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How to Advertise with Google: The Definitive Guide

Google launched Google Adwords in October 2000 but renamed it Google Ads in 2018. In keeping with its approach to organic search results, Google considers who links to a given web page and when to show an ad based on how relevant it is to the user’s query.

The world’s favorite search engine sets the ads apart from the actual search results and places them either on the top or bottom of its result pages.

This article breaks down how to advertise on Google so you understand how Google Ads work and the different types of ad campaigns you can leverage to advertise with Google.

Plus, you’ll learn the steps to create Google Ads, best practices and bidding strategies to help you get the most out of your advertising budget.

But before that …

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Terms to understand how Google Ads work

Before running an ad campaign, make sure you understand the following common Google Ads and PPC terms. These will help you correctly set up, manage and optimize your ads and get the best results from your paid marketing efforts:

1. PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising method where you pay each time a user clicks on your online ads. It’s the most common type of paid campaign and is not specific to Google Ads. You must know the pros and cons of PPC before advertising with Google.

2. Bidding

Google Ads works on a bidding system where businesses enter the arena as advertisers. You select the highest bid amount you are willing to pay for a click on your ad and Google measures that against other bids to allot ad placement on its pages or the Google Display Network.

The three options available for bidding are:

  • CPC (cost-per-click): It’s what you pay for each click on your ad
  • CPM (cost per thousand): It’s the amount when your ad shows to a thousand people
  • CPE (cost per engagement): It’s the dollars you pay when users take a predetermined action on your ad

Let’s take an example to understand this better. If your maximum bid is $5 and Google sets the CPC to $3, then you get the ad placement. But if Google determines the CPC is more than $5, you lose the ad placement to another bidder.

3. AdRank

AdRank determines the ad placement. If it has a higher value, your ad will rank better and generate more clicks from users. Google calculates AdRank by multiplying your maximum bid by your Quality Score (QS).

4. Quality Score (QS)

QS judges the quality of your ad by CTR, the relevance of keywords, the user experience offered by the landing page, and its performance on the search result page (SERP). According to Google, “higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.”

Measured on a scale of 1-10, a QS of 10 denotes the best score and means a lower ad spend.

5. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR denotes the number of clicks your ad gets out of the total views. A higher CTR means your ad targets the relevant keyword(s) and meets the search intent.

6. Conversion Rate (CVR)

CVR refers to the number of form submissions in proportion to the total visits to a landing page. When you have a high CVR, it means that your landing page offers a superb user experience in line with your ad’s promise.

7. Google Display Network (GDN)

It is a network of websites that let out spaces on their web pages for Google Ads in exchange for a “commission.” These can be text-based or image ads and show up alongside relevant content to your target keywords.

Google Shopping and app campaigns are the two go-to Display Ad options.

8. Extensions

Ad extensions let you furnish your ad with additional details at no extra charge. The five categories under which ad extensions lie are Sitelink, Call, Location, Offer and App.

How is Google Ads different from AdSense

Google Ads is an online advertising platform that allows businesses to bid for ad placements and drive traffic to their websites. The ad placements can either be on the search engine result pages or on any sites and apps that make the Google Display Network and show the display ads.

Let us take two examples to understand this better.

The image below shows the topmost section of the search result page for the term “project management tools.” Here, the ads from Monday and Jira come up for this query because they are targeting it as their keyword in the paid advertisement.

The ads on search essentially follow the same rules as organic results. You target a keyword and use it in your campaign to capture the best position in the SERP.

Image Source: Google

But it’s a little different with Google Display Network ads (also simply known as display or banner ads). Unlike text results marked as “Ad” on search, display ads appear on the articles, videos or websites that your target audience browses.

You rent space on another web page and use stand out graphics to drive clicks to your site.

Take this banner ad by Adobe on Collins Dictionary’s site, for example.

It illustrates how Google Display Network ads work. A great blend of copy and design, the Adobe ad shows on the Collins site because the latter is a part of the Display Network.

The ad pushes the site visitors on Collins to check out the introductory offer on Adobe’s Creative Cloud.

Image Source: Collins

After paid search and banner ads, let’s now talk about Google AdSense.

Google AdSense came three years after Google Ads. It lets publishers carry advertisements on their websites and other digital platforms in return for a commission.

These publishers make the Google Display Network and help advertisers get their campaigns in front of a large audience. In the above example, Collins is a publisher and leverages Google Adsense to earn a commission by carrying Adobe’s ad.

To sum up the deal about Google Ads and Adsense:

They have different uses and serve different audiences. The Google Ads program attracts advertisers to run campaigns and drive traffic to their websites.

Meanwhile, Google Adsense attracts publishers to “rent out” space on their virtual real estate and monetize existing traffic.

Types of Google Ads

Google Ads begins with a goal and campaign. With five campaign types to choose from, you must select one that aligns with your brand strategy, marketing goals and budget.

To understand the right campaign type for your advertising needs, consider the above factors alongside the following features and uses of each:

1. Search campaigns: text ads on search results

These are ads on search result pages reaching customers when they hunt for your product or service on Google. Since these text ads reach people actively looking for your product or services, they are great for driving traffic and leads to your website.

Other benefits of search campaigns include:

  • Easy to set up, especially with smart campaigns
  • Boosts online sales and signups
  • Offers highly specific targeting

The following image shows the search ad by Google for the phrase “advertise with Google.”

Image Source: Google

2. Display campaigns: image ads on websites

Through visually appealing graphics, display ads let you reach your target audience beyond Google search and on millions of apps, websites and Google-owned properties.

It helps increase your reach and stay top of mind with the option to create a Display campaign that uses data segments to show ads to people who have visited your website or engaged with your app.

Other benefits of display campaigns are:

  • Drive signups and leads
  • Boost brand awareness and product/service consideration
  • Follow up with people who’ve already viewed your ads or site

3. Video campaigns: video ads on YouTube

Video campaigns show video ads on YouTube and other websites. While some campaigns help increase general brand awareness, others drive conversions or customers to shop on your website.

Google offers three different video ad formats for YouTube. But within those options, you can also pick an overlay image or text ad to appear on the lower 20% of a video.

Image Source: YouTube

4. Shopping campaigns: product listings on Google

Shopping campaigns are helpful for retailers looking to sell their product inventory. These ads appear on the Google shopping tab and search results pages.

Image Source: Google

Through shopping campaigns, Google also lets store owners use local inventory ads for advertising products available at their brick-and-mortar locations.

You can use shopping campaigns to:

  • Turbocharge your retail marketing efforts through captivating product listings
  • Drive sales and leads
  • Boost a nearby storefront

5. App campaigns: promote apps on many channels

App campaign uses information from your app to automatically optimize your ads across YouTube, Discover, Play, Search and over 3 million apps and sites. It helps you find new app users and increase sales within your app.

You should use app campaigns to:

  • Drive installs, engagements and signups for your app on mobile devices
  • Engage in multichannel marketing
  • Automate targeting, ad creation and bidding for best performance

Image Source: Google

How to create Google Ads

There are a couple of easy ways you can start with Google Ads. You can visit the Google account associated with your brand and follow these steps to start running paid campaigns on Google:

1. Define a goal

Go to the Google Ads homepage and click on the “Get started” button on the top right hand corner or in the lower left of the page. If directed to your dashboard, select + New Campaign.

Next, choose a goal for Google to understand your target audience and how they will get the bid money.

Image Source: Google

2. Select business name

After goals, Google will ask for your business name. Fill in the field and add the website URL where you want the users to reach after clicking your Google Ads.

If you have Google Analytics set up on your website, connect it with your ad campaign to track its performance or skip this step for later.

3. Create an ad

This section allows you to craft a compelling headline and description for your ad. To get your creative juices flowing, Google also offers helpful tips and sample ad descriptions.

The secret to writing a high-performing ad is knowing the target audience and its pain points. Dig into your customer persona research to find that info while crafting the ad copy.

4. Choose keywords and location

On the next page, choose the keyword themes that match your ad to searches and select the location where you want to run your ad. This location can be a specific region where a physical storefront delivers its services or a broader geographical category like a city or country.

Image Source: Google

5. Add billing details

The last step in the process is to set the budget. Google lets you pick from pre-made plans or create a custom budget. Once done, review your campaign and enter the payment information.

Verify the details and click on “Submit” to create your first Google Ad.

Image Source: Google

Like all Google products, Google Ads is easy to set up and does not take much time. But if you don’t follow Google Ads best practices, there’s a high chance that your ad campaigns will underperform and not turn in ideal results.

1. Use a PPC planning template

A planner helps to organize your PPC campaigns. With Google’s PPC planning template, you can see how your ads will look online, the character counts, and manage your ad campaigns from one place.

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2. Don’t target broad keywords

If your keywords are a long shot, Google will place your ad in front of the wrong audience. That’s why testing keywords should be a key component of your strategy.

To avoid fewer clicks and a higher ad spend, review keywords generating clicks and use them to match your ads with the right audience.

3. Stay away from irrelevant ads

Your ads must match the searcher’s intent to generate enough clicks. Otherwise, you may end up squandering away your PPC budget.

Ensure your headline and ad copy match the keywords you are bidding on and the target audience can see the value of your product or service for their pain point.

4. Improve QS

Google uses QS to determine the rank of your ad. The higher it ranks, the better its placements. If your QS is low, the ad will get less traction and convert fewer visitors. Review the QS components and work on the CTR to improve your QS. Another way is to optimize the landing page.

5. Optimize the ad landing page

An excellent ad is only one aspect of online advertising. The real challenge is to keep the visitors on your site after they click through the link.

If the ad landing page experience on your website is “Below average” or “Average,” try these methods:

  • Offer people what they want. If someone clicked on your ad for “running shoes,” the landing page they visit should have a shoe inventory.
  • Maintain consistent messaging from ad to landing page. Ensure the page follows through on the ad’s call to action or offer. If that’s not possible, find the most relevant and useful page from the existing ones.
  • Ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Check for ease of navigation and use the Mobile-Friendly Test to see how your landing page performs on mobile devices.
  • Try conversion rate to judge the quality of your landing page. It does not impact its status but can be a helpful way to measure and optimize the user experience. Here’s a tip from Google on what a great user experience can look like.

Image Source: Google

  • Work on loading speed. The time a landing page takes to load can determine if someone bounces or buys from you.

It is crucial to understand the three-layer design of Google Ads and how Google structures your account before you create multiple ads. It will enable you to organize your ads, keywords and ad groups into powerful campaigns that reach the right target audience and meet business goals.

