, but they are not mutually inclusive. While the former is about physical relocation and setting up a unit in another country like China, outsourcing refers to hiring a third-party vendor that may or may not be located in the home country.

In an article for Forbes, Jonathan Webb described outsourcing this way:

Image Source: Forbes

Combined together, offshore outsourcing is an arrangement where you hire a vendor that operates from an overseas location. For example, Office Beacon is a US-based company that has offices in India, Uruguay, and the Philippines and provides virtual assistants to SMB owners in the US. There are four types of offshore outsourcing:

• Information technology outsourcing (ITO)
• Business process outsourcing (BPO)
• Offshore software development
• Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO)

The distinction between offshoring, outsourcing, and offshore outsourcing is an important one. And you need to be aware of the pros and cons of each to make the best decision.

Let us look at the benefits of offshore outsourcing for businesses in detail below.

Many wrongly think tax breaks to be the top reason why firms prefer offshore outsourcing and hire virtual assistants from overseas. It is true that US corporate income tax is one of the highest in the world. And companies indeed benefit financially from collaborating with the offshore staff.

But there are no roundabout methods that businesses can use to bypass the US law or avail definite tax breaks for outsourcing. Instead, companies hire BPOs to:

• Cut expenses: You can decrease operational costs for keeping a full-time staff and physical office. A lower-cost labor market like India or the Philippines enables you to work with a global talent pool using variable-cost models like fee-for-service plans instead of fixed-cost models when working with local employees.
• Boost speed and efficiency: Virtual assistant services help companies finish their tasks in less time and accurately. You save resources and optimize your performance. For example, a real estate VA can easily handle complex databases that allows realtors to focus on inventory issues and manage sales pipelines.
• Attain flexibility: Virtual assistants are skilled at tasks that kill productivity and efficiency. They perform tiresome chores that frees up your time to devise strategies for releasing new services, drive business growth, and mitigate risks.
• Go global: Businesses have access to a talented workforce from around the globe when they outsource to a BPO provider with many delivery centers. Virtual assistants working as part of these companies can serve customers in multiple languages and cut expenses on the rarely used divisions.
• Solidify core competencies: Virtual assistant services allow SMB owners and entrepreneurs to hone their competitive advantage. They can focus on finding their business differentiators and reiterate upon them to position themselves in the market firmly.
• Improve non-core offerings: Top-notch BPO providers offer excellent services to their clients in non-essential business areas. They regularly invest in the latest processes and tech stack that deliver remarkable breakthroughs to help companies better their side products.

The next section discusses the factors you must consider before hiring virtual staff from overseas.

Begin by assessing the nature of the job you could delegate. Does it involve IT development, manufacturing, or back-office support functions like accounting? Clarity on what needs outsourcing will help you pick a BPO provider that has operating centers in the right offshore locations.

While China became a favorite destination for production offshoring after its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, India won the US software industry and companies that wanted to outsource back-office tasks after the drastic technological progress in telecommunications.

Apart from having a pretty high wage difference between the US and offshore countries and scope for remote work, the following factors are key to making a sound decision about offshore outsourcing:

• Infrastructure: Physical location of the BPO provider trumps any other consideration for most firms, but the infrastructure is equally crucial. If the vendor operates out of a makeshift office with no proper facilities, their staff may face productivity or efficiency issues.

  Does the service provider have well-maintained and equipped delivery centers and invest in the latest technology to support its clients are therefore good questions to ask before settling on an agreement.

• Experience: The BPO provider should have significant industry experience serving clients of your business size and type. An excellent way to judge that is by looking at their portfolio and workflow processes.

  Go to their website and spend some time on the ‘About Us’ page. The testimonial reviews should also offer a clue to their processes and attest to the quality of work they deliver.

  An industry leader would have an esteemed clientele and standard operating procedures to cater to divergent needs, be it for an SMB owner or enterprise company.

• Expertise: There are niche segments like travel, knowledge process outsourcing, legal process outsourcing, human resources, and information technology-enabled services in the BPO industry. Check if the vendor specializes in a particular area and measure that against your requirements.

  Does your business operations call for an expert or a general BPO service? Choose a vendor to support your functions accordingly.

Not thinking through the above questions can lead to huge financial losses and risks.

Offshore outsourcing is infamous for giving business owners a hard time because of the time zone differences. Unless you find a service provider who works the same shifts, collaborating with offshore teams can become challenging. Below is a funny take on this side of the BPO industry, but most executives find it hard to adjust their schedules to accommodate updates from overseas workers.

Image Source: Twitter

The second reason why companies fail to make the most of the partnership with a third-party vendor is that they rush headlong into offshore outsourcing without carefully weighing its cons. These include:

• Linguistic and cultural roadblocks: The culture gap is a major barrier to seamless coordination with remote staff. Every country has a distinct culture and language preferences, and you must know how people there conduct business to communicate with them effectively.
• Hidden costs: Running fees in contract renegotiation, infrastructural upgrades, currency fluctuations, vendor selection, layoffs, and internal transitions are not explicit at the outset. If you do not factor them in at the initial stages, they can skyrocket your budget for hiring virtual assistant services.
• Brand damage: Cultural flubs, missed deadlines, and quality issues stemming from working with an amateur can dent your image and make recovery difficult. Though some of it might be within your control, links to a provider that underpays its staff or offers poor working conditions will be hard to defend.
• Below average quality: The workforce in developing nations like India faces enormous work demands and earns low wages, making it difficult for the staff to invest in your business deeply.

  This can cause the product and services quality to take a backseat.

  It is why checking out the ‘About Us’ page on the vendor’s website and its employee turnover and retention rate can speak volumes ahead of the actual negotiation.

  Make sure the lower cost doesn’t let you compromise with quality and miss out on working with an industry expert.

Ravi Aron and Jitendra Singh, in their article “Getting Offshoring Right” for Harvard Business Review, discussed three reasons behind an unsuccessful partnership between a firm and BPO vendor:

• Lack of strategic division: Companies prioritize the physical location of the vendor over a standard method to determine the processes they should keep in-house and outsource. The right overseas destination is undoubtedly crucial, but after separating the core tasks from non-essential ones.
• Inaccurate risk analysis: Firms do not register the full import of sending their processes overseas. Most professionals run a simple cost/benefit audit that does not account for the leverage the BPO provider gets when companies hire them to tackle their operations.
• Inadequate information: Most businesses don’t realize that BPO is no longer an all-in or out option. They can now choose between buying services from dedicated virtual assistants, getting into joint ventures, or establishing their own captive centers overseas rather than using models that are ill-fitting for their purposes.

Apart from the above challenges posed by offshore outsourcing due to poor planning, there are risks specific to IT-related services. When you delegate tasks like software development to an external provider, it gets difficult to check the quality of the code without a local engineer, not to mention the threats of potential data breaches and vulnerability disclosures.

Dylan Rosario, Chief Innovation Officer at Rowzzy, put forward these concerns in his comment on a LinkedIn post. The below image highlights why businesses in the US are hesitant to hire foreign developers, but these issues become invalid when you work with a BPO provider like Office Beacon that has a proven track record of delivering excellence.

Image Source: LinkedIn

Here’s what you can do to get off on the right foot and collaborate efficiently with the service provider.

Begin by undertaking extensive research and background check on the available options. Review all the crucial details and screen out anyone who doesn’t fit or align with your business goals. Look for a partner that has significant industry experience and a solid portfolio to back it up.

Once that’s sorted, implement the following tips:

• Specify needs: Consider how you can get the key stakeholders on the same page about your needs for offshore outsourcing. Consult with them to define expectations, objectives, potential risks, and scope for sending operations overseas.

  And use this collective input to shortlist a few candidates from your prior research.

• Ask for a proposal: Go through the collected input and settle upon the qualities you would need in the BPO provider. Measure it against your audit on the current requirements, decide the service management model, and request a proposal from the shortlisted companies.
• Select the vendor: Take time to judge the quality of the received proposals. The effort put into creating them can hold the clues for assessing whether the service provider is the right fit. Understand the primary business process outsourcing solutions they offer and what quality check systems and metrics they use to measure their performance.
• Negotiate the deal: Contact the selected firm on the contract schedule. It’s pretty standard to decide the service parameters, but the agreement can get a bit tricky with the schedule. Ensure it carries both and has easy-to-follow clauses on the hidden costs.
• Assign the work: Set up a common collab channel internally as well as with the service provider to make it easier for everyone to keep a tab on the delegated work and updates. Create a plan for the work transition and send out the tasks to the vendor.
• Nurture the relationship: Do not think your work over after hiring the vendor. Invest in proactive virtual meetings, track performance, and offer regular feedback to forge a successful partnership. Be on the lookout for proper governance during the contract period and send inputs to fix the course if things go off track.

A few additional pointers to include in your checklist while searching for the correct vendor:

• Assess if the potential hire offers valuable insights into the tasks you should keep in-house and outsource. A credible firm will never try persuading you to outsource your core competencies.
• Check if the vendor offers ideal working conditions and work-life balance to its employees. It will help you to judge its productivity as a business unit and predict work quality well ahead of time.
• Gauze whether the BPO provider is only interested in the money or wants to act as a strategic partner genuinely interested in seeing your business scale. An experienced org has definite workflows and processes to deliver quality work and collect feedback from their clients.

The financial impact of the pandemic, the rapid shift in consumer interaction with digital media, and the demand for multichannel communication in the US are leading businesses to embrace offshore outsourcing increasingly.

India and the Philippines are current favorite offshoring destinations, but oversaturation is pushing the way for Uruguay, Romania, Egypt, and Mexico to enter the BPO market.

The steady progress in technologies across automation and artificial intelligence is another emerging factor for businesses sending their operations overseas.

As the BPO market size is predicted to surpass $400 billion by 2028, here are some key predictions:

The lack of experts to manage high-end services for US companies made imparting skills to their staff a must for vendors in India and the Philippines. Business leaders and governments in the two countries will continue investing in training their BPO workforce to avoid losing valuable clients.

Business process outsourcing is pivotal to achieving long-term ROI goals. Startups experienced this in a big way during the pandemic years and will continue harnessing its power in the future.

The entry of small businesses into the arena has made it imperative for BPOs to be more transparent with their clients. Unlike the 2000s, when only big names outsourced processes, new entrants will push the service providers to be open about their SoPs, tech stack, challenge areas, and pricing.

The Trump era had raised concerns over the future of the BPO industry due to the changes in tax, trade, and visas policies. But the experts do not believe the shifting political orders in the US will have any significant impact on the BPO.

The industry needs people with diverse skillsets and expertise, and that will make the market less prone to disruption due to individual country politics.

Firms will bring together external resources to better serve customers. This will revamp the organizational structures, and businesses that are on the innovation side will send many tasks offshore.

Next up are a few FAQs about offshore outsourcing that come my way. Let’s take them up before concluding this post.

Repetitive back-office jobs like data entry, payroll, accounting, human resources, and customer support make up a large chunk of offshore outsourcing services. Companies hire virtual assistants to perform them and cut down their operational costs on a physical office and in-house staff.

There is a fair share of political debate on the topic of business process processing in the US. Forbes reported that consumers (wrongly) believe it to be a concentrated effort by corporations to ‘screw over the little guy.’

But this stems from a wrong understanding of outsourcing, offshoring, and offshore outsourcing.

These terms are often confused with each other and used interchangeably.

Based on the location of the service provider, BPO can be categorized as onshore, nearshore, or offshore. While offshore outsourcing has been the focus of this post, let us quickly cover the other two.

• Onshore outsourcing: The virtual assistants in this arrangement are in the same country though they may work from a different state or city for your business. For example, if you are in California, an onshore BPO would mean working with a vendor in a state like Alabama or anywhere else in the US.
• Nearshore outsourcing: It refers to a setup in which you outsource business operations to a virtual assistant in a neighboring country. A BPO in Mexico is a nearshore service provider to a business in the US.

Offshore outsourcing can accelerate your business growth but only when done right. Partner with a BPO service provider who understands your vision and has the resources to realize it. Get together with your strategic business partners and craft a list of non-core operations to outsource right away.