The three layers of Google Ads are:

  • Account: Your account is linked to a unique email address, password and billing information
  • Campaigns: Your campaigns have their own settings and budget that determine where your ads appear
  • Ad groups: Your ad groups contain a similar set of keywords and ads

Image Source: Google

As the above image shows, “account” sits at the topmost level of the Google Ads hierarchy. Within each account are campaigns that contain their ad groups.

In turn, each ad group has its unique ads and keywords. While each campaign takes a theme like the Memorial Day sale, you can structure ad groups by your products or services.

The structure of your Google Ads account may not reflect the above hierarchy but ordering the account will have a significant impact on PPC metrics like QS.

Bidding strategies for Google Ads

Bidding comes after you set up your ad campaign and tracking. Since the ability to rank in Google Ads depends on how well you bid, it’s crucial to be aware of the best practices for Google Ads bidding strategies.

While your budget and goals determine the bid amount, a few pointers to keep in mind as you get ready to launch your ad campaign are:

1. Automated vs. manual bidding

Automated and manual are two options for bidding on your keywords. In automated bidding, Google adjusts your bid based on the competition. You can set a maximum budget and Google gives you the best shot at winning the bid within a specific range.

On the other hand, manual bidding lets you set the bid amounts for ad groups and keywords, putting you in control of your budget and limiting ad spend on ineffective campaigns.

2. Cost per acquisition

Like manual bidding, cost per acquisition puts you in charge of your ad spend. At first, it may seem counterintuitive because of its high price.

But if you don’t want to spend huge money on converting prospects into leads, then cost per acquisition is an excellent option since you pay dollars only after acquiring a customer.

3. Bidding on branded search terms

Branded search terms include your company or unique product name, like “Office Beacon virtual assistant.” The argument in favor of bidding on branded search terms is that it lets you claim real estate that may otherwise go to competitors.

However, the critics consider it a waste of money since bidding on branded search terms will likely turn up organic search results.

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How to use Google Analytics to track Google Ads

Whether social or search, big brands have a ton of customer research and money to invest in paid marketing and win handsome returns. But small businesses need to be extra careful with their advertising efforts to ensure they are not wasting their resources and targeting the right audience and keywords.

That’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Google Analytics lets you track and analyze your Google Ad campaign. It offers insights into what’s working and not to help you make necessary adjustments to your future campaign to make sure they have a better chance at pulling in the desired numbers.

After setting up Google Analytics, follow these steps to link it with Google Ads:

  1. Visit your Google Ads account and click the “Tools” menu.
  2. Under Setup, click “Linked accounts” and select “Details” under Google Analytics.
  3. The above step will take you to the list of Google Analytics websites you can access. From the available options, choose “Set up link” on the website you want to connect with Google Ads.
  4. You will now be able to link the Google Analytics view of your website.
  5. Finish the process by clicking “Save.”

The next section looks at how you can use Google My Business to advertise on Google for free.

How to advertise with Google for free

Image Source: Google

According to Google’s Economic Report, more than 17 million American businesses received calls, requests for directions, bookings, reviews and other direct connections to their customers from Google in 2020.

To take a state-wise share, Google helped generate $93.24 billion of economic activity in California and nearly 2.09 million California businesses benefited from Google advertising products.

Google Ads is a quick way to get the word out about your product or service. But you can achieve the same goal through Google My Business without spending a ton of money.

Unlike Google Ads, Google My Business allows local businesses to advertise their business on Google for free and acquire new customers.

Follow these steps to start with your Google Business Profile:

Image Source: Google

  1. Visit Google Business Profile Manager and enter your business name and category.
  2. Add your location if you run a brick-and-mortar and want customers to visit on-site. This puts you on Google Maps and helps users find you easily.

    Not adding this detail will still show service-area businesses for relevant searches. Select the relevant service areas pertaining to your businesses when setting up your profile.

  3. Input the contact details for your business, including the phone number and the website URL
  4. Last, finish the process by clicking ‘Next’ to verify your Google My Business profile.

Remember that the steps outlined above help you begin with advertising on Google for free. To see results and drive revenue, you must follow Google My Business best practices and optimize your Business Page + website.

Let’s take two FAQs.

Frequently asked questions

1. How much does it cost to advertise with Google?

It depends on the advertising channel. With search, you pay money every time a user clicks on your ad in the results pages. This CPC varies depending on the bidding amount, the AdRank and the QS. But with banner ads on Display, you can go for CPC, CPM or cost-per-action (CPA).

While CPC works to generate traffic, CPM and CPA help increase awareness and conversions. Assess your current business goals and choose a suitable advertising option when running banner ads on Google Display Network.

You do not pay a fee for participating in Google AdSense but the revenue you earn through this channel depends on your audience, the ad quality and the ad placement.

The higher the clicks and impressions the ads elicit from your site visitors, the better the commission from AdSense.

2. Are Facebook Ads better for businesses than Google Ads?

Both advertising platforms are for different stages in the buyer’s journey. Google Ads is better for reaching people with high purchase intent, whereas Facebook Ads help run paid social campaigns and reach customers near the top of the funnel.

Depending on your paid marketing strategy, you can focus on either channel or use them together to hit business goals.

Wrapping up

Google Ads has amazing benefits for business goals like driving brand awareness and website traffic but with so many tasks on their plates, most entrepreneurs find themselves unable to take on one more project.

An easy solution is to hire a marketing remote assistant. Contact us today to pair you with a top-notch expert to help you get started with Google Ads right away!

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The Definitive Guide to Crack Paid Social Ads in 2022

We saw the benefits of paid social media in the last article on paid vs. organic social. It helps businesses with quick visibility and leads during time-sensitive campaigns. It also enables them to start those campaigns at a boosted speed not possible with organic social.

Overall, the article highlighted the pros of paid social media for targeting audiences and driving sales, with its value for measurable KPIs.

Paid social media is a failsafe way for businesses to build brand awareness. With the increasing monetization of top platforms like Meta (earlier Facebook) and Instagram, B2C brands are setting up social commerce stores for direct selling and plan to spend big on ad campaigning to reach targeted demographics.

In 2022, ad spending on social will cross the $173 million mark, and the share of video ad spending will increase by a whopping 20.1%.

Image Source: eMarketer

Which means …

Unless you make paid social ads a core part of your strategy, it will fail to drive sales.

Read this article to learn the basics of paid social media and how to run successful ad campaigns. By the end, you will understand the differences between paid social and search and what factors you need to consider when estimating the cost of a social media campaign.

But before that, here are the key takeaways:

  • Any content under the “promoted” or “sponsored” tag is paid ads on social networking platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
  • Brands can choose different ad formats as per budget and business goals. Most social channels offer image ads, carousel ads, product ads, collection ads, interactive ads, lead form ads, video ads, and text ads.
  • The major difference between paid social and paid search relates to ad format. While the former has several options to hook user interest, paid search mainly includes keyword-focused text ads to match search intent on Google.
  • There’s no right time to start with paid social ads. But great organic visibility and social media following are a good place to start for sizing up the potential returns from paid social.

    The boosted visibility from ads will not yield much if users don’t trust your brand via organic social media marketing.

  • Craft a solid social media strategy to ace ad campaigns. Pick the right channel, ad format, audience, and metrics to measure the impact of paid efforts.

    Begin with competitive research and find the correct positioning to ensure your ads resonate with the audience.

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What are paid social ads

Paid social ads are any content assets lying under the “promoted” or “sponsored” tag on social networks. They target a specific sub-audience and do not depend on dynamic algorithms for reach.

Instead, the money put into ad campaigns determines their views, traffic, and engagement. The three well-known types are pay-per-click advertising, branded, and influencer-generated content.

Paid social includes many display ads (more on it below) that have varying features and serve different goals. You can use them as stand-alone or in combination to achieve business targets. They offer plenty of options for ad format, budget, and audience demographics.

This makes them a must-try for brands to fuel their inbound marketing efforts.

Paid search includes keyword-focused text ads that match users’ queries on search engines. Though paid search has a better conversion rate than paid social, it doesn’t have many options to create laser-sharp ads matching netizens’ interests.

You need to combine the power of both to maximize the chances of business growth in the digital world.

Types of social media ads

Social networking platforms let brands pick an ad format depending on budget and the action they are trying to drive. To name a few, you can choose an ad format for boosting product sales, offering an immersive experience to users, and generating leads.

Ultimately, the key to running a successful paid campaign is knowing your options and how they serve different business goals.

Some popular ones include:

  • Image ads: They perform best for driving site traffic. Image ads are easy to make and can include links to specific pages on your website.

    Visual-focused channels like Facebook and Instagram are the best bets for distributing them since the users actively engage with visual content.

  • Carousel ads: They let you tell a fuller (and far richer!) story about your brand. Most ad formats allow you to pick anywhere between 5-10 images or videos within a single carousel, each with its specific CTA and individual link.

    With platforms like Facebook, you can also optimize the order of the carousel images, depending on each card’s performance.

  • Product ads: They are great when you want to display multiple products or want to retarget customers dynamically. The top-performing product ads have high-quality images and little to no text.

    Instagram offers the option to tag multiple products directly in posts to help people easily find and engage with your products.

  • Collection ads: They offer an immersive and visual-rich experience to the users. A subset of product ads, collection ads let people window shop in a virtual storefront. They usually have a big image (or video) banner with a row of four product images.

    When users click on a collection ad, it offers a fast-loading visual treat and lets them learn more about the product without leaving the channel.

  • Interactive ads: They draw in users, encouraging them to interact with the content. They are experimental and push people to take actions like tilting a photo by 360°, replying to a question, or answering a poll.

    This interaction helps cement a stronger relationship between brands and their customers.

    Instant Experience, Messenger Ads, Stories Ads, and Conversational Ads are different types of interactive ads.

  • Lead form ads: Also called ‘lead ads’ or ‘lead generation ads,’ they let you build a list of prospects for newsletters, event registrations, and follow-up services.

    Lead form ads work best when you provide useful content to people in the form of an eBook or resourceful guide.

    They easily integrate with modern-day MarTech like CRMs, messengers, and InMail services.

  • Video ads: They are the topmost assets for hooking interest on social. Video ads perform well on almost every social networking site, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

    They maximize views, reach, and other engagement metrics to offer capital real estate on users’ screens.

    You can run these ads in different formats like video story ads, video carousel ads, interactive video ads, and unskippable and bumper video ads.

  • Text ads: Although they don’t get as much traction, text ads are a pocket-friendly option for businesses just getting started with paid social ads. You can either ‘boost,’ ‘promote,’ or ‘sponsor’ any text-only post on social channels to increase its reach.

    The best-performing text ads are short, targeted, and relevant to users’ pain points.