The global share of the business process outsourcing market was $232.32 billion in 2020. The Grand View Research report further reveals that this number will soon be a thing of the past as the BPO market is set to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.5% over the next few years.

The verdict is in.

Businesses will continue using virtual assistant services to fuel their revenue engine. But what’s behind the trend?

Image Source: Grand View Research

In an article for Forbes, Mark Thacker, President of Sales Xceleration, traced the growth of virtual assistant services to the fundamental business need for “agility, connectivity, and cost-containment.” Business process outsourcing helps organizations to brave the ever-changing industry dynamics and focus on their core functions.

Get ready to win a competitive advantage over your rivals as this post prepares you to outsource business operations to virtual assistants. I take an in-depth look into everything you need to know about business process outsourcing and cover these topics:

• What is business process outsourcing
• Different types of business process outsourcing services
• How does BPO work
• Benefits of business process outsourcing
• Risks associated with business process outsourcing
• How to choose a BPO provider
• Latest business process outsourcing trends

By the end of this article, you will understand why hiring virtual assistants is the best way to meet the rising business demands and access global resources to stand out in the market.

Let’s begin!

It refers to the practice of hiring third-party vendors to perform secondary business tasks that may or may not require expertise in a specific niche.

Popularly known as virtual assistants in American lingo, these services providers may be independent contractors, freelancers, or large-scale enterprises like Office Beacon that tackle both front-office and back-office operations as per your needs.

Businesses of all sizes outsource their processes to cater to the growing demand and stay a step ahead of their competitors. These usually involve a combo of technical and nontechnical services related to bookkeeping, accounting, payroll, data recording, telemarketing, customer support, website management, and digital marketing.

BPOs often offer them together to help businesses run smoothly.

Many end-use industries like manufacturing, healthcare, banking, and financial services have been leveraging business process outsourcing for a long time to enhance their agility.

But what has taken this a notch up recently is the giant technological leap across areas like AI, machine learning, robotic process automation, big data analytics, and social media browsing.

That’s not the only reason, though.

The shift towards SaaS-based solutions, process automation, and cloud-based infrastructure in business functions is an equally crucial reason.

The Grand View Research report I mentioned earlier also noted the impact of the rising popularity of Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) on the market growth of BPO, foregrounding the role of multiple factors in pushing business process outsourcing mainstream.

With the basics clear, let us move on to the categories of BPO.

There are mainly three types of business process outsourcing depending on the location of the service provider. You can get the maximum out of BPO by using them in combination with each other:

• Onshore: The virtual assistants are in the same country though they may work from a different state or city for your business. For example, if you are in California, an onshore BPO would mean working with a vendor in Alabama or any other US state.
• Offshore: It is a kind of business process outsourcing where virtual assistants are in a different country than your own. If you hire a service provider from the Philippines or India, that’s an offshore BPO.
• Nearshore: It refers to a setup in which you outsource business operations to a virtual assistant in a neighboring country. A BPO in Mexico is a nearshore service provider to a business in the US.

BPOs are also grouped on the basis of the services they provide:

• Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO): It has virtual assistants catering to businesses that outsource crucial IT-related tasks that are central to their value chain and require a high level of domain expertise.
• Legal process outsourcing (LPO): It has vendors offering legal support services to businesses in different areas. While offshore LPOs do not involve activities that may need a physical presence in courts or one-on-one negotiations, onshore virtual assistants can handle agency work and services that need court appearances.
• Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO): Virtual assistants in this business process outsourcing manage a small part or the entire permanent recruitment for your business.
• Information technology-enabled services (ITES) BPO: Business process outsourcing companies in the ITES area use data network or information technology over the net to serve their clients. They have virtual assistants that analyze service desk, IT, and production support.
• Travel:This form of BPO takes over the complete operations you need to support your travel logistics. The service providers are generally trusted partners of airline and travel companies who outsource either their front-office or back-office for streamlining purposes.

Each of the above-listed BPO specializes in certain key areas that can be grouped as follows:

• Back-office administration: The operations include credit and debit card processing, transportation administration, dispatch and logistics, collection, receivables, and warehouse management.
• IT and software operations: Virtual assistants perform technical support functions such as application development and AB testing, IT helpdesk, and implementation services.
• Customer support services: It covers a breadth of customer interaction-focused functions over channels like voicemail and email for your business. This BPO also looks after appointment scheduling, telemarketing, marketing program, surveys, quality assurance, payment processing, and warranty administration, among others.
• Human resource: The virtual assistants in the HR niche help you resolve workplace challenges and offer services related to healthcare administration, hiring and recruitment, employee training, payroll, insurance processing, and retirement benefits.
• Finance and accounting: The external vendor performs functions such as accounts payable, receivables, auditing, billing services, general accounting, and auditing on your behalf.
• Knowledge services: They cover complex processes that may include data mining, data analytics, web research, and data and knowledge management. You can also expect the virtual assistants in this sector to create an information governance program and capture the voice of customer feedback.

The next section looks at how BPO works to support your business. Stay tuned!

It varies a lot depending on the vendor’s location, SoPs, and expertise. There is no one set formula (and cannot be!) that all BPO companies follow as the terms and conditions of the agreement vary according to the job and the complexity of tasks involved in the outsourcing process.

Many Americans wrongly believe tax breaks to be the top reason why companies outsource jobs and hire virtual assistants from overseas. It is true that US corporate income tax is one of the highest in the world. And businesses indeed benefit when they relocate to a place with a lower income tax since they pay the rate of their host country.

But there are no loopholes that businesses can bypass in the US law or definite tax breaks for outsourcing. Other than the benefit of lower-income tax rate, they hire BPOs to:

• Lower costs: You can cut down costs for in-house staff and operational expenses on a physical office. A lower-cost labor market like India or the Philippines allows you to partner with a global talent pool using variable-cost models like fee-for-service plans in place of fixed-cost models when working full-time with local employees.
• Enhance speed and efficiency: Niche BPOs hold a high level of expertise that helps businesses complete their tasks faster and with accuracy. You save resources and optimize your performance when working with skilled virtual assistants.

  For example, a real estate VA can easily manage complex databases that allow agents to focus on inventory issues and sales pipelines.

• Achieve flexibility: BPOs are pro at tasks that kill your productivity and efficiency. They perform tedious chores that frees up time to design the action plan for business growth and manage risks associated with releasing new services and products.
• Cement global presence: Businesses have access to a talented workforce when they outsource to BPOs with multiple delivery centers. Virtual assistants in offshore locations can serve customers in multiple languages and cut your expenses on the least used divisions.
• Strengthen core competencies: Virtual assistant services enable entrepreneurs to home in on their competitive advantage. They can focus on discovering their business differentiators and reiterate upon them to set themselves out in the market.
• Better non-core offerings: BPO companies offer first-rate services to their clients in areas that are non-core to their businesses. They regularly invest in the latest processes and tech stack that deliver remarkable breakthroughs on scale.

A BPO can get you incredible business results. But only when you onboard the right virtual assistants. Next, I bust some myths related to outsourcing and share risks that make business owners skeptical of entrusting their operations to a third-party vendor.

Not everything is merry with business process outsourcing. Contrary to what most BPO companies claim, there are risks you should consider before outsourcing your business operations. These pertain to:

• Security: Wherever information systems (IT) enter the picture, concerns around communication and privacy are bound to rise, and it is no different with outsourcing to virtual assistants.

  It gets more complicated when the vendor handling your IS is not in the same country, making data leaks and vulnerability disclosures a real threat.

• Cost of services: It can far exceed your estimate if you do not factor in the running costs, particularly in contract renegotiation and upgrades. The hidden fees around currency fluctuations, internal transitions, vendor selection, layoffs, and software and hardware upgrades can also take the cost of business process outsourcing to the roof.
• Quality: A BPO provider becomes a part of your workflow when you outsource, leading your business to face problems when the former runs into a difficult situation.

  You may have to incur extra costs and experience lower productivity due to an individual worker’s inefficiency or decline in a labor shortage, causing quality to take a backseat.

• Communication: A global talent pool in outsourcing is a two-edged sword. You unlock new opportunities to connect with more customers and cement your image but also risk losing the existing clients due to cultural and linguistic barriers.

  It can limit activities, cause delays in new processes, and curb feedback from different departments.

A large share of these issues stems from working with either freelance workers or contracting to an inexperienced enterprise. Marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork seem a pocket-friendly option for bootstrapped startups and SMB owners, but the lax rules around talent management can lead you to waste time and resources in hunting for the right fit.

Concerns around tracking productivity and communication make it a bit more tricky. How do you check that your virtual assistant is making the best use of their time and billing you rightly?

And how do you get on quick video calls with them to share updates on changes in schedule and business priority? Those are the questions you must address to avoid a risky situation with business process outsourcing.

That’s unless you partner with a top-notch BPO provider like Office Beacon. Seasoned business process outsourcing providers have solid security measures and tight-knit teams that work round the clock under the expert care of project managers to deliver the highest quality work on time consistently.

You can find the perfect fit for your business by sticking to a few best practices. Read on to learn more about them in the next section.

The search for the right BPO company involves extensive research and a careful review of many crucial details prior to settling upon an agreement. Look for a provider that has considerable experience in the industry and can match your organization’s goals.

Then follow these steps as outlined below:

1. Define needs: Carefully consider the key stakeholders and how to include them in the process from the start. After that, set out clear expectations and determine objectives, potential risks, and scope for the BPO. Based on these criteria, shortlist a few candidates.
2. Request a proposal: Get together with your business stakeholders and settle upon the essential elements you require in your BPO provider. Perform market research, figure out the service management model you want to use, and send out the request for proposal to the shortlisted companies.
3. Choose the vendor: Take your time to assess the proposals. The effort vendors put into creating them can reveal a lot about their thinking process and the quality of work you can expect. Be on the lookout for their chief business process outsourcing solutions and what quality check measures and metrics they use to measure performance.
4. Negotiate the agreement: Consult the final BPO candidate on the contract schedule. It’s standard practice to reach an agreement on the service parameters but not the latter. A rock-solid contract has both. It is a crucial step in the hiring stage and must have the buy-in from every stakeholder.
5. Hand over the work: Begin by setting up a communication channel internally as well as with the service provider so that everyone is in the loop about the delegated work and the updates. Develop a plan for the work transition after that and set it in motion.
6. Manage the relationship: Do not outsource and forget. Open communication, performance tracking and management, and feedback are the key to a healthy partnership with a BPO company. Check proper governance during the lifecycle of your contract and provide regular inputs.

Here are a few more pointers to keep in mind as you hire a BPO company:

• The right vendor will offer strategic insights into the tasks you should finish in-house and not try to push you into outsourcing your core competencies.
• Work-life balance and employee appreciation is the hallmark of a good BPO company. It leads to better communication between the team members and boosts productivity.
• A competent vendor is not only after the money but genuinely interested in seeing your business scale. They have set workflows and well-defined processes to deliver quality work and hone in on their expertise while using the client feedback to continue improving the services.

Outsourcing to freelance help is the best bet for businesses for whom hiring an established BPO company is out of the question at the moment.

As discussed before, it will definitely pose a lot of challenges, but they can be mitigated, keeping in mind some valuable lessons. Experts believe there is a lot they can do to manage the risks associated with hiring independent contractors.

The foundation of a collaborative relationship between remote staff and its clients rests on a couple of factors like definite workflows, duties, standard operating procedures, and minutiae of reporting. They need to sort them out before hiring for virtual assistant services to avoid unnecessary troubles later.

As the image below shows, they can effectively delegate tasks to a virtual assistant by outlining the following at the outset:

1. Tasks and goals
2. Work standards
3. Deadlines
4. Schedule for updates
5. Feedback opportunities

Once these are clear, there are better chances of finding a virtual assistant who shares the same values and is aligned on the key performance metrics and business priorities. They should make sure the remote worker meets the vital behavioral competencies and has incredible time management and communication skills.