How much does it cost to run paid social ads

Research studies on the cost of a social media campaign peg it anywhere between $4000 to $7000 per month, with prices going upwards of $20,000 in some cases. But it can vary wildly based on business size and goals.

As you plan the budget for your social media campaign, think about:

  • The scope of operations: Consider the kinds of content assets you will create, how you will socially engage with your target audience, and measure the performance of ads.

    For example, sharing videos and webinar recordings to drive sign-ups for product demos will cost much more than sharing infographics and online games to boost website traffic.

  • The scale of the campaign: Do you plan to run ads on one platform, or would it be a cross-channel effort on all major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn?

    Consider these questions alongside the amount of content you will need to create for each and if you will use Google Adwords to solidify your efforts with paid search.

  • Internal costs: Not factoring in fees for a project manager overseeing the execution of your strategy or social media management tools can lead you to underestimate the cost of a campaign.

    The dollars you spend on creating content assets for social media (or hiring virtual assistants who do) are as important as the money paid to social channels directly.

  • Paid metrics: You pay only for work that goes into creating content in organic social marketing. But with paid ads, metrics like cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), cost-per-view (CPV), and cost-per-action (CPA) determine the cost of a social media to a great extent.

When to start with paid social ads

Any marketer worth their salt knows that a combo of organic posts and paid social ads are the best way to win at social media marketing. Unless you leverage the power of organic social to establish a solid brand presence first, your ads will fail to hit the bull’s eye.

So, long story short, there’s no right time for running ad campaigns.

But before you join the races on paid social, ask yourself the following questions. The more yeses there are, the higher the chances of your ads yielding the desired results:

  • Is there great organic visibility to signal the authenticity of my brand?
  • Do I have a considerable social following to engage and win traction with my existing followers with paid content?
  • Can I allocate an appropriate budget to campaigns for the best returns?

Ultimately, the decision to run ads should rest on various factors, including your industry, business goals, creatives, cost-per-click, and the time for running a campaign.

Do not run ads without a concrete plan and tie them with the bigger revenue picture to fully benefit from the targeting and quick visibility that paid social offers.

How to run a successful paid social media campaign

A foolproof strategy is what a successful ad campaign rests on. As you get ready to try paid social ads, make sure to:

1. Choose the right platform

The Sprout Social Index, Edition XV: Empower & Elevate report echoes that the reach of a channel should be the topmost factor determining whether to target it or not. The fact holds true for both organic posts and paid ads.

Globally, more than half of marketers take it into account when deciding the platform for their social media marketing efforts.

Start where you have an established audience and do not run the same ad campaigns on different platforms.

2. Set goals

Clarity on the goals for ad campaigns will help you pick the right metrics for tracking performance. Is it brand awareness or more product demo sign-ups or sales? Choose the desired results from your paid ads and build a campaign around them with the right creatives.

All modern ad platforms host the right features and options to support a specific brand goal and measure KPIs.

3. Research competitors

Sit down with competing paid social ads and notice their wins and losses. Do not limit yourself to content posted by big brands. Instead, actively seek out ad campaigns run by businesses of comparable sizes to see how their creatives talk to customers.

You can either find businesses on Meta Ad Library or take time to browse social media platforms for yourself.

Image Source: Meta

4. Find right positioning

Ad platforms make it easier for beginners to set up campaigns by offering step-by-step tutorials. They let you touch base with call-to-action phrases, marketing messaging, target audience, and demographics.

Familiarize yourself with these aspects and finetune the details when running your first ads. It will help in strengthening the campaign and ensuring it hits a chord.

5. Track performance

Paid social ads can burn a hole in your pocket if there are no checks in place determining their value for business goals. Use a social media management platform like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to check whether your ads are working.

These tools go beyond engagement metrics and clicks to offer insights that help clarify:

  • Whether paid social ads work better than organic content
  • If the paid campaigns drove ROI
  • How to optimize future campaigns

Next, let us look at different platforms for running advertising campaigns.

Get most of your paid social media campaigns

Channels for paid social media strategy

Every social media platform has unique features that set it apart from others. Like I said before, paid ads on different channels will differ based on the campaign and target audience.

But the three essential components of a highly converting ad that each channel should offer are visuals, space for ad copy, and easy access to lead capture forms.

Meta, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter are four major ad platforms for most businesses. Here’s how you can get started on each one.

1. Meta

Meta Targeted Ads is the most robust ad platform that allows you to narrow your audience to a handful of people depending on demographics, interests, location, behavior, and connections.

Though not necessarily helpful for big companies, it makes all the difference for small businesses that are often short on resources.

To set up a Meta ad, visit your Business Manager account and follow these steps in the Ad Manager:

  • Pick an objective for creating a sponsored post like “send people to website” and give a name to your campaign.
  • Select a group for targeting by choosing from either of the three options: Core Audiences, Custom Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences.
  • Choose the placement for Meta to display your ad at the place most likely to reach the target audience.
  • Set a budget by selecting “Daily” if you want the campaign to be continuous or run for a specific number of days. Alternatively, pick the “Lifetime” budget option, which lets you determine the ad spend over a given period.

    The advanced “Ad Scheduling” option goes a step further to let you choose specific hours and days of the week.

  • Select an ad format for your campaign. While the single image option is self-explanatory, the carousel allows you to pick up to five images or videos to show multiple products, features, step-by-step guides, and brand information.
  • Upload the media and ensure the images do not exceed 1200 x 68 pixels. The ad copy should not cover more than 20% of the image and must include details related to your business, including social profiles and the website.
  • Finish the process by previewing the ad and placing your order.

Let us take an example. Consider this Facebook ad by Harvard Business School Online. It’s a perfect blend of creative and copy, persuading the users to hit the “Learn More” tab at the bottom of the ad.

There’s no doubt about the action it wants users to take and makes it easier for them to convert on the spot.

Image Source: Facebook

2. LinkedIn

LinkedIn has an active user base of 830 million, with thousands of decision-makers, thought leaders, and hiring managers. If that wasn’t enough to prioritize LinkedIn as an ad platform for B2B firms, 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions and have 2x times the buying power of the average web audience.

That easily makes it the most popular ad platform for lead generation. You can set up an ad campaign on LinkedIn by following these steps in Campaign Manager:

  • Select the company account and choose “Sponsored Content” to ensure your ad reaches the members right in their feed.
  • Enter the campaign name and pick the option to create new sponsored content.
  • Add the post text that includes a link to your website and upload an image with 1200 x 67 pixels. Remember to maintain a title safe space of 1000 x 586 to ensure it’s not cropped off.
  • Choose your target audience and set the budget by selecting between CPM and CPC. While the former ensures more visibility, CPC has an automatic bid rate set by LinkedIn to reach most members.

    Fix your “Daily” budget and plan the ad schedule.

  • Last, save your payment details, review the order, and launch.

Take a look at this LinkedIn video ad by Taj Hotels.

 

Source: Linkedin

It works for a couple of reasons. For one, it takes a women-first approach and instantly draws in the users to the vivid interiors of Taj Hotels. It keeps them hooked and makes most of the available space by combining the right mix of captions, copy, and headlines.

3. Instagram

It’s the go-to ad platform for companies in the B2C space. Instagram has 1.16 billion accounts, and 84% of users find new products through social media advertising.

To run ad campaigns on this platform, sign up for a business profile and set up an eCommerce store on the app.

Because Instagram belongs to Facebook, your ads run on both channels and can be easily managed together from one center.

In the Instagram Ad Manager, follow these steps:

  • Choose the objective for creating a sponsored post and give a name to your campaign.
  • Select the target audience and pick placement. By default, Meta recommends “Automatic” placement. But if you wish to advertise on Instagram alone, deselect everything else and manually choose your placement.
  • Pick a budget option and choose an ad format.
  • Upload media, and add copy and a CTA button to the ad for people to easily find your store on the app or visit the website.
  • Preview the ad and finish the process by placing your order.

Image Source: Instagram

Like its ad on Facebook, Harvard Business School Online does a great job on Instagram. Notice how keeping with the nature of the platform, the ad is all creative and hardly includes any written text?

The design is intuitive and contains one simple CTA – making it easy for users to access the required information.

4. Twitter

Twitter has 192 million monetizable daily users, meaning those many people can see your ads daily. That might not be much compared to giants like Facebook and Instagram, but it’s steadily rising the ladder.

The best thing about Twitter ads is that they do not stand out as promoted content and seamlessly blend into the users’ feeds.

With mixed opinions about where advertisements will stand after the takeover by Elon Musk, it’s still a good idea to consider ad campaigning on the platform to reach new people.

Here’s how you can get started with paid social ads on Twitter:

  • Create a new campaign and select an aim for creating promoted content like driving website traffic or conversions.
  • Pick a name for your campaign and fix an ad schedule for the time you want it to be active. The options vary between running it immediately or during a specified period.
  • Add the main site domain and choose a category to describe your website.
  • Select target audience. While Twitter offers similar options to other platforms for pointed advertising, it has one unique option called “Tailored Audience.” It is a curated list of people you want to target through promoted tweets, such as website visitors.
  • Set a budget by choosing between a daily and total limit.
  • Create tweet text, add a headline, and upload an image with 800 x 320 pixels dimensions.
  • Finally, include the website URL to serve as the final destination for users after they click, and publish your tweet.

Take this promoted tweet by Taylor Nieman. It’s a perfect example to wrap up the discussion on Twitter ads. What makes it stand out and highly converting is the harmonious blend of an enticing visual design, laser-sharped copy, and URL for the users to check out Toucan’s website.

It’s neat and resonates with the audience.

Image Source: Twitter

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

Frequently asked questions

1. What are the cons of paid social advertising?

The benefits of paid social far outweigh the cons. Regardless, it helps to remain on top of the challenges posed by ad campaigning to devise an optimal paid strategy. As I mentioned before, ads need the backing of organic content to help users see the legitimacy of your brand.

Unless there’s enough organic presence, the quick visibility offered by paid ads will not amount to any tangible results.

What compounds it further is the competition. Social media is highly competitive, where countless brands are constantly vying to capture user attention.

This makes social a densely cluttered space, leading people to either ignore the ads entirely or get frustrated with the number on their feeds.

A strategy that combines the wins of organic and paid social is the way out of the situation.

2. What is the best way to optimize paid social with a small budget?

Budgetary limits are an opportunity to sharpen the ad campaign and test it with a smaller audience before going all in. Do not target a broad user base when working with a small budget and set easy goals like traffic (instead of conversions) to judge the performance of your ads.