As they search around for the perfect resource, the following tips will come in handy:

• Do not rely on just one virtual assistant. Keep a backup ready
• Introduce them to the preferred method of accomplishing things before assigning them duties
• Increase the workload of virtual assistants only gradually
• Divide up tasks as per their priority on the to-do list
• Be explicit with work instructions for virtual assistant services
• Set up a separate email address to track correspondence for virtual staff
• Always send constructive feedback and be polite
• Maintain dedicated cloud storage to transfer and store files
• Use the latest productivity tools for a smooth and streamlined workflow

BPO has a lot to offer to early-stage businesses and corporate powerhouses. If you are wondering where this industry is heading, hang on there!

The next section brings you the latest trends and expert opinions on the future of outsourcing for a better insight into the topic.

The global BPO market share is over $300 billion, with more than 3 million virtual assistants working for vendors in India alone. The Philippines is the second most preferred destination for hiring talent for BPO companies and has one million-strong workforce.

Europe and the US follow close behind and have millions of others in the field.

The pandemic played a huge role in the spike of business process outsourcing services during recent years. But the industry experts predict the BPO market to continue flourishing due to the radical shifts in consumer behavior and demand for multichannel communication.

The SMB owners will leverage emerging technologies like automation, cloud services, machine learning, and influence the growth of the market in the near future.

Watch out for these trends in business process outsourcing in 2022 and beyond:

The progress across technologies in cloud computing, AI, automation, and social media use will have noticeable effects on the BPO industry.

The lack of experts to manage high-end services for US companies made imparting skills to their staff a must for vendors in India and the Philippines. Business leaders as well as governments in the two countries will continue to invest in training the BPO workforce to avoid losing valuable clients to AI.

Business process outsourcing cuts down overhead expenses, saves resources, and streamlines workflows. It boosts productivity and efficiency and is pivotal to achieving ROI goals. Startups experienced this heavily during the pandemic years. Need I say more?

The entry of small businesses into the field has made it imperative for BPOs to be more transparent with their clients. Unlike the 2000s, when only big names outsourced their business operations, the current environment will push the service providers to be more open about their SoPs, tech stack, challenge areas, and pricing.

The Trump-era had raised concerns over the future of the BPO industry due to the changes in tax, trade, and visas policies. But the experts do not believe the shifting political orders in the US will have any major impact on the BPO.

The industry needs people with diverse skillsets and expertise, and that will make the market less prone to disruption due to individual country politics.

Established market players such as India and the Philippines will dominate the BPO industry in 2022. The workforce in these locations would invest in upgrading their skills over the next few years and increasingly cater to companies in the automation space.

Shedding light on the Philippines, Cision reported the IT-BPO industry in the country to grow at an annual compound rate of 11.5% until 2023.

Oversaturation in the top business process outsourcing locations is paving the way for countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Egypt, Mexico, and Colombia to enter the global BPO arena. These nations are will soon be tough competitors and emerge as the hot destinations for outsourcing in the coming years.

It is now time for expert opinion on the future of outsourcing. Check out these voices published by Smartsheet:

1. 1. Alex Genadinik, Founder and CEO at Problemio

      “Moving forward, I fear that there will be a decline of quality as the market saturates with more and more companies and freelancers that do essentially the same relatively low-quality work.

      The challenge is that if you hire high-quality companies, they typically do great work, but are costly. As a business owner, this means that you must either get to the point where you can hire costly companies on a long-term basis or allocate resources in-house.

      If done intelligently, it doesn’t have to require many resources, but at least you will have control and transparency.”
   2. Thomas Wooldridge, PR Specialist at Relamark Web Design & Marketing

      “BPO is something that will never go away. It’s like saying you want to bring back encyclopedia books or Blockbuster videos. Our world has never gone backward from technology. The internet has made it much easier to bring the whole world together.

      There will always be a need for low-skill and low-wage workers who would be difficult to hire in the West, although many countries such as India, the Philippines, or China will gladly do it on your behalf. On the other hand, the same country you used to hire the low-wage workers will eventually get smarter.

      The local economies and workers’ skills will improve to where they are demanding higher pay. So then you have to look into another third-world-type country to attract.”
   3. Derric Haynie, CEO at Vulpine Interactive

      “In the short term, I see BPO being easier to access and utilize by all companies, but I also see AI and technology eliminating many BPO jobs in the short- and long-term future.”

Let us take a few FAQs before wrapping up this post.

BPOs can handle a host of business functions related to back-office and front-office management. They are experts at non-core tasks and offer a gamut of services that fall under IT and software operations, human resource, finance and accounting, and customer support.

Business process outsourcing helps companies leverage their key competencies while strengthening their non-core offerings. It delivers world-class results that translate into a remarkable customer experience for its clients.

BPO brings down operational costs and significantly improves business agility, making it a growing business strategy.

BPO stands for business process outsourcing, while BPM is business process management. The BPOs who closely align themselves with their clients and offer the best value are BPM experts. In an article for TOI, Raman Roy, the founder of one such firm, noted “the rebranding was to actualize what has been accomplished in the work.”

No. BPO is a broad category that includes various functions, whereas a call center handles only telephone-related services like resolving customer complaints for a business. A call center is a BPO organization, but the reverse is not valid for business process outsourcing.

It ultimately depends on your business requirements. Until you are clear about the services you should outsource and how they connect to the larger picture, finding the right BPO company will be a difficult task.

Begin by outlining your needs, the job functions you want the virtual assistants to perform, and the KPIs you will use to measure their performance.

Refer to this blueprint to check the potential BPOs eligibility and choose someone who shares your values.

The practice of outsourcing non-core business operations is no longer exclusive to corporate giants. The COVID-19 pandemic forced a lot of SMB owners to lay off their in-house employees and hire virtual assistants to survive the severe economic restrictions.

But after experiencing massive benefits of outsourcing, businesses want to continue using virtual assistant services to meet their ROI targets. That spells good tidings for the BPO industry once the pandemic is over as well.

Which services will you outsource to ramp up your competitive advantage in the global market? Head to the comments section and let us know!