Final thoughts

Paid social ads let brands get in front of their target audience and score quick wins. But setting them up and figuring out best practices for each social platform can be challenging for business owners who already juggle too many tasks. Contact us to pair a top-notch marketing virtual assistant with you to help with that (and much more!), and ace paid social.

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How to Nail Organic Social Media Growth: Tips, Tools, and Strategies

Organic social growth refers to the boost in visibility from posting visual content such as photos, videos, reels, and stories on social media. It lets you drive brand awareness and build meaningful relationships with your target audience.

Unlike paid ads, it’s a free way of advertising your products and services by sharing valuable content that offers a joyful experience to the users.

But it’s getting hard due to rising competition and curbs on the reach of organic posts by social networking sites. This post discusses the challenges to growing organically and how to counter them effectively.

It will share actionable tips and tools to help you build your brand organically on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Key takeaways:

  • Volatile social media algorithms and content saturation affect the reach of organic posts on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
  • Organic social media growth is within reach when businesses create an impactful marketing strategy for each social channel and measure their efforts using a social media management tool.

    Buffer, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite are three advanced social listening tools most virtual graphic designer professionals use for easily scheduling posts and staying on top of all things social.

  • Different marketing tactics work for growing organically on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

    While Instagram and Facebook favor visual-heavy content, insightful text-based posts and threads win on LinkedIn and Twitter.

  • A hybrid marketing strategy is the answer to declining organic social media reach. Brands need to combine the wins of organic and paid social to reach their business goals.
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Barriers to Organic Social Media Growth

Social media platforms work on a pay-to-play model where the brands that get success are majorly the ones putting dollars behind their marketing efforts.

The volatile ranking algorithms are constantly limiting the reach of organic content, and Facebook, in particular, has curbed the spread of non-promoted content over the years.

The average reach of an organic post on a Facebook page is 5.20%. This means only one in 19 fans see a page’s organic content. For big brands, it’s even less.

It leaves small businesses in a lurch as they don’t have the budget to go big on ad spending. What adds to this challenge is the phenomenon of the ‘content epidemic.’

There’s more content on social media than the feeds can hold. Every minute, there are above 510,000 comments and 293,000 status updates. Combine it with the fact that social networking sites constantly strive to offer their users the most relevant content.

And it’s not hard to make sense of the decline in organic reach for optimizing user experience and increasing engagement.

But does that mean organic social media is a lost cause? On the contrary.

Organic social media growth is crucial for winning customer trust and building brand credibility. It’s what acts as a bedrock for paid ads, and unless you invest in getting yourself off the ground through organic means first, your paid campaigns will fail to pull in the desired results.

Here’s how you can ramp up you organic social media growth with the help of remote graphic designer.

6 Tips to Boost Organic Reach

1. Pick the Right Channel

Social media marketing involves optimizing content depending on the business and the channels your target audience hangs out on. If your brand caters to young millennials, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok will work better than LinkedIn and Twitter, which work superbly for B2B organizations.

Your remote graphic designer can do a thorough research and create suitable content for the right social media platform to use its features to the fullest potential.

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2. Create a Strategy

Use your remote graphic designer to perform research on your audience and competitors to create a tailored strategy for each channel (more on this below). In an article for Forbes, Andrew Brooks, Sinclair Global Founder, notes that “building a brand is both a creative venture and a journey of discovery.”

It needs a mindset that rests on “selling a lifestyle” and does not see social as another channel to promote products and services.

Customers are no longer interested in hearing about the latest launches. To intertwine them with your brand, you need to become a part of their daily lives and engage with them personally.

Brooks shared how he did that at Sinclair Global:

“Most of the content my company posts is really based on us. We post funny moments in life, our weekend brunches with friends, etc. We essentially show them what real life looks like. At the same time, we have the hype of unique aspects of our lives, with photos and stories featuring our crew socializing with professional athletes, chart-topping musicians and Hollywood celebrities.”

This diverse marketing strategy allows brands to show off products and services without overselling them and find a way into their customers’ hearts.

Your remote graphic designer evaluates what content type is helping your competitors drive engagement on social and be on the lookout for content gaps. These are topics your target audience wants to explore but does not have the resources for currently.

Let your virtual graphic designer create content to answer these micro-moments and win eyeballs.

3. Engage Employees 

Brand advocacy works like magic for organic social media growth on sites like LinkedIn. And nobody can better hoot for your business than internal team members.

Nearly 72% of customers said they felt closer to a brand whose CEO and employees posted regularly on their handles and trusted them over journalists and advertisers.

Advocacy platforms like Hootsuite Amplify let employees share vetted social content with their friends and followers. You can either opt for one of these or just go the classical way and ask your teammates to give their workplace a shoutout on their profiles.

But do not forget to share their insights on your official company page.

Image Source: LinkedIn

This is how we do it on our LinkedIn. Check our page for more amazing tricks!

 4. Provide Value

Part of what makes organic social media growth so tricky is that social media is not a tool to, as Dave Willis said, “impress people; use it to impact people.” Brands must offer valuable content to their followers to give them a reason for following and sharing their posts.

That value could be entertaining, informative, or motivational, depending on the business type, target audience, and social media platform.

 

Source: Instagram

If you run a local hair salon, then strategize content ideas like styling tips with your remote graphic designer and post it on your Instagram page can capture the attention of youngsters looking to experiment with their hairstyles.

Similarly, since adults over 65 are Facebook’s rapidly growing audience segment, sharing handy tips or exercise tutorials on knee joints through an appealing infographic can work wonders for a small business selling physio and ortho products, for example.

Check out this infographic posted by a Delhi-based medical center called AktivHealth on the benefits of 30-mins walk every day. It’s informative and gently encourages people to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

Image Source: Facebook

5. Host Virtual Events

Tequia Burt’s analysis of research studies by Content Marketing Institue and MarketingProfs revealed that virtual events, webinars, and online courses were the top-performing content marketing assets during the pandemic.

And unsurprisingly, businesses planned on allocating a considerable chunk of the marketing budget to digital events to engage their audience in the post-pandemic future.

Image Source: LinkedIn

A budget-friendly asset, virtual events help businesses stir buzz around their brands and up the entertainment quotient. They also let you collect insightful data and your remote graphic designer can repurpose it as blog posts and short social media creatives.

While webinars are the most popular virtual event type for B2B brands, businesses in the B2C space can experiment with Ask Me Anythings (AMAs) and live streams on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Check out this Q&A uploaded as a post by Ladies and Luggage on its Instagram handle. You can also try this as a story and respond to questions over DMs.

To make it more fun and interactive, add your answers as story updates over the entire day and encourage people to come back for your replies!

Image Source: Instagram

6. Connect with People

That’s all it takes to boost organic social media growth. Simple.

A few ways to go about it are: provide quality customer support, use hashtags and leave comments on posts, tag followers in your stories when they show brand love, or ask for their feedback on the latest industry trends using creative polls on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Or you could do something as simple as post pictures with people.

A research study by Yahoo Labs and the Georgia Institute of Technology confirmed that photos containing faces get 32% more comments and 38% more likes. Increasingly, customers are moving away from brands that are out of touch with their reality.

They care about how a brand treats its employees and connect better with the latter than products and services.

Remember what I said about engaging employees earlier? Spotlight your teammates and remember to be diverse and inclusive. The more people see themselves in your content, the more they will engage and share it.

Let us hone in on strategies that work for organic social media growth on Instagram.

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How to Grow Social Media Platforms Organically

1. Instagram

Towards the end of 2021, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, posted a video on his Twitter account to announce that the social networking site was no longer “just a photo-sharing app.”

Nobody knew what that meant for small businesses until, as Sana Javeri Kadri put it, “the algorithm changed and our sales dropped horrifyingly.”

Kadri’s spice company owed its initial success to Instagram, but after the shift to video, the platform reduced the traffic small businesses get to their accounts and, consequently, websites.

When Instagram first arrived in 2010, posting pictures, writing a compelling caption, and including relevant hashtags were enough for sales.

But, after the change in 2021, it is no longer a low-cost advertising method. Businesses that do not regularly post the short-form videos called Reels not only appear below others but have considerably less engagement on their posts.

While posting videos is one way to grow your Instagram organically, here are others:

  • Be consistent about putting out quality content. Fix a posting schedule and frequency by maintaining a social media calendar to track efforts. Research the best times to post on Instagram for your business and set expectations with the target audience.
  • Apart from in-feed posts and Reels, let your virtual graphic designer experiment with content types like stories and IGTV episodes. Test a few stories every week in different formats and see what resonates with your followers to channel efforts in the right direction.

Image Source: Instagram

The above image shows how NY Times does this on its Instagram. Just the right mix of creatives and copy is enough to encourage readers to check out the complete story on the official website.

  • Post contests, quizzes, and giveaways to hook customer interest. It’s an interactive way to let followers know about the latest discounts, running schemes, and offers. You can also engage them further by including specific requirements for giveaways, such as following your handle and tagging friends in the comments.

Take a cue from how Safecup does it on its Instagram channel.

Image Source: Instagram

  • Use cross-platform promotion to direct people to your profile. Highlight your presence on Instagram by using another visual-heavy platform such as Pinterest to distribute Instagram content.

    Another way is by adding social media buttons in your website’s footer and newsletter. Add your Instagram account to in-store signage to do the trick offline.

  • Get micro- and nano-influencers to give your brand a shoutout. Though with a smaller following, they have super specific niches and a highly engaged audience. Partner with them to gain traction and establish trust in your business.
  • Lastly, do not overlook one-on-one engagement. It’s a surefire way of growing Instagram organically. Reply to queries, brand mentions, comments, and repost user-generated content.

    Actively engage on your Instagram feed to build long-lasting customer relationships and move past announcing boring company updates.

Image Source: Instagram

Big clothing brands like H&M make customer engagement a top priority on their social profiles. Notice how they respond almost instantly to a follower’s query and take the conversation forward by asking them to check out other styles matching their taste?

2. Twitter 

Twitter is the hub of political discourse and memes. But it’s also the most prime and underused social media platform by brands for engaging with target audiences.

Twitter has 436 million monthly active users, and its revenue rose to $1.284 billion in 2021, making it a lucrative platform for business growth. No one can say what new Twitter will look like with Elon Musk at the helm.

But here are a few best ways that you can (still) use to increase the reach of organic posts:

  • Keep messages to the point, and do not go overboard with hashtags. Use 1-2 per tweet, trying to include them naturally in your copy and maintaining a conversational tone.
  • Do not write tweets in all-caps. Consider emojis to add emotions to your copy and include strong calls to action.
  • Go easy on text-heavy images. For videos, keep them to 15 seconds or less. Be mindful of people with hearing disabilities and always use captions or any other ‘sound-off strategy.’
  • When driving to links, use website buttons to make the images and videos clickable. Create content themes for each day of the week and find opportunities to take part in recurring weekly hashtags.
  • Maintain a content bank of evergreen and approved tweets to send out using a social media management tool. Test your performance and dig into data to find which copy, creative, and tone resonates the most with followers.
  • Track indirect mentions of your brand in keywords and hashtags and be prompt with responses. You can also improve the response time by creating pre-saved answers to common questions that come your way.
  • Finally, watch out for trending topics in your niche and engage in ongoing conversations to push people to check out your profile.
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3. Facebook 

Facebook is the world’s oldest and largest social network, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users. It commands a quarter of all digital ad spending, making it the no. 1 platform for marketing despite its steady curb on organic posts.

The average organic Facebook page gets only 0.07% engagement, and the shifting Facebook algorithms are making it harder than ever for brands to reach their audience.

Image Source: Smart Insights

This state of affairs makes it important to understand how algorithms work to ace organic social media marketing on the site.

As of 2022, there is no News Feed, and what comes up when your followers scroll through Facebook is simply called Feed. It’s a place where users get stories “that are meaningful and informative.”

And what determines this is a set of three main ranking signals: who posted it, content type, and interactions:

  • Who posted it: Followers will see content from sources they interacted with, including friends and other businesses.
  • Content type: Their feed will be curated for types of content depending on the past engagement. If they engage with photos, the Facebook feed will show photos. If it’s videos, they will get more audio-visual content.
  • Interactions: Your followers will get posts that stir up engagement, especially from people they interact with on the site.

With this in mind, follow these tips to nurture organic conversions and reduce the cost per click of paid campaigns on Facebook:

  • Use Audience Insights to build a target persona for your Facebook page and attract the right demographics to engage with content and boost marketing campaigns.
  • Publish evergreen content like video tutorials, interviews, thought leadership insights, industry news, and snippets from “how-to” posts, as these have a longer lifespan and remain useful for audiences for extended periods.
  • A virtual graphic deisgner must remember to- keep posts short, visuals solid, and calls to action creative. Do not ask people to like and comment on your posts alone. Instead, go the next step and nudge them to check your website for more info about a product or service.
  • Create a Facebook group for the most engaged customers or join another active niche-related group that’s both active and serves business goals. The idea is to use a group for building a vibrant community around your brand and keep it active through a solid content strategy.

    Safecup’s Facebook group is a cool hangout zone for women to discuss their menstruation woes. The brand keeps it pulsating throughout the year and shares informative tips on using its products properly by engaging with customers in the comments!

Image Source: Facebook

No matter what you sell, community groups on social networking sites are a great way to build your online presence and turn customers into loyal brand ambassadors over time.

  • Use organic post targeting to ensure your content reaches the right people. Like Facebook Ads, it helps distribute posts to customers based on their age and location and is particularly useful against the decline in organic reach on Facebook.
  • Post updates at the optimal time. Consider your audience’s profile, the type of content you put out, and when your fans are most active daily and weekly.

    Dig into Facebook insights to collect this info and post during the peak-off hours when the highest number of followers are online.

  • Use the latest features and updates to promote your organic posts. The hottest ones in the market right now are Facebook Messenger Bots, 360-degree photos and videos, Facebook Stories, Facebook Offers, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Marketplace.

Next, let’s look at the most effective ways for building your brand organically on LinkedIn.

4. LinkedIn 

LinkedIn is all about building professional networks and connecting with business influencers. Unlike Instagram, a favorite among B2C brands, this social platform is for B2B companies.

Globally, it has an active user base of 830 million and is the top most-used platform for the distribution of both organic as well as paid content.

But here’s the thing: LinkedIn has one of the most educated bases on social media.

Unless you know your stuff, there’s no point in marketing on LinkedIn. And if that wasn’t reason enough, LinkedIn algorithms favor content from people over pages – making growing a professional page a highly challenging task.

To grow your company page followers and engagement organically on LinkedIn, follow these tactics:

  • Get your employees to connect their accounts to the page properly by adding their current job role in the work experience section. It’s often an overlooked part of setting up a profile and a necessary best practice for organic social media growth for businesses.

See how our team members linked their profile to the company page?

Image Source: LinkedIn

  • Ask a few chosen employees to invite their connections to the company page manually. Do not cold-invite users as it can be off-putting to get DMs from random people and does not help with a great first impression.
  • Ask team members to add the page’s link to their email signatures. It’s a subtle and non-jarring way of getting your brand in front of new prospects and leads.
  • Use LinkedIn’s native ‘Notify Employees’ feature to update team members about new posts on the company page so that they can engage and share them with their networks.
  • Post engaging videos in the form of client testimonials and product demos to drive traffic to your website. But do not forget to optimize your content for users on mobile.
  • Publish long-form thought leadership content on the latest industry breakthroughs to cement your position as a leading expert with a distinct voice.
  • Include questions and polls in posts to make them more interactive and invite readers to take forward the conversation in the comments. Try to respond to all the replies and keep the comment threads active.
  • Follow community hashtag topics from your company page and respond to the trending content showing in the feed. Post content around these trending topics and use relevant hashtags to increase its reach.

    Here are two community hashtags on Zomato’s LinkedIn.

Image Source: LinkedIn

The Hybrid Approach to Social Media Strategy

The debate between paid vs. organic social media has been raging for quite some time now due to the decline in organic social media growth. But the most effective social media strategy combines the power of both paid ads and organic posts to reach business goals.

To bolster your organic efforts, you must:

  • Measure the performance of your social content (more on it in a sec) and select the best organic posts for boosting through paid ads.

    It’s an entry-level (and pocket-friendly) trick for businesses new to the social field that may not have a huge budget for promoting their content.

  • Set up manual split tests for organic content and track them using UTM parameters. This A/B testing helps you check messaging, brand positioning, visuals, ad format, and copywriting to understand what’s working on your social media accounts and which content format is not.
  • Use retargeting ads to hook leads who already know your business through organic marketing but need a gentle nudge to return to your handle and explore new offerings.

    It is a low-cost and foolproof tactic to spark lost interest in your company’s services.

The next section looks at the social media management tools for brands to size up their social media marketing strategy.

Tools for Organic Social Growth

Social media tracking tools ready you for organic growth by providing:

  • Cross-platform support, so you don’t waste time checking every social handle multiple times a day for updates
  • Options to schedule future posts and ace your social media posting schedule
  • Data-informed insights on the wins and losses of your content efforts

The three best ones dominating the industry are:

1. Buffer

Buffer offers support for all the major social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can use it to set up a schedule for posting updates on your profiles according to time zone and the target audience’s social media surfing habits.

Image Source: Buffer

Pricing: It has a free plan for one user account.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a great tracking tool for social listening, engagement, publishing, and measuring current strategy. In addition to basic tracking features, it has the option for designing and sending personalized messages to prospective customers.

You can also use its customer service features and provide support to your followers.

Image Source: Sprout Social

Pricing: Sprout Social offers three paid plans, with the lowest one available at $89 per user/month. Though paid, it has a free 30-day trial window for users who may not be ready to make the switch just now.

3. Hootsuite 

Hootsuite offers the best social media management features to take charge of your content calendar. You can use it to schedule posts and review content in an intuitive calendar view.

It lets you access images directly from the dashboard for posting and determine what your customers think by keeping a tab on the latest trends, conversations, and brand mentions.

Image Source: Hootsuite

Pricing: Hootsuite has four plans for different social needs. Growing companies can subscribe to its ‘Professional’ pack and connect up to 10 accounts to access their social inboxes from one central place and schedule unlimited advanced posts.

Final Thoughts

Organic social media can get quickly overwhelming for small business owners who often juggle many tasks and don’t have the time to engage with their customers daily.

To build long-term and meaningful customer relationships on different channels, they can hire a marketing virtual assistant to manage their social media operations. SPEAK WITH US with us to pair you with the right fit today and get ready to kickstart social growth.

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Paid vs. Organic Social: Why You Need to Combine Them

A solid social media strategy can help small and medium-sized businesses reap many benefits. But crafting one requires a good understanding of the differences between paid social ads and organic marketing.

This post takes an in-depth look at the two and discusses their cons and benefits. By the end, you will know which one to choose for your social efforts and how to bring them together for maximum impact on your target audience.

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Key takeaways:

  • Organic social media marketing lets brands connect with their followers and drive engagement over a sustained period. But it depends on volatile ranking algorithms for that and may not directly boost ROI.
  • Paid marketing involves spending money on social ads and campaigns to reach a highly targeted audience. It’s a great tactic to capture leads and drive conversions but needs considerable resources and efforts to deliver results.
  • Organic works for small businesses just entering the field and want to build customer relationships. But paid ads should be a core part of the marketing strategy for any scaling enterprise with the budget and expertise to invest in social ads.
  • Business owners can hit their revenue targets by integrating paid social with organic marketing. A well-rounded strategy helps them reach new audiences while maintaining valuable relationships with their existing followers on social.

What is organic social media marketing

Organic social media marketing denotes activities brands perform to share content with their followers on social platforms. These involve sharing multimedia assets such as posts, reels, and stories to drive engagement and build a community.

It is popular with small businesses because organic social is a free way of reaching new people and converting them into loyal brand ambassadors over time.

That’s what Guy Kawasaki, Chief Evangelist of Canva, meant too when he said:

“A large social media presence is important because it’s one of the last ways to conduct cost-effective marketing. Everything else involves buying eyeballs and ears. Social media enables a small business to earn eyeballs and ears.”

When you use organic social media to share helpful content, it wins you a community of followers who may or may not convert but still play a major role in boosting your credentials.

Or, as Sinziana Ecaterina puts in the below image, organic social media does not directly generate leads, but it’s a ‘business card’ that consolidates your brand in the online market.

Image Source: Superpath

For example, FII is a small India-based digital media and news company whose marketing strategy is nailing organic social.

While its primary aim is to cover the Indian political landscape through a feminist lens on social media, FII has built an amazing community of followers that buys from its merchandise store and helps it find opportunities for business collaboration with similar companies.

Check out its handles on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Image Source: Instagram

Image Source: Twitter

Image Source: Facebook

A large social media presence is just one aspect of organic social. It has other benefits and drawbacks that you must consider when deciding to use it in your marketing strategy. Let’s hone in on them in the next section.

The pros and cons of organic social media

Organic social puts you in front of a large audience. But when these users share your content on their handles through the stories feature or DMs or tag their connections on your posts in the comments, it sets off a chain reaction that guarantees even greater visibility for businesses through what is as good as ‘word-of-mouth’ in the online world.