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed almost every industry. And the real estate market in the US was no exception. Data on real-estate platforms like Zillow and Realtor shows that page-per-property views were up by 50% year-over-year at most places. Forbes quoted George Ratiu, Senior Economist at realtor.com, on this trend:

“Real estate markets have undergone noticeable shifts since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. In the wake of the lockdowns in March, Americans discovered that existing homes were not adequate for the new work, teach, exercise, cook, and live at home reality. Based on our surveys of consumers, we learned that home shoppers are looking for more space, quieter neighborhoods, home offices, newer kitchens, and access to the outdoors.”

The need for warmer, safer, smaller, and stabler homes have led to a whole generation of Americans out on the hunt for real estate in the suburbs and smaller metro regions. Data on realtor.com makes it clear that five of America’s most lucrative real estate markets are in New England. These include Melrose, MA, Portland, ME, Hudson, NH, Worcester, and Rochester.

The great migration set off by the pandemic offers real estate agents an exciting opportunity to tap into this arena and earn handsome profits. But without virtual assistant services at your disposal, that may be a hard task. You specifically need a real estate virtual assistant to handle your back-office duties while you focus on scaling your business.

I take an in-depth view into the profile of a real estate virtual assistant to help you understand the duties they perform and why you should hire them. By the end of this post, you will have a firm grip on the following:

• What is a real estate virtual assistant
• Benefits of hiring a real estate virtual assistant
• Tasks you can outsource to a real estate virtual assistant
• Where to find the right real estate virtual assistant
• Best practices when hiring a real estate virtual assistant
• How to manage a real estate virtual assistant

You can leverage this knowledge to devise a solid strategy for your real estate business and make the most of the golden chance presented by the migration of Americans to smaller cities and second-home destinations.

Let’s begin!

A real estate virtual assistant (VA) is a dedicated resource that handles standard business operations like cold calling, lead generation, finance tracking, website development, marketing, and database management. They work remotely and lend their expertise to help you focus on the core tasks as they run the show in the background.

There are four types of real estate virtual assistants. They are:

1. Administrative real estate VAs
   Administrative virtual assistants hold expertise over office management, scheduling, data entry, phone calls, and back-office duties like expensing and bookkeeping. Anything that falls under the ambit of management of an office- and that can be overseen remotely- lies within their sphere of responsibility.
2. Sales real estate VAs
   A sales virtual assistant is a contractor that helps you build a more efficient sales process through cold outreach via phone and email to find new consumers, nurture prospective leads, and close better deals.
3. Customer support real estate VAs
   Virtual assistants in the customer service niche handle calls and emails to offer your clients an overall pleasant experience. They respond to queries, guide customers through sales processes, process requests for refunds, manage CRM, and gather feedback to strengthen the current systems at your organization.
4. Marketing real estate VAs
   Marketing virtual assistants craft and execute your marketing strategy on all fronts like search, social, and email. They create tailored content for every channel and help you bring your A1 game to the table. They work hand-in-hand with virtual sales assistants to provide best results.

Depending on budget and requirements, you can onboard them as either contractual or full-time employees and get amazing benefits that come with outsourcing. Let’s zoom in on that in the next section.

A recent research report by NanoGlobals on the growth of the virtual assistant industry during COVID-19 made three key discoveries:

• The laying off full-time US staff led to a 41% hike in the hiring of virtual assistants through offshore agencies in 2020
• US companies made up a large chunk of inbound inquiries that offshore virtual assistants received in 2020
• More than half of inbound leads for virtual assistants came from companies that worked with in-house staff before the pandemic

Economic restrictions were surely one reason for this YoY boom in the hiring of VAs. But it is only one-half of the picture. The truth is virtual assistant services entailed so many benefits for businesses that they continued the practice long after the economic effects of the lockdowns wore off.

You can expect the following benefits on hiring a real estate VA:

1. 1. Domain expertise: A real estate virtual assistant is often niche and leverages that industry know-how to help you stand out in the market. Their experience from working with a diverse set of clients and ability to quickly adapt to changing priorities makes them a valuable resource.
   2. High productivity: Real estate VAs let you have a few extra hours on your hand to take up the tasks you sidelined previously. That helps boost productivity and allows you to focus on your clients’ needs and expectations.

1. 3. Increased efficiency: Efficiency comes close on the heels of productivity. You can delegate cumbersome tasks like ordering paperwork, updating property databases, and sending follow-up emails to virtual assistants and begin managing inventory issues, sales pipelines, and open houses.
   4. Scope for scalability: Virtual assistant services remove the need to invest in the hefty compensation package of a full-time hire due to an occasional increase in the workload. Real estate VAs function as an extra pair of hands that finish projects within a given time frame and do not burn a hole in your pocket. You save big on hiring and training costs as a result.Check out this cool Twitter thread which echoes the exact feeling!

Image Source: Twitter

5. Flexibility: A real estate VA can offer round-the-clock business operations online, long after you have signed out for the day. You can outsource back-office tasks to offshore talent and provide 24-hour services without burning yourself out or exceeding overhead expenses on night differential.

Here are a few tasks a real estate virtual assistant can do for you.

Cheryl Young, Senior Economist at Zillow, noted the surge in demand for housing in the US during the pandemic and commented that homes are “selling quickly for the prices above what we were seeing” before the pre-covid period. An equally interesting insight came from Andrew Rybczynski, Managing Consultant at CoStar.

He discerned the accelerating demographic trends during the pandemic for businesses seeking expansion in areas that were low-tax and pro-growth and believed they would continue to seek “low-cost alternatives to more expensive coastal markets” after the pandemic.

This spells good tidings for real estate professionals and emphasizes the need to hone in on the opportunity. You can hire a real estate VA to handle the following tasks and start prioritizing building your client base.