Apart from traction and brand credibility, organic social media marketing helps small businesses to:

  • Establish a distinct brand personality (more on it in a sec) and voice
  • Nurture customer relationships by sharing resonating content
  • Directly connect with customers and offer qualitative engagement
  • Provide instant customer care support services and manage reputation

Despite these benefits for lifetime value and customer retention, organic social is steadily declining due to ranking algorithms. Hootsuite’s Digital 2020 report shows the organic reach for a Facebook post is about 5.5% of your follower count and even lesser for big brands.

Algorithms curb the spread of organic posts, and their volatile nature makes it difficult for busy business owners to adjust strategies on the go to stay relevant with the trends. Other cons to consider are:

  • It needs massive effort to churn out quality content and actively interact with users on different social media platforms daily
  • It doesn’t let you distribute content outside of your social following
  • Its ROI can be difficult to measure as organic is for branding than sales

Image Source: LinkedIn

As Prasad Bambarkar notes in this LinkedIn comment, organic social is an awareness channel that works magic if businesses focus on branding instead of promoting their services. They need to invest in value-adding content and be patient with the results. Here are a few best ways for acing branding on the organic front.

Social Media Plans

Best practices for organic social media marketing

The benefits and drawbacks listed above suggest that organic social media marketing efforts are best suited for businesses just getting started and fixing their social operations.

As the chief aim during the early funnel stage is brand awareness and building relationships, they do not need to spend many dollars on targeted advertising. But they must solidify their organic social efforts by:

  • Minimizing promotions: Instead, the focus should be on creating informative and helpful social content that positively impacts users. While a local hairdressing business can share pro tips on hairstyling via reels on its Instagram page, a SaaS startup can post thoughtful takes on current problems in the industry and how their product solves them.
  • Showcasing brand personality: The content should mark your visual identity distinctly and always conform to branding guidelines. It’s easy to get swayed by viral social media trends, but picking up the wrong ones can do more harm than good to your business image.

    Stick to niche-specific discussions and create content highlighting your brand values.

  • Addressing topic gaps: Produce content that answers users’ urgent needs during micro-moments. These are times when customers surf social networks with a definite purpose.It could be checking out an easy tutorial or a product demo before making the final purchase.

    Perform competitive research and use social media listening tools like Sprout Social to create in-demand content.

What is paid social media marketing

It’s a marketing strategy in which businesses pay money to social platforms for running social ads and campaigns. Unlike organic, which has a limited reach and depends on ranking algorithms for content distribution, paid social media is a surefire way of getting in front of a broad and specific target audience by boosting organic content and advertisements.

Take this Sponsored Content on LinkedIn from Nielsen, for example. It’s a boosted organic social post that blends right into the feed and doesn’t stand out as an ad.

Image Source: LinkedIn

The social media ad market is the largest in the US, and it will surpass the $200 billion mark by 2024. This trend becomes particularly poignant when seen alongside the changing preferences of consumers during the pandemic and their social media habits.

They spent a good deal of time on social channels browsing products during the lockdowns and bought directly through social eCommerce.

As the number of active users on these platforms continues to go up and likes and retweets influence shopping behavior, businesses need to design their social media campaigns and ads with great care (more on it below) to stand out from their competitors.

But before involving your marketing team to get paid social media underway, check out its benefits and drawbacks for a better understanding.

The pros and cons of paid social media

When Apple introduced additional privacy features that allowed iPhone users to limit ad tracking, marketers debated the value of paid social media to reach their business goals. But, half of the adults said that when brands use their data in advertising, it lets them discover useful products and services.

A broad reach is the top benefit of paid social media, here are others:

  • Target particular demographics that’d be interested in your brand
  • Capture leads and drive conversions
  • Promote the latest releases, events, and deals easily
  • Move people through the various stages of the customer journey
  • Track results and refine your marketing strategy

Ad tracking is a great way for some users to keep up with the latest offerings. But for others, the thought of social media platforms collecting their personal information is off-putting.

The Facebook data breach that exposed millions to Amazon’s cloud computing service and the criminal negligence charges have made customers wary of sharing personal info with social media platforms– making paid marketing relatively tricky.

While that’s one thing to keep in mind when opting for a paid social media strategy, other cons include:

  • It may be difficult for small businesses to match a high PPC rate to reach their target audience by consistently creating high-quality content to get returns on paid budget
  • It’s a massive waste of money if the efforts don’t yield desired results
  • It needs constant monitoring to understand how your ads are performing and pivot if the analytics are not up to the mark
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Let’s dive into the best practices for social media advertising in the next section.

Best practices for paid social media

It’s not hard to nail down paid social media marketing using the following tactics:

  • Select the right audience: Social ads work best when they carry the right message at the right time and for the right audience. Make your paid ads effective by pairing laser-targeted messaging with the intended users to drive results.
  • Craft a clear CTA: The value of paid social ads lies in the business objectives they help serve. If the aim is to capture leads by sharing informative content like an in-depth guide, the ads should carry a direct CTA like ‘Download Now.’

    Include strong (and relevant!) CTAs in your paid campaign to help people take the next action.

  • Be brief: Paid social ads target a large demographic that may or may not have heard about your business. To win attention, keep your ads – be they graphics or videos- catchy and concise. Share resonating content with your target audience and limit your video ads to 15-30 seconds.
  • Track performance: As I said before, paid social ads can be expensive and need constant monitoring to ensure you don’t end up wasting resources.

    Social media management tools help businesses measure analytics and take a data-informed approach to their marketing strategy.Use these tools to measure the impact of your ad campaigns and make necessary changes.

Watch this space to learn the best practices for paid ads on different platforms!

6 methods to combine organic and paid social media marketing

An all-round social media strategy takes the best of organic and paid content to hit business goals. It leverages the ability of the former to build a community and nurture valuable relationships.

Simultaneously, it relies upon paid ads to attract potential customers and boost conversions. Here are six ways you can integrate them to truly serve your audience:

  • Decide upon the promotional posts: Reserve the social ads only for content tied to measurable KPIs. While most big businesses use advertising to promote their latest release and announce new events, organic can be a great way for growing companies to do the same through a creative and compelling organic post without spending much.
  • Boost organic content: Use social analytics tools to identify the organic posts that got the most traction with your target audience and boost them through paid ads.

    It’s one of the low-cost methods for small businesses that may not be well-versed with the ins and outs of social ad campaigns and equipped with the resources to run them on scale.

  • Use A/B testing: Test paid ads with smaller audiences before allocating a large budget for social spending. See if your messaging, positioning, visuals, copywriting, and ad format hit a chord with modern shoppers and offer them an enjoyable experience.

    Set up manual split tests for organic content and track its performance using UTM parameters.

  • Align target audience: Remember what I said about selecting the right audience for paid ads earlier? It’s mostly the lookalike of your followers or newsletter subscribers (for example), having similar likes, choices, and demographics.

    The only difference is they haven’t had the chance to interact with your social media content. Use your customer persona and data on the organic following to run social ads with this lookalike audience.

  • Use retargeting ads: It’s a highly effective and budget-friendly means to capture leads who already know your business organically but need a reminder about the latest product or offering from your company.

    Craft a compelling ad with the right messaging to nudge them to come back and check you out.

  • Automate: Use a social media tool for not just tracking the performance of your organic and paid campaigns but also for managing the workload that comes with combining the two social media marketing tactics.

    Streamline your content creation process, schedule the organic posts in advance, and create customized alerts for boosted content.

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Before wrapping up this post, let us take up two FAQs on paid vs. organic social marketing.

Frequently asked questions

Should a startup go for organic or paid social media strategy?

It depends on many factors, including business type and objectives. Social media marketing is saturated for B2B SaaS and B2C organizations.

They may need to include paid social ads as a core part of their overall marketing strategy to reach new audiences and drive conversions. But the same doesn’t hold for firms offering services to other companies, as organic social can help them achieve the same results without any considerable ad spend.

Is organic or paid marketing better for Facebook?

You get better results from paid marketing on Facebook. The average organic reach of a Facebook post is a small percent of an account’s follower count, and organic reach, in general, has been in a steady decline over the years.

To talk numbers, only one in 19 fans see a page’s non-promoted content– stressing the need for businesses to blend ads into their organic strategy.

A flawless marketing strategy leverages the potential of both paid social media and organic to meet different business objectives at different times. SPEAK WITH US with us to pair you with an expert marketing virtual assistant to handle your social media operations and help you establish a solid brand identity.

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B2B Social Media Strategy: The Definitive Guide for 2022

Small businesses spend considerable resources on organic reach and email marketing to acquire new customers. But social? It’s the last channel on their mind, and for obvious reasons. They don’t have the time or the budget to design and execute a full-blown strategy.

And when they do, it’s a tepid effort as they’re skeptical about its ROI.

Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia, summed this perfectly in a quote:

“When I hear people debate the ROI of social media? It makes me remember why so many businesses fail. Most businesses are not playing the marathon. They are playing the sprint. They are not worried about lifetime value and retention. They’re worried about short-term goals.”

Ignoring the lifetime value and retention of customers and focusing on flimsy goals can lead to poor performance on social. But you can escape this fate through strategic planning.

This post discusses why customer-focused marketing is vital for B2B and shares essential tips and examples to build a social media strategy laced with innovative graphic designs, that convert users into paying (and loyal) customers.

Key Takeaways:

  • B2B social media strategy refers to the way businesses catering to other companies use social media for marketing their product or services
  • An effective strategy helps small businesses to build brand awareness, drive website traffic, position themselves as thought leaders, deliver quality customer support, and manage online reputation
  • Build a tailored marketing strategy for each social channel to win traction with your target audience
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What Is B2B Social Media Strategy?

B2B social media strategy is the approach to social channels for advertising products or services to prospective customers in a business-to-business setting.

The dominant view holds B2B to be a widely different niche from B2C and one that requires a distinct social media strategy. While that’s true, it’s worth noting that customers deciding whether or not to buy in B2B are people and a part of the same marketing ecosystem as customers in the B2C.

But why should you invest in social media in the first place? The next section discusses five benefits of social media marketing.

5 Reasons Why Small Businesses Need A Social Media Strategy

Amy Jo Martin beautifully described the power of social media in this quote:

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

She means that social media is not an isolated chamber for singular posting. Instead, it’s more like a game where two or more players participate to take it forward.

Social networks promote diverse opinions and encourage dialogues such that every user becomes a part of one big digital community which is always in conversation.

Couple this insight with the fact that 58% of the world’s population now uses social media, and 59% of marketers consider it a very important” part of their overall marketing strategy. And it’s not difficult to see why it’s a lucrative medium for small businesses to win new customers through engaging content.