1. Real estate research
   A virtual assistant can free up resources by taking on research involving:
   • Prospecting and finding property details like location, top features, and amenities
   • Analyzing market trends and pricing points for different areas
   • Examining competitors’ business strategies
   • Upcoming global real estate conferences

2. Appointment scheduling
   It is easy to lose track of appointments when you are into real estate. A virtual assistant is well-versed with tools like Google Calendar and Calendly that helps them:
   • Easily manage your monthly calendar and book meetings with prospects
   • Prioritize appointments with buyers and sellers
   • Add buffers to avoid meeting overlaps

3. Back-office administration
   A real estate VA can handle the tasks of a marketer, account manager, or project leader to oversee your office operations and cut down overhead costs for physical office space and work equipment.
   You can outsource these services to a virtual administrative assistant:
   • Bookkeeping and payroll duties like calculating hours, adding expenses, and updating salaries for in-house staff
   • Cold calling and phone answering services such as handling incoming calls and leaving voicemails
   • Building databases and managing entries related to sales, lead generation, contacts, and CRM activities
   • Performing bank-related tasks like transferring funds and paying bills
   • Sending out new property deals to customers via email
   • Creating and presenting weekly reports on sales and deliverables
   • Email management like responding to queries and cleaning the spam
   • Organizing technical support tickets and taking part in customer support
   • Sending out personalized greeting cards, invitations, and thank you notes to prospective clients as well as long-standing customers
   • Launching and looking after cloud computing accounts on storage servers
   • Converting, merging, and splitting document files
   • Creating final documents from handwritten drafts, faxes, and dictations
   • Making forms and surveys to collect customer responses and feedback
   • Proofreading property files
   • Generating graphs from spreadsheets

4. Social media marketing
   • Social media is a great channel for customer acquisition. If you don’t leverage it and rely only on email and search for leads, you leave money on the table. Social media is becoming popular with users of all ages and is set to have a whopping 4.41 billion users by 2025.
   • You may feel tempted to get on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram right away and start putting out content. The truth is, it is no use if there is no underlying strategy governing the effort. Social media, like every other content distribution channel, needs proper research and thought.

Otherwise, you waste money and risk hurting your business image. Outsource social media management to a qualified marketer and trust them to handle the following:

• Set up social media channels on platforms your target audience is on
• Sketch out detailed profiles in line with your brand and link them to the company website
• Create, edit, upload, and share property photos using channel-specific features of the platform
• Perform a social media audit to figure out what’s working and what it isn’t to adjust the strategy
• Research competitors to find the keywords they are betting on
• Optimize social media strategy for mobiles
• Discover trending real estate topics and viral hashtags to reach relevant users
• Engage with the audience by responding to their queries and feedback on DMs, comments, and mentions on stories
• Run paid campaigns and promotional activities to hook the customers
• Find exciting games and challenges for clients to take part in
• Partner with influencers to get the word out about your brand’s competitive advantage

5. Website management
   The purpose of a website is to drive business. If it does nothing to bring you quality leads and prospects, the chances are it is not built to compete in the fierce online real estate market. A mean website offers your customers the best UX with these four attributes:

1. Quick loading time
2. Easy usability
3. Seamless navigation
4. Optimized for search

It is impossible to achieve the above targets without the expertise of a real estate virtual assistant. Hire a dedicated expert to prep up your website for competition by:

• Planning, designing, and developing it
• Offering technical support through coding
• Installing, customizing, and updating plug-ins and themes
• Maintaining its functionality, security, and troubleshooting
• Embedding chat tools, payment gateways, social channels for easy sharing
• Optimizing user interface and cross-browser compatibility
• Adding alt tags and metadata to web pages
• Performing regular audits to identify any security threats
• Backing up information to prevent data loss
• Creating online forms for customer queries and feedback
• Starting affiliate marketing and launching research-backed campaigns
• Monitoring and managing affiliate links

Not sure whom to ask to take notes during meetings with clients? Or to send you that much-needed cup of coffee when running late? That is a personal real estate virtual assistant’s forte. They understand your hectic life and can run these errands:

• Jot down minutes of meetings and create detailed documents for future reference
• Transcribe voicemail, videos, and audio recordings
• Research data, fact check, and create PowerPoint presentations
• Buy office equipment online
• Book venues for meetings and parties with clients
• Hire a cleaning service for your office
• Gather documents for the tax season
• Set up an online project management system
• Brief team members on the progress of projects and deadlines
• Send thank you and gift cards to clients on special occasions
• Contact customer service for bank-related work and tech support
• Perform thorough background checks on prospective buyers
• Make customized welcome and goodbye packages for in-house staff members and clients

You can either find real estate VAs on freelance marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork or outsource your back-office duties to a BPO company. Each has its pros and cons. While online talent marketplaces can be economical, you have to dig deep for the perfect fit and find the right MarTech tools to manage and track their productive hours.

A BPO company can seem super expensive but its benefits far outweigh the challenges. Some amazing perks they offer include:

• Compliance with industry-specific regulations
• Swift complaint tracking and resolution
• Guaranteed data security
• Qualified and vetted professionals
• Fast turnaround time
• First-rate services
• Seamless coordination across teams
• Leading infrastructural assets and techn
• Round-the-clock customer services

The choice between the two options is not always easy for businesses. It is especially true for those who are either bootstrapped or on a budget. But no matter whom you pick, a real estate VA will surely prove their worth in no time. They are an absolutely indispensable asset for real estate agents who are busy clinching deals.

The next section covers the best practices of hiring virtual assistant services to help you steer clear of the common pitfalls. Stick around!

The roots of a strong business relationship rest on key factors like a clearly defined workflow, job role, and KPIs that must be determined after a careful analysis of core objectives and business goals. You need to sort them before hiring a real estate VA to avoid any mismatch in expectations later.

As the image below illustrates, an efficient delegation of business operations mainly depends on:

1. Tasks and goals for the real estate VA: Build a detailed job description for the worker to understand the scope of work. Give them a clear idea of the nature of the job and the duties it would involve.
2. Work standards to follow: The real estate virtual assistant must have a blueprint for reference and a handy resource they can check whenever in doubt about a task at hand.
3. Deadlines to hit: They must be reasonable and not taxing. A great way to find the perfect balance is by prioritizing and finishing off tasks that are at the top of your to-do list.
4. Schedule for updates: Coordinate with your virtual assistant to find a schedule that works for both of you. Which online platform to use, what would be the frequency of the updates, and how detailed are a few questions for you to consider and act upon.
5. Feedback opportunities: You should send out regular feedback to help the virtual assistant understand the areas they are acing as well as lagging in. Likewise, you must be available to take up their doubts and any troubles they might be facing with the existing workflow.