A customer-focused B2B marketing strategy helps small businesses to:

1. Build Brand Awareness

Research by Sprout Social shows that moving forward, customers would prefer to learn about brands through social media and buy directly from them.

This makes it a golden moment for businesses to leverage social channels and acquire prospective buyers following a few best practices. In fact, 65% of consumers have already directly bought through social media, and social commerce sales will cross $53 billion by 2023, nearly double from $28 billion in 2020.

Most small businesses compete against big names on Google and do not get top spots, but social media offers them an easy route to get in front of their target audience. They can sign up for business profiles and optimize them to increase their reach.

I cover more ground on how social media influences buyers’ purchasing decisions later. Stay tuned.

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2. Drive Website Traffic

Google considers various factors to rank a website on its pages, and social signals are one of them. While social media accounts may or may not directly affect your rank on Google listings and traffic, it certainly influences the content of your search results. Social profiles are often #1 for brand name searches on Google and get significant digital real estate.

Image Source: Google

Notice how our social media accounts on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn show up for our brand name on Google? A great social media presence adds to your ranking potential on the result pages. It enables users to explore your brand at leisure and offers them the necessary details to make an informed choice.

3. Positioning Themselves as a Thought Leader

Every social network caters to a different audience and purpose. While channels like YouTube and Instagram serve people looking for light time on the net, LinkedIn and Twitter cater to audiences searching for educational content from experts to hone skills and advance in their careers.

A well-planned B2B social media strategy helps businesses share expert takes on the latest developments, get followers, and partner with other thought leaders in their niche.

They let you share your career highlights and show people the formula to replicate similar success, getting you a personal brand and better visibility for your business in turn. This is how Ryan Law, VP of Content at Animalz, does it on Twitter. Though Animalz is not a small business, you get the hint.

Steal the trick!

Image Source: Twitter

Another helpful example for thinking about this is Ashley Faus. Her thought leadership on content marketing is helping her build a solid personal brand on LinkedIn. Read this insightful take on a career in content to understand why others marketers rely upon her wisdom to fix the content operations at their workplaces.

Image Source: LinkedIn

4. Deliver Quality Customer Support

Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends Report disclosed that three out of five consumers believe good customer service is essential for brand loyalty. And fast responses hold a big share among factors that constitute excellent customer support. Social media and instant chat tools allow you to connect with buyers quicker than traditional methods like email.

5. Manage Online Reputation

Social media lets you privately respond to complaints via DM as well as offers the option to leave comments publicly. That helps prospective clients judge brand authenticity and decide whether they want to transact with you.

Small brands may not get into the center of big storms involving big B2B companies such as HubSpot or Mailchimp. But a bad customer experience can dent their business image within a niche community and escalate into a crisis.

If someone airs their grievance on social, you can use a tool like Hootsuite to track brand mentions and reply promptly to address their concerns.

This brings us to the key to cracking social media for business goals.

It holds incredible potential for earning revenue but only when used right. Its core aim is to bring people together in what Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher, described as a ‘global village.’ When your marketing efforts align with this purpose and customers’ interests are always at the top, success is yours.

The next section discusses more on that and offers actionable tips on designing an effective customer-focused strategy.

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How to Build a Social Media Strategy?

We live in a time where digital media shapes our perception of the real world and vice-versa. Increasingly, customers are moving away from brands that do not understand their reality and are just profit-driven. Sprout Social’s report echoed this observation and revealed:

  • People trust in the power of social media to forge connections, and 78% of them want brands to use social to help users connect with each together
  • 76% of customers buy from a business that invests in building relationships, and 57% of them increase their spending when they feel connected to a brand
  • 72% of people reported feeling closer to a brand whose CEO and employees posed on their social media feed regularly, highlighting the need for being authentic in building relationships with customers

The takeaway from the above findings is this: customers are not interested in what you sell alone and want businesses to use social media meaningfully. Unless you share interactive content on the right platform, you won’t gain traction with your target audience.

To get success, follow these best practices:

1. Determine Business Goals

Think about your business objectives and where social media fits into that. Every aim calls for a different strategy and social channel. The top three goals for B2B small businesses are brand awareness, building trust, and educating customers about the advantages of a product or service.

Match this goal with the right social platform, target audience, and draft a tentative plan.

2. Perform Competitive Research

Spend time on your competitors’ social profiles and note which content works for them. Is it catchy data-informed visuals or videos generating engagement on their handles? This competitive research will help you identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in the niche and sharpen your plan.

3. Link Competitive Research with Buyer Personas

Your strategy will always be off the mark unless you know about customers’ social media habits and preferences. Research the social sites your buyers surf for consuming industry news and notice the overall demographics.

For starters, check the age group of your prospective buyers on a particular site and whether the content reaching them is through organic or paid social. Research by Content Marketing Institute reveals LinkedIn is the top-performing organic channel for B2B marketing, and Facebook outranks Twitter for paid social media posts.

4. Share Relevant Content

Use intel on customer preferences to share unique and helpful content with potential customers. As I said, social media aims to bridge the gap between people.

A strategic customer-focused B2B social media marketing takes it a step forward by sharing delightful content as insider tips and hard to come by knowledge in the form of how-to information and thought leadership on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

5. Set KPIs

Decide the metrics to gauge your performance and the social media tools for measuring them. Without monitoring KPIs such as response time, impressions, engagement rate, and conversions (more on this below), you won’t know the content that’s working and focus your efforts in the right direction.

Choose your metrics and then track your social media performance against them.

Social media virtual assistant

Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Social media is a competitive space. For small businesses already grappling with budget constraints, it poses unique challenges.

How do they tie results from social to business goals, quantify revenue to different channels, and track actual results? What practices should they adopt to not run themselves dry while simultaneously offering value to their target audience?

Here are a few bonus tips:

  • Measure the success of your marketing efforts by using corresponding metrics for different stages of the sales funnel. If you are just getting started, focus on building brand awareness and track metrics like followers, engagement, reach, and cost per lead.

    After gaining traction, start tracking followers who engage with your website and contribute to the pipeline.

  • Adjust your brand’s message as per the social media platform, and do not overwhelm followers with dull posts filled with industry jargon. Adapt your marketing strategy to the informal nature of social and share relevant and engaging content at all times.
  • Use micro-moments to answer clients’ urgent needs. These are instances where potential customers surf social media with a definite purpose. They may go to YouTube to find a product demo or use LinkedIn to inquire about a future event.

    Address these micro-moments to convert users into loyal brand ambassadors by maintaining a solid online presence.

  • Refine buyer personas depending on the profiles who used your product or service. Ask them for feedback, schedule interviews, and collect testimonials. Pick their brains on the past problems, the solutions they stumbled upon, and what about your product/service stood out to them.

    Use that insight to make suitable changes to your marketing strategy and strengthen brand positioning.

Here’s a great question bank from Fio Dossetto for reference:

Image Source: contentfolks

  • Join niche social media groups and communities to share content until you have a dedicated audience. But remember to check (and abide by) the unsaid rules regulating the sharing and promotion of content in these networks to ensure you are not violating them and risking getting marked as spammed or blocked.
  • Try combining different tactics on each platform to see what works best for your businesses. Explore options like social media ad campaigns, influencer marketing, and brand collaborations with established market players in the industry.

The three sites that hold the most value for small businesses in the B2B industry are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Let us look at social media best practices for them below.

B2B Social Media Strategy for LinkedIn

It is the most effective platform for generating leads, and a large share of visits to company websites comes from LinkedIn. Over 600 million active users on this channel mine it for articles, status updates, and networking opportunities with other professionals daily.

That signals a huge opportunity for business owners to build brand awareness and credibility. The best ways for driving results from LinkedIn are:

  • Optimize the company page by adding an impressive business overview, banner image, and CTA button for directing users to your homepage or a service landing page on the website
  • Try different content formats like carousels, video testimonials, and PDFs
  • Use the native poll feature to perform market research, kick-off engagement, and collect customer feedback

Image Source: LinkedIn

  • Start an employee advocacy program to get in-house team members to give their organization a shout-out (remember what I said about how employee stories help people feel closer to a brand and build authentic relationships?)
  • Repost blog posts on your website as LinkedIn pulse articles to establish credibility

B2B Social Media Strategy for Facebook

With the shift to Meta, Facebook has (almost) entirely rebranded itself. It isn’t the platform where people hang out to share goofy pictures of themselves anymore. Their preferences are different, as are the platform’s products and features.

But that’s not all bad news. It’s still the most used social site, and conversion from Facebook ads is between 9 and 10% – higher than most paid channels.

To drive results from Facebook:

  • Target broad paid reach to get through users interested in your offerings but who haven’t visited the website yet
  • Join community groups to share industry breakthroughs and answer customer doubts about products and services in your niche
  • Create engaging video content in the form of reels, ads, and lives
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B2B Social Media Strategy for Twitter

Not many small businesses use Twitter for social media marketing. And the ones that do fail to get it right. Mostly, it happens because they don’t get the platform’s quirks.

Unlike Instagram or Facebook, Twitter is about building relationships with your target audience in real-time. With close to 300+ million monthly active users and 500+ million tweets sent daily, it’s a channel for keeping tabs on what’s happening worldwide.

To drive results from Twitter:

  • Cement meaningful relationships by having one-on-one engagements with users and personalizing your brand’s interactions with them by retweeting their tweets and quote tweeting them
  • Track mentions to see what people are tweeting about competitors as well as your business and gather customer intel to find new content opportunities
  • Join conversations on trending topics in your industry and leave thoughtful comments to get likes and retweets and win brand awareness for your business
  • Share short videos and tweet at the correct times for better reach

Social Media Tools for B2B Marketing

You may now be wondering about the tools to create assets for your social media marketing strategy. Social media is all about visual content marketing.

But before filling your content calendar with ideas and executing them, follow these best practices for creating visual content:

  • Design original graphics to grab eyeballs and avoid stock photos. A virtual graphic designer (or remote graphic designer) can help you in the quest.
  • Play with colors to add personality to posts but maintain branding.
  • Use contextual images to complement captions and be relevant.
  • Choose a suitable format for data-based visuals. If the data involves big figures and shifts, use graphs. But if it’s a trend during a specific period, go with a pie chart.
  • Use contrasting colors in data-informed graphics to avoid confusion about represented values.
  • Ensure these visuals need no additional context to decode them.
  • Use business objectives to pick a suitable format for video content. For example, if the aim is to drive website traffic, a client testimonial may work better than an interview with a subject matter expert on a technical topic.
  • Produce engaging videos by taking a story-telling approach to content.
  • Include captions in videos for people with hearing disabilities.
  • Add CTAs to videos depending on the content to drive people to take the desired action after watching them.
  • Notice videos formats getting the most engagement on a specific channel. Create them for your profile and use others on a different platform.

You can use the following tools to bring your marketing strategy alive:

For visual content

There are plenty of options for creating high-quality visual assets for social media. But most of them are either too expensive for small businesses or highly complex to use for those not savvy with design. Pick these two user-friendly freemiums tools to produce content for your social media operations and hit the ground running:

1. Canva

Canva is the most loved design platform among small teams for its incredible library of professionally designed layouts. You can choose from over 100 free templates for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and design incredible graphics following the steps outlined in this photo.

Image Source: Canva

2. Vimeo

Vimeo provides video-related services and delivers HD videos across various devices. Though not strictly free, it’s the best video-making and editing platform in the market. You can explore a wide range of free professional templates and create stunning videos for your marketing campaigns in seconds.

Follow the steps shown in the photo below:

Image Source: Vimeo

For tracking performance

Tracking tools align your operations across social networks and bring uniformity by offering:

  • Cross-channel support to save time on posting and checking for updates on individual sites multiple times a day
  • Options for scheduling future posts to remain on top of your social media calendar
  • Analytics features for identifying engaging content that resonates with your target audience

Based on the above criteria, here are two tools that make the cut:

1. Buffer

Image Source: Buffer

Pricing: It offers a free plan for one user account.

Buffer supports all major B2B social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It automatically creates a schedule for social posting according to your time zone and lets you easily schedule future posts.

2. Sprout Social

Image Source: Sprout Social

Pricing: It has three paid plans, with the lowest tier priced at $89 per user/month. Though paid, Sprout Social offers you a 30-day free trial before subscribing.

Sprout Social is great for social listening, publishing, engagement, and sizing current strategy. Apart from basic tracking features, it lets you design and send personalized messages to followers and prospective customers. You can use its customer service features and offer support to your buyers whenever needed.

Let’s take a few FAQs before wrapping up this post.

Frequently asked questions

1. Which social media is best for B2B?

There isn’t one right channel for social media marketing, although research suggests LinkedIn performs the best for B2B. Ultimately, a data-informed and well-designed marketing strategy rests on customer and market research. If your audience is on Facebook, target it.

But suppose they like to learn about the latest developments in your industry through videos on YouTube. In that case, it would be the ideal platform for boosting brand awareness and building trust.

Let customer preferences govern the course of action for your marketing efforts.

2. Which B2B companies are winning at social media marketing?

Semrush and Slack are B2B brands with a great social media presence on Twitter. Apart from them, Drift and Salesforce are two examples that get frequent shout-outs for their social media strategies.

3. How can I manage multiple social media accounts?

You cannot be on top of all your profiles without a social media management tool. It lets you automate future posts, track updates, and monitor pre-determined KPIs to judge whether your existing marketing strategy needs to be adjusted. Sprout Social and Buffer are excellent options and must check-outs for scaling small businesses.

4. What lies ahead in B2B social media marketing?

Only time will tell! But one thing is sure. The pandemic disrupted the content marketing budgets across industries and realigned priorities, with many businesses opting for videos and webinars to engage with their customers during the COVID peak.

Research by Content Marketing Institute revealed that 58% of B2B marketers identified virtual events and webinars as top-performing assets in 2021 and planned on continuing investing in them.

Final thoughts

Social media will have a lot more users by 2025, but marketing to them will become tougher due to increased competition among small businesses to capture new customers. To leverage its full potential for business growth, SPEAK WITH US with us to pair you with an expert marketing virtual assistant and scale your social operations.

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7 Most In-Demand Virtual Assistant Services in 2022

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!

Download Service Guide

What is a virtual assistant

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.

Types of virtual assistants

Hire your virtual assistant
  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.

Benefits of virtual assistant services

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.
  1. 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.
  2. 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.

  3. 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!

Most in-demand assistant services

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
  1. 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
  1. 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
  1. 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
  1. 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
  1. 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

  1. 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.

How to find the right virtual assistant

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.

Frequently asked questions

What are the niches for virtual assistants?

You can find virtual assistants working in almost every niche now. From back-office administrative tasks to virtual events management, remote workers have carved a place for themselves in the most unimaginable fields.
They provide entrepreneurs, SMBs, start-ups, and large multinational corporations a reliable resource that can perform tangential business activities that are laborious and repetitive.

What qualities should I look for in a virtual assistant?

A virtual assistant must be well-educated and qualified for the job is the number one prerequisite for a successful long-term collaboration. Some may have higher-level education like a diploma or partial degree from an accredited university.

But a good assistant-client match ultimately depends on the nature of the job and the complexity of tasks. Besides expertise and knowledge, Shelby Larson, author of Moonlighting on the Internet, believes certain soft skills like reliability, accuracy, and integrity in virtual assistants are an absolute must for forging a healthy business partnership.

Echoing Larson, Kiara Nicole, a Florida-based VA, turned a critical eye to her profession and posted this awesome thread on what makes a great virtual assistant on Twitter. Hear her out!

Image Source: Twitter

A virtual assistant needs to be proactive and a go-getter above all else. But they should also be well-versed with the latest tech tools, showing an impressive comfort level with communicating and coordinating via mainstream digital channels, along with any popular office-specific software.

What are the virtual assistant services rates I can expect?

The rates for virtual assistant services depend on many factors. The major ones are remote workers’ location, experience, expertise, job type, frequency, and technical knowledge. Whether the virtual assistant works as an independent contractor or part of a BPO company also plays an equally crucial role.

The following image shows the hourly rate charged by various North American virtual assistants on Upwork, a leading online marketplace for freelance talent.

Image Source: Upwork

At first glance, platforms like Upwork seem like a pretty viable option to find virtual assistants for companies on a budget. But like I mentioned earlier, it may bring plenty of management and time-tracking headaches for the already busy SMB owners.

A better alternative is to opt for an outsourcing services company like Office Beacon. Though a bit on the high side, they offer top-notch management support and HR training that more than makes up for the extra fees.

What are the most in-demand virtual assistant services?

Virtual assistants are fast winning over SMB owners from fields as diverse as real estate and technology. A few popular services they offer their clients span marketing, sales efforts, customer service support, and general back-office administrative duties. To get more specific about the role of an administrative virtual assistant, they perform a combo of these tasks:

  • Manage all digital communication to respond, group, and track correspondence
  • Schedule and manage calendar appointments
  • Organize client appreciation outreaches
  • Answer phone calls
  • Coordinate with vendors and suppliers
  • Research and identify business opportunities
  • Synchronize tasks related to sales events
  • Assist with developing contracts

Similarly, you can expect a sales virtual assistant to carry out the following:

  • Research potential clientele and develop comprehensive databases
  • Undertake transaction-based tracking
  • Manage prospects’ database and CRM
  • Organize, manage, and update MLS listings
  • Handle incoming and outgoing prospecting calls
  • Create and maintain CRM databases
  • Make spreadsheets with price-point comparisons
  • Research industry-specific sales trends and compile lists

Conclusion

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!

Top 5 Benefits of Social Media for Small Businesses

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.

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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

5 Benefits of Social Media for Small Businesses

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.

Tips for Social Media Marketing

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

Types of Social Media Content

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.

Content Strategy virtual assistant

Tools for Creating Social Media Content

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

Conclusion

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.

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Offshore Outsourcing: Definition, Benefits, and Trends

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.
Offshore outsourcing

What is offshore outsourcing

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.

Benefits of offshore outsourcing

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.

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Factors to consider before offshore outsourcing

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.

Risks of offshore outsourcing

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.

6 tips to ace business process outsourcing

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:

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#1 Training will help overcome skill shortage

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.

#2 Startups will become dedicated BPO customers

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.

#3 There will be higher transparency

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.

#4 Politics will have little to no influence on BPO

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.

#5 Companies will get laser-sharped focus to meet consumer needs

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.

Frequently asked questions

What are offshore outsourcing services?

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.

Is offshore outsourcing ethical?

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.

What’s the difference between shore and offshore outsourcing?

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.

Final thoughts

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.

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Business Process Outsourcing (BPO): The Definitive Guide

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!

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What is business process outsourcing

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.

Different types of business process outsourcing services

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!

How does BPO work

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.

Benefits of business process outsourcing

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.

Risks associated with business process outsourcing

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.

How to choose a BPO provider

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.
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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:

#1 New technologies are on the rise

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

#2 Training will help overcome skill shortage

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.

#3 Startups will become dedicated BPO customers

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?

#4 There will be higher transparency

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.

#5 Politics will have little to no influence on BPO

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.

#6 Favorite outsourcing destinations will continue to grow (for now)

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.

#7 Other countries will look to break into the BPO market

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. 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.

Frequently asked questions

What services does BPO provide?

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.

Why is BPO a growing business strategy?

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.

What is the difference between BPM and BPO?

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.”

Is BPO the same as the call center?

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.

How to choose the best business process outsourcing company?

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.

Conclusion

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!

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Real Estate Virtual Assistant: What You Need to 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!

virtual real estate assistant

What is a real estate virtual assistant

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.

Real estate outsourcing services

Benefits of hiring a real estate virtual assistant

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. 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. 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.
    2. 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

  1. 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.

Tasks you can outsource to a real estate virtual assistant

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
  1. 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
  1. 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
  1. 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
  1. 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

Miscellaneous

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

Where to find the right real estate virtual assistant

Virtual real estate agents

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!

Best practices when hiring a real estate virtual assistant

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.

How to manage a real estate virtual assistant

Top-notch virtual assistant providers have well-defined systems and processes in place that guarantee flawless work, with quality assurance at every step. They have dedicated team leaders and project managers that supervise the remote staff and monitor their productivity and performance on the determined KPIs.

But real estate agents who cannot afford to outsource their functions to these power magnates at the moment can rely on freelance help and manage them using the latest communication and productivity tools. They cater to different needs and require you to analyze their features before using them.

There are tools for:

  • General collaboration
  • Task and project management
  • Scheduling and hosting virtual meetings
  • Asset management
  • Announcements and internal documentation

1. Tools for general collaboration

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.

2. Tools for task and project management

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.

3. Tools for scheduling and hosting virtual meetings

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.

4. Tools for asset management

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.

5. Tools for announcement and internal documentation

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.

Frequently asked questions

What skills should I look for in a real estate virtual assistant?

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.

2. How much does it cost to hire a real estate virtual assistant?

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.

3. What do real estate VAs do?

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.

Conclusion

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!

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