You have better chances of finding a real estate virtual assistant who shares the same values and is aligned on the core business priorities once these are clear. As you look around for that rockstar assistant, ensure they are behaviorally competent and have incredible time management skills.

A few other best practices to keep in mind as you hire and onboard your remote employee are:

• Do not rely on one real estate VA. Always have a backup ready
• Introduce them to your preferred mode of doing things before handing out duties
• Increase the workload of your virtual assistant steadily
• Assign tasks as per priority on your to-do list
• Be lucid with your work instructions for the real estate VA
• Create a separate email address for collaborating with them
• Be polite and always share constructive feedback
• Keep dedicated cloud storage to share and track files
• Use the latest productivity tools for maximum efficiency

It is one task to onboard a real estate virtual assistant, managing them for smooth business functioning totally another. It is natural to have doubts about remote staff when so much is at stake. Questions like how to communicate with them and monitor their productivity are bound to crop up.
The next section looks at the latest tech stack you can use to put these doubts to rest.

Google Suite

Image Source: Google Workspace

Google Suite or G Suite is the perfect option for agents who don’t want to spend a fortune. It is a budget-friendly platform that allows you to collaborate with your virtual assistant on Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Slides, among a tribe of Google Drive tools. You can use G Suite for a team calendar and also create work emails.

Microsoft Office Teams

Image Source: Microsoft

Unlike G Suite, Microsoft Office Teams is not an entirely online platform. You can download apps like Excel, Powerpoint, Word to your devices and use them to edit, store, share, and manage documents in team folders. Besides these apps, it is a great channel to communicate with your virtual assistant via video calls.

Trello

It is easy to get lost when there is no system in place to track progress on tasks. Who is working on what, chasing which deadlines, and spending how much time on individual projects are daunting questions for anyone who has not worked with a remote employee. Enter Trello.

You can either fly solo or invite your virtual assistant to collaborate and update their progress.

Image Source: Trello

Trello allows you to set up a dashboard that focuses on large projects and their related tasks. Each small task is a “card” that you can assign a color tag and text and move around the board as it reaches different cycles of a project cycle.

For example, if your real estate VA is tackling a priority task related to database management, you can create a red card labeled ‘urgent’ under a ‘to-do’ category in the dashboard, assign it a deadline, and follow its progress in the Activity area.

Podio

Image Source: Podio

Podio is a two-in-one combo. It is part project tracker and part Facebook for business owners. You can use it to get a bird’s eye view of tasks you need to finish and chat with your virtual assistant while they are in progress.

Its most remarkable feature allows you to create “workspaces” for different aspects of a project. They are somewhat like Facebook pages where your remote worker can comment or share useful information.

Zoom

Image Source: Zoom

Thanks to the pandemic, the market is rife with virtual meeting tools. The likes of Microsoft Office Teams offer the option to e-meet your colleague as an additional nice-to-have feature. But if you want a more dedicated platform, you must check out Zoom.

It is an easy-to-use app and desktop platform for scheduling, launching, and recording virtual meetings. Your virtual assistant will have plenty of options to attend these meetings from a smartphone, computer, or a dial-in phone.

But not everyone is into video meetings. While it is a good idea to add a dash of personality to your communication every now and then, video chats are not always feasible for obvious reasons. You can instead use tools like Slack and WhatsApp for quick chats.

Google Drive

Image Source: Google Drive

Like all G Suite tools, Google Drive is free. It stores and organizes your data on the go, making file sharing and collaborating with your virtual assistant super easy.

Dropbox
You cannot share large files via email but can over Dropbox. It is a wonderful tool for sorting freelance work. Ask your real estate VA to upload their files into monthly folders and ping you once they do.

Confluence

An Atlassian product, you can use Confluence to create an internal blog and wiki for your remote employee. It is a team manager that organizes all your documents, notes, and plans in one easily searchable place.

Loom

Image Source: Loom

Remember what I said about adding a bit of personality to your meetings? What if there was a platform you could use for just that and without the awkwardness of a live video meeting? That’s Loom.

It allows you to record a presentation or just your voice to announce an update to your remote worker. You can generate a link to share this recording and send it to others on your team via email or instant messengers.

Let us take a few FAQs about real estate VAs before wrapping up this post.

It goes without saying real estate VAs must have a strong educational backing and solid skillset. That’s the number one prerequisite for a successful long-term collaboration.

These gems however can be hard to come by as some virtual assistants only have a diploma or partial degree from an accredited university. But that’s okay too under certain conditions. A good assistant-client match at the end of the day ultimately depends on the nature of the job and the complexity of tasks at hand.

Besides expertise and knowledge, Shelby Larson, author of Moonlighting on the Internet, believes soft skills such as integrity, reliability, and accuracy in real estate virtual assistants hold equal value, if not more, for a healthy business partnership.

Kiara Nicole, a Florida-based VA, believes that as well and turned a critical eye to her profession in this awesome on what makes a great virtual assistant. Give it a read!

Image Source: Twitter

A real estate virtual assistant should also be proactive and a go-getter above all else. They must be hands-on with the latest tech tools and show an impressive comfort level with communicating and coordinating via mainstream digital channels, along with any popular office-specific software.

It varies widely. Apart from market conditions, factors like experience, location, expertise, nature of job, frequency, and technical knowledge heavily influence virtual real estate assistant pricing. Whether the remote worker joins you as an independent contractor or part of a BPO company and on a part-time or full-time basis are equally important determiners.

The right fit ultimately depends on the specifics of your project and what you need. A skilled real estate virtual assistant may be on the higher end, but they also work faster, go niche, and turn in quality work. Though a pocket-friendly option, an independent contractor still in the middle of building a client base leaves much to be desired.

A real estate virtual assistant can perform a variety of tasks. From boring daily activities like cold calling and email follow-ups to handling complex databases and paperwork, they can be an absolute powerhouse and delight to work with. You first need to figure out your requirements, and real estate VAs can take over from there.

The countless benefits of virtual assistant services make them a must-try to hit long-term revenue goals. Real estate professionals can take a leaf from the books of early adopters of the practice and outsource their back-office operations to make the most of the pandemic-induced migration in the US. If you are convinced by now, the time is just right to hire a virtual assistant and reap benefits